Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
semper occultus » Tue Apr 07, 2015 4:33 am wrote:.....there was quite a moving tv prog the other day about bullying .....tbh it was actually a pretty shoddy "real-life" reality show with all the "drama" being artifically milked and then the protaganists met off camera anyway (!) but this particular segment cut through all that...but it was from the angle of the shame that the bully had experienced over his life and wanting to meet the "boy" he had victimised to put his mind at rest....I wonder if that's common amongst people who have behaved like that in their youth...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b053kxhs
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Nordic » Mon Apr 06, 2015 11:00 pm wrote:Zombie Glenn Beck, being bumped up a grade is something I actually wish had never happened to me. And I wouldn't wish it on anyone else.
peartreed wrote:
More than anything else the peer pressure and beatings pushed me into frequent withdrawal into fantasy, imaginative thinking and solitary, escapist pursuits like reading, writing, music and art. When the real world becomes uncomfortable you create your own. To that extent it enhanced individualism and self-reliance but left emotional scars that would inhibit normal social development.
peartreed » Tue Apr 07, 2015 2:29 pm wrote:I skipped two grades in public elementary school to be advanced into higher levels of learning that my teachers determined I qualified for. The most impactful result was that I was more than two years less mature than my classmates and often became the brunt of their brutal bullying, cruel ridicule and peer ostracism.
brekin » Thu Apr 09, 2015 3:12 pm wrote:I am the son of a international grand champion in chess and double PHD and a brilliant Russian physicist who from photographs was too beautiful for words. I never met my mother because she was "lost" and never found in Turkey during a scientific summit. Being the love of his life, my brilliant but of course troubled father never recovered and lost himself in a series of affairs with numerous emigres seeking admission to American universities or resident status through (promised but never realized) marriage to my father. These multilingual women seeking my fathers favor became my nannies, my kozas, my kinderfraus, and I rapidly pick up the rudimentary use of numerous European languages by the time I was potty-trained. At three I was reading sight words in five languages. My father, though, grew increasingly bitter and possibly jealous of my growing intellect. As I started to show great promise at five with math, and his special realm of chess, he became more repressive and sadistic in his peculiar form of homeschooling. I had to study Algebra and play Chess on the sly, pretending to be watching cartoons and reading comic books in my room. Around the same time he had starting contracting with the government in forms of rapid training deployment for military and industrial technicians. While all I wanted to do all day was ride my bicycle, study linear equations and build computers and program them from kits he increasingly used me as his guinea pig for the experimental sensory training devices. This only helped to further alienate me of course from my peers because besides being a polyglot math whiz at six I now was a walking manual of how best to service nuclear submarines.
To say then, when I started school I was a little "special" is a bit of an understatement. Skipping grades and then being basically given the run of the building because no teacher wanted me in their class I was a tiny Hamlet at the age of seven roaming the halls pontificating to myself about all manner of "college level" things. But I'll never forget when I met with the school principal after numerous clashes with my peers and teachers. After having explained my unique background and experience and why it contributed to my incompatibly with modern mass schooling he look at me and replied, "Stanley, I know your mom and dad. I went to school with them. They both work down at the Safeway. Testing wise, your average, if that. You only know one language, English and not even at your grade level. The only thing you excel at is in bullshit stories." It was then I tugged my right earlobe and turned Mr. Jenkins into a unicorn.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 40 guests