ARE SCHOOLS INTENTIONALLY DUMBED DOWN?

The danger of education...is that it so easily confuses means with ends...it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated graduates...people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they had and their contemporaries have conspired to call "life." ~Thomas Merton, Love and Living.

  1. TV News: What Local Stations Don't Want You to Know! If corporate America controls media in ways these articles discuss, why wouldn't schools also be a target?
  2. Choice in Education
  3. The Makers of Modern Schooling
  4. Thoughts on Education
  5. The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?
  6. The Curriculum of Necessity
  7. The 9 Assumptions of Modern Schooling
  8. Gatto's Dumbing Us Down Essays
  9. John Taylor Gatto-Selected Excerpts
  10. Reasons Reform Will Likely Fail: Joseph Chilton Pearce
  11. New Democracy ~ MCAS' Corporate-Government Background
  12. Maitland School of Advanced Learning Student Handbook Third Edition (1999)
  13. Question Authority: An Essay on Educational Reform

    ARE THERE ANY SOLUTIONS?

    **Parker Charter Essential School in Ayer, Mass. (on the former Ft. Devens grounds) is the best example of a public school moving in the direction of a high quality, democratic education. Check out their curriculum, assessment, and other online resources!

    The **Coalition of Essential Schools Field Book also has numerous links showing how SOME schools avoid the problems Gatto cites.

    **Empowering Students: Essential Schools' Missing Link

    **Defensive Routines and Organizational Learning -- Searching for the way out of "political" decision making and leadership

    The Ed Reform Tool We Most Need:

    The TEACHER DEVELOPMENT NETWORK
    ozpk@earthlink.net

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