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John Taylor Gatto, author Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction

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Broadcast 9/19/2010 at 18:12:02 (3 Listens, 1 Downloads, 5 Itunes)
Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show Podcast

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a wide ranging discussion on the problems with the American Education system, or as Gatto clarifies-- compulsory schooling, which is not the same as education.
Interview notes: (numbers in parentheses are approximate time into the inteview)
top down : For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from a lofy central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. it won't won't w ork. and it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made th is nation a noble experiment."

"nobody survives these places with their humanity intact, not kid not teachers, not administrators and not parents."

At our best we human beings are much, much grander than merely rational; at our best we transcend rationality while incorporating its procedures into our lower levels of functioning.

half of eligible citizens registered to vote and barely half do vote and so, in two party jurisdictions, a trifle over one eighth of the citizenry is sufficient to elect public officials.

american federation of teachers trying to get businesses to hire based on grades.

Public schools in small towns in western PA during WWII operated something on the order of undergraduate colleges-- reading, in 6th grade, in a coal mining town, Monongahela-- Marcus aurelius, reading it in Latin in 9th grade. Heavily in algebra in 7th grade.

Young people were not considered incomplete human beings. They were considered to be working members of the community at about the are of 12-- you were expected to be making money or you were considered a parasite.

What we learned in 3rd grade was reserved for elite students in 9th grade in NYC.

School forced him to dumb down assignments-- from toughest reading to easier reading--
since they realized they were being drowned in crap they paid back the institution in kind--

Institution created to build a harmonious customer- did not include people with sharp minds...

For people to think clearly, they have to put up a rigid barrier between being schooled, like a fish, and education.

Was one of the founding members of the NY Conservative party. Most of people who call themselves conservatives are anything but... they are wild eyed radicals and social

13 By intensely
the bell curve is an immense fraud-- an artifact of the way we do business... permanently freezes people in the dead middle and disaffects bottom people from ever learning anything and is meant to .... be a stabilizer of the social order.

these people indict themselves with their own words.
Winston churchill was the first man to order the poison gassing of a civilian population from the air. Churchill when criticized, when gassing the Kurds, (20 min in.)

William James says that the onlyu way that the poor are kept from murdering the rich is by training their habits and attitudes in early childhood. They can never escape that is built into them. He says that's the only way that civilization progresses.

Profile the leadership mind in the last two hundred years. Nobody... thought that ordinary people were anything other than biological degenerate, unrecoverable and a constant menace to the good people.

Charles is the premier mass murder in human history.
Descent of man-- informed the wealthy-- if the good breeding stock, scandinavian, german... bred with Irish, Italian.. would ....23 minutes in.

The book led to the explosive growth of elite private boarding schools and
the kind Clinton sent kid to, kind Bush, Roosevelt, Kennedy attended.

How is that the american political leadership sees to it that their children are educated...

The school training of the managerial class has no thing whatever to do with standardized tests, with subject learning-- a fantastic mutilation of what you have to learn.

Schooling for the management class:
the most important thing to learn is expression, in a convincing way-- that's the way you win allies, sell your point of view-- strong competency-- active literacy is speaking to any kind of audience and writing persuasively. Neither one of those are touched by any public school in the United states. maybe a little lip service.

People who have a command of speaking and writing are dangerous people.

We're sitting with a president who is superb. he's not naturally way. He's received rhetorical training of a surprisingly excellent quality-- got him elected.

that's deliberately kept from you, me our children and everybody listening to your show. The tricks have been known since ancient rome. They've been passed down to an elite population for thousands of years.

Second-- remember we're doing this in lieu of English social studies, math etc.... they offer insight into all the institutional forms-- churches, military, govt, etc. so you iknow what each protestant sect teaches about life...
without knowing that you are like some helpless intelligent fool. You are absolutely disadvantaged because you are unable to see how theology has written our laws, our preferences, our customs.

Example-- after WWII war crimes trials at Nuremberg. People sentenced to executions. Germany was the most law abiding nation on earth. They didn't break their laws, they broke natural laws, God's law.

One thing that american corporations have dropped the ball on. In 1946 FDR worked out a deal with the most influential corporations to absorb the soldiers coming home from the war or they offered a plan to go to college.

Imagine what happens to a nation that allows people trained to use deadly weapons to go on unemployed. you don't have to imagine. That's what happened in Germany after the first world war.

If you want to redeem your stock options, you lay off 10,000 people and your stock shoots up (25 minutes in.)

They deliberately focus on what's behind the machinery, behind the curtain in institutions.
The third t hing would be easy to teach-- the theory of human nature-- from all the accumulated history of the human race-- what the common expectation of human nature is.
Instead of putting a book in front of children to memorize--
We're looking for a working paradigm of human behavior.
Theology is forbidden to be taught in schools... theological insight is actually psychological insight-- are really psychological treatises--
To deny this kind of insight is a criminal act.

Number four should be the most obvious of all--mastery of social forms-- used to have all black and hispanic classes.
Would say-- what you believe is racial prejudice is really something else. You don't dress, speak, use manners... the way mainstream society does. If you could master, not absorb, them, you would suddenly burst to a new plateau.

Teach them rituals of ordinariness, of customary behavior-- it was overwhelmingly successful.

the elite private boarding schools make sure that you automatically know the hundreds of little details-- how to address elders,

At my first class at Columbia, on business decision making-- taught how many buttons to wear on cuffs, how to put hands in pockets... This was an official subject in an Ivy league college, wh

Fifth-- appearance
there really is a prejudice to overweight people, sloppy people-- they are barriers to opportunity.

how come these things are so close to the surface

six-- emphasis on independent work. Obviously in all crisis situations in your life, or the need to distinguish yourself, you will not have a private coach telling you need to do this or do that. If you submit yourself to that for 12 years of your life.

Only independent will free you to be a liberated human being. You give the minimum in a given situation. you are always looking.... to push them further.

Principle of not being taught to swim but being thrown in the deep end of the swimming school. It's not that crude--- you're not coddling any more than you need to.

Number seven-- one of my favorites-- I have to preface it that Plato said thousands of years ago, that to manage society, you have to destroy the imagination of the people-- .....(48)

Calvin said the major job is to destroy the imagination, because people with imagination-- you can't figure them out and they have the capacity to unpleasantly surprise us.

Spinoza-- in Tractatus Religio Politicus-- published in 1690-- read by every leader in the american colonies-- says the majority of the human race is murderously .... unless you can destroy their minds and imagination, they will destroy the good people.

Address to the German nation-- Nobody should have a choice at keeping their kid out of school because that's the way you lose battles. if they retain an imagination they will disobey orders from a commanding officer.

American philosophers re-created american schooling as a way to destroy imagination.

In order to provide an antidote for this imaginative destruction-- elite boarding schools offer familiarity with the... master creations which have stood the test of time-- arts, music, drama-- they are a record of the bredth and depth of the human imagination that future generations still respect.

Number 8-- and th is can only be developed independently-- to create the capacity in the mind of the camera and the tape recorder-- powers of objectively seeing and remembering-- you can temporarily discipline your mind.

Number 9 Can only be developed in independent study-- Developing and testing your own judgement so you don't ahve to take any other person's word. ....57.

Princeton turns down 4000 people with perfect grade and SAT scores. Harvard turns down 80% of valedictorians who apply.

How can you make decisions unless you know this quite verifiable information.

number 10-problem with liberals- you need the ability to master your own natural aversions. You can't know what the people who are detestable...56. Unless you iknow what that is, you end up with endless name calling.

Surgeon-- You master what you dislike by rubbing your own face into it.

underground history, recommended by Howard zinn.

We don't have a two party system. We have a one party system that understands what side of the bread the managers bread is buttered on.

Corporate is the highest class.
The political class makes sure that things remain stable.

Why was his first action in office to enlarge a phony war in Afghanistan.? ... you have to pay off the munitions and defense contractors.

Turning over the economy to the people who crashed-- Goldman, Sachs and company-- How does that square with who the president is?

Number 11-- when you accept a significant challenge and independently pursue that challenge, the effect is beneficial, lifelong, and these people are all around us-- 22 richest man in the world-- Richard Branson-- Virgin Airlines-- dropped out of school, never went to college. When he was four years old his mother drove him miles from his home, asked him if he could get home. He said he could. She dropped him off and let him go home. When he got home he realized that nothing in his world was an obstacle too high to climb

dell, turner, Gates, Jobs, Avis, didn't waste time in college. The founder of Ikea dropped out elementary school.

How long do we have to wake up to the deceitful narratives, from good people-- churches, responsible

The cost of colleges removes so much money from the productive economy in order to create a jobs project for people who would be revolutionaries otherwise-- Germany had the largest colllege population, by five times-- it's widely acknowledged that the extreme degree of schooling in Weimar Germany led to the second world war because the expectations of college graduates couldn't be matched.

Trilateral university-- 1975 sponsored book-- Crisis of Democracy-- crisis is that democracy has any influence over what happens. what must be done is to lower the expectations by making the college population aware that they are no better off than the high school crowd.

the economy in the black is Brazil and it is run by a fourth grade dropout from the slums of Rio de Janiero. how come, every single day this isn't the headlines. instead, we hear y ou are in a hell of a lot of trouble if you don't go to college. You've wasted a lot of time, a lot of resources than you ever were.

People have been brainwashed not to say what's under their noses or to mumble that there's nothing to do about it.

We live in a house of mirrors and your escape is in your own hands.
As soon as competive power succeeds in showing it's own head, it's bought off.

the easiest way to get rich in america has always been sales. Almost every CEO has come up through sales.

There isn't a computer in the country that isn't spied on by little cookies.

For most people, not all, but for most people, the people in charge of your databank know more about you than you do yourself, know your hot buttons, your cold buttons and what you are going to do.

at some point this current system is so unstable, that even with all the advantages of mind control, it will come down.--

jean Kirkpatrick--

the universal yearning to be your own person, to be at liberty, does not depend on training. What does it mean that no government wasn't upset, that they do not perpetuate themselves.... they always carry with them the seeds of their own destruction, because what is the point of controlling a population other than to exploit it.

Exploitation leads to the rise of a revolutionary consciousness.
if american's were able to read the federallist papers (120)

We've watched the corruption of the american presidency two years after it brought the first rays of hope in 20 years.

12th-- taught theories of access to anyone on earth-- You want to talk to the president of the Unnited states and you're a slum kid-- you are taught in this system how to have the highest percentage of success.

Bartleby Project-- end standardized testing.
the proper way to upset standardized testing. Don't put a rational argument in front of the legislature. Mothers of Scarsdale NY refused to allow their kids to take standardized tests. Scarsdale isn't just another rich community. It's one of the power centers of the world.

it was a dagger at the throat of the standardized test business. there could be only one explanation-- the parents causing the trouble-- that their kids would not have to take the tests, buit in exchange, they would stop being the vanguard of the unwashed--

Bartleby the Scrivener-- a lowdown office clerk refuses to do reasonable tasks-- he simply says "I would prefer not to."
he is fired and says, when told to leave the office, "I would prefer not to."
When sent to debtors prison, he prefers not to eat and starves himself to death.
Story was written in 1850.
Unless you have full sovereignty over refusing yoru cooperation, you are a slave.
Simply write on the face of the test, "I would prefer not to take the test."-- the locution a gentleman would use. It would only take 5 percent of the country to bring this $50-60 testing business down.

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