If Fascism is Love, is Mentoring Hatred?

John T. Gatto has a dreadful impertinence, an intellectual Tourette's syndrome, blurting things like this out:

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.

We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody.

Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, John Taylor Gatto

Perhaps this explains why our society is all so fragile about the risks of sexual predation of children - deferring the issue of intellectual predation.

I've wondered so long about why my education didn't get me further - it wasn't intended to.

1. The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong."
2. The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch.
3. The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command.
4. The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study.
5. In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth.
6. In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched.

Perhaps that is what is so disquieting about President Obama - he was the ultimate achiever within the system, and White folks don't know what blue contacts are for, exactly, nor what an Oreo means - but somehow fear them nonetheless.

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