Stupid by design

Possibly the biggest conspiracy of our time?


Are you stupid? I’m certain you don’t think so, I certainly don’t feel stupid. How can we be? We did great in school; some of us were even honored students. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us were at the top of our classes. But are we in fact, not stupid?

Why do I ask this question?

Because we were designed to be stupid. More specifically, Americans have been designed to be stupid.

Piqued your interest yet?

The USA’s current school system was designed to suppress creativity and free thought. DESIGNED THAT WAY! The very people who put together America’s school system did so with the sole intent to keep the classes separated and to supply the industrial revolution with content, conforming workers. This was actually planned and it’s the same system we use today.

This is not my opinion, this is fact and I will prove it to you.

But before I do, I want to share a portion of an 8th grade final exam from 1895 with you:

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

See the rest of the exam here


How many did you get right? More importantly, how many would an American 8th grader get right today? Heck, how about a high school senior? College Senior for that matter? Not many I’m sure.

Keep the difficulty of this test and the year it was used fresh in your memory as I make my case for this conspiracy.

Before the turn of the century, and in the midst of the industrial revolution, can easily be argued was the time where America as a future superpower was born. It was a time of amazing growth and wealth…(For some). It was also a time when populations exploded and social systems started to take form out of necessity. Like our public school system.

Until then, school systems were managed locally and mostly independently. This actually turned out exceptionally bright people, as the only purpose of these small systems was education for the sake of education. In a microcosm, highly educated people are required for development and growth, but what about in the macro? The big picture?

In the late 1800’s it was decided that it would be detrimental to have too many highly educated free thinkers and not enough people to work the plants and do the manual labor required to power the industrial revolution. It was decided for us by the wealthy and powerful.

Remember John Dewey? (Dewey Decimal System) Here is a quote Mr. Dewey made in 1897 you were never supposed to hear:

“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.”

Yeah, he said that. “…maintenance of the proper social order…” that’s a gem huh?

How about this one from the Dean of Education at Stanford Elwood Cubberly in 1905:

…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."

Who are these guys you ask? These are the very guys who created and implemented today’s school system. The one that ALL American’s in the last century was educated with.

The system was designed to produce a proportionate number of “worker bee’s” and limit the amount of highly educated free thinkers.

Am I over thinking this? These quotes don’t prove anything you say? Well read this one from William Torrey Harris, the actual US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906:

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.

Harris all but states it as fact that 99% of students are “automata” by design! This is the very man responsible for the educational system. Not convinced yet that the US government wanted its masses to be uneducated robots? Would you believe the President himself?

President Woodrow Wilson:

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.

I don’t know how else to spell this out for you. The very people who are responsible for creating and implementing the current United States school system designed it to keep the majority uneducated.

Let’s revisit that 1895 test. Think about how hard that exam is today, for anybody, let alone a 13 year old. But the reality is that this was a typical exam PRIOR to the implementation of today’s educational system. Educators back then had one priority: To teach you and make you smarter. But as a collective, too many smart people didn’t serve the interest of the country as a whole. So a system to churn out the appropriate percentage of “worker bee’s” was implemented.
I am a product of it, my parents and their parents were all products of it.

Find me one college level professor, from any institution, that can score a 100% on that 8th grade exam in the times allotted and without a calculator or PC. You cannot. Because they were designed to be stupid, just like you and me.


Sources:
www.thememoryhole.org...
www.johntaylorgatto.com...


[edit on 25-1-2006 by skippytjc]

I saw this a while back to and was fooled. Go to this link, It's a tired urban legend..


www.snopes.com...

Also ask yourself this.

"how about the biology, physics, chemistry, world history, world literature, and computer programming those 1895 kids weren't asked about?"very little


[edit on 25-1-2006 by Uber Fr0g]

[edit on 25-1-2006 by Uber Fr0g]

Originally posted by Uber Fr0g
annnnnnnnnnnh try again!

I saw this a while back to and was fooled. Go to this link, It's a tired urban legend..


www.snopes.com...

[edit on 25-1-2006 by Uber Fr0g]

My post is not about the test, try reading my post and not just parts of it. The post is about a conpsiracy to keep us stupid, I use the test as a point, its not the arguement.

[edit on 25-1-2006 by skippytjc]

I see where your coming from, but you cant use false information to help prove a point. Well you can, but people dont take kindly to it lol.

I read this in an article recnently(i cant remmber where unfortunately) I believ this is the real problem in schooling.


What we have then, are two opposing approaches to education: one stressing knowledge that is demanding and challenging and with rich academic content, the other stressing social growth, sensitivity, feelings, emotions, values, behavior, the fostering of self-esteem, and desirable attitudes toward life and learning which will lead to "self-directed, creative and productive" learners.

Originally posted by skippytjc
Possibly the biggest conspiracy of our time?

I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll say it again, but if there is a conspiracy in education, it's a conspiracy of apathy. No dark cabal of leaders saying "This, this is what we can do to create more sheeple this year!" but rather thousands of individuals, working alone or in small groups, to keep students docile so the day goes smoother. Teachers, parents, counselors, administrators, health-workers are all involved, each doing a small part to keep kids calm, to keep them from asking disruptive (and as an unfortunate consequence, challenging) questions, to keep them in their seats during class and not up and running around.

Why do I ask this question?

Because we were designed to be stupid. More specifically, Americans have been designed to be stupid.

Not quite, "docile" would be a more appropriate term. Under the educational doctrine of docility, the ideal student would be like Ghandi: quiet, but attentive, intelligent and persuasive. Unfortunately for us all the first goal, quiet, is relatively easy to achieve (through drugs, social engineering, etc), but the latter is difficult enough that it's all too often easy enough for a teacher to say to themselves "Well, I've got them calmed dow this year, next year's teacher ought to be able to get the "attentive, intelligent, and persuasive" parts down for them.

The USA’s current school system was designed to suppress creativity and free thought. DESIGNED THAT WAY! The very people who put together America’s school system did so with the sole intent to keep the classes separated and to supply the industrial revolution with content, conforming workers. This was actually planned and it’s the same system we use today.

Again, kind of. The modern American school system is, indeed, a product of the Industrial Revolution's thinking: namely, that assembly lines are the best way to produce any product. Since then, we've had patch after patch applied until our system is now the equivalent of that old late-70's El Camino you see at the supermaket that's as much Duct Tape and Bondo as it is sheet metal.

The push for education in the US was, at least in part, designed, though it was more of a social-darwinist school of thought. It was believed, at the time that public education was starting in the US, that educaiton would allow the lower classes to lift themselves from their "shallow little worlds" and into the enlightened thinking of the upper classes. That if we could just educate everyone, the social evils of the time would disappear. We still see a lot of that in our society today and it's this thinking, at least in part, that's caused teachers and schools to take on more and more responsibility for children's upbringing.

This is not my opinion, this is fact and I will prove it to you.

But before I do, I want to share a portion of an 8th grade final exam from 1895 with you:

As was said, this is a bit of a disingenuous tangent here. The fact that the subjects taught in school have changed, that formalized grammar has decreased in importance in the Western world, for example, is not indicitive of a lack of quality in education. Indeed, seen independant of other information it could be said that we'd merely eliminated the chaff to allow our schools to teach children the truly important things. That's not to say I buy into that fully, but getting into a "who's got the bigger educational willie" contest is a little silly.

Remember John Dewey? (Dewey Decimal System) Here is a quote Mr. Dewey made in 1897 you were never supposed to hear:

“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.”

Melvil Dewey did the Dewey Decimal System. John Dewey was the educator.

[/nitpick (sorry, my wife's a librarian and wouldn't let me pass on that ]

Yeah, he said that. “…maintenance of the proper social order…” that’s a gem huh?

How about this one from the Dean of Education at Stanford Elwood Cubberly in 1905:

…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."

Yep, sounds pretty accurate for the time. They did see students as raw materials, little bundles of potential that were pretty much useless in their natural state, but that could be shaped to society's advantage. If you look at the time, you'll see all sorts of odd social engineering attempts taking place. Heck, if you look throughout human history you'll see such attempts. John Dewey et all were just using the most up-to-date technology of their time --the techniques of the Industrial Revolution-- just as previous social engineers had used other techniques such as religion, war, clan-structure and so on to reinfoce their own views of how the world should be "Made Better™"

Who are these guys you ask? These are the very guys who created and implemented today’s school system. The one that ALL American’s in the last century was educated with.

The system was designed to produce a proportionate number of “worker bee’s” and limit the amount of highly educated free thinkers.

Yep, that's what the folks at the time thought was necessary to have the highest proportion of happy people. We do the same thing now, even most so-called enlightened folks in the US, we just export the "worker bees" mold to people in other countries.

Am I over thinking this? These quotes don’t prove anything you say? Well read this one from William Torrey Harris, the actual US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906:

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.

Harris all but states it as fact that 99% of students are “automata” by design! This is the very man responsible for the educational system. Not convinced yet that the US government wanted its masses to be uneducated robots? Would you believe the President himself?

President Woodrow Wilson:

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.

I don’t know how else to spell this out for you. The very people who are responsible for creating and implementing the current United States school system designed it to keep the majority uneducated.

Not uneducated, educated in different things. Look at the state of the world in the late 19th and early 20th century. The US did not have the infrastructure to support the large number of highly-educated people that we have today. The US, at that time, was an up-and-coming manufacturing powerhouse and the palin truth was we needed workers who knew how to do the physical side of that. There were no robots at the time, there was no fast-and-cheap global transport of goods to allow us to oursource our workforce, we needed Americans who were physically mechanically adept in order to get, and maintain, our prosperity.

Let’s revisit that 1895 test. Think about how hard that exam is today, for anybody, let alone a 13 year old. But the reality is that this was a typical exam PRIOR to the implementation of today’s educational system. Educators back then had one priority: To teach you and make you smarter.

When you go to complete local control of education, though, this doesn't hold. The purpose of education, in such a system, is whatever the local school board wants it to be. For some this will be the increase of knowledge. Others may want a minimum level of education, just enough to maintain the social mores present. Still others will find education to be a frivolity and cease to fund it at all, leaving it up to each individual family (or group of families) to fund any education for their children. While I'll agree that our federal Department of Education has grown too large and powerful, I do think there is a need for some presence on the federal level, if only to maintain a bare minimum set of standards for US schools. Pure anarchy may look good on paper, but ask anyone in Somalia how well it works out in a practical application.

But as a collective, too many smart people didn’t serve the interest of the country as a whole. So a system to churn out the appropriate percentage of “worker bee’s” was implemented.

Not exactly. "As a collective, too many thinkers and not enough doers didn't serve the interest of the country as a whole." would be a more accurate way to state that. If everyone's drawing blueprints for the Next Big Invention, but nobody knows how to actually work the smelter, you have just as much a problem as if everyone's a worker and there's no one designing new things. It's the converse to the problem Rand raised in Atlas Shrugged.

Find me one college level professor, from any institution, that can score a 100% on that 8th grade exam in the times allotted and without a calculator or PC. You cannot. Because they were designed to be stupid, just like you and me.

Again, not so. Taking a college professor will get you someone with a highly specialized field of knowledge. This is kind of like asking a software engineer to explain, in scientific detail, why suspension bridges work without recourse to a computer, and then using his lack of ability to explain as proof that American engineers are incompetant.

The test is using different criteria than even our best educational institutions now use. Not "better" criteria, "different" criteria. Sure, I can't tell you the volume of a bushel. How many of those 19th century 8th graders could, for example, tell you how to figure a subnet, or how many bits in a byte. "If I have a flash media drive capable of storing 1 Gigabyte, how many 3-bit files could fit on it?"

Actually, I can see your argument. From Language and Math springs everything else. I always found it odd that my Grand son failed in English, yet he excelled in Computer Lab. I'm tickled he found a field wherein he is really good. (Now at seventeen, he runs circles around me when it comes to MS Office.)

However, I have to ask how much further along would he be, if he had first disiplined himself in English and Math? It's more than just learning facts and figures, it's learning disipline and focus.

You have hit on a problem but it isn't a conspiracy as such.

Schools like they are today are a product of the industrial age, a characteristic of the age was that production line thinking was applied across many areas and centralised. Many houses were built off the same plans, of course everything began to be made the same on production lines.

This thinking goes along the lines that everything fits though the same hole and if it doesn't push it through until it does, if it still doesn't turn out right its a reject and throw it away. All decisions are made at the top and filter down. This is where bureacracy began to take over and many other institutions as well, look at the military, same deal, take raw recruits and remould them to be the same, schools are just another by product of this era.

These days we have computers and automated machines to do most of the boring production line work. The current line of thinking (in business at least) is decentralisation and customisation, business tends to change more rapidly than dinosaur government institutions. Though now even the military realises that this is also the way forward to a degree.

Obviously everyone is different. They learn in different ways and excel in different areas. Ideally school would be tailored to each individual student, as it was often in the past where the child would have an individual tutor if the parents could afford it, or they worked in the mines if they couldn't.

This is not easy or cost effective to change so the school system plods along not doing the best it can due the limitations placed on it. With modern technology though, it could be easier to make tailored learning a reality for everyone.

The main barrier is that those few who excelled under the old system of schooling dont see the problem because they did ok and they assume that if it worked for them it will work for everyone. These are the people who got good marks and went to university and then became decision makers. They are products of the system and will fight to keep it from the one thing they fear most, which is radical change. Those who didn't do well at school are relegated to less influential areas of life and so the cycle continues.

A tragedy, yes, conspiracy, unlikely.

I am in High school, now, and yes, this test of yours is like none I've ever seen before. It's different subject matter, though, our society is concerned more with the principles of science and technology than the rules of english. And like someone said before, they couldn't answer the type of questions that we have on tests today.
Am I stupid? I don't know. Is the student who excels in health but fails in math stupid? Is the person who has memorized the tableof elemants and all of their latin names but failed Computer Science stupid?

[edit on 1/29/2006 by Lifeadventurer]

what are me and you to believe memory has anything to do with overall intelligience?

most of the greatest thinkers of all time have no memory whatsoever. they are only able to remember what equation or thought they THEMSELF made up because the equation or thought is a PART of HIM/HER.

memory is a negligiable requirement of intelligience.

for instance, whether you consider this reply- or even this whole thread an intelligient discussion.... you will most likely forget it soon.

by the way... did you remember you pinky toe just right now?
no.
but... all of a sudden you feel your pinky toe(even without touching it- just in your mind you suddenly feel it.
did it not exist before i reminded you of it)?
i don't know either bro man......

...CHiBi-Dai

p.s.- why do we feel so dumb? it is simple. most of what the people know today came from ONE person.
i.e., did the man who created the light bulb know how to design a car fueled by gasoline? did the man who created the light bulb even know of wavelengths/amplitude/frequency?
maybe not!!!
in turn- my point is, each of those inventions/discoveries was created individually...
the light bulb, an engine, and the discovery of wavelengths/amplitude/frequency.

what am i to you if i dont know what you know of what someone else created?
... a person who cannot memorize something from books from multitudes of peoples minds?

it is the individuals who led us here.
the inventors mind is different from a memory-capable mind.
and an inventors mind WITH an memory-capable mine is a man to be afraid of.

...CHiBi-Dai

[edit on 29-1-2006 by chibidai_rrr]