Reddit reviews Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Not a high schooler anymore but read Dumbing us down by John Taylor Gatto (a multiple winner of "Teacher of the year" for NY city and one time winner of "Teacher of the year" for NY state).

let me see if I can explain. The public school system in America was not designed to help literacy for poor immigrants, although that would be noble. And it wasn't really designed to make us #1 in math or whatever (it would be failing at both of those goals).

It was designed to break children from their parent's culture and to help them integrate into the melting pot.
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X

Any number of videos by John Grotto on this. He's kinda crazy on a lot of things, but his education experience is quite sound.

My wife firmly believes the school system is corrupt. I can see how the church, under David O. McKay (or at least when he was an apostle) incorporated Correlation and the public school system to revise how kids are taught in order to pull them away from previous religions and cultures in order to assimilate them into the new culture of the church.

We talk about it as brainwashing, but a lot of it is culture-washing. You're no longer a mexican/Brazillian/swede/russian. You're a Mormon, here is your jell-o salad and please bring funeral potatoes.

Your parents might pray to the previous God once in a while (such as the pentacostal who still speaks in tongues once in a while, even after having been to the temple) but the kids... they know better. They roll their eyes at their parents and try to be more righteous, more godly, like they're supposed to be.

Does that make sense?

Though if we look at what concentration of the population buts what books we will see that these people can read but they are still dopes. During the civil war nearly everybody in the country minus black slaves bought books by Paine, while today rarely anybody buys books that in depth.


In fact Gatto's book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling even goes as far as saying people during the civil war were more literate than today.


I have look for citations and have not been impressed with anything. Some say people are smarter today other say they are not and standards have just been lowered.

Read this book, and then consider that it's been going on for generations. Also the culture of immediate gratification. And things...