School is indoctrination.
http://www.sntp.net/education/school_state_3.htmIn 1910 Ernst Troeltsch pointed out the obvious: "The school organization parallels that of the army, the public school corresponds to the popular army." The German philosopher Johann Fichte was a key contributor to the formation of the German school system. It was Fichte who said that the schools "must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."
Importantly, American advocates of compulsory state schooling observed the Prussian system, became enamored of it, and adopted it as their model. As former teacher John Taylor Gatto writes:
A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores. Prussia's ultimate goal was to unify Germany; the Americans' was to mold hordes of immigrant Catholics to a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influences.
Gatto emphasizes how the Prussian model set the standard for educational systems right up to the present. "The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders," he writes.
He says the American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children "to obedience, subordination, and collective life." Thus, memorization outranked thinking. Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented "subjects" and school days were divided into fixed periods "so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions." Third, the state was posited as the true parent of children. All of this was done in the name of a scientific approach to education, although, Gatto says, "no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or what learning is of most worth."
To appreciate the nature of the Prussian system, let us look at one of its innovations: kindergarten. In 1840, Friedrich Froebel opened the first kindergarten, in Germany, as a way of socializing children. "As the name implies," Spring writes, "the kindergarten was conceived as a garden of children to be cultivated in the same manner as plants."
Educators in America observed what was happening in Germany and transplanted kindergarten to the New World. In 1873, the first public school kindergarten was opened in the United States, in St. Louis. Its purpose, according to school superintendent William Torrey Harris, was to rescue children from poverty and bad families by bringing them into the school system early in life. "The child who passes his years in the misery of the crowded tenement house or alley becomes early familiar with all manner of corruption and immorality," Harris said. The kindergarten curriculum, writes Spring, included the teaching of moral habits, cleanliness, politeness, obedience, and self-control.
The education historian Marvin Lazerson, in his study of the Boston school system, found that the administrators saw kindergarten as an indirect means of teaching slum parents how to run good homes. That represented a change from an earlier conception of kindergarten with its emphasis on play and expression. In the 20th century, the emphasis switched again, from reforming parents to reforming children and protecting them from their urban surroundings. The use of the school as a buffer between the child and his family and community led to the establishment of playgrounds and parks, and then summer schools all intended to extend the school's influence over the child. The objective was to keep children busy.
As a superintendent of schools in Massachusetts said in 1897, "The value of these [summer] schools consists not so much in what shall be learned during the few weeks they are in session, as in the fact that no boy or girl shall be left with unoccupied time. Idleness is an opportunity for evil-doing." Idleness apparently meant any time spent out of school. Joel Spring comments:
By the early twentieth century the school in fact had expanded its functions into areas not dreamed of in the early part of the previous century. Kindergartens, playgrounds, school showers, nurses, social centers, and Americanization programs turned the school into a central social agency in urban America. The one theme that ran through all these new school programs was the desire to maintain discipline and order in urban life. Within this framework, the school became a major agency for social control.
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/book.htm
Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2012 11:01 am
Maybe he is referring to the number of christians that were persecuted for their beliefs.
