USA education failure, true or false

originally posted by: hopenotfeariswhatweneed
a reply to: Edumakated

Schools reflect the communities they serve. There is only so much a school can do if the child doesnt have a solid foundation at home. Education is reinforced at home. Wealthier and educated parents tend to spend more time reading and doi g other things that helps their childre perform better in school. Poorer kids often have illiterate parents and they dont spend nearly the same effort reinforcong education.

Damn i rarely agree with a post from you but in this part of what you are saying ....my god man you are spot on...

....it is all about what goes on at home....

Poorer kids often have illiterate parents and they dont spend nearly the same effort reinforcong education. Sociologist have studied that there is a huge gap in vicabulary by age 5 between affluent and poor kids. Our school system is not perfect but i think the larger issue is the breakdown of families. You can have a state of the art school and great teachers but if a childs home environment is messed up it wont matter.

Dude ...what is the context of poor ? I know parents whom were poor that put their heart and souls into their kids to give them a chance at success in this world......There is so much wrong in this blanket statement it really hurts.....

I didn't mean poor... should have said broken families. However, you have a higher concentration of broken families at the lower incomes. Yes, some poor families have children who do very well in school. It is usually because they have strong family bonds. You see this a lot of with Asian immigrants who may be poor financially, but their children still out perform kids from wealthier families. Typically, poor families that exhibit these characteristics don't stay poor long or over multiple generations.

My point is just that the public school system itself is fine by in large. Most of the failures are more related to the parents and cultural issues moreso than the school.

To illustrate, I live in a very wealthy community. We have excellent public schools from K - 12. My community is very diverse though racial and income wise in that compared to some other suburbs, we have a higher number of lower income students. Many of the lower income students still do not perform well in school despite having more resources available to them than probably 99% of school systems. So once can reasonably conclude it isn't the school system that is the issue. These kids have the same exact teachers and access to resources but for some reason are unable to take advantage.

Our community is constantly hand wringing as to why these kids don't perform. Given the community is very liberal, they refuse to start looking at obvious differences such as culture, single parent hood, and other more relevant characteristics.

AS it has always been, education is as good as the effort the student chooses to put into it.

a reply to: kenpachicero

Education is a loaded term. The system is great at producing regurgitating drones, but is horrible at producing critical thinkers. The dilemma is critical thinkers which are better at complicated jobs are also better at figuring out how much of a scam our system really is.

originally posted by: kenpachicero
We are constantly bombarded by news of sinking U.S. test scores and the dismal showing in comparative international testing. We are told a plethora of reasons for the systemic failure of education in this country, from not enough spending to ineffective teaching techniques. Whats the truth?

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
The Memory Hole
Sep. 09, 2009

www.informationliberation.com...

"It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was. Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.

How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.

Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."

By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part:

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."


John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above historical quotes. It is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. You can order it from Gatto's Website, which now contains the entire book online for free.

The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's exc

a reply to: namelesss

It appears as tho you didnt actually read or perhaps miss read the information i posted. The point I am making is that the U.S. scores, broken into racial groups, haven't changed since international comparison began. It isn't that teaching has become substandard its that the racial percentages of total population have changed. Statistically hispanics score lower on aptitude tests and as their percentage of the total population grew it lowered the overall scores for the country as a whole.

Public schools are an absolute failure.

One of the big problems is the influx of non English speaking students. Teachers are required to teach everything at least twice. Once in English and once in whatever the next most demanded language is - usually Spanish. The problem is the school year is not twice as long, the teachers don't teach twice as fast, and the students don't learn twice as fast. That means the students, English speaking or not, are only getting half an education. And it shows.

originally posted by: kenpachicero
a reply to: namelesss

It appears as tho you didnt actually read or perhaps miss read the information i posted. The point I am making is that the U.S. scores, broken into racial groups, haven't changed since international comparison began. It isn't that teaching has become substandard its that the racial percentages of total population have changed. Statistically hispanics score lower on aptitude tests and as their percentage of the total population grew it lowered the overall scores for the country as a whole.

I understand what you are saying, but since we were discussing education, I just threw that in parenthetically, as a point of interest.
Sorry for the divergence.