238 Empty Children: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

238 Empty Children: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Empty Children

 

    Not far to go now. Here is my recipe for empty children. If you want to cook whole  children, as I suspect we all do, just contradict these stages in the formula: 

 

 1. Remove children from the business of the world until time has passed for them to  learn how to self-teach.

 

  2. Age-grade them so that past and future both are muted and become irrelevant.   

 

3. Take all religion out of their lives except the hidden civil religion of appetite, and  positive/negative reinforcement schedules.  

 

4. Remove all significant functions from home and family life except its role as  dormitory and casual companionship. Make parents unpaid agents of the State;  recruit them into partnerships to monitor the conformity of children to an official  agenda.    

 

5. Keep children under surveillance every minute from dawn to dusk. Give no  private space or time. Fill time with collective activities. Record behavior  quantitatively.  

 

6. Addict the young to machinery and electronic displays. Teach that these are  desirable to recreation and learning both. 

 

 7. Use designed games and commercial entertainment to teach preplanned habits,  attitudes, and language usage.  

 

8. Pair the selling of merchandise with attractive females in their prime childbearing  years so that the valences of lovemaking and mothering can be transferred intact  to the goods vended. 

 

 9. Remove as much private ritual as possible from young lives, such as the rituals of  food preparation and family dining. 

 

 10. Keep both parents employed with the business of strangers. Discourage  independent livelihoods with low start-up costs. Make labor for others and outside  obligations first priority, self-development second. 

 

 11. Grade, evaluate, and assess children constantly and publicly. Begin early. Make  sure everyone knows his or her rank. 

 

 12. Honor the highly graded. Keep grading and real world accomplishment as strictly  separate as possible so that a false meritocracy, dependent on the support of  authority to continue, is created. Push the most independent kids to the margin; do  not tolerate real argument.  

 

13. Forbid the efficient transmission of useful knowledge, such as how to build a  house, repair a car, make a dress.  

 

14. Reward dependency in many forms. Call it "teamwork."  

 

15. Establish visually degraded group environments called "schools" and arrange  mass movements through these environments at regular intervals. Encourage a  level of fluctuating noise (aperiodic negative reinforcement) so that concentration,  habits of civil discourse, and intellectual investigation are gradually extinguished  from the behavioral repertoire.