Sunday, October 30, 2016

86. No Place To Hide: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archve.org

No Place To Hide 

How could the amazing lives of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, the John D. 
Rockefellers, Margaret Fuller, Amy Lowell, my own immigrant McManuses, Gattos, 
Zimmers, Hoffmans, and D'Agostinos, have added up to this lifeless Utopia? Like a black 
hole it grew, although no human being flourishes under such a regime or rests easily 
inside the logic of hundreds of systems intermeshing into one master system, all 
demanding obedience from their human parts. Here is a materialistic inverse of Ezekiel's 
spiritual vision of wheels within wheels. 

In a New York Times description of the first "Edison Project" school in Sherman, Texas — 
a system of proprietary schools supplying a home computer for every child, e-mail, 
longer school days and years, and "the most high-tech school in America" (as Benno 
Schmidt, former president of Yale, put it) — the local superintendent gloated over what he 
must have regarded as the final solution to the student-control issue: " Can you imagine 
what this means if you're home sick? The teacher can just put stuff in the student's e- 
mail... .There's no place to hide anymore!" 

The Irony Of The Safety Lamp 

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