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:
“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“There used to be housekeepers with more energy than sense—the everlasting scrubber; the over-neat woman. Since the better education of woman has come to stay, this type of woman has disappeared almost, if not entirely.”
—Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)
“I think the most important education that we have is the education which now I am glad to say is being accepted as the proper one, and one which ought to be widely diffused, that industrial, vocational education which puts young men and women in a position from which they can by their own efforts work themselves to independence.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)