Public school is toxic for a child’s heart and mind. When we understand the agenda behind it, we’ll do everything in our power to protect our kids, just like we do when we put medicine out of their reach.
Below is an excerpt from an essay by John Taylor Gatto which explains why public schools are such unhealthy places for our kids. It’s an essay no parent will want to miss.
The Short, Angry History of Compulsory Schooling
Theorists from Plato to Rousseau knew well, and explicitly taught, that if children could be kept childish beyond the natural term, if they could be cloistered in a society of children, if they could be stripped of responsibility, if their inner lives could be starved by removing the insights of historians, philosophers, economists, novelists, and religious figures, if the inevitability of suffering and death could be removed from daily consciousness and replaced with the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear then young people would grow older but they would never grow up.
In this way a great enduring problem of supervision would be decisively minimized, for who can argue against the truth that childish and childlike people are far easier to manage than accomplished critical thinkers.
With this thought in mind, you're ready to hear the six purposes of modern schooling I found in Dr. Inglis' book. The principles are his, just as he stated them nearly 100 years ago, some of the interpretive material is my own.
1st Function
The first function of schooling is adjustive. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.
Fixed habits.
Of course this precludes critical judgement completely. If you were to devise a reliable test of whether someone had achieved fixed habits of reaction to authority, notice that requiring obedience to stupid orders would measure this better than requiring obedience to sensible orders ever could.
You can't know whether someone is reflexively obedient until you can make them do foolish things.
2nd Function
Second is the diagnostic function. School is to determine each student's proper social role, logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records.
3rd Function
Third is the sorting function. Schools sort children by training individuals only so far as their likely destination in the social machine and not one step further. So much for making boys and girls their personal best.
4th Function
The fourth function is conformity. As much as possible, kids are to be made alike. As egalitarian as this sounds, its purpose is to assist market and government research, people who conform are predictable.
5th Function
The fifth function Inglis calls "the hygienic function”. It has nothing to do with bodily health. It concerns what Darwin, Galton, Inglis, and many important names from the past and present would call, "the health of the race."
Hygiene is a polite way of saying that school is expected to accelerate natural selection by tagging the unfit so clearly they will drop from the reproduction sweepstakes.
That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward, and all the posted lists of ranked grades are really about. The unfit will either drop out from anger, despair, or because their likely mates will accept the school's judgement of their inferiority.
6th Function
And last is the propaedeutic function. A fancy Greek term meaning that a small fraction of kids will quietly be taught how to take over management of this continuing project, made guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered childish in order that government and economic life can be managed with a minimum of hassle.”
What Will You Do?
And there you have it, in a nutshell, so how will you educate your children?
There was a time when the government schooling agenda was obscure but that time has passed.
From the incompetency in key subjects to our severely low literacy rates, we have to face the truth.
Our tumbling literacy rates reflect the dumbed-down minds of our people.
If we want to raise children who are not dumbed-down, children who are not lacking in common decency, then we need to do something about it.
And that something is not school.
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Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a homeschooling thought-leader and the founder of Smart Homeschooler.
As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, she has 23 years of experience working in education.
Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child, based on tradition and modern research, Liz devotes her time to helping parents to get it right.
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"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”
—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. For a copy of The Short Angry History of Compulsory Schooling, click here.
