Weapons of Mass Instructions
Posted on: June 15, 2009 - 1:17am
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Weapons of Mass Instructions
I was watching book TV on C-span last night,and the author-John Taylor Gatto book "Weapons of Mass Instruction : A schoolteacher's journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling"sounded really good,he's against the mandatory testing,the IQ system,and the over all destruction of our children's minds. It a way to dumb us down and keep us in "line".Check out his web site newsociety.com/blogs/index.php/2008/12/15/weapons-of -mass-instruction-a-schollteac . give me some feed-back about your opinion,concerning learning methods. 
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so after clicking the link on my post,it'll redirect you to a Google site,then click on the top link there.
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Okay; I read Dumbing Us Down back when it was a best seller, and while I appreciate and agree with a few of Mr. Gatto's (that name is awesome) points, he goes way, way, WAY over the top far too often and uses far too many anecdotes for his work to be taken seriously. I mean, take a look:
...So he's denying, then, that there are people with legitimate learning disorders (down syndrome, for example)? Or that there are savants? Both of these claims are just plain wrong.
This is the URL you want, BTW.
His new book, at face value, only seems to head further down the wrong path. Note that any claim that some faction or organization has society hung like a puppet on strings is essentially self-refuting (organizations and factions are a part of society, necessarily). It is not the malevolent goal of school boards everywhere to 'keep us in line'. The simple truth is that we've decided to put people in charge of teaching the next generation who have no business doing so, and our present capital-based system sucks and is broken. We do need to make changes to it - we do not need to go about casting aspersions over a phantom cabal working to 'uneducate' us.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
I recently received my monthy Alumni magazine from the privat college I attended in CT, and I was suprised to learn that SATs have been entirely optional since sometime in the 1990's. According to some unnamed studies of SAT scores they unfairly favored financially privileged students.
I thought that sort of favoritism was firmly entrenched in NCLB, and rather widely supported.
Anyway, the college Admissions office wrote that they relied on school transcripts, short essays, personally meeting perspective students, etc.
In his speech,there is no indication that he denies legitimate mental disorder's(Down syndrome) or that there aren't savants,his whole speech was to show us how we are trained,not taught,and if society wants a learned citizenry,schooling needs to be over-hauled in order to be a just and truly free society. I was wondering if you ever read "Lie's my Teacher Told Me:everything that your American History Textbook Got Wrong" www.uvm.edu/~jlowen/liesmyteachertoldme.php and then there's Howard Zinn's book "A People History of the United States" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States. I just tried both of these links,and James Lowen link says that its forbidden ? and the one linking to Howard Zinn at Wikipedia links to the wrong page-sorry about that,I need glasses or else my typing is wrong,I always mess up on links.
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Yes ! indeed,the financially suited students and well off parents are highly prized in our society,but they are not aware that they are really worse off,they're slaves to money making capabilities,they deny themselves of true freedom in order to feel superior over less educated people. As I have heard many times "They sold their soul's for the almighty dollar"
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Being rich has gotta be a bitch!
Where do I make my next
500 Mill must be commonplace.
Yeah. They're slaves and I pity them. Sure.
but I do feel sorry for them in many ways,the rich kid's parent's have a Illusion world view of life and they teach their young ones the same values.It kind of reminds me of religious parents indoctrinating their children.
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Everyone takes the same test. It is a merit based test that does not know your partent's income level or your race. People who complain that poor students and black students have lower average scores than rich and white students seem to have forgotten that the test is perfectly fair and merit based. Either you are capable of correctly answering math and linguistic questions or you aren't. If your skin happens to be light or dark, or if your parents happen to be rich or poor, you either can answer those questions correctly or you can't. So no, the test isn't unfair, it is actually perfectly fair and even.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
If only that were true. I have to agree with treat2 on this one. The SAT has been heavily biased for decades. In fact, one of the reasons for some schools no longer requiring an SAT has to do with the fact that the ETS got caught redhanded in the early 90's providing biased scores.
Basically, the application for the test has a number of biographical questions that ETS claimed they were using strictly for demographics. However, it turned out that ETS was handing out extra points based on what boxes you checked. So anyone who took the test between 1980 and 1994 could secretly be awarded those points.
Post 1994, they changed the test around to avoid getting caught doing that type of stuff but the changes rendered the test much less valid as a predictor of academic performance. Hence the reason why some schools do not require it any more. Also, Mensa will not accept a post 1994 test as proof of eligibility.
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I didn't state my personal opinion as to whether I agreed or disagreed with what was written. I simply stated what I read in the Alumni mag.