The State Education System

Flight · August 22, 2013

State education. Anyone have insights into this ? Something I wish I'd known a lot more about earlier in my life.

The whole state education system was built on the premise that isolation from first hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders.

American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia.

1. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children "to obedience, subordination, and collective life." Thus, memorisation outranked thinking.

2. Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented "subjects" and school days were divided into fixed periods "so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions."

3. Third, the state was posited as the true parent of children. All of this was done in the name of a scientific approach to education."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBNh543A81U

I believe that one day we will regard the second half of the nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth as an educational dark age, lit only by the likes of Ivan Illich, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and our own Roland Meighan and the thousands of parents led by pioneers like Joy Baker who chose to home educate their own children outside the state system.

cymrococh · August 22, 2013

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