Tammy’s Reviews > Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling > Status Update

“When you believe in determinism-biological, psychological, and sociological, or theological (and schools believe in all those in various times and places), the very idea of feedback leading to growth must be held at arms length.”

Quote from the first month of my teaching career of 30 years, I realize that intellectual Power, creative, insight, and good character we’re being diminished in my classroom and that indeed I have been hired for precisely that purpose. I was a clerk and a vast penitentiary; the rules and procedures where the guards.”

“… School is not a good place for your kids.”

“The principal reason bureaucracies are so stupid as they cannot respond efficiently to feedback. Think of school management, compelled by law to follow. The rules made long ago and far away.-as if human situations are so formula they can be codified.“

“… A few of the best classes… were to be held to a traditional standard. As for the others, the mass of fairly well-behaved kids was mixed with an infusion of violent, restless, disruptive students until only a primitive level of instruction was possible… b/c reasonably patient children became angry at a teacher’s ineffectiveness in maintaining order, many of the polite kids joined the destructors too.”

“The degree of disrespect our nation has assigned its ordinary population wouldn’t be possible unless somewhere in the command centers it hadn’t been decided that common men and women should be stripped of any power to Rebel and that they could be lied to without compunction, because their dignity didn’t count. Or their lives.“

“In the thousands of hours, I’ve spent in teachers rooms and teachers meetings, not a single soul beside yourself was open to discussing anything profound about our notions of pedagogy, nothing that could get them in trouble. Shirli that intellectual vacuum says something terrible about the business, which has swallowed up your life in my own.“

“The steep decline in common prosperity over 90 years of intense for schooling, drove both parents from the home to work, depositing their children and the man systems of daycare and extended schooling. Despite a century long herring that schooling is the cure for an evenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred. Wealth was 250% more concentrated at centuries and then edit to beginning.“

‘Goddard believed, standardized test scores used as a signal for privileged treatment would cause the lower classes to come face-to-face, with their own biological inferiority. It would be like wearing a public dense cap. Exactly the function ‘special education’ delivers today.”