Comments on: All Meaning Would Vanish

By: Becky

Becky — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:43:27 +0000

Aretae, thanks for the link. I haven’t read the 7 lesson schoolteacher, but will now. I first saw him on C-span and went out and got the book.

By: Michael Strong

Michael Strong — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:22:29 +0000

Superb. Gatto is superb, the book mentioned here also sounds superb. The case against child labor is vastly over-done. Many of our problems are cause by the combination of compulsory education and the ban against child labor. See also Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, in which he shows that the categories known as "teenager" and "adolescent" are of recent vintage, and caused by compulsory high school, a relatively recent phenomenon (it was only in the 1930s that a majority of American teens attended high school). Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and countless others began their work life around the age of 12 or 13. In traditional cultures, males and females went through a rite of passage at that age and then assumed adult roles and responsibilities. Our system of government-enforced immaturity creates vast pathologies that extend far beyond adolescence.

By: Aretae

Aretae — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:37:26 +0000

If you haven't read Gatto — my favorite is The 7 lesson schoolteacher — you're missing something.

By: Becky

Becky — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:44:38 +0000

I just finished reading John Gatto’s (former NY teacher of the year who quit in an oped) “Weapons of Mass Instruction”, where he also makes the case against compulsory education as more of a way of controlling and keeping the masses inferior than of providing education.

By: Aretae

Aretae — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:36:23 +0000

The book Against Adolescence makes the argument in full.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:40:17 +0000

Peter Drucker asserted that it is inherently vicious to evaluate people on their “potential” rather than on their performance. He was talking about corporate appraisal and promotion systems, but the same principle applies here. No matter how rigorous education is, it remains in a sense about potential rather than performance, since the outcomes do not matter in themselves but simply as indicators.

Also ran across this quote from Antoine de St-Exupery yesterday:

“A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them”