This is an absolutely fascinating interview. Mr. Gatto was the New York State 2009 public school teacher of the year.

Mr. Gatto quit as a public school teacher in order to stop harming kids. He had discovered that institutional schooling is designed to prevent the natural genius of children from emerging. Public schools impose a state of permanent incompletion to our kids, by teaching habit-training, not intellectual development. The power elite deliberately suppresses independent and critical thinking, to make us obedient citizens and consumers. Gatto, author of the best-selling Weapons of Mass Instruction, Dumbing Us Down, and The Underground History of American Education, discusses how the twenty elite boarding schools teach their students according to ancient principles, and homeschoolers and unschoolers are doing the same.

Gatto’s website

Great essay from 1994 (the year I graduated from the NYC public school system).

What Really Matters

by John Taylor Gatto

This originally appeared in Natural Life Magazine, November/December, 1994.

Going to the moon didn’t really matter, it turned out.

I say that from the vantage point of my six decades living on Planet Earth, but also because of something I saw not so long ago. It was at Booker T. Washington High School where I watched an official astronaut – a handsome, well-built man in his prime, dressed in a silver space suit with an air of authentic command – try to get the attention of an auditorium full of Harlem teenagers. It was the Board of Education’s perfect template for dramatic success – a distinguished black man leading ignorant black kids to wisdom. He came with every tricky device and visual aid NASA could muster, yet the young audience ignored him completely. I heard some teachers say, “What do you expect from ghetto kids?”, but I don’t think that explained his failure at all. The kids instinctively perceived this astronaut had less control over his rocket vehicle than a bus driver has over his bus. I think they had also wordlessly deduced that any experiments he performed were someone else’s idea. The space agency’s hype was lost on them.

. . . .

After 12,000 hours of compulsory training at the hands of nearly 100 government-certified men and women, many high school graduates have no skills to trade for an income or even any skills with which to talk to each other. They can’t change a flat, read a book, repair a faucet, install a light, follow directions for the use of a word processor, build a wall, make change reliably, be alone with themselves or keep their marriages together. The situation is considerably worse than journalists have discerned. I know, because I lived in it for 30 years as a teacher. (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

In my own field of work, university education, there are a great many who scoff at the idea of privatization, something that is exactly how a free society should handle all education from primary to post graduate schools. There is no excuse for government to be responsible for educating young people or anyone else for that matter. Not only is it destructive of educational impartiality to entrust schools to governments – only if there is variety can impartiality be at least approximated – but the threat of out and out indoctrination is most real when one monolithic agency, with the power to coercively collect funds for its operations and conscript its students, runs “education.”

Yes, thousands of professor and teachers want the government to be in charge but after this has been accomplished, as it has for a couple of centuries throughout America and elsewhere, there is no escaping the turf fight that takes over educational policy, especially when it comes to such courses as history, civics, and even biology and the textbooks teachers are required to use in them. (Read more from thedailybell.com)

This is several months old, but it is fantastic. How can anyone possibly oppose college tuition subsidies? Please listen and learn. Like most government programs, government tuition subsidies punish exactly the people they presume to help.

Yale University

1810-1852 tuition = $33/year or 1.65 ounces of gold
1918 tuition = $160/year (dollars were inflated during WWI) = 8.4 ounces of gold = 32 days of manual labor
2009 tuition = $36,500/year or about 33 ounces of gold = 550 days of manual labor

This was caused not by freedom or greed. It was caused by reckless government subsidies.

Department of Education = Drain on resources. It’s a monstrosity which should be abolished. Who’s with me?

I’m a big fan of Lew Rockwell podcasts. I often listen to them while preparing breakfast. These two interviews both touch on what’s a new idea to me: college as government intervention – guaranteeing loans, subsidizing student lending, eliminating free market disciplines on Universities. Suddenly I see in a new light the extravagant cost of tuition, the legions of people devoting thousands of hours to subject which they themselves do not care about.

Peter Schiff: You’re Better Off as a Renter. March 23, 2009.
Peter Schiff talks about the college in the last quarter of the interview, from 11:30 onward.

Gerald Celente: The Fed Has Wounded You. April 26, 2009.
Gerald Celente only touches on it briefly in this great interview, from 9:45 to 12:30.

This is an inspirational story about one College’s defiance of invasive, misguided federal policies.

“Hillsdale’s modern rise to prominence occurred in the 1970s. On the pretext that some of its students were receiving federal loans, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare attempted to interfere with the College’s internal affairs, including a demand that Hillsdale begin counting its students by race [emphasis added].”

Hillsdale College didn’t need race-related “help” from the feds because “it was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery. It was also only the second college in the nation to grant four-year liberal arts degrees to women.”

“Hillsdale’s trustees responded with two toughly worded resolutions: One, the College would continue its policy of non-discrimination. Two, ‘with the help of God,’ it would ‘resist, by all legal means, any encroachments on its independence.’

Following almost a decade of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against Hillsdale in 1984. By this time, the College had announced that rather than complying with unconstitutional federal regulation, it would instruct its students that they could no longer bring federal taxpayer money to Hillsdale. Instead, the College would replace that aid with private contributions.” (Read more from hillsdale.edu)

“We need to enroll more children and we need to start at an even earlier age.” ~ Emperor Obama

67% of Americans agree, which is what I’m trying to change here on LostRepublic.us . Please watch:

Government: We screwed up Headstart and we screwed up K-12, but give us your money and give us control of your four-year-olds, because this time we’ll get it right. We promise.