in dumbing us down: the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling, john taylor gatto presents the seven-lesson system that american public schools teach children: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and that one cannot hide. our school system enters children into a system that breeds fear of curiosity, short attention spans, fear of authority, and drowns out any individuality and eagerness for learning that we innately have and would have if we were put to our own resources.

what is the american school system attempting to achieve with the compulsory schooling & curriculum that we currently have? does it work? is this truly education? what can we do to fix it?

our country had higher rates of literacy before compulsory schooling was in place. people learned to read and write and count, on their own terms, when they needed to, for their own reasons. individuals had intellectual curiosity and if they didn't necessarily, they learned a trade and were happy that way without being discouraged and graded on their merits in subjects that didn't apply to them. people learned to do things for themselves; the thinkers were the thinkers and the doers were the doers. the american school system does not breed great thinkers; we are one of the most intellectually devoid countries in the world while at the same time claiming to be the most prosperous. does that strike anyone as odd?

I always wanted to know how does that kind of thing works on United States and i think that so far there is no Michael Moore documentary about that.
Well, Brazilian education sucks worst. I wish college here was like in USA, here we have to do an exam to pass to the college, my teacher said that over there you just get recommended or something like. The problem is the Racial Quota. They give black people, indians, people with disability and people who went to public schools almost a free pass to get into the best colleges. So people who worked hard for that can't get in, there aren't enough places. The worst part is that most of these people give up in the first week, they just don't have the education required for the course, they weren't properly tested.

I learned that if I get poor the government will take care of me, why should I try?

yeah, americans do too, it's called the sats. but this isn't what i'm talking about.

Because if you try hard enough in school, you could start a bank, lose all of other people's money, and then the government will take care of you even more.

with the curriculum i think they are trying to give us what someone has decided is a well rounded education, but it's not and it doesn't work good. it doesn't seem that well rounded. just take history for an example, let's pretend in my schooling career i have spent 1000 hours studying world history. i would estimate a good 700-800 of those have been spent studying europe. so about 200-300 for the rest of the entire world. did something good ever happen in asia? africa? south america? apparently not that much worth talking about. oh yeah, and i never learned any politics or history of the middle east until i was in college. this kind of stuff is making our kids stupid as f*ck and have a warped perspective on the entire world.


i don't hardly think anything about our school system currently works good. almost everything hinges on funding and where you live. if you live in a poor district, it won't matter if you pass probably, because you'll come up with an education significantly lower than the kid a few miles away who lives in the rich district. we care too much about tests and teach kids how to pass them but not to know what's really on them. we cater to the stupid because we don't like to admit that some people are just smarter at the end of the day. so those of us who learn fast are forced to sit through 4 week lessons on the number line or how to plot X,Y on a graph because of the kids who couldn't learn it faster. (neither the fast or the slow learning kids are probably benefiting from this) also our teachers generally suck and they've created a union that makes them almost immune to having any responsibility whatsoever in the success of their students. they bitch non stop about how valuable they are to society and how they should get paid more...meanwhile they work a shorter workday than most, get summers off, get longer vacations on holidays than most, can't get fired for being bad at their job unless they do something outrageous, don't have to worry about accountability like most of the rest of the working world, etc. they have a idealistic view of their role in the world, but don't realize that just being a teacher doesn't make you valuable to society at all unless you're actually teaching kids something valuable. out of all the teachers i've had, i would classify most of them as babysitters rather than real teachers. + more and more reasons why our school system doesn't work

there's not much incentive for teachers or students to do better it doesn't seem like. /rant

i don't know how to fix it.

i duno i hate the school system. i think it's bullshit. if it wasn't for the social aspect of it, i would probably homeschool my kids without a second thought. i have wasted so much of my time in school being bored out of mind and going over the same material year in and year out, waiting for other kids to soak it in so that i can finally move on to something else.

shit. but then i have to try harder. maybe if i don't learn anything at all i won't learn what i'm missing and not being taken care of as much as the bankers won't bother me because i won't know what i'm missing.