Education
Increased participation in higher education has attracted the maintenance of distinctions through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees. The high school physics instructor, Wellington Grey, published an Internet petition, wherein he said, "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be"; and complained that “ calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE.” Among the examples of dumbing down that he listed were “Question: Why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals? Answer: Can be processed by computer / ipod” to “Question: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?” (The latter question is also an example of political correctness in that the focus of the course is hijacked into one of agitation for political solutions to asserted problems.)
In Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1991, 2002), John Taylor Gatto presented speeches and essays, including “The Psychopathic School”, his acceptance speech for the 1990 New York City Teacher of the Year award, and “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher”, his acceptance speech for the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year. Gatto speculated:
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 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.
In examining the seven lessons of teaching, Gatto concludes that: “. . . all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. . . .” That “School is a twelve-year jail sentence, where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school, and win awards doing it. I should know.”
Read more about this topic: Dumbing Down
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)