Dumbing Us Down

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Connections

Kyle’s essay Employees Wanted, The Educated Need Not Apply cites Dumbing Us Down — grouping John Taylor Gatto’s critique of schooling with its argument that the pre-college system optimizes for checklists and report cards rather than lifelong learning (Education).

Highlights

From Roam

Roam page metadata — Author: John Taylor Gatto · Reading Status: Books Read · Source: https://medium.com/@kwharrison13/2018-in-books-part-i-7d3590e7f5e8 · Recommended By: SWKT · Tags: #Books

• ==Highlighted Quotes==
• “Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act.” #Education
• “Rich or poor, school children who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental intention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction. #Education
• “Keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most and so our children talk constantly.”