School reform

Various discussions with nashobabear and items in the news had me looking at Joanne Jacobs' excellent blog on educational reform issues, where I discovered John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education has been put up on the Web. His major point is that public education as we know it is oppressive, demeaning, socially damaging, and retards actual education. He does not posit a conspiracy to implement this system of social control, but suggests that it suits a Leviathan state to cripple its subjects by indoctrinating them in boredom and submission.

Here's a few of his Web-available writings:

A Short Angry History of American Forced Schooling
The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?
The Underground History of American Education

While I don't agree that things are as bad as he states, reading this material is a useful antidote to the constant praise for public schools, as if education were like some commodity that can be purchased and injected into children if only enough money were spent on it. I am already sympathetic to his point of view because I suffered severely in public schools -- not only the usual tortures of bullying and abuse, but also from the forced study of things I was uninterested in which constantly broke the natural flow of learning about other topics I was curious about.