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:
“How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Do we honestly believe that hopeless kids growing up under the harsh new rules will turn out to be chaste, studious, responsible adults? On the contrary, by limiting welfare, job training, education and nutritious food, won’t we plant the seeds for another bumper crop of out-of-wedlock moms, deadbeat dads and worse?”
—Richard B. Stolley (20th century)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)