Burn Them Down!
Leonardo DaVinci wrote in his journal, "Wisdom is the daughter of experiment. Experience is never at fault." And. "I know well that because I have not had a literary education there are some who will think in their arrogance that they are entitled to set me down as uncultured -- the fools." In DaVinci's day rich fathers hired tutors for their sons to learn literature. William Shakespeare may have attended Stratford grammar school for a while, but no records exist that he did. It is known that he spent part of his youth helping in his father's business. George Washington attended school for only 2 years, to study surveying. Ben Franklin became one of the leading philosophers, writers, and scientists of his time after having only attended a grammar school from age 8 to 10. Abraham Lincoln attended a one room school for only a few months. He learned to read and write by candle and firelight after his day's work was done, and he became a practicing lawyer by serving as an apprentice to another lawyer. In contrast, a lieyer today is required to attend 20 years of schooling after which he has lost all understanding of truth, justice, or even the basis for laws. Albert Einstein flunked out of school for refusing busywork.
Before we had compulsory public schools the literacy rate was higher than it is today. Our literacy rate in the USA since compulsory public schools has never been higher than around 90%. This compares to literacy rates in the first half of the 19th century, which were around 98%. Before compulsory schooling we also didn't have students conducting violent assaults on their schools such as those at Columbine High School and many others.
Half a century ago the baby boomers were flooding public schools. Citizens were funding great increases in school construction and teacher education as the number of American children rapidly increased. In those years Bob was immersed in grade school. By the time Bob had gotten as far as "Jr. High School" which it was then called, he was already aware that most of his previous years had been a waste. It was apparent, even to a 7th grader, that most of the reading, writing, and arithmetic was age dependent. Almost all of the arithmetic taught in grades 1 through 4, for example, could just as easily been included by starting in 5th grade if all the repetitive boring busy work was left out. Likewise, if some basic reading was taught in 3rd grade it could have been skipped entirely in 1st, 2nd, 4th and 6th grade without losing any competence. As a young man of 14 I understood that something was seriously wrong with the public schools, but while you are in school you really don't have time to ponder basic questions. The time to do that has been taken away from you. It has taken me another half a century to learn what the problem with schools really is.
We the public are told, or should I say that we have been taught, to believe that compulsory public schools are necessary for young people to learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Like most of the other lies you were told in school that is utter nonsense. I'm not the only man who has been thinking about this topic for a long time. Mr. John Taylor Gatto speaks from 30 years of teaching experience in New York where he was voted "Teacher of the Year" in the last year before he abandoned the school system and began writing about it. Gatto Institute or johntaylorgatto.com His observations of the actual lessons of public schools and the reasons for those problems coincide and articulate what Bob has understood since his years as a student.
All of us alive today were raised and thought conditioned in public schools, but such has not always been the case. Schools, colleges, and Ph.D.s did not always exist, and were not invented in America. In the 19th century many Americans went to Prussia to obtain the new Ph.D.s that could be earned in Prussian education system. The Prussian state was dominated by the remnants of a feudal Aristocracy and rigid class segregation. They were embarking on the industrial revolution, taking peasants off farms and stuffing them into factories in large numbers. The Prussian aristocracy invented compulsive public schools as a means of psychological control and subjugation of the mass of lower class people. During the late 19th century and early American robber barons such as Carnage and Rockefeller promoted education as a way of controlling American lower classes, reducing labor unrest, and assuring political control. Their foundations, along with leading "educators" of the time created the American public school system as we know it. Once created, it has become a huge public trough at which legions of "well meaning" employees can feed, lobby for ever increasing funds, and turn out generation after generation of submissive sheep from the lower classes. Compulsory public schooling is a self perpetuating monster doing exactly what it was intended to do.
According to Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto, the seven real lessons of compulsory public schools are:
In 1992, seven years before the Columbine High School massacre, Mr. Gatto quoted Nobel Prize winning author Octavio Paz's observation that modern American schools cannot help but provoke violent individual rebellions. And Columbine High School is nothing new. Bob remembers students ripping woodwork off walls, pulling pins out of a door that fell over and injured an old female teacher, and hitting an ex-marine drill instructor in the back of the head with a large rock in 1960. Even then school administrators were hiring ex-marines to "get tough" on school rebellions, because rebellion by a few students is built into the oppressive school system that wastes years and years of the time, prevents education, and teaches only the lessens listed above.
In recent times we have seen "home schooling" becoming more and more popular as wise parents take their children out of public schools. Bob became interested in home schooling when one of my radical friends told me how he had raised his children. He just never sent them to public schools. He reported them as "home schooled" but in truth they learned life from doing rather than lesson books. His children, then in their 20s, knew every bit as much reading, writing, and arithmetic as other kids who had been trained in obedience, but they also knew how to build a house, run a business, and even to think for themselves.
Over the past few decades we have seen schools teaching feminism along with the above lessons. Boys are encouraged to suicide or shame, and have been dropping out of school in greater numbers. So much the better. The sooner boys abandon the social conditioning of public schools the better off they are. The less time boys spend in mind numbing conformity and shame lessons the more they can have time to learn. Men too are abandoning public school teaching in droves for reasons they can't articulate. Maybe men will eschew the work of dumbing down boys in favor of meaningful jobs that provide the community with positive benefits. Public schools train you to be sheep, to serve the upper class, to buy whatever you are told to buy, to believe whatever you are told to believe, to vote however you are told to vote. That is what they are intended to do, and they are very effective in doing it.
Last spring The World According to Bob contained an article about voting against the annual school levies which we are asked to continually support public schools through ever increasing taxes. At the time, Bob was undecided about whether to vote against levies because they hurt children, or to vote for them because an under funded school may be worse for the children than a well funded one. Bob is no longer ambivalent, having spent more time studying and learning about schools, their history, and their real teaching. Tear them down. Burn them down. Stop voting for them. Demand that our legislatures stop requiring mass submission training. If you are a parent take your kids out of school now, today.
If you are a young man reading this blog, withdraw from school today. Get a job. Get on with your life. Take time to read and think in whole hours and days, not in 40 minute chunks interrupted by bells. When Bob was in college in the 1960s there was a saying, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education." It was said to be humorous, but it had a deep underlying truth. Every minute you spend in school takes away a minute you can spend actually being educated. School dumbs you down, prevents you from learning, prevents you from thinking, takes away your ability to be yourself, and makes you a sheep following every advertising suggestion that the mass media tells you to buy.
Tear them down! Burn them down! Obliterate them! Save the children! Save the nation!
Before we had compulsory public schools the literacy rate was higher than it is today. Our literacy rate in the USA since compulsory public schools has never been higher than around 90%. This compares to literacy rates in the first half of the 19th century, which were around 98%. Before compulsory schooling we also didn't have students conducting violent assaults on their schools such as those at Columbine High School and many others.
Half a century ago the baby boomers were flooding public schools. Citizens were funding great increases in school construction and teacher education as the number of American children rapidly increased. In those years Bob was immersed in grade school. By the time Bob had gotten as far as "Jr. High School" which it was then called, he was already aware that most of his previous years had been a waste. It was apparent, even to a 7th grader, that most of the reading, writing, and arithmetic was age dependent. Almost all of the arithmetic taught in grades 1 through 4, for example, could just as easily been included by starting in 5th grade if all the repetitive boring busy work was left out. Likewise, if some basic reading was taught in 3rd grade it could have been skipped entirely in 1st, 2nd, 4th and 6th grade without losing any competence. As a young man of 14 I understood that something was seriously wrong with the public schools, but while you are in school you really don't have time to ponder basic questions. The time to do that has been taken away from you. It has taken me another half a century to learn what the problem with schools really is.
We the public are told, or should I say that we have been taught, to believe that compulsory public schools are necessary for young people to learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Like most of the other lies you were told in school that is utter nonsense. I'm not the only man who has been thinking about this topic for a long time. Mr. John Taylor Gatto speaks from 30 years of teaching experience in New York where he was voted "Teacher of the Year" in the last year before he abandoned the school system and began writing about it. Gatto Institute or johntaylorgatto.com His observations of the actual lessons of public schools and the reasons for those problems coincide and articulate what Bob has understood since his years as a student.
All of us alive today were raised and thought conditioned in public schools, but such has not always been the case. Schools, colleges, and Ph.D.s did not always exist, and were not invented in America. In the 19th century many Americans went to Prussia to obtain the new Ph.D.s that could be earned in Prussian education system. The Prussian state was dominated by the remnants of a feudal Aristocracy and rigid class segregation. They were embarking on the industrial revolution, taking peasants off farms and stuffing them into factories in large numbers. The Prussian aristocracy invented compulsive public schools as a means of psychological control and subjugation of the mass of lower class people. During the late 19th century and early American robber barons such as Carnage and Rockefeller promoted education as a way of controlling American lower classes, reducing labor unrest, and assuring political control. Their foundations, along with leading "educators" of the time created the American public school system as we know it. Once created, it has become a huge public trough at which legions of "well meaning" employees can feed, lobby for ever increasing funds, and turn out generation after generation of submissive sheep from the lower classes. Compulsory public schooling is a self perpetuating monster doing exactly what it was intended to do.
According to Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto, the seven real lessons of compulsory public schools are:
(1) Confusion: We are taught to disconnect all knowledge, divide our knowledge up in pieces so we can't relate it to our other knowledge and gain wisdom. Children are taught disconnected facts and then constantly switched to some other subject before they can put anything in perspective.
(2) Class Position: Class is taught by assigning children to small groups consisting only of their age group, from their own neighborhood. They are constantly graded and numbered. They are taught to accept that the numbers are their proper place in the social pyramid.
(3) Indifference: Children are taught that no matter how interested a child becomes in a topic, the bell or horn will sound and he must abandon it. Day after day his interest is interrupted. He never is allowed to have a complete experience with any thought, or interest. His world becomes little disconnected pieces. They destroy the past and the future, abstracting days and life into little segments.
(4) Emotional Dependency: Approval comes in the form of little gold stars, smiles from the teacher, and alleged honors. Disapproval is from red checks, frowns, and reprimands. All his rights may be granted or withheld at the whim of some person in authority. The same arbitrary authority may withdraw all his privileges. He learns to be dependent.
(5) Intellectual Dependency: Students wait for the teacher to tell them what to do, what to read, what to think. Students are not allowed to pursue study based on their individual curiosity. Instead of intellectual curiosity they become dependent on the tidbits of facts that authority gives them. "Bad" kids fight for intellectual freedom, and are routinely squashed and punished by those in authority.
(6) Provisional Self-Esteem: Self confident people don’t do what they are told. Schools condition children to accept self confidence only when the school approves. They use grades, report cards, notes to your parents to assign you a level of self esteem. Every day you are adjudged and graded, and taught to conform to their whims to gain their approval. The student's vision of his future becomes dependent on the teacher's constant evaluations. Self evaluation is never part of the program. The masters are certified by the state to evaluate and tell him what he is worth.
(7) One Can't Hide: One of the most insidious lessons of schools is that you can't hide from authority. Schools and prisons are designed from the "Panopticon" model of architecture, designed for constant surveillance of the inmates. There are no private spaces for children. There is no private time. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other. Parents are encouraged to report their own child's behaviors. Homework follows the student home to use up all his private time outside of school hours. Students learn that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. We have been trained to accept and believe in constant surveillance by authority.
In 1992, seven years before the Columbine High School massacre, Mr. Gatto quoted Nobel Prize winning author Octavio Paz's observation that modern American schools cannot help but provoke violent individual rebellions. And Columbine High School is nothing new. Bob remembers students ripping woodwork off walls, pulling pins out of a door that fell over and injured an old female teacher, and hitting an ex-marine drill instructor in the back of the head with a large rock in 1960. Even then school administrators were hiring ex-marines to "get tough" on school rebellions, because rebellion by a few students is built into the oppressive school system that wastes years and years of the time, prevents education, and teaches only the lessens listed above.
In recent times we have seen "home schooling" becoming more and more popular as wise parents take their children out of public schools. Bob became interested in home schooling when one of my radical friends told me how he had raised his children. He just never sent them to public schools. He reported them as "home schooled" but in truth they learned life from doing rather than lesson books. His children, then in their 20s, knew every bit as much reading, writing, and arithmetic as other kids who had been trained in obedience, but they also knew how to build a house, run a business, and even to think for themselves.
Over the past few decades we have seen schools teaching feminism along with the above lessons. Boys are encouraged to suicide or shame, and have been dropping out of school in greater numbers. So much the better. The sooner boys abandon the social conditioning of public schools the better off they are. The less time boys spend in mind numbing conformity and shame lessons the more they can have time to learn. Men too are abandoning public school teaching in droves for reasons they can't articulate. Maybe men will eschew the work of dumbing down boys in favor of meaningful jobs that provide the community with positive benefits. Public schools train you to be sheep, to serve the upper class, to buy whatever you are told to buy, to believe whatever you are told to believe, to vote however you are told to vote. That is what they are intended to do, and they are very effective in doing it.
Last spring The World According to Bob contained an article about voting against the annual school levies which we are asked to continually support public schools through ever increasing taxes. At the time, Bob was undecided about whether to vote against levies because they hurt children, or to vote for them because an under funded school may be worse for the children than a well funded one. Bob is no longer ambivalent, having spent more time studying and learning about schools, their history, and their real teaching. Tear them down. Burn them down. Stop voting for them. Demand that our legislatures stop requiring mass submission training. If you are a parent take your kids out of school now, today.
If you are a young man reading this blog, withdraw from school today. Get a job. Get on with your life. Take time to read and think in whole hours and days, not in 40 minute chunks interrupted by bells. When Bob was in college in the 1960s there was a saying, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education." It was said to be humorous, but it had a deep underlying truth. Every minute you spend in school takes away a minute you can spend actually being educated. School dumbs you down, prevents you from learning, prevents you from thinking, takes away your ability to be yourself, and makes you a sheep following every advertising suggestion that the mass media tells you to buy.
Tear them down! Burn them down! Obliterate them! Save the children! Save the nation!
posted by Bob | Sunday, January 28, 2007
10 Comments:
Excellent post.
It is no surprise that columbine happened.
It happens because of all the reasons that Bob has listed in this article.
It happens because schools are thought producing factories where thought conformity and conscription is rewarded.
Women are allowed in, Latinos who don't speak english, fat black crippled dykes, retards and social losers are allowed in because they can easily be coerced into being complete and total moronic parrots, in other words "scholars" and "PhDs".
School is a sick joke. A waste of time for any man who sees it as it really is.
Thank you to Bob and to Mr. Gatto for the excellent knowledge for all men, and for those women who can understand this crucial topic.
Keep up the independent thoughts.
From C.
For what it is worth to the readers of The world according to Bob:
This is a compilation of thoughts on so called "education".
A Tool is: someone who has no more immediate purpose than just pleasing corporate higher-ups/conformists/kissing the proverbial ass of those with more money than they do. All Tool’s want to do is make other tool’s/morons and teach their job’s/conformity to someone else, to the best of their ability and that is their only purpose for existence.
"Do I have to have a college education to make it as a writer?" "I haven't finished high school. Can I still write?" "I've always wanted to be a writer, and I've done a lot of writing, but I couldn't afford to go to college when I was younger . . ."
This question arrives in my e-mail box about once a week, worded in any of a dozen different ways. Some of the questioners tiptoe around it, embarrassed to ask, pretty sure they know what the answer is going to be, but hoping that it won't. Sometimes I can feel the frustration and the pain, the barriers erected by poverty or lack of a diploma/fancy piece of paper or lack of time. Some of the questioners are as young as thirteen, some have been as old a sixty.
All of them assume that formal education is the road to writing; that a degree will confer legitimacy to their words and to their lives; that if they could just get more schooling, publishers' doors would open.
They've been brainwashed by experts/ignoramuses/”teachers”, by a system designed to create people who fit neatly into the corporate-image [cue severe stomach churning] categories like 'accountant' and 'nurse' and 'manager' and ’attorney’. They've been trained to believe that the best education is an education that comes from sitting passively/aimlessly at a desk in an overcrowded room, being bored/talked at by an expert/selfish egomaniac, who does not know anything outside their own “profession”.
Obviously, so called “experts” have gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure they (and you) believed this. They've tried to get employers to make grades the basis for hiring -- a move many employers have so far been bright enough to refuse. They have managed to close many fields to anyone who hasn't sat inside “the jail”/college like a good little crone/drone for sixteen years or more.
You now have to have a degree to be an “architect”, a “doctor”, a “teacher”, or an “engineer”. Experts are trying to make sure you have to have a degree to become an “RN”. They'd also prefer that you had to have a degree in order to be a “social worker”, “respiratory therapist”, an “interior decorator” . . . and sooner or later, when they make degrees mandatory to those fields, I imagine they'll get to work on “truckers” and “plumbers” and “bakers” and “hairdressers”. College-educated experts are trying to marginalize/subsidize/close every field/put up a wall, because college education is a big, business/corporation, and the more people that go through it, the more money the useful idiots/so called experts make.
And if you think I'm full of shit here, and that people really do need college educations before going out and doing great things, consider this -- the gothic cathedrals, the pyramids, and the Roman roads and aqueducts were designed and built by men who did not have college educations. Jesus Christ learned from God’s Laws, Michaelangelo did not have a college degree, nor did Leonardo da Vinci (as Bob has pointed out). Thomas Edison didn't. Neither did Mark Twain (though he was granted honorary degrees later in his life, probably used them as toilet paper.) All of these people were significant. None of them were so-called “experts”, none of them had PhDs/toilet paper.
Get your education from professionals in a trade, and always avoid experts/professors/egotists.
An expert is somebody with a degree/fancy piece of paper that certifies thier enormous egotism. The degree doesn't mean piss on a wall, it does not mean he knows how to do what he's an expert at, it does Not mean he knows anything at all – In fact, he might have absolutely no practical experience at all!
But has the degree/coveted piece of glorified toilet paper, which confers on him the right to impress upon other people with his meaningless accomplishment (which was obtaining the degree), and to get paid for his expert/useless opinions. Clint Eastwood once said in the movie: The Dead Pool, that ‘The trouble with opinions is everybody has one’. You must understand that a so-called “expert” gets paid by third parties – a so called expert’s work is never placed out in the open where it will either sink or swim on its own merit. “Experts” earn more money and more security only by their conscription/conformity, every other man has to take risks -- if the morons conform for a long enough time without annoying anyone or doing anything interesting/original, they can earn higher positions or, in college systems, tenure…ere rather, Menure. Therefore, in a so-called “expert” system, the talented, the challenging and the brash, the avant garde are cut/weeded out, and the inoffensive pandering pussies, the boring-as-whale-shit-mediocre remain. Many college professors are self-proclaimed “experts”, with “tenure”/Menure you know tenure/menure is only a letter away from being menure, a great big pile of useless, decaying, rotting, putrid cow shit, which exactly fits the lack of personality traits and lack of character of these experts.
A professional is someone who makes a living working in the field in question. A professional architect designs and builds houses for clients. A professional auto mechanic fixes customers cars. A professional writer writes stories, articles, or books for readers. All of these people get paid by the people who are direct users of their work. If they do bad work, they don't get paid. The managers will weed out the bad professionals, so the ones who have been around for a while and who are still working are probably worth learning from.
College educations are designed by conformists to create more conformists, and gradually graft in all of the worlds people, wealthy enough to afford this expensive waste of time. Even those colleges which point to their “radical stance” and “avant garde” teaching are only creating students who conform to their mold for lifetime-bland marginalization and selfish alienation (their so-called “radicals”, their so-called “avant garde”). Students in college have to earn the approval of their teachers/conformists in order to get their grades/results of conforming and graduate/piece of paper that says in writing you conformed and wasted 4 to 10+ years of your life. And you don't learn anything significant new/useful, its just conformists quoting/endlessly repeating other conformists, if your main goal in life is seeking the unconfident, pathetic and insecure approval/insecurity of knowledge of brand-name experts/conformists then by all means go to YALE UNIVESITY inc,. or HARVARD UNIVERSITY Co Inc,. PRINCETON co,. inc,. or any of the many mainsteam, shallow minded-corporate conformist “one thought fits all- schools” that offer you nothing for $$$omething.
If you're looking at writing/ or something else as a career, or at any work of any importance, you're looking at a future of tremendous freedom. You can do what you want to do with your life, and publishers and editors don't ask if you have a degree, and don't care if you have a degree. They only care that you can put good words on a page, and that you can tell a story. They'll pay you well if you can do those two things -- and you can learn to do them without a college education, without a high school education, without having spent a day in your life locked behind the walls of a classroom.
You'll learn to write if you teach yourself. Put yourself in situations where you can learn new things from the people who actually do them. Hang out with auto-mechanics and painters and long-distance runners and carpenters. Get them to show you the tricks of their trade. Learn how to build a stained glass window, how to paddle a canoe, how to swim, how to bait your own hook and tie your own flies and how to identify the flowers and shrubs and trees native to your region. Grow a garden. Paint your own house and fix your own leaky faucet. Go camping with a couple of outdoorsy friends. Read good books. Read non-fiction. Especially books about interesting subjects, that are written for the intelligent layman, by white men.
Never pick up a textbook -- textbooks are worthless, besides their trade in value, which is totally pathetic. They're politically correct pandering, manufactured by big name publishers that conform to the congress critters subsidized thought process companies/NHS National Historical Society, which is designed to spoonfeed tiny bits of lies/disinformation/so-called “relativity”=no absolutes, to people who aren't interested in the subject matter without offending those people's parents. Anything designed to be inoffensive as its primary goal, is not going to be worth your time – life and the truth itself is offensive.
And while you're doing all this reading and self-educating, keep writing. Have the guts to believe in yourself, have the guts to ignore the experts who want your money, have the guts to take a chance on making your dream a reality. You can do it. I write, and I don't have a college education either, and it’s great.
From C.
Note to C: Thank you for the informative and interesting comments.
You are only devaluing education because it is not an exclusively white male domain. Also, the main thing that is missing with regards to vocational preparation is the practice of apprenticeship. Don't blame educators for employers choosing to abandon apprenticeship. It has also been proven that education is a means out of poverty.
If anything, I think it would be truly beneficial to encourage students to educate themselves before, during and after they receive their degrees. That way they get the best of the academic and non-academic worlds.
Note to anonymous: You missed the point entirely. Education is not being devalued, and in fact is being promoted. Schools destroy and prevent education. Compulsory public schools are prisons that prevent young people from becoming educated. We need to burn them down to promote and encourage real learning and education.
Your racism and sexism are also highly offensive. You sound like a school teacher.
Youre welcome bob and Thank you for the excellent, interesting and important topics that you write about.
You have a great point of view of the true nature of things in life.
Thank You, From C.
Bob,when you get the time go burn down the college where you claim you were a physical science major.
I want to translate your post on schools into Hebrew and publish it on my blog (Named "Ancient Rage" - Za'am Kadmoni), I'm asking your permission to do so because I respect you.
I suffered much in school from other students and from teachers, I haven't learned anything, I'm impressed by the rest of your posts as well as of this one.
Goodbye.
Note to: Yosef Cohen
I am glad that you have enjoyed my writing. You may translate and republish The Truth According to Bob provided that it contains recognition of the source and a URL link to this blog.
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