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The National Education System

Dick Eastman

o think in quantative and geometrical relationships, and the physical sciences like chemistry and physics which teach cause and effect; and the sciences of geology and astronomy which teach of ungoing processes, and the organic sciences and social sciences -- all which prepare one to better understand society and economics and government and history -- all of this is not wanted by the ruling elite for our children -- they fear we will understand their scams, they fear we will expose them and depose them from their ill-gotten positions. Rather than supply-and-demand or Pavlovian conditioning or taking derivatives to find rates of change of one variable with respect to another etc. -- our children are sent to job-training programs -- not learning to think, but learning how to change a tire or color hair or this or that set of routines that some business needs done. And they say that the secret of equalizing incomes in this country is the economic reforms that the elite are pushing -- outcomes based education -- where the retarded and the gifted all work on the same objectives and where gifted must stay and tutor retarded until retarded "gets it" before anyone can move on, etc. And the testing -- where the schools lose money if a certain score is not reached on a certain test -- so that all that matters is the test -- and schools teach the tests, and bend the children to the tests. Teachers were once professionals who chose the curriculum under the supervision of the principal and the school board -- with the objective of producing an "educated person" of developing a student to his potential, of finding and developing his talents -- of teaching scholarship -- a liberal education -- so you know who you are and what is important and what society is about and what general principles are operating in the universe in which you live etc.

But instead we get dumb-down. We have been proletarianized -- not educated, but potty-trained with the right attitudes about racism and sexism and homophobia and holocaust studies and global warming and the threat of terrorism and a feel-good history about great black people and great brown people and great women -- but not the history of the struggle for freedom and justice and participatory government of parliamentary procedure and debate. It is a crime worth fighting a civil war over -- except that the people don't know what has been taken from them. I graduated from Oakland High School in 1967, one year after SAT scores peaked from their all time high. I've had the honor of working with some very fine young people in recent years -- but good as they are I see that they have been cheated of knowledge of basic knowledge that makes one competent to be a citizen. Rather they are trained to follow what the mass media will be feeding them. And I have seen text books with inexcusable errors of fact -- errors of hard fact that cannot have been accidental. The dumb-down and the social engineering to make a docile pliable non-threatening-to-the-elite citizen has been accomplished.

And so our children learn how many million died in the holocaust and how to put on a condom. Still, I think it is not too late -- it is never to late to profit from learning the truth about the world -- never too late to take our schools back, take our children back and start all over the right way. Why should the foundations and their education lobbyists (those tools of the anti-middle class super rich) why should they control the lives and minds of our children. -- Dick Eastman note: You can have a PhD in chemistry but you cannot teach high school chemistry, but you can have a B.A. in physical education and teach the chemistry class if you have a teachers certificate, if you have taken the PC education courses.

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