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       ARE OUR "SCHOOLS" CONCENTRATION CAMPUSES FOR MIND DESTRUCTION?
                              Part 1 of 2

An extract from the Personal Empowerment Resources web-site:
http://www.mind-trek.com/_ng.htm
Original URL of this article:
http://www.mind-trek.com/reports/misc/minddest.htm

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Much attention has recently been focused on child abuse. In my opinion, by
far the worst and most damaging form of child abuse is called "compulsory
education." Personally, I would rather not have children than subject them
to incarceration in a concentration campus for mind destruction.

In Report #03: How to Improve Your Information, the Semmelweis-reflex is
described. In summary, the Semmelweis-reflex is the automatic rejection of
the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment.

You may think that in the supposedly enlightened age of the 1990's, humans
no longer suffer from the Semmelweis-reflex. This view is mistaken. During
the past twenty-five years numerous authors have written several dozen
books - published by "mainstream" publishers - on why "compulsory
education" should be abolished. The results of this cruel form of mind
destruction are disastrous. Yet most people, when confronted with the
suggestion that "compulsory education" be abolished, will summarily reject
the suggestion without examination. The Semmelweis-reflex in action.

The desired end result of an education system might be described as people
who:

   * competently read, write, speak, count and calculate;
   * think independently, rationally, and creatively;
   * have developed, and can increase, their consciousness, intelligence,
     thinking-skills, will-power, etc.;
   * can speak in public;
   * can do research;
   * can be inventive;
   * apply common sense to solve problems;
   * have developed, and can enhance, practical skills in their areas of
     interest;
   * conduct successful relationships;
   * competently manage their own finances (money);
   * apply appropriate values, principles, and reason to make decisions;
   * continuously strive to improve every aspect of their life - happiness,
     health, success, confidence, competence, personal power, wealth,
     abilities, etc.;
   * have a positive outlook on life;
   * etc.

People generally believe that children have to go to school to be educated.
However, many authors demonstrate that the state-"education" system is
worse than useless - children would be better off if state-"education" were
abolished altogether. Parents should be free to educate their children as
necessary. If schools are necessary, parents or businesses will pay
entrepreneurs to create such schools.

"Compulsory education" is a hoax because - rather than focusing on teaching
reading, writing, and the ability to think creatively, critically, and
independently - the emphasis in state-"schools" is on producing obedient
conformists who can't think. In reality "compulsory education" is a form of
mind destruction.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF "EDUCATIONAL" MIND DESTRUCTION

     "A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding
     people to be exactly like one another; and the mould in which it
     casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the
     government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an
     aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in
     proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a
     despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over
     the body."
                       - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

A report in The Arizona Republic of September 16, 1992 reflects the extent
of the mind destruction wreaked by our "educators." A study found that 64
percent of elementary-school teachers say that the health of pupils is
declining, while only 5 percent see it as improving. And "92 percent of the
teachers listed psychological and emotional difficulties as the most common
health problem. Researchers said those resulted mainly from divorce,
neglect, low self-esteem and separation of family."

The report didn't say anything about the fact that most of the parents of
the pupils had themselves been incarcerated in concentration campuses for
mind destruction - most of the teachers had of course suffered the same
fate.

The extent of the mind destruction of our youth is also reflected in
increased rates of mental illness, suicide, violent crime, and further
child abuse.

In their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity Neil Postman and Charles
Weingartner report as follows:

     "... [T]he number one health problem in the United States is
     mental illness: there are more Americans suffering from mental
     illness than from all other forms of illness combined. Of almost
     equal magnitude is the crime problem. It is advancing rapidly on
     many fronts, from delinquency among affluent adolescents to
     frauds perpetrated by some of our richest corporations. Another
     is the suicide problem. Are you aware that suicide is the second
     most common cause of death among adolescents? Or how about the
     problem of 'damaged' children? The most common cause of infant
     mortality in the United States is parental beating."

THE NATURE OF THE MIND DESTRUCTION

     "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one
     liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that,
     after I had passed the final examination, I found the
     consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an
     entire year... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the
     modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the
     holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside
     from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this
     it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave
     mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can
     be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."
                             - Albert Einstein

     "Some day, maybe, there will exist a well-informed,
     well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most
     deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's
     spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of
     trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good
     and seem ever so right, is prone to perversion by destructive
     forms of conscientiousness."
                               - Erik Erikson

Jonathan Kozol is a teacher. In 1967 he wrote Death At An Early Age: The
Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public
Schools, for which he won the National Book Award.

Kozol taught for a year in a Boston school. Two weeks before the end of the
year he was fired for reading a poem by a widely-recognized black poet
whose work was not part of the compulsory curriculum. Kozol recounts how
some teachers spoke of their black students as "animals" and referred to
the school as a "zoo." He tells of the many beatings using bamboo whips. He
provides extensive details of "pedagogic brainwashing" - for example,
children are taught that "true obedience is true liberty." He quotes 15
such slogans.

"Well, that was 25 years ago," you might say, "Things have changed
dramatically since." In a recent article (The Arizona Republic, September
3, 1992), columnist Walter Williams wrote, "The education that most kids
receive is nothing to write home about; however, that received by black
youngsters is criminal... 46 percent of white - and 54 percent of black -
Chicago public school teachers have their own children in private schools."
Williams also cites statistics that indicate that the more money is spent
on education, the worse are the results.

Kozol is also the author of Illiterate America, which claims that one-third
of adult Americans are illiterate. Among blacks, 44 percent of adults are
illterate. That was in 1985. The situation today is probably even worse.

On April 2, 1992 a letter from a concerned parent appeared in The Arizona
Republic under the heading, "What is my son learning in kindergarten?
Violence." Some extracts from the letter:

     "Guess what my son learned at school this year. He learned
     aggression. He learned how to tell others: "I'm going to kill
     you. I'm going to break your arm."

     I don't think he should have learned that in kindergarten...

     I ate lunch with my son, and I found out the reason he had come
     home with so many bruises, abrasions and complaints of children
     abusing him. Another child had forced him to stay in a corner for
     the whole recess or get beaten up. (The playground teacher didn't
     see anything.) He was devastated.

     Another time, four months after school had begun, he came home so
     pleased: "Mommy! Guess what! Today was the first time I got to
     play on the swings." Now it was my turn to be devastated."

According to Alvin Toffler in his far-reaching book, The Third Wave,
compulsory public school systems were designed to produce obedient factory
workers who are used to performing repetitive tasks. They are based on
ideas that children have to be coerced to learn, and that all should learn
the same politically-decided dogma. Students are not taught to think
critically, but rather to obey rules; not to express themselves, but to be
quiet, and to suppress their creative talents.

John Taylor Gatto was a public school teacher in Manhattan for 26 years.
Each year from 1989 to 1991 he was named New York City Teacher Of The Year.
In 1991 the New York Senate named him State Teacher Of The Year. The
following excerpts are from his book, Dumbing Us Down:

     "Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's
     power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it,
     but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement,
     the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy,
     the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national
     curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had
     set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act,
     to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

     "...the truth is that reading, writing and arithmetic only take
     about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is
     eager and willing to learn.

     "...Institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.
     ...[T]he massive rethinking the schools require would cost so
     much less than we are spending now that powerful interests cannot
     afford to let it happen.

     "The lesson of my teaching life is that both the theory and
     structure of mass-education are fatally flawed; ...Mass education
     cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice
     is practice in rigged competition, suppresion, and intimidation.
     The schools we've allowed to develop can't work to teach
     nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone's
     life, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held
     together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots
     and sticks. Working for official favor, grades, or other trinkets
     of subordination; these have no connection with education - they
     are the paraphernalia of servitude, not freedom.

     "Break up these institutional schools, decertify teaching. Let
     anyone who has a mind to teach bid for customers, privatize the
     whole business - trust the free market system. I know it's easier
     to say than do, but what other choice do we have? We need lees
     school, not more."

According to an article by John Taylor Gatto published in the Las Vegas
Review-Journal on June 13, 1993 under the title "The Public School
Nightmare," the American state education system [infact, all "compulsory
education" systems of other countries also] was copied from the Prussian
19th century system with the objective to produce:

     "1) Obedient soldiers to the army;
     2) Obedient workers to the mines;
     3) Well subordinated civil servants to government;
     4) Well subordinated clerks to industry;
     5) Citizens who thought alike about major issues.

     ...You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our
     school institution Prussian purpose - which was to create a form
     of state socialism - gradually forced out traditional American
     purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be
     self-reliant.

     ...Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue
     effectively.

     One of the most interesting byproducts of Prussian schooling
     turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history.
     Erich Maria Remarque, in his classic "All Quiet on the Western
     Front" tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks
     of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich
     Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable
     product of good schooling.

     It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally,
     not metaphorically - schooling after the Prussian fashion removes
     the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to
     wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have
     done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyzes the moral will
     as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled
     students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of
     great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their
     own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped.

     ["Compulsory education" is only on what to "know". It is far more
     important to know how to think; and knowing what to know comes
     automatically to the independent individual who knows how to
     think. Another problem is that some areas of what is "taught" in
     these "schools" as "knowledge", is actually brainwashing - not
     useful facts.]

     ...[C]ompulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at
     least since Plato's "Republic," a bad idea that New England had
     tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed
     through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course,
     the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a
     legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society
     which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star
     Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple sentence, "I know
     nothing" - hence the popular label attached to the secret
     society's political arm, "The American Party."

     Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending
     schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government
     monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this - the children
     who could afford to be privately educated.

     It's important to note that the underlying premise of Prussian
     schooling is that the government is the true parent of children -
     the State is sovereign over the family. At the most extreme pole
     of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the
     enemies of their own children, not to be trusted. You can see
     this philosophy at work in court decisions which rule that
     parents need not be told when schools dispense condoms to their
     children, or consulted when daughters seek abortion.

     How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in
     American schools? ... Virtually every single one of the founders
     of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and
     many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the
     Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous "7th Report" of 1844,
     still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most
     important of these.

     By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for
     harvest. In that year the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William
     Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington,
     that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent
     "over-education" from happening. The average American would be
     content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner,
     because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My
     guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about
     any other role.

     In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago,
     said that independent, self-reliant people were a
     counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the
     future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by
     their associations - the groups they belonged to - not by their
     own individual accomplishments. In such a world people who read
     too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately
     empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they
     don't know by themselves, without consulting experts.

     Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make
     reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He
     advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be
     abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the
     latter was more efficient (he admitted it was less efficient) but
     because independent thinkers are produced by hard books, thinkers
     who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey
     meant a program of social objectives administered by the best
     social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road
     to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a
     vision radically disconnected from the American past, its
     historic hopes and dreams.

     Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said
     this at about the same time. "Reading should no longer be a
     fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." Hall was one
     of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic
     administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous
     that structure really became can only be understood by
     comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school
     administrators than all of the European Economic Community
     nations combined.

     ...Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was
     among the most radical experiments in human history, that America
     was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical
     thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by
     treating them seriously when they are little, giving them
     responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and
     solitude for them, making them readers and thinkers of
     significant thoughts from the beginning. There is no evidence
     that has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion
     schooling.

     When Fredrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th
     century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for
     children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and
     children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be a way
     to break the influence of mothers on their children.

     ...A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and
     community as government-system schooling has been might be
     expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled
     with an increasingly aggressive shakedown of the taxpayer, but
     this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the
     transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and
     towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.

     While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on
     people, and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling
     the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest
     grantor of contracts, next to the Defense Department. Both of
     these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with
     powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other
     useful allies. This is large part of the explanation why no
     amount of failure ever changes things in schools. School people
     are in a position to outlast any storm and to keep
     short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.

     An overview of the short history of this institution reveals a
     pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by
     enlargement of the monopoly in every case.

     After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools,
     some considered good and some bad, I [Gatto] feel certain that
     management cannot clean its own house.

     ...Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism,
     loneliness... all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in
     education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the
     daytimes of childhood, can be called to account for this."
     [emphasis added]

In another article Gatto confesses to being "the 7-lesson schoolteacher."
To keep his job as a teacher he is compelled to teach the seven lessons:

  1. Confusion. Gatto admits that everything he teaches is out of context.
  2. Class position. Children must know their place and stay in the class
     where they belong. "The children are numbered so that if any get away
     they can be returned to the right class."
  3. Indifference. "Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in
     any class I know of."
  4. Emotional dependency. Gatto says that he teaches children to surrender
     their will to the chain of command, using "stars and red checks,
     smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces."
  5. Intellectual dependency. The most important lesson. Children must wait
     for the expert authority to make all the important decisions, to tell
     them what to study. There is no place for curiosity, only conformity.
  6. Provisional self-esteem. Because it is so difficult to make
     self-confident spirits conform, children must be taught that their
     self-respect depends on expert opinion. They must be constantly
     tested, evaluated, judged, graded, and reported on by certified
     officials. Self-evaluation is irrelevant - "people must be told what
     they are worth."
  7. You can't hide. Children are always watched. No privacy. People can't
     be trusted.

According to Gatto, these are the consequences of the seven lessons:

   * The private Self is almost non-existent; children develop a
     superficial personality borrowed from TV shows.
   * Desperate dependence.
   * Unease with intimacy or candor; dislike for parents; no real close
     friends; lust replaces love.
   * Indifference to the adult world; very little curiosity about anything;
     boredom.
   * A poor sense of the future; consciousness limited to the present.
   * Cruelty to each other.
   * Striking materialism.
   * The expectation to fail; the idea that success has to be stolen.

Gatto says it takes about 100 hours for most children to learn the three Rs
(reading, writing, and arithmetic). He also says:

     "After years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between
     children and education I came to believe that government monopoly
     schools, compulsion and all, are structurally unreformable. They
     cannot function if their central myths are abandoned, so no
     amount of tinkering will correct what is wrong, although the
     danger is that tinkering can make these places more cosmetic.
     They are corrupt: like a rotten pear they have lost integrity and
     cannot be made whole."

(John Taylor Gatto's two books, The Exhausted School and Dumbing Us Down,
are available via mail-order, postpaid at $12.50 each, by writing to 235 W.
76th Street, New York, NY 10023, USA.)

John Holt is the author of Instead of Education. He suggests that we learn
best from "doing - self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work." He
advocates the abolition of "education" - which he describes as "learning
cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed
and fear." He says:

     "Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all
     human rights is the right to control our own minds and
     thoughts... Whoever takes that right away from us, by trying to
     'educate' us, attacks the very center of our being and does us a
     most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we
     cannot be trusted even to think...

     Education... seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and
     dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the
     deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state... My
     concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to
     end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to
     allow and help people to shape themselves."

Phyllis Schlafly is author of the book Child Abuse in the Classroom. She
writes:

     "A remarkable real-life drama took place in seven American cities
     during March 1984. Hundreds of parents traveled to one of seven
     locations to testify at U.S. Department of Education Hearings on
     proposed regulations for the Protection of Pupil Rights
     Amendment.

     More than 1,300 pages of testimony were recorded by court
     reporters as parents, public school teachers, and interested
     citizens spelled out their eye-witness accounts of the
     psychological abuse of children in the public schools. They
     related how classroom courses have confused schoolchildren about
     life, about standards of behavior, about moral choices, about
     religious loyalties, and about relationships with parents and
     with peers.

     These Hearings explain why we have 23 million adult illiterates
     who graduated from public schools, and why young people are
     experiencing high rates of teenage suicide, loneliness,
     premarital sex, and pregnancies.

     These Hearings explain how schools have alienated children from
     their parents, from traditional morality such as the Ten
     Commandments, and from our American heritage. These Hearings
     explain why children are emotionally and morally confused and
     why, in the apt colloquialism, they need need to "search for
     their identity."

     These Hearings explain what children have been doing in their
     classrooms instead of learning to read, write, spell, add,
     subtract, and the essentials of history, geography, and civics.
     These Hearings explain how children learn in school to be
     "sexually active," take illegal drugs, repudiate their parents,
     and rationalize immoral and anti-social conduct when it "feels"
     good in a particular "situation."

     These Hearings speak with the thunderous voice of hundreds of
     parents who are angry at how their children have been
     emotionally, morally, and intellectually abused by psychological
     and behavioral experiments during classroom hours when the
     parents thought their chidren were being taught basic knowledge
     and skills. Parents are indignant at the way that educator
     "change agents," spending federal tax dollars, have used children
     as guinea pigs for fads and experiments that have been
     substituted for real learning."

...Continued in next message - Part 2 of 2...

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