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Submitted by : spanky Submitted on : Jan 11,2005 12:10:47 pm ballot title: Is education a basic human right or a privelege only for those who can afford it?ballot number:64342
Any civilized country should have universal education. This is a tough one. The government is violating the rights of millions of people in order to provide public education. But herzog is right; it generates much more money than is put into it. Private companies can do it better but the government would still have to extort taxes to pay for the poorest children to go. This is a difficult area because it deals with children. It would be nice to have a good voucher system in place. Take the money spent per student on public education and give it to the parents (with restrictions of course, it can only be used for education). And then turn the public schools into private enterprises, make them competitive for a change. But without education we'd break into a relatively permanent upper and lower class. A study in Canada just found that public day care is of better quality than privatized day care. Public day care pays their employees better, attracts better care givers and its standards are higher. How would privatizing education make it better? There's no doubt that private schools easily outperform public schools on average. And why wouldn't they? When a private school has a reputation of producing barely literate graduates they lose money, so they work to fix the problem and fire the whoever fell down on the job. When public schools have a terrible performance record they are given more money and told to try harder next time, nobody loses their job, the system remains the same. "COMPULSORY STATE EDUCATION IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL, COMMUNISTIC, AND CRIMINAL " The U.S. Constitution (Chapter Ten) makes no mention of education. Most of our Founding Fathers took it for granted that education was a private matter. (At the time of the American Revolution, almost certainly, there was a higher rate of literacy than we now have.) The U.S. Constitution says: * Amendment VIII: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. * Amendment XIII, Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
by bigmonkeynuts on Tue Jan 11, 05 11:29pm
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Compulsory state education is coercive power at its worst. Innocent children are herded into concentration campuses where they are effectively stripped of individual power. They are brainwashed to be powerless individuals, owned and cared for by omnipotent big-daddy government. Its not your right to impose this evil on anyone and we are going to murder you in massive numbers because of it "Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts... Whoever takes that right away from us, by trying to 'educate' us, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think... Education... seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state... My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves." --- Holt "Much attention has recently been focused on child abuse. In my opinion, by far the worst and most damaging form of child abuse is called "compulsory state education." Personally, I would rather not have a child than subject it to incarceration in a concentration campus for mind destruction. A report in The Arizona Republic of September 16, 1992 reflects the extent of the mind destruction wreaked by our "educators." A study found that 64 percent of elementary-school teachers say that the health of pupils is declining, while only 5 percent see it as improving. And "92 percent of the teachers listed psychological and emotional difficulties as the most common health problem. Researchers said those resulted mainly from divorce, neglect, low self-esteem and separation of family." The report didn't say anything about the fact that most of the parents of the pupils had themselves been incarcerated in concentration campuses for mind destruction - most of the teachers had of course suffered the same fate. The extent of the mind destruction of our youth is also reflected in increased rates of mental illness, suicide, violent crime, and further child abuse. In their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner report as follows: "... he number one health problem in the United States is mental illness: there are more Americans suffering from mental illness than from all other forms of illness combined. Of almost equal magnitude is the crime problem. It is advancing rapidly on many fronts, from delinquency among affluent adolescents to frauds perpetrated by some of our richest corporations. Another is the suicide problem. Are you aware that suicide is the second most common cause of death among adolescents? Or how about the problem of 'damaged' children? The most common cause of infant mortality in the United States is parental beating." Stewart Emery is author of the book Actualizations: You Don't Have to Rehearse to Be Yourself. He says: "In our society, when we talk about raising children, we are really talking about driving them crazy. What education is about is conditioning people to be irresponsible and stupid. It teaches them to be skillful technologists and useless people... At the end of the "educational" process we have become technically semi-competent human machines, and as creative human beings we have turned into morons." Ayn Rand was a novelist and philosopher, best known for her books, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Among other books, she also wrote The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, with a chapter, "The Comprachicos." Comprachico is a Spanish word meaning "child-buyer." The comprachicos were a nomadic association, notorious in theseventeenth century. They bought and sold children - special children, children turned into deformed freaks, used in freak shows to amuse the public. At an early age they placed a young child in a porcelain pot with a grotesque form. As the child's body grew, it had to assume the shape of the pot. The result was a deformed freak for people to laugh at. Rand uses the practice of the comprachicos as an analogy to describe American "education." She refers to our "educators" as "the comprachicos of the mind." Children's minds are forced to assume the shape of a grotesque "intellectual pot." Rand describes the result: "The students' development is arrested, their minds are set to respond to slogans, as animals respond to to a trainer's whistle, their brains are embalmed in the syrup of altruism as an automatic substitute for self-esteem... They would obey anyone, they need a master, they need to be told what to do. They are ready now to be used as cannon fodder - to attack, to bomb, to burn, to murder, to fight in the streets and die in the gutters. They are a trained pack of miserably impotent freaks, ready to be unleashed against anyone."
by bigmonkeynuts on Tue Jan 11, 05 11:35pm
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How to create a skitzo Confusion. Gatto admits that everything he teaches is out of context. Class position. Children must know their place and stay in the class where they belong. "The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class." Indifference. "Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in any class I know of." Emotional dependency. Gatto says that he teaches children to surrender their will to the chain of command, using "stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces." Intellectual dependency. The most important lesson. Children must wait for the expert authority to make all the important decisions, to tell them what to study. There is no place for curiosity, only conformity. Provisional self-esteem. Because it is so difficult to make self-confident spirits conform, children must be taught that their self-respect depends on expert opinion. They must be constantly tested, evaluated, judged, graded, and reported on by certified officials. Self-evaluation is irrelevant - "people must be told what they are worth." You can't hide. Children are always watched. No privacy. People can't be trusted. According to Gatto, these are the consequences of the seven lessons: The private Self is almost non-existent; children develop a superficial personality borrowed from TV shows. Desperate dependence. Unease with intimacy or candor; dislike for parents; no real close friends; lust replaces love. Indifference to the adult world; very little curiosity about anything; boredom. A poor sense of the future; consciousness limited to the present. Cruelty to each other. Striking materialism. The expectation to fail; the idea that success has to be stolen.
by bigmonkeynuts on Wed Jan 12, 05 2:38am
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"Gatto explains how the leaders of industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, to name just a few— influenced, guided, funded, and at times forced compulsory schooling into the mainstream of American society. This was when the basic structures of the public education system were first being set down. These emerging corporate giants knew they needed three things in order for their interests to thrive: 1) compliant employees; 2) a guaranteed and dependent population; and 3) a predictable business environment. It is toward these ends - and not education - that modern compulsory schooling was established. America at the time of the birth of modern schooling was not conducive to the formation of a corporate consumer society. Businesses were mainly operated by individual proprietors on a small scale. Entrepreneurs were in control of their own livelihood. Americans like Ben Franklin, George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Thomas Edison were independent, free thinkers. (None of these men spent more than two years in any kind of school, yet all led productive, successful lives.) However, powerful leaders of large corporations knew the development of such individuals would hinder their goals. The solution: remove children from the stable influence of their families, place them in public schools, and mold them into the kinds of people upon whom big business depends. Just in case parents were unwilling to comply, compulsory schooling was made into law. At the same time, there were many other social influences that fed and accelerated the process of mandatory state schooling. For one thing, forced government schooling was a means to transform the diverse array of incoming immigrants into homogenized Americans. In addition, popular ideologies of the time such as Social Darwinism justified the intervention of public schooling into the lives of everyone, because it was believed that the best should wield power over the rest, and lead the ignorant masses to happiness under the enlightened and benevolent guidance of the elite. " "John Taylor Gatto was a public school teacher in Manhattan for 26 years. Each year from 1989 to 1991 he was named New York City Teacher Of The Year. In 1991 the New York Senate named him State Teacher Of The Year. The following excerpts are from his book, Dumbing Us Down: "Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior. "...the truth is that reading, writing and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. "...Institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. ...he massive rethinking the schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that powerful interests cannot afford to let it happen. "The lesson of my teaching life is that both the theory and structure of mass-education are fatally flawed; ...Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppresion, and intimidation. The schools we've allowed to develop can't work to teach nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone's life, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Working for official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination; these have no connection with education - they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not freedom. "Break up these institutional schools, decertify teaching. Let anyone who has a mind to teach bid for customers, privatize the whole business - trust the free market system. I know it's easier to say than do, but what other choice do we have? We need lees school, not more." According to an article by John Taylor Gatto published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on June 13, 1993 under the title "The Public School Nightmare," the American state education system was copied from the Prussian 19th century system with the objective to produce: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers to the mines; 3) Well subordinated civil servants to government; 4) Well subordinated clerks to industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike about major issues. ...You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose - which was to create a form of state socialism - gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant. ...Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively. One of the most interesting byproducts of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Remarque, in his classic All Quiet on the Western Front tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling. It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically - schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyzes the moral will as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped. ...ompulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's Republic, a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple sentence, "I know nothing" - hence the popular label attached to the secret society's political arm, "The American Party." Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this - the children who could afford to be privately educated. It's important to note that the underlying premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children - the State is sovereign over the family. At the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted. You can see this philosophy at work in court decisions which rule that parents need not be told when schools dispense condoms to their children, or consulted when daughters seek abortion. How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in American schools? ... Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous "7th Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these. By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. In that year the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent "over-education" from happening. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role. "
by bigmonkeynuts on Wed Jan 12, 05 2:38am
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Nico_B Look up the amount spent per pupil in public vs. private schools. Lower end private schools with higher test scores than publics cost about the same amount when you adjust for transportation. Vouchers and private schools all lead down the same path: Education based on what people can afford to pay. Which means establishing a permanent underclass. It is in Society's interest not to create a permanent Ignorant class ... or institutionalized stratified levels, based on wealth. 'Vouchers and private schools all lead down the same path: Education based on what people can afford to pay.' The rich already send their kids to private schools, they would be unaffected. Creating a voucher system based on the amount of money we spend per kid now, which is higher than the tuition rate at most private institutions, would give the children of the poor a similiar chance at success. I disagree. Once privatized, they can turn away applicants. This results in cherry picking from more privileged demographics ... a practice they will have to engage in if they want to keep their numbers competitive. Further, by siphoning off monies from the Public School system (which never has enough, as it is), you undermine the public school system. Once you have a widespread voucher system, the Public School system collapses. The private schools are not better because they are private ... they get higher scores because they cater to a more select demographic and can turn away "undesirables". |