Special people come from special places. America’s schools desire the ability to make every child important, yet, they attempt to achieve individualism through standardization. By entrenching themselves in the philosophy that if one child fails, all fail, and that children are not to be trusted, they ensure that no one succeeds in the first place. This educational phobia makes every policy designed to encourage the individual only address children as statistical groups. Educational phobia in America has inspired massive arguments over the safest system of schooling. Politicians and administrators have irrationally retreated into a corner filled with No Child Left Behind, absurd amounts of standardized tests, and a direct-instruction curriculum which destroys the social development of children- all in the name of preserving a low-risk, low-reward system.
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Understanding the history of education, and the fear it is rooted in, is necessary for understanding exactly why education is failing its most basic purpose. Public education was created in the hopes of producing a wonderful industrialist, not a creative thinker. Fear drove the necessity of drivel education to be implemented in our culture. The social elite feared an educated populous, because they believed them to be dangerous. John Taylor Gatto, a former school teacher, exemplified this fear when he recounted “A few months before the Manifesto began circulating aggressively, an executive director of the National Education Association announced the NEA expected ‘to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.’ That’s straightforward enough, isn’t it”
Our …show more content…
Understanding the history of education, and the fear it is rooted in, is necessary for understanding exactly why education is failing its most basic purpose. Public education was created in the hopes of producing a wonderful industrialist, not a creative thinker. Fear drove the necessity of drivel education to be implemented in our culture. The social elite feared an educated populous, because they believed them to be dangerous. John Taylor Gatto, a former school teacher, exemplified this fear when he recounted “A few months before the Manifesto began circulating aggressively, an executive director of the National Education Association announced the NEA expected ‘to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.’ That’s straightforward enough, isn’t it”