EDUCATION
John Dewey, 1859-1952.
Thanks to Steve Bartin. Posted Saturday, April 23, 2022.
“Capture of Higher Education in America,” Gary North, April 13, 2019.
“The Public Schools,” Gary North, November 23, 2016.
“The Five Revolutions in Western Civilization,” Gary North, May 5, 2016.
The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto, a free edition thanks to Gary North, December 5, 2018.
“How J. D. Rockefeller, Senior, Hijacked American Education,” Gary North, May 17, 2012.
“The Rockefellers: The Supreme Symbols of the Establishment’s Takeover of American Politics,” Gary North, October 26, 2020.
“Symposium on Education,” 1977, Gary North, March 25, 2017.
“Jewish Origins of American Legal Pluralism,” Andrew Joyce, July 30, 2021.
“Christian Education: Education and Political Action,” Kevin Craig, September 25, 2021.
“The Messianic Character of American Education,” Gary North, November 28, 2013.
1. Collectivism on the Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges, E. Merrill Root.
2. The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education (2013), Charles Hugh Smith.
3. John Taylor Gatto articles.
4. A Place Called School, John Goodlad, 2004.
5. Crisis in the Classroom, Charles E. Silberman, 1971.
6. Fred M. Hechinger, conservative educator, a staunch supporter of public schools, points out that kids have been getting kicked out of school since the turn of the century.
7. John Holt books. Here is Holt’s Wikipedia page. Modern childhood was invented for the modern world.
8. How Children Learn (Classics in Child Development), John Holt, 2009.
9. Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling, John Holt, 2099.
10. Learning All the Time, John Holt, 1990.
11. How Children Fail (Classics in Child Development), John Holt, 1995.
12. Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, John Holt, 2003.
13. Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children, John Holt, 2013.
14. John Holt’s YouTube channel.
15. Freedom and Beyond, John Holt, 1972.
16. Is Public Education Necessary?, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, 1985.
In early American history, a literate and well-educated majority of Americans thrived without a national, tax-funded educational program. In fact, few of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and drafted the U.S. Constitution had ever seen a public school, and yet they benefited from a free system of education vastly superior to the imagined benefits of today’s state-controlled schooling. What happened over the course of the last and a half centuries? Why did Americans surrender the educational freedom that produced such widespread academic excellence to embrace a state of functional illiteracy under complete government control? In his seminal book Is Public Education Necessary?, Samuel Blumenfeld unpacks two centuries of source material to present an accurate history of the religious and philosophical transformations that gave birth to the educational statism controlling America’s children today. From the New England Puritan experiments in compulsory schooling to the Unitarian crusades to perfect man with the “strong arm of government”, Blumenfeld shows that public education in America has always been more about religion than literacy. A colorful history full of fascinating characters and incisive commentary, Is Public Education Necessary? challenges American parents to discard the common wisdom concerning public schools to re-shoulder the responsibilities that are rightfully theirs, to fight to keep the liberties they inherited and to teach their children to do the same.
17. Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, Sheldon Richman, 1994.
18. Marshall Fritz, chairman, founder, and former president of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State.
The one important person I have not had the opportunity to chat with is the great John Taylor Gatto.
19. Why Johnny Can’t Read, Rudolph Flesch, 1955.
20. Worthless, Aaron Clarey, 2011.
21. The best description of what government money did to higher education is Robert Nisbet’s book, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, 1971.
22. The Messianic Character of American Education, R.J. Rushdoony, 1995, his book of essays on the founders of American progressive education.
23. Intellectual Schizophrenia, R. J. Rushdoony [his short book on education]
24. Lively Experiment: Shaping Christianity in America, Sidney Mead, 1963.
25. Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman, 1961.
26. Passion-Driven Education: How to Use Your Child’s Interests to Ignite a Lifelong Love in Learning, Connor Boyack, 2016.
27. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957, Lawrence A. Cremin, 1964.
28. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783, Lawrence A. Cremin, 1972.
29. American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980, Lawrence A. Cremin, 1990.
30. American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876, Lawrence A. Cremin, 1980.
31. Popular Education and Its Discontents, Lawrence Arthur Cremin, 1990.
32. Public Education (The John Dewey Society Lecture), Lawrence A. Cremin (1976-04-03), 1875.
33. The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America, Sidney E. Mead, 2007.
34. No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools, Samuel Casey Carter, 2000.
35. Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids: What You Need to Know, James Ostrowski, 2009.
36. How to Become a Millionaire in Christian Education, Ellsworth E. McIntyre, 1997.
37. Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas, Thomas Sowell, 1992.
38. Charles Burris’ Top 3 Educational books here.
39. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, 2011.
40. Get Out Now! Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late, Mary Rice Hasson, J.D., and Theresa Farnan, Ph.D., 2018.
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The great philosopher of the public schools in the United States was Lester Frank Ward. He was a self-taught polymath who is an expert in several fields. He was a senior government statistician, but he was the philosopher of government interventionism on a comprehensive scale. He was a Darwinist. He was a Left-wing social Darwinist. He was an educator. He recognized early that the key institution that social Darwinist performers had to gain control of is the public school system, precisely because it is here that students can be kept away from ideas that threaten central planners. He realized that it was not possible in the United States to control the population by burning books. So, he recommended an alternative program, namely, screening out rival ideas in public schools, so as to immunize students in their formative years from rival opinions. He outlined all this in his two-volume work, published in 1883, Dynamic Sociology. In 1907, he was elected president of the American Sociological Association.
The above video is an interview of John Holt. What is remarkable is that I’ve posted at least 3 other video interviews of his and each one the YouTube channel pulled it. Let’s see what happens with this one. I posted this one on 12/24/2016
Thanks to Charles Burris.
Guilt, Shame, & Understanding: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions, Peter Breggin, 2014.
BULLYING @ SCHOOL
1. Bullying at School: What We Know and What We Can Do, Dan Olweus, 1993.
2. Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel, 2023.
3. When it comes to bullying, women are the worst especially when their targets are men.
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COMMON CORE
1. Rotten to the (Common) Core: Public Schooling, Standardized Tests, and the Surveillance State, Joseph P. Farrell & Dr. Gary Lawrence, Foreward by Catherine Austin Fitts, 2016. What the authors say about Common Core:
Standardized Testing in America has a troubled history. Its agenda has long remained veiled behind “expert opinions” and “latest studies.” The future of American education stands in a tradition of social engineering, data mining, pseudo-psychology, and dumbing down classroom strategies.
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STANDARDIZED TESTING
1. Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, Todd Farley, 2009. Farley writes:
That testing was not really about establishing whether a student had any real competence about the subject. The real goal, in his experience, was really merely to ensure that certain “keywords” or concepts occurred in student responses, whether or not the student actually understood their meaning.
Sarah Halzack of the Washington Post notes that
Farley spent almost 15 years working in the standardized testing industry for grades K-12, starting as an entry-level scorer and eventually becoming a test writer and scoring trainer who lived high on his expense account. His experiences led him to conclude that these tests are “less a precise tool to assess students’ exact abilities than just a lucrative means to make indefinite and indistinct generalizations about them.”
Then this . . .
Throughout his career, grade manipulation was the norm.
This was common. Though most of the manipulation took place at the district and administrative levels.
He and other leaders would change scores or toss some out in order to achieve “reliability,” a measure of how frequently different readers scored a question the same way. Among scorers, he writes, “the questions were never about what a student response might have deserved; the questions were only about what score to give to ensure statistical agreement.” Once, he and his fellow scorers changed standards midway through the scoring process when a representative from a state department of education objected to the large number of mid-level scores.
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TEACHER UNIONS
1. The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education, Peter Brimelow, 2004.
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THE ROLE OF CHILDREN IN PUBLIC EDUCATION
1. “Children Are Property of the State,” Jacob Hornberger, FFF, April 1, 2000.
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FIGHTING AGAINST PUBLIC SCHOOLS
1. “Enemy of Public Schools: How One Man Spent 25 Years Thwarting Bond Money for Rural Districts,” Alex Baumhardt, August 29, 2019. This article is about Paul Dorr, the owner of Copperhead Consulting.
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San Gabriel Tutor 