Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of

Description: Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto Compulsory schooling cripples imagination, critical thinking, and strips youth of their best qualities, producing a nation of employees. Weapons of Mass Instruction shows how to escape this trap and help develop more meaningful lives. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description John Taylor Gattos Weapons of Mass Instruction, now available in paperback, focuses on mechanisms of traditional education that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorization drills. Gattos earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, introduced the now-famous expression of the title into the common vernacular. Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another chilling metaphor to the brief against conventional schooling.Gatto demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, he argues, is to render the common population manageable. To that end, young people must be conditioned to rely upon experts, to remain divided from natural alliances, and to accept disconnections from their own lived experiences. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence.Escaping this trap requires strategy Gatto calls "open source learning" which imposes no artificial divisions between learning and life. Through this alternative approach, our children can avoid being indoctrinated-only then that can they achieve self-knowledge, judgment, and courage.John Taylor Gatto is an internationally renowned speaker who lectures widely on school reform. He taught for thirty years in public schools before resigning on the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal during the year he was named New Yorks official "Teacher of the Year." On April 3, 2008, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard credited Gatto with adding the expression "dumbing us down" to the school debate worldwide. Back Cover The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn Have our schools become mere Weapons of Mass Instruction, or can they be transformed to offer genuine freedom to learn? John Taylor Gatto has been a hero of mine for years. He has the courage to challenge an educational system that is obsolete and out of touch with reality. Years ago, he gave me the courage to speak out and write my books. I trust this book will give you the courage to speak out and challenge the system. - Robert Kiyosaki, author Rich Dad, Poor Dad John Taylor Gattos voice must be heard ... He knows why the (education) system is so utterly flawed and lays it out right here. We ignore his profound insights at our own peril. -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, founder Zaytuna Institute (credits and title need checking) Weapons of Mass Instruction is a hard-hitting critique of the mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple imagination and discourage critical thinking. In his earlier book, John Taylor Gatto brought his now-famous title - Dumbing Us Down - into common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the lengthy brief against schooling. Weapons of Mass Instruction demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, Gatto claims, is to render the common population manageable, to remove the obligation of child care from adult workers so they are free to fuel the industrial economy, and to train the next generation into subservient obedience to the state. Gatto reveals that Ivy League schools do not produce the most successful graduates; that some of the worlds riches entrepreneurs are high school drop outs; and that Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie didnt finish elementary school. Filled with examples of people who have escaped the trap of compulsory schooling, Weapons of Mass Instruction shows us that the realization of personal potential requires a different way of growing up and learning, one Gatto calls "open source learning." Urgent and controversial, this book is a page-turner that promises to appeal to all who harbor doubts about the current education system. A remarkable achievement. I cant remember ever reading such a profound analysis of modern education . Howard Zinn, on The Underground History of American Education Flap The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn Have our schools become mere Weapons of Mass Instruction, or can they be transformed to offer genuine freedom to learn? John Taylor Gatto has been a hero of mine for years. He has the courage to challenge an educational system that is obsolete and out of touch with reality. Years ago, he gave me the courage to speak out and write my books. I trust this book will give you the courage to speak out and challenge the system. - Robert Kiyosaki, author Rich Dad, Poor Dad John Taylor Gattos voice must be heard ... He knows why the (education) system is so utterly flawed and lays it out right here. We ignore his profound insights at our own peril. -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, founder Zaytuna Institute (credits and title need checking) Weapons of Mass Instruction is a hard-hitting critique of the mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple imagination and discourage critical thinking. In his earlier book, John Taylor Gatto brought his now-famous title - Dumbing Us Down - into common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the lengthy brief against schooling. Weapons of Mass Instruction demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, Gatto claims, is to render the common population manageable, to remove the obligation of child care from adult workers so they are free to fuel the industrial economy, and to train the next generation into subservient obedience to the state. Gatto reveals that Ivy League schools do not produce the most successful graduates; that some of the worlds riches entrepreneurs are high school drop outs; and that Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie didnt finish elementary school. Filled with examples of people who have escaped the trap of compulsory schooling, Weapons of Mass Instruction shows us that the realization of personal potential requires a different way of growing up and learning, one Gatto calls "open source learning." Urgent and controversial, this book is a page-turner that promises to appeal to all who harbor doubts about the current education system. A remarkable achievement. I cant remember ever reading such a profound analysis of modern education . Howard Zinn, on The Underground History of American Education Author Biography John Gatto was a teacher in New York Citys public schools for over 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. A much-sought after speaker on education throughout the United States, his other books include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000). Table of Contents Prologue: Against School; Everything You Know About Schools is Wrong; Walkabout: London; Fat Stanley & the Lancaster Amish; David Sarnoffs Classroom; Hector Isnt the Problem; The Camino de Santiago; Weapons of Mass Instruction; What is Education?; A Letter to My Grand-daughter About Dartmouth; Incident at Highland High; Afterword: Invitation to an Open Conspiracy: The Bartleby Project; Index. Promotional The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn. Long Description The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn. John Taylor Gattos Weapons of Mass Instruction , now available in paperback, focuses on mechanisms of traditional education which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorization drills. Gattos earlier book, Dumbing Us Down , introduced the now-famous expression of the title into the common vernacular. Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another chilling metaphor to the brief against conventional schooling. Gatto demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, he argues, is to render the common population manageable. To that end, young people must be conditioned to rely upon experts, to remain divided from natural alliances and to accept disconnections from their own lived experiences. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence. Escaping this trap requires a strategy Gatto calls "open source learning" which imposes no artificial divisions between learning and life. Through this alternative approach our children can avoid being indoctrinated-only then can they achieve self-knowledge, good judgment, and courage. Promotional "Headline" The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn. Description for Reader John Taylor Gattos Weapons of Mass Instruction , now available in paperback, focuses on mechanisms of traditional education which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorization drills. Gattos earlier book, Dumbing Us Down , introduced the now-famous expression of the title into the common vernacular. Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another chilling metaphor to the brief against conventional schooling. Gatto demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, he argues, is to render the common population manageable. To that end, young people must be conditioned to rely upon experts, to remain divided from natural alliances and to accept disconnections from their own lived experiences. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence. Escaping this trap requires a strategy Gatto calls "open source learning" which imposes no artificial divisions between learning and life. Through this alternative approach our children can avoid being indoctrinated-only then can they achieve self-knowledge, good judgment, and courage. Feature Author is well-known for leaving the teaching profession in 1991, claiming he "was no longer willing to hurt children"; the same year he was named New York State Teacher of the Year. He has since spent his career speaking in the area of school reform, lecturing in every American state and a dozen foreign countries. His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, which sold over 100,000 copies, and The Underground History of American Education. Gatto took part in the Harpers Magazine forum "School on a Hill" with an article "How public education cripples our kids, and why" on September 2003. The hardcover edition has sold almost 9000 copies. Excerpt from Book Everything You Know about Schools is Wrong In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school. - Helen Todd, "Why Children Work" McClures Magazine, April 1913 Running the World In 1919, in the heady aftermath of World War victory parades and an intoxicating sense that nothing was forbidden to the United States, including the very alteration of human nature, Professor Arthur Calhouns Social History of the Family notified the academic world that something profound was going on behind the scenes in the nations schools. Big changes were being made to the idea of family. And it was a consummation to be celebrated by Calhouns crowd, although not by everyone. Calhoun wrote that the fondest wish of utopian thinkers was coming true: children were passing from blood families "into the custody of community experts." In time, he wrote, the dream of Darwin and Galton would become reality through the agency of public education, "designed to check the mating of the unfit." The dream of scientific population control. Not everyone was as impressed as Calhoun with the school agenda discreetly being inserted into classrooms beyond public oversight. Mayor John Hylan of New York City made an elliptical remark in a public address back in 1922 which preserves some of the weirdness of that moment. Hylan announced that the schools of the city had been seized by "tentacles" of "an invisible government, just as an octopus would seize prey," a pointed echo of the chilling pronouncement made years earlier by British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, when he claimed that all important events were controlled by an invisible government, of which the public was unaware. The particular octopus Hylan meant was the Rockefeller Foundation. The 1920s were a boom period in compulsory schooling, as well as the stock market. By 1928 the book A Sociological Philosophy of Education was claiming, "It is the business of teachers to run not merely schools but the world." A year later, Edward Thorndike of Rockefeller- sponsored Columbia Teachers College, creator of a curious new academic specialty called "Educational Psychology," went on record with this dramatic announcement: "Academic subjects are of little value." His colleague at Teachers College, William Kirkpatrick, declared in his own book, Education and the Social Crisis, that "the whole game of rearing the young was being taken over by experts." It seemed only common sense to Dr. Kilpatrick. Family, after all, was a retrograde institution, why should mom and dad know better than experts how to bring up baby? The Control of Human Behavior On April 11, 1933, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason, announced a comprehensive national program underway, with the help of the Foundation, to allow "the control of human behavior." School figured centrally in its design. Max Muller, an Eastern European geneticist, inspired Rockefeller to invest heavily in control of human evolution. Muller was using X-rays to override normal genetic laws, including mutations in fruit flies. Mutation appeared to open the door to the scientific control of all life. In Mullers mind, as to Galton and Darwin before him, planned breeding of human beings was the key to paradise. His thinking was enthusiastically endorsed by great scientists and by powerful economic interests alike. Muller won the Nobel Prize and reduced his scheme to a 1,500-word Geneticists Manifesto, signed by 22 distinguished American and British biologists. State action should separate worthwhile breeding stock from the great mass of evolutionary dead end material. The Manifesto can still be Googled. What had been discussed behind closed doors in the 1870s, before we had forced schooling, had broken through into public discourse, at least in high policy circles, and in the writings of sophisticated literary artists like F. Scott Fitzgerald. A movement away from democratic egalitarian ideals was underway, which Fitzgerald alludes to in The Great Gatsby. In simple language, on the most basic level of institutional management, smart kids had to be kept from stupid ones; Horace Manns common school notion that all levels of society would mix together in the classroom to create social harmony was now officially stone dead, except for rhetorical purposes. A few months before the Manifesto began circulating aggressively, an executive director of the National Education Association announced the NEA expected "to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force." Thats straightforward enough, isnt it? World War II drove the eugenic project underground, but hardly slowed its advance. Following the end of hostilities, school became an open battleground between old-fashioned, modest, reading, writing and arithmetic ambitions of historic schooling, and proponents of advanced academic thinking, located mainly in project offices of great corporate non-profit foundations like Carnegie and Rockefeller - men who worked diligently to lead institutional schooling toward a scientific rationalization of all social affairs. Two congressional investigations, one in 1915 and one in 1959, came to the identical conclusion that school policy in the new pedagogical order was being deliberately created far from public oversight, in corporate offices - inserted into the school mechanism by a sophisticated, highly nuanced campaign of influence, invisible to public awareness. Neither report received much public attention. While both are available for examination today, virtually nobody is aware they even exist. Every major teachers college in America flushed them down the memory hole, under whose orders nobody knows. Two decades after WWII, between 1967 and 1974, teacher training was radically revamped through the coordinated efforts of important private foundations, select universities, think-tanks, and government agencies, encouraged by major global corporations and harmonized through the US Office of Education and a few key state education departments, particularly those of California, Texas, New York, Michigan, Indiana, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Three milestones in this transformation were: (1) an extensive government exercise in futurology called Designing Education for the Future; (2) The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project; and (3) Benjamin Blooms multi-volume Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, an enormous manual of over 1,000 pages out of Blooms office at the University of Chicago. Later, this work impacted every school in America. Blooms massive effort is the work of a genuine academic madman, constituting, in his own words, "a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think and feel as the result of some unit of instruction." Its the "think and feel" part that gives the game away. Simple fascism would have stopped at action, but as Orwell warned in 1984, something deeper than fascism was happening. Drawing on the new technology of "behavioral psychology," children would be forced to learn "proper" thoughts, feelings, and actions, while "improper" attitudes brought from home were "remediated." Seething and bubbling in the darkness outside the innocent cluster of little red schoolhouses coast to coast a chemical wedding was being brewed worthy of Doctor Frankenstein. On all levels of schooling, experiments were authorized upon children without any public notice. Think of it as the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment writ large. Testing was an essential part of the experiment - to locate each childs mental susceptibility on an official rating scale. Blooms insane epic is reminiscent of The Complete System of Medical Policing, proposed for Prussia by another mad German doctor in the late 18th century (in which every citizen was charged with continually spying on every other citizen, detecting any sign of disease pathology, even a sniffle, and reporting it at once to authorities for remedial action), Bloom spawned a horde of descendant forms: mastery learning; outcomes-based education; school-to-work; classroom/ business "partnerships;" and more. You can detect Bloom at work in any initiative which seeks to classify students for the convenience of social managers and businesses. Bloom-inspired programs are constructed so as to offer useful data for controlling the minds and movements of the young - mapping the next adult generation for various agencies of social engineering. The second pillar of change agentry, Designing Education for the Future, belies its benign title and would well repay a disciplined readthrough of its semi-literate prose. Produced by the US Office of Education, it redefined "education" after the Prussian fashion as "a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character." No mention of personal goals are in evidence. State education agencies were henceforth ordered to act as on-site federal enforcers, ensuring compliance of local schools to central directives. Each state education department was to become "an agent of change," and these were advised to give up "independent identity as well as authority," accepting a junior partnership with the federal government. Or suffer financial penalties for disobedience. Finally, consider the third gigantic project, twice the size of Blooms Taxonomy: the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project (contract number: OEC-0-9-320424-4042), BSTEP for short, which clearly sets down government policy intentions for compulsory schooling, outlining reforms to be forced on the US after 1967. Institutional schooling, we learn, will be required to "impersonally manipulate" the future of an America in which "each individual will receiv Description for Sales People Author is well-known for leaving the teaching profession in 1991, claiming he "was no longer willing to hurt children"; the same year he was named New York State Teacher of the Year. He has since spent his career speaking in the area of school reform, lecturing in every American state and a dozen foreign countries. His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, which sold over 100,000 copies, and The Underground History of American Education. Gatto took part in the Harpers Magazine forum "School on a Hill" with an article "How public education cripples our kids, and why" on September 2003. The hardcover edition has sold almost 9000 copies. Full Text The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn. Details ISBN0865716692 Author John Taylor Gatto Short Title WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION Publisher New Society Publishers Language English ISBN-10 0865716692 ISBN-13 9780865716698 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 379.23 Year 2010 Imprint New Society Publishers Subtitle A Schoolteachers Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling Place of Publication Gabriola Island Country of Publication United States Residence NY, US UK Release Date 2010-04-01 Publication Date 2010-04-01 NZ Release Date 2010-04-01 US Release Date 2010-04-01 Pages 240 Alternative 9781550924244 Audience General AU Release Date 2010-05-04 Edition Description Paperback Edition We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:160540201;

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