“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of
Massachusetts around 1850.
It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated eighty percent
of the Massachusetts population,
the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children
until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia
and children marched to school under guard.”

/ / / /

“I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions
which must lay behind using the police power
to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit
to being schooled by strangers.”

/ / /

"But no large-scale reform is ever going to work
to repair our damaged children and our damaged society
until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main
engine of education.

If we use schooling to break children away from parents —
and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools
since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools
in 1650
and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools
in 1850 —

we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”

/ / / /

"John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on
mechanisms of familiar schooling that cripple imagination,
discourage critical thinking,
and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-
memorization drills."

“This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build
a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another.
Now we have been rendered permanent children.
It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”

“average men and women don’t really exist
except as a statistical conceit.”

“As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman,
Ben Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day —
though he left school at ten."

"Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his
peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.”

_

“The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist
in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted
to tending them
will seem incredible to you.”

_

"Schools train individuals to respond as a mass.

Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious,
emotionally needy, generally incomplete.

A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele.

A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish
requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion,
and universal participation;
our own requires a managed mass of
leveled, spiritless, anxious,
familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people
who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject
worth arguing about.”

“At the heart of the durability of mass schooling
is a brilliantly designed
power fragmentation system

which distributes decision-making so widely
among so many different warring interests
that large-scale change is impossible to those without a codebook.”

_

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