Monday, March 31, 2008

If the Children Don't Learn, the Schools Didn't Teach

Today, public schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transferring knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions -- mostly because of individual teachers' efforts -- but what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. The schools are not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. Thus, there is no accountability in the system.

The law says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, the schools blame the child or the parents or "society" or TV or something else. Thus, to the schools, failure is always the child's fault, never the schools, even though it is often the case that the schools did not provide proper instruction.

When a business does not achieve its mission, it loses its customers, lays off its employees and goes out of existence. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve. But when a government agency -- say the school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected and even claims to provide, what happens? Nothing.

In fact, failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, "We are failing because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools.

According to international and US Dept of Ed reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year for their failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. We are hearing more and more that public school has the purpose of turning out a "workforce." Well, a workforce is best if it is well schooled in basic knowledge, and yet the schools have all but eliminated the teaching of skills and knowledge that former generations were taught -- basic arithmetic facts and phonetic skill for reading. Therefore, the schools are failing in their fundamendal purpose.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Schools Teach Sex, but not Math and Reading

How schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions, but .... what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. It is not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no requirements for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. There is no accountability in the system.

The law says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, the schools blame the child or the parents or "society" or TV or something else. Thus, to the schools, failure is always the child's fault, never the school's, even though it is often the case that the schools did not provide proper instruction.

When a business does not achieve its mission, it loses its customers, lays off its employees and goes out of existence. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve. But when a government agency -- say the school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected and even claims to provide, what happens? Nothing.

In fact, failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, "We are failing because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools.

According to international and US Dept of Ed reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year of failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. We are hearing more and more that public school has the purpose of turning out a "workforce." Well, a workforce is best if it is well schooled in basic knowledge, and yet the schools have all but eliminated the teaching of skills and knowledge that former generations were taught -- basic arithmetic facts and phonetic skills for reading. Therefore, the schools are failing in their fundamendal purpose.

Monday, March 24, 2008

"Standards" -- What Standards?

Below, I'm using information about my state, Connecticut (CT). If you live somewhere else, your schools probably have similarly bad "standards."

School administrators often mention their school's "Standards," but no one in the public knows what they are talking about. Here's why: The administrators don't know either, because, in CT and other states, there really are no standards. "Standards" is just a word they like to use.

My dictionary defines "standard" as follows: "A degree or level of requirement, excellence or attainment."

There is an organization, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, that looks into all the states' standards for English and Math. Its findings are on its website www.edexcellence.com . Every five years, they report on the standards for every state. The Connecticut Standards for both of those subjects are rated F (the worst).

Fordham: >>Two-thirds of school children in America attend class in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn. <<

also Fordham: >>The Unfortunate Influence of 1990s-era National Standards. The standards developed by professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics continue to create havoc, as states embrace their faulty fads and anti-knowledge orientation. << Got that? "anti-knowledge orientation."

The following is what Fordham says about CT's English curriculum standards:
"The standards suffer from systemic vagueness. For example, one suggests that students "maintain a multimedia portfolio that provides opportunities for reflection and dialogue regarding creative processes." These are empty words, unwelcome anywhere, but are particularly insufferable in English standards. Vocabulary development is ignored, and the state fails to outline a core literature for its high school students. Connecticut recently updated its English standards and, from our perspective, managed to make them worse.

"Despite having updated their standards since 2000, Connecticut's overall grade has gone from C to F. Many features are not clear, specific, or measurable, while the language is also pretentious and vague. Meanwhile, there is little on vocabulary development through the grades.
"Language Art, as taught in CT schools, is undefined and unteachable and content-free. Therefore, if districts do not have their own standards, they are merely passing along a poor program.

Math
>>CT gets an F for its math standards, which are a mishmash of trendiness and vacuity. CT places on its students the burden of "constructing" the number system, eschewing memorization and mathematical reasoning for a reliance on technology, manipulatives, and "real life experiences." When the standards do get to the task of defining skills to be learned, such as the K-4 directive to "develop proficiency with basic addition," the state gives teachers and students little guidance as to how this amorphous goal is to be realized, and relies on calculator use throughout the grades as a crutch.<<

2005 State Report Card
Connecticut
Clarity: 0.67
F
Content: 0.33
F
Reason: 0.00
F
Negative Qualities: 1.00
F
Weighted Score: 1.37
Final Grade:
F
2000 Grade: D
1998 Grade: D
Connecticut’s standards are marked by vagueness and ambiguity. For example, the Common Core goals and standards, which are also repeated in the Framework, are no more than broad aspirations for all of the grades K-12, as in this example: 'Students will use mathematical skills and concepts with proficiency and confidence, and appreciate the power and utility of mathematics as a discipline and as a tool for solving problems.'Laudable, surely, but this is not a standard, strictly speaking. To be fair, the Framework does include more specific performance standards, but they mostly serve to highlight Connecticut’s constructivist approach to mathematics education:>> Connecticut students are not expected to have automatic recall of basic number facts, nor are they required to master computational algorithms.
The standard says: "Instructional activities and opportunities need to focus on developing an understanding of mathematics as opposed to the memorization of rules and mechanical application of algorithms.


>> . . . Technology plays an important role in developing number sense. Students should have opportunities to use the calculator as a teaching and exploration tool. Young children can use the constant feature of most calculators to count, forward or backward, or to skip count, forward or backward. . . . At the 5-8 grade level, students continue to need experiences that involve the regular and consistent use of concrete models. Ambiguity Abounds Still, the Framework is not completely devoid of arithmetic and computation requirements. In K-4, for example, students “develop proficiency with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts through the use of a variety of strategies and contexts,” while in grades 5-8, they “develop, use, and explain procedures for performing calculations with whole numbers, decimals, fractions, and integers.” A promising start, but in keeping with the amorphous nature of Connecticut’s standards, no procedures or strategies are identified.

>>The ambiguity of these standards works against the careful development of fractions and credible preparation for algebra. The Pythagorean Theorem is mentioned only once, in a convoluted standard for grades 5-8: Describe and use fundamental concepts and properties of, and relationships among, points, lines, planes, angles and shapes, including incidence, parallelism, perpendicularity, congruence, similarity, and the Pythagorean Theorem. Quadratic polynomials and the quadratic equation receive no mention in these standards. Finally, the Goals 2000 sample activities do little to clarify the mathematical content of the standards and are at best suitable as classroom enrichment activities.

Surely, CT has enough academic talent to do better. a local group -- perhaps the school board itself -- could come up with standards that a) are true standards, b) make sense, c) include specific requirements for learning, and d) demand accountability from employees.

Monday, March 17, 2008

School Corruption: Here and Now

The words School and Corruption are seldom, if ever, seen together. Why? Because most people simply refuse to believe that something so sacrosanct as school can be connected with illegal and immoral acts. We just do not expect those who are responsible for the education of our children to be capable of being irresponsible, let alone guilty of corruption. However, that is exactly what is going on.

It is time to address this huge problem. School budgets have reached the point where too many people have their hands in the pies, and when people mix with other people’s money, we should always expect problems.

Armand Fusco, former superintendent and author of “SCHOOL CORRUPTION,” writes, “School corruption takes many forms, but it falls into three main categories: I: cheating and deceit, II: waste and mismanagement, and III: fraud and stealing.” He should know. Many people sense that the schools are dishonest, but few will admit it about the schools in their community. Take a look at ours.

Category I: cheating and deceit. Let me count the ways:
About 60% of my town’s tenth graders fail the state test of basic skills based on information taught up to eighth grade, but the employees tell us that they are delivering “excellence in education.” The terrible results tell us that the school system has the children for ten years to provide an eighth grade level schooling, and still only 40% can pass according to the state. Are we being deceived about the quality of the schooling offered? Is 60% failure a high quality result?

Next, who benefits when 75% of middle schoolers are placed on the honor roll? If we know that only about 40% are at their grade level, then we know that a large portion of the kids on the honor roll are below their grade level. What’s going on? It’s called cheating by the schools, just like the times when teachers change the students’ tests in order to show a higher percent of achievement. I’ll get back to this a little later.

Are we justified in calling it cheating by the employees? You bet. It deceives the children; it deceives the parents; it deceives the community. This practice of putting failing students on honor rolls is fraud, and fraud is a form of corruption. The same goes for all the occasions when courses are dumbed down and children who do little are given passing grades. Maybe the worst example: the brightest students are ignored. They are cheated and used by the employees. Is that corrupt? You bet.

“Edspeak” is the language of school employees. It is a language designed to deceive.

There is another big category of school corruption. It is the corrupting of the very purpose of school-- that is, the education of our children. The government has never been interested in truly educating our children. Its schools’ original purpose, back in 1840 was to turn out the millions of factory workers for the industrial revolution, plus a good supply of soldiers. Government officials were clear in their requirement that the masses should not be too well educated…their goal was to train obedient workers and predictable consumers. That has not changed, in fact, academic instruction has been steadily watered down over the years while psychological conditioning has emerged as a main goal today, training our children to have certain government-approved attitudes and opinions, but not to have the creative intelligence to become leaders or innovators.

The result is a total corruption of the very idea of education. Conditioning to certain ideology is the opposite of education. Education is training children how to think; while the methods our state-run schools use are therapy, or mind-changing methods.

I'll get to catagories II and III later.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

The Big Betrayal

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program."
-- Main's Law

From the "Mission" statement of the public school district in my town, we read that "excellence" is now the reason for the existence of the school system. But, excellence at what? They don’t say. Let me simply say, excellence, by itself, is not a mission. It could be called a standard, however, if we look closely, the public school system has no standards or even goals.
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What Is the mission of the school system?

Under the schools’ multi-page Strategic Plan, there is no mention of schooling. Nowhere is there any hint that people are expected to teach basic skills and/or knowledge that children might need in their lives. Nowhere is any mention of what those skills or knowledge might be. No subjects, no teaching methods, no goals, no expected results are offered. How can a forty-million-dollar-a-year agency get away with having no aims, no desired outcomes, and no stated purpose?

The plan includes this: “There will be a “challenging academic environment.” How strange, when the curriculum and books are dumbed down. In both the Mission and Guiding Statements, there is the claim of a “respectful environment.” Again we wonder, respect for what? The school environment is one of distrust, coercion and fear, with a good dose of bullying. We also know that some teachers degrade people’s traditions, religions and parenting practices. To me, it looks as though they want respect for themselves, even though they neglect their educational duties and often disrespect the students and parents. Let them show respect, before demanding it from others.

Why don’t the schoolers simply say that they intend to run the schools as well as they can, teaching the 3Rs and the few other subjects that the state requires, and leave it at that? Why don’t they say that they will try to run the schools honestly with well-trained employees and will do so with the least possible waste of taxpayers’ money? Why is it, that instead of running the schools with transparency and openness, they seek to keep them closed and secret?

And besides, isn’t teaching respect the domain of families and the mission of the churches that set the moral and ethical tone for society, those who actually guide our civilization, our common culture, our civic institutions, our traditions, our way of living? Isn’t it the job of the school employees to demonstrate respect rather than to preach it? Why can’t they do that?

Government educationists claim parents have abdicated their duties to the government schools. How self-serving of them, to blame parents for an alleged lack of moral training. Of course, no matter how inept they are, the school employees are all too happy to take on the role of surrogate parents since it allows them to increase their control over the community’s time, energy and resources. For them, the system is about empire-building. While enrollment has been flat for years, employment has ballooned and spending has doubled, and doubled again. Has it helped achievement? Not a bit.

The schools have reduced their emphasis on academic instruction while adopting psychological and political correctness agendas. The schools no longer offer knowledge of facts and basic skills. They now offer “moral guidance,” but in the form of psycho-therapy. The schools no longer are interested in what our children know; they are now primarily concerned with what they “are like.” I remember a former superintendent saying, “I don’t care about test scores, I just care how the kids feel about themselves.” He wasn’t kidding. We are being conned into believing that the government knows – better than we do -- how to raise our children.

And what does the government want? Soldiers and a docile workforce, not thinking, educated individuals. The training begins in K, now pre-k. It consists of “sit down, be quiet, do what you are told, your interests are not important, your questions do not matter. You belong to the state.” They want our children for twelve or more years, because that is how long it takes the government to thoroughly dumb down a once-intelligent child.

Here’s Thomas Sowell, author of Inside American Education: “They have taken our money, betrayed our trust, failed our children, and then lied about the failures with inflated grades and pretty words.” Or this: “They have used our children as guinea pigs for experiments…or just to be warehoused until labor unions are willing to let them enter the job market.” He calls the education establishment, “Morally and intellectually bankrupt.” Considering all their lies and adulteration of values and their inability to state their own purpose, who can disagree?

War Against Intelligence

“According to a 1993 national survey by the Educational Testing Service
of 26,000 adults with an average of 12.4 years of schooling, only 3.5% of the sample had the literacy skills to do traditional college level work.”
-- Bruce N. Shortt, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools

Are your children bright? Most kids are. Chances are that you see their intelligence and strengths. You are aware of their interests and inclinations. You sent them off to school at a young age with the hope that the school would inform them of needed facts and knowledge as well as encourage their strengths and feed their interests. However, the public schools no longer do what parents expect, and that fact is the reason for the school wars.

Today’s schools have reduced the content of all instruction by about four grade levels, compared to fifty years ago. Teachers are now “facilitators” while the children reach “consensus” about their subjects. The CAPT test, Connecticut’s high school “exit exam,” is based on material offered only up to eighth grade. The courses, textbooks and tests have been dumbed down to that level. International testing shows that, compared to students in other advance countries, “The longer our students are in school, the lower their comparative performance,” says Gordon Ambach, former head of the Council of Chief State School Officers. He should know.

It gets worse: The schools have changed in purpose from education to political and social indoctrination, with “equality” as the goal. Schools don’t care how much children learn, they are primarily interested in what kids “are like.” The school’s goal is to transform children’s varied attitudes, values and opinions from those of traditional families to those desired by the government. The government seeks to turn a population of diverse children into a mass of predictable citizens who know the same things and believe the same things, with no one ahead or behind too far. That is why today’s public schools spend lots of our money trying to raise the bottom children up to the middle mass, but nothing to help high-achievers. In fact, they are designed to prevent the brightest kids from reaching their full potential. Now you know why “one-size-fits-all” and “dumbing down” are the major policies of public schools. The only way they can achieve “equality” of outcomes is by lowering their standards.

Today, the schools have a far different agenda for our children from the one we expect of them. They are failing to provide the children with the needed basic skills, knowledge and information, but, worse, they are interested in finding children’s weaknesses and psychological “needs” instead of their strengths and interests. The school system makes the basic assumption that all children have “disabilities” and need the school to provide “treatments” for them. The result is that school has become therapeutic and psychological even to the point of requiring many children to take mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, in order to control their behavior.

The school system has several reasons to do this – all of which work directly against most parents’ hopes and wishes for their children. The government is seeking to mould the citizens of our country into a docile, easily controlled mass that can be employed or will become soldiers who do exactly what they are told to do, and nothing else. What does this all mean? It means that government school is no longer for the benefit of children. It is for the benefit of a government that seeks to control, instead of being controlled by, the people.

Unfortunately for America, our country needs well-educated people now, not dumbed-down people. There lies the School Wars, pitting the government school establishment against the rest of us. Government school offers Artificial Stupidity – turning bright kids into ignorant robots; our children need the exact opposite. The schools are turning intelligent children into stupid adults by the millions simply by not offering them what they need, while offering them large quantities of what they do not need, or want. I believe the situation is well described by Thomas Sowell: “In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools are producing artificial stupidity.”

Monday, March 10, 2008

Letter to a Worried Parent

My wife, Luz, and I get emails and calls from parents who are anxious about their children. The kids are miserable in school, but the parents often do not know how to offer an alternative. We try to calm them while encouraging them to try homeschooling. One such letter last year was the following:

Dear Martha,

The big advantage our son had, thanks to unschooling throughout his youth, was that he learned to be in charge of his learning and, really, his life to a great degree. In contrast, kids who attend schools learn to wait for others to tell them what to do, what to think. After twelve years of that, they become completely dependent on others for direction.

In general, that does not prepare young people for real life or college. Colleges prefer people who have initiative and can motivate themselves, who know what they want to learn, and most important, know how to find information when they need it, and are not afraid to make decisions for themselves. Those characteristics are the opposite of what public schools teach. The government schools have the goal of turning out a "workforce" of dependent predictable people. The government does not want people to be well educated -- just enough, but no more. The "economy" needs lots of sheep, not too many shepherds, lots of spectators, but not many players. Our son, and many homeschooled children we know, learned to be independent and creative thinkers, to do what was right for them, not necessarily for the "economy."

School does not prepare children for life. Each year of school merely prepares them for the next year of school. Our motto is, "Live with your children as though there were no such thing as school." Let your kids know that they are responsible for their lives and for their learning, no one else is.

Our son never did lessons, never looked at a school book. We did not teach him school stuff at home. He learned what he was interested in, which was almost everything. He scored 1390 on the SATs and got into college easily on his own and breezed through happily and graduated Magna Cum Laude (top one percent). He was well prepared for college without doing any of the school stuff. He was prepared for life, not just college. He is grateful for his experience growing up and we are still his best friends. What more can we ask?

Suggestion: If your daughter is unhappy in school, take her out for a while at first, say, for the rest of this school year. See if she is happier with you. Make sure she has a friend her age to talk to sometimes, if she wants. Your job will be to give her access to the world...to see where her interests lie. Do things with her. Give her responsibilities, real work. The idea is to let her have a real life as much as possible, to share your real life, not have an artificial life such as schools create.

Best wishes,
Ned

I heard back, as follows:
I asked my daughter at dinner why she doesn't like school. Not surprisingly she doesn't like talking about the subject very often! She replied with all of the wisdom that only a six year old has, "Because all we do is work...for hours." When I told her that I plan to teach her at home she said, "But what will we do?" I replied, "Paint, grow a garden, plan your birthday party, swim, cook, and anything else you would like to do." She looked at me with wide eyes of excited disbelief and said, "You mean, That is learning?"

Friday, March 7, 2008

Evelyn Russo is above average !

Evelyn Russo (see my previous post) is above average ! She was given a doctorate in instruction even though she had no idea how to teach reading, didn’t know how, and obviously did not teach the children how to read. We have the kids’ results. To call it failure is being kind. She and those thousands of others who are doing what she was doing are creating the disaster that has been going on for decades in the public schools of our state, and our town.

We can’t allow ourselves to think that because we live in a relatively affluent town, the teachers here are better trained than those who work anywhere else. They are all trained exactly the same ways, and they are teaching in the schools of their affluent towns without a clue how to teach children to read.

The reading problem is just a symptom of what is happening in all the other areas of instruction. We know that the Math program (Everyday Math) is just as much a failure as the reading program is. How can we expect any of the programs to be effective when the two most important ones are such documented failures? There is no way.

About MATH, here’s columnist Laura Maniglia who writes a bi-weekly apology for the public schools. On Nov. 23, 05, she wrote about what she calls the Math Debate, admitting that US students rank 29th out of 34 nations – ahead of only four Mediterranean countries and Mexico while China, Japan and Korea rank at the top.

She describes the debate between proponents of “traditional” math and the new “constructionist” math, including Connected Math and Everyday Math used in Guilford. She says that traditional math would teach the foundations of computation and number facts (you know: adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) which provides them with the skills needed in more advanced math and problem solving. No surprise there. It’s what everyone needs. It’s what we all use in our lives.

On equal footing, she puts something called the “constructionist approach” -- “it emplasizes an enquiry program for pupils to construct their own knowledge through ‘reasoning.’ This approach,” she continues, “often intruduces calculators as early as first grade with the HOPE that the students will learn math in the process.”

There you are: just like in the Whole Language reading instruction in which they HOPE the children will learn to read even though they do not teach them how to do it. The new new math program – Connected Math or Everyday Math flies on the HOPE that the children will learn actual math even though the teachers do not teach it.

And we wonder why American jobs are being exported by the millions…
Here is your answer: the American public schools are not teaching American children even the basic skills they need in order to survive in the world today.

It’s another part of the national crisis. The schools refuse to hire people who are well educated in the fields they are supposed to teach. It’s true of reading; it’s true of mathematics; it’s true of all the subjects. Dumbing down starts at the top. What can you expect at the bottom?

It’s your money. They’re your children.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

“Experts” Without a Clue

Americans are gradually becoming aware of how poorly our students are doing compared to those in the rest of the world. In reading English, we are at or near the bottom in every international test. Same for math and science.

For some insight into the problem, let me quote from a recent article: “She studied to be an elementary teacher, taught in New Haven, CT public schools for 10 years and got a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, but Evelyn Russo says she was missing one crucial skill. She didn’t know how to teach children to read.”

That is the first paragraph of the lead article in the Hartford Courant on May 1, 2006. Ms. Russo says, “I had no clue how to teach them to lift words off a page, to increase their vocabulary…I didn’t know anything about fluency.”

This person taught elementary grades in CT public schools for ten years and had no clue how to teach children to read. Why? Because she went to a college where people like her “study” something called “education” but do not learn how to teach children to read. In fact, they don’t learn much of anything. They come out of those places believing they are experts and professional educators, but they have very little knowledge and do not have a clue about learning. Ms. Russo must have had at least 250children in her classes over those ten years and she did not know how to teach them to read.

It gets worse. During that period, she got a doctorate degree in something called “curriculum and instruction,” and yet she still had no clue how to teach the most fundamental skill in all of schooling – how to read.

I hope you understand what this means. It is this: None of the people who teach in public elementary schools in CT know how to teach children to read. Ms Russo is just one out of thousands of CT elementary teachers who have no clue how to teach children how to read.

The State department of education doesn’t know how to teach a child to read, and if someone told them, they would not pay any attention. Some of the world’s most knowledgeable reading specialists – even Sally Shaywitz, Yale’s noted brain researcher on reading skills -- have been telling them for years, but they stick to the methods that have always failed. The same is true for math, science and history.

Do you smell the crisis now, and do you sense that this astonishing fact is at the root of the crisis? I hope so. The problem has finally floated to the top of the first page of the state’s biggest newspaper. The people in charge of our children's education do not want to know. The horror for our country is that CT pretends to have “the best” school system in the nation. Is it possible that most other states can be worse? Yes.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Dumbing Down in Seven Lessons

Dumbing down has been the major public school policy for a few decades now, and from all indications, it is working well. Local, State, National and International test results all show that while our kids are still as intelligent as ever, their essential knowledge and skills are on a steep downward incline with no change in sight.

So we must assume that the schools are operating as they are intended, and that their purpose is not to turn out well informed citizens, but people that the government calls "human resources" who will be obedient, docile, and dependent. How does the government do that? The process is described in John Taylor Gatto's classic book, "Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum" While the schools claim to be educating, the seven lessons teach quite the opposite. They are as follows:

1. Confusion. Everything is out of context, disconnected and unrelated to real life. Confusion is thrust upon kids by strange adults, each working alone, pretending to an expertise they do not possess. All information is fragmented -- the opposite of cohesion. It's like TV programming. Gatto says, "I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny."

2. Class Position. Children learn their place in the grand pyramid. School teaches children to accept being numbered; not to imagine themselves somewhere else; to fear the better classes and to have contempt for the dumb classes; to stay where you are put.

3. Indifference. This is taught by the bells and buzzers and other distractions. Nothing is so important that it can't be interrupted or stopped. Years of bells condition children to know that no work is worth finishing. They, "innoculate each undertaking with indifference."

4. Emotional Dependency. Kids must surrender their will to others. They learn they have no rights in school, unless school authorities say they do. There is no individuality in the classification system. They become dependent on gold stars, prizes, "honors," smiles, frowns and even disgraces. They are hostages.

5. Intellectual Dependency. Children must wait for others to tell them what to do, and to make meaning of their lives. Teachers and other school employees decide what children study, regardless of the child’s interests or desires. Whether or not they “learn” it, means their “success” or “failure.” Curiosity has no place; only conformity.

6. Provisional Self-Esteem. This lesson is that a kid’s self-respect should depend on the opinion of others. Children must be evaluated and judged, and found wanting, imperfect, “learning disabled,” ADHD or some other fictitious abnormality. Self-evaluation is never accepted. Gatto: “The lesson of report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should rely on the evaluation of ‘certified’ officials.”

7. You Can’t Hide. Students learn that they must always be under surveillance by teachers and other staff. The lesson here is that children are not trusted and their privacy is not legitimate. The purpose is to maintain constant central control over society. The State cannot allow too many citizens to listen to any drummer other than its uniformed marching band.

Middle class parents, having been through the school mill, seldom believe that their child’s school is one of the bad ones. They learned all seven lessons, most important of which is waiting to be told what to think and do. Our society is made up today largely of what Gatto calls, “psychic invalids” who must be fed, clothed, entertained, medicated, educated and otherwise served by “others.” In fact, the economy would probably fall apart if a large portion of us suddenly did not feel helpless but became more self-sufficient.

Gatto concludes, “The seven lessons are prime training for people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”