Weapons of Mass Instruction
John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple imagination and discourage critical thinking.
Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable, remove the obligation of child care from adult workers so they are free to fuel the industrial economy and to train the next generation into subservient obedience to the state.
John Gatto shows us that Ivy League schools do not produce the most successful graduates, some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs are high school drop outs and Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie didn’t finish elementary school. An education matters desperately, but spending a fortune on college fees will not get you one.
Filled with examples of people who have escaped the trap of compulsory schooling, Weapons of Mass Instruction shows us realization of personal potential is not possible within the system of compulsory schooling. That requires a different way of growing up and learning, one Gatto calls “open source learning. ” In chapters such as “A Letter to Kristina, my Granddaughter”; “Fat Stanley”; and “Walkabout: London”, Gatto gives us a window into a different reality.
makheru bradley said...
Drop out of school! Hundreds of thousands of young Afrikan Americans males are doing just that.
I’m sure this is thrilling news for DV. The latest data show that only 47 percent of Afrikan American males are graduating from high school. And these statistics should make DV ecstatic-- only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math—which virtually guarantees an escalation in Afrikan American drop out rates.
Then there's the drop out to prison pipeline.
[In 1980, one in 10 black high-school dropouts were incarcerated. By 2008, that number was 37 percent. Western and Pettit calculated that if current incarceration trends hold, fully 68 percent of African-American male high school dropouts born from 1975 to 1979 (at the start of the upward trend in incarceration rates) will spend time living in prison at some point in their lives.]
Given the property and profits the mass-incarceration of Afrikan American drop outs provides for the prison-industrial complex it’s absolutely certain that America’s oligarchic psychopathocracy supports your exhortations.
Given the fact that this crimogenic society provides minimal if any reentry programs, recidivism assures a proliferation of grist for the prison mill. Not to mention the diminished employment opportunities resulting from even a misdemeanor conviction.
Currently 72 percent of Afrikan American children are being raised by a single parent. Mass-incarceration contributes to that number. To suggest that Afrikan Americans drop out of public education without any mass-based viable alternatives in place is the epitome of asininity.
Denmark Vesey said ...
Brother Makheru,
Don't you understand that the schools and the prisons are run by the same people?
Schools don't educate.
Prisons don't rehabilitate.
The are both traps.
The only thing that will protect people from getting caught in those traps is education.
Real Education.
Not Indoctrination disguised as Education.
The Negro faith in the American school system is mind boggling. Same cats talking about "The Global System of White Supremacy" are DEMANDING the Plantation "PwoVide Dem Wit Uh EduuMaCaShun!".
The government is no more capable of giving you an education than the government is capable of making you healthy.
Makheru, if these 'African-American Males' to whom you refer did "graduate" from High School ... how would their lives be different in 2012? In 2015? In 2020?
What is a high school diploma from Grimsley High in Greensboro NC going to be worth in the global economy of 2025?
Won't be able to get that "job" down at the factory without a "high school" diploma huh?
Come on now bra. Think this through: WHAT FUCKING JOB DOES A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA ENSURE AN "AFRICAN AMERICAN MALE"?
High School ensures a job in this economy the way a ticket ensures a cabin on the Titanic.
The kids are not dropping out because they have failed school. They are dropping out because school has not only failed them ... school has HARMED them.
The sooner those ... "educated" members of the black "community" acknowledge this and offer viable private educational alternatives, the sooner we can provide young black people educational opportunities that actually empower them instead of beating them over the head and demanding they do the same shit that didn't work for us.
Cadeveo said ...
Uneducated people staying in school and "graduating" uneducated is going
to lead to the same outcomes as uneducated people dropping out of
school and staying uneducated.