Dumbing Us Down

Key Takeaways

Kyle, in 2018 in Books: I’ve been reading more and more about education, and realizing how little about it I know. It began last year when I read ‘The Smartest Kids in the World’ by Amanda Ripley and has continued in bits and pieces. Before I took the job I have now, I was in the process of interviewing for a job with Teach For America. My intention was to get that job and request a teaching position in New York City. I felt like that melting pot was one of the best places to get the experience I wanted. And while I’m sure I would have learned some truly invaluable lessons in New York, I chose a different path. But much of what I think I would have learned and been frustrated by, is clearly laid out in this book by a 30-year veteran of teaching all over New York. Many thanks to some random professor who left a stack of books in the BYU Spencer W. Kimball Tower (SWKT), because this was one of them and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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-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.”