Ordinary schooling is not about education, but is simply social behavioral conditioning designed to keep people stupid and make them obedient. No one has stated this better than H. L. Mencken, who wrote in 1924 that “The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.”
You would think that the first thing they would teach you in school is how to study. How to learn stuff should be the first thing you learn; then once you know how to learn, you can teach yourself anything you want to know. If you think that makes sense (and it does), then you don't understand how school really works.
Here's the truth: the people who design and manage the educational system at the highest level don't want you to learn independently; they deliberately make you dependent on the school system so they can teach you what they want you to learn, and to keep you away from the subjects that they don't want you to learn: for example, the Esoteric Teaching.
In fact, only the very best private schools and colleges like Harvard actually train their students in the scientific methods of how to learn. These are the schools of the social and economic elite, and they want their kids to actually be smart, to actually know how to do stuff, so they can continue their dominance of society. It is assumed that these kids are motivated to be obedient to the system, because they have so much to lose if they are not. So they are given the opportunity to actually become wise, if they so choose. Everybody else is deliberately kept ignorant, and manipulated through the media, financial controls and corporations.
Being wise not only means knowing how to learn, it also means knowing how to think for yourself. Most people don't really know how to think; they simply form opinions based on what they have heard or whether they like or dislike something. Thinking is a higher-level skill. Knowing how to learn comes first, because you have to know how to learn before you can teach yourself how to think. And you have to teach yourself how to think, because the very nature of thinking for yourself means that it is one of those things in life that nobody can teach you—you just have to figure it out for yourself.
I was fortunate to discover the method of actual learning and thinking independently when I was quite young. It helped me teach myself so many things. For example, I learned to play classical music and jazz at a professional level while still in High School. This accomplishment not only gave me a lot of personal satisfaction, but I also got to tour the USA and Canada with the All-USA High School Band, which was great fun.
I also learned English, math, chemistry and physics well enough to get a perfect score on my college entrance exams and qualify for a scholarship to engineering school, which I rejected because I wanted to be a musician. But no problem, I was able to put myself through music school by earning money with these skills, and since then have never had any difficulty finding a job. I can just get some books on any subject, sit down and teach myself how to do it in a few days or weeks.
Essays of John Taylor Gatto
If you doubt our assertion that the public school system is not geared to provide actual education, then you should read up on John Taylor Gatto, an outstanding American educator who was named a Teacher of the Year in the New York Public School system in 1990. Then they fired him, because he started telling everybody what was really going on behind the scenes, why our schools are such a mess and why they don't really educate their students. On purpose.He climaxed his teaching career as "New York State Teacher of the Year", after being named "New York City Teacher of the Year" on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. He then became an education activist, noted for revealing the actual aims and intentions behind the public education program in his books and essays. In this unit we study several of his essays to understand the problems in the Western educational system, and why a completely different approach is needed.
Gatto revealed in his blockbuster The Underground History of American Education that no public school has classes or courses on how to study or how to learn, because their purpose is not to help you learn; it is to train you to be obedient to authority.
For instance, for those of you who believe in testing, school superintendents as a class are virtually the stupidest people to pass through a graduate college program, ranking fifty-one points below the elementary school teachers they normally "supervise" on the Graduate Record Examination, and about eighty points below secondary-school teachers, while teachers themselves as an aggregate finish seventeenth of twenty occupational groups surveyed. The reader is of course at liberty to believe this happened accidentally... [Gatto, Underground History of American Education, Prologue]If the supervisors are stupider than the teachers, and the teachers are stupider than the students, what will be the inevitable outcome of such a system? It certainly cannot be brilliant, well-educated students. Gatto documents the design and development of the current educational system, and proves his points from the actual writings of the architects of the public school system. I came to many of the same conclusions by observation and experience a long time ago.
Thus we can understand that real education has to be driven by students' interests, and cannot be a thin pretext for command and control training without hurting the students' natural urge for learning and thirst for knowledge. A real student wants to acquire a certain skill; thus real education must combine theoretical instruction and practical experience to actually help the student reach his objective.
Video: State-Controlled Consciousness- Video: John Taylor Gatto: Schooling is not Education
- Video: On Education
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