Reading John Taylor Gatto

We've all heard of the dumbing down of America, but reading a new book by John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, has made me realize that education in American is in much worse shape than anyone would have ever thought.

All I can say is, read the book, and see what you think.

Now, I come from a family of "educators" - sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts who have chosen teaching in the public school system, from elementary to university, as their life's work - people whom I admire and respect to the utmost for their intelligence, integrity and commitment to education. Yet, the system of compulsory schooling itself is corrupt and based on wrong principles which go against the basic freedoms and liberties upon which our country was founded.

John Gatto gives example after example of individuals who have achieved much, including the founding fathers of this country, inventors, writers, presidents, captains of industry and more, who had little or no schooling but taught themselves what they needed to know. He states, "mass abstract testing, anonymously scored, is the torture centrifuge whirling away precious resources of time and money from productive use and routing it into the hands of testing magicians. It happens only because the tormented allow it." And he asks us to STOP. Bring the testing empire to an end. In the tradition of Gandhi, and the great world changers who acted peaceably and with passive resistance, he says, "Let a group of young men and women, one fully aware that these tests add no value to individual lives or the social life of the majority, use the power of the Internet to recruit other young people to refuse, quietly, to take these tests. No demonstrations, no mud-slinging, no adversarial politics - to simply write across the face of the tests placed in front of them, 'I would prefer not to take this test.'"

Wow! "I prefer not to take this test."

Reading this book has inspired me to create my own blog page - as if I didn't already spend enough time everyday on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Huffington Post, or watching Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann on msnbc.com, etc. - so I could write this one blog at least and spread the word.