John Taylor Gatto says ...
"Highly centralized mass production economies can't function well without colonizing individual minds and converting them into a mass mind. The conversion works best if started early, in the lower grades of elementary school, in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten. The function of these collective rituals we call school has very little to do with the intellectual development - consider only the familiar madness of teaching the colors and days of the week or months of the year to little people who come to school already knowing those things.
The collective rituals of lower grades are about habit training, about practicing attention and fealty to authority. In this way, independent consciousness can be undermined in its formative stages.
The opposite of mass-mindedness is dialectical mindedness.
A tremendous example of this is buried in the foundational religious documents of Western culture, in the story of young Jesus closely questioning elders in the temple afteer slipping away from his parents, itself a contrarian action. Indeed, the New Testament is so replete with contrarianism it's little wonder it plays a stupendous part in Western history from the beginning of the modern era until today.
Complex minds are always dialectical. Aristotle sets that as a basic requirement of being fully human, but because the reality of dialectical minds is that they always challenge assumptions and take nothing for granted, their presence in large numbers poses acute problems for corporate business and corporate government." John Taylor Gatto
Cés said...
Brother DV. I'm a long time follower, first time commenting. Love
your stuff. Love everyone on here and even though I hadn't commented
yet, this is my home. With that said have you seen this foolishness?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_yi8mjMhTU&feature=related
His father is weak as hell. I'm at a loss for words.
The original teaching method of Socrates of drawing from within has been largely displaced by professorial deference to received scholarly authority.
Students are taught how to take exams but not how to think, write or find their own path. An educated man is not necessarily one which has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge.
An educated man is one who has so developed the faculties of his mind that he may acquire anything he wants or its equivalent without violating the rights of others.