John T. Gatto has persuasively argued that the system’s goal is to produce a “schooled” person, something quite different from an educated one.

His teachers are subject matter experts. By and large they are men, and his school is not Co-Ed. He is taught by men, and he and his peers are taught to be men. Discipline is strict. You might get two strikes but you don’t get three. Community service is mandatory. They are taught that they are damn lucky to have the opportunities they have and they are taught to help others who do not have those opportunities. Boys who do not dress appropriately or mind their instructors are often pinned against a locker by an instructor when the incident happens. Very few boys fail to learn the lesson by their first offense. In other words, it’s an old fashioned school. This school has churned out leaders in every generation of American society almost since their has been an America and I’m confident the digital revolution will not make their methods obsolete any more than all the other revolutions of the past 150 years.

My main point is that it’s a cross between education’s numerous failed social experiments and ineffective modern parenting that adds to even more social experiments in education. There was nothing wrong with the education system that most of us 40-year-olds and older got in the 70s or before, since most of us, and my colleagues at work, are from that same generation. But now it’s constantly changing and all I see is failure after failure. A lot of it is just PC bullshit, too.

I had a Classroom Management course that finished last week, and we made posters for classroom rules and consequences to hang in our classrooms at school. The instructor loved my consequences poster, but at the last minute said that the font I chose, which is all caps, makes it seem like it’s shouting at the kids. She made me change fonts and style so I wasn’t “shouting” anymore. This is how retarded things have become.

Meanwhile, what passes for education today is content free nonsense suitable to create the illusion of activity without permitting any measurable demonstration of achievement. As the joke went in the Soviet union: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

His vision (in this story), was a place where someone who wanted to learn how to fly would only truly “learn” if he first studied the birds, then build his own glider, then a Wright flyer, then a Curtis Jenny and so on through history. It was sort of a Kung Fu kind of school where you “experience” flight and of course would never exist, but the point was there is something to learn from all ages of our existence. If you read this story which he wrote before he penned Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you can sort of see the whole point of the seagull book in the making, but I digress.

Can anyone really appreciate what we have today, be it i-pods, computers or anything else without at least learning about what came before?

I don’t buy that line about “we have to teach these (punks) a certain way because they’ve been raised in a different time and can’t or won’t learn like (the old-folks) did”. Experience has shown me that people are quite adaptable, and given enough motivation they can do amazing things. Things that may even amaze themselves.

Touchy feely douche-bags are going to be the death of this nation.

University should be a time to hash out ideas and talk about and argue the big picture: values, culture, character, etc. Where all those fit into out Western experience — where have we been and where are we going kind of questions.

The argument that some professors have “no real world” experience is a bit of a canard. I know plenty of people with life experience to burn but don’t know shit about life. Knowledge is a tool — if one has it but doesn’t know how to use it — it is useless.

Of course — it’s easy for me since I have real world experience.