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:
“In England, I was quite struck to see how forward the girls are made—a child of 10 years old, will chat and keep you company, while her parents are busy or out etc.—with the ease of a woman of 26. But then, how does this education go on?—Not at all: it absolutely stops short.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Whatever may be our just grievances in the southern states, it is fitting that we acknowledge that, considering their poverty and past relationship to the Negro race, they have done remarkably well for the cause of education among us. That the whole South should commit itself to the principle that the colored people have a right to be educated is an immense acquisition to the cause of popular education.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)
“Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)