All three of the following books are referenced in the movie IndoctriNation and are free to read on-line.
This week, my husband and I started reading John Taylor Gatto's book An Underground History of American Education. Having worked within the walls of the public schools as a high school and middle school math teacher, I can totally identify with what is written in this book. Read it for free at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm.
If you have about an hour to read a short book, a pdf version of Murray Rothbard's Education: Free & Compulsory can be downloaded at http://www.mises.org/document/2689/Education-Free-and-Compulsory.
And another book you might want to read, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, is available as a free pdf download at http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/index.html.
Thanks to Tami for recommending these books!
And, finally, don't forget to read Leigh Bortins's book Echo in Celebration: A Call to Home-Centered Education - a short, easy, and inspirational read. I highly recommend it! Download the pdf version at http://www.classicalconversations.com/pdffiles/EchoACallToHomeCentMar2008.pdf.
I'm glad to hear that you are reading thru John Gatto's opus! It is the most life-changing education work I have ever read. I read it a couple of times online, and read a huge amount of it out loud to my husband, before I finally purchased a paper copy to mark up. Murray Rothbard wrote his book in the 60s, so is much earlier, but Gatto goes so much farther. Here is another link you may enjoy.:
ReplyDeletehttp://lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto7.1.1.htmlit
John Gatto is in his 80s now, and this is a multi-hour interview with him from last spring. The first 15 min or so are just intro, but after that the entire thing is a Q&A format. He talks about topics that are not in his books, esp on the subject of how the elite educate their children vs how public schools (& most private schools) do. Education for the masses is centered on passive literacy - how to be good readers so as to understand what others are teaching. But the emphasis in the small group of NE boarding schools, from which essentially all of the political elite graduate, is just the opposite - active literacy, or how to communicate your own ideas, in writing & public speaking, to those poor dumbed down masses who are being trained to listen to you. He specifically mentions Obama, and how the speaking skills he exhibits cannot be explained by his background. He says there must have been some significant "intervention" by whomever it was that groomed him for office. Very interesting, I thought. I was struck by how much his description of the NE boarding schools lines up w/ Leigh Bortins' objectives in the challenge year programs. If you have time to listen, be ready to take notes! This interview convinced me to put a lot more emphasis on developing my daughters's speaking skills, not only for their CC presentations, but also by participating in as many speech & debate activities as we can. For example, they are taking part in a "Flood the Five" weekend in a couple of weeks. This is an event put on by Communicators for Christ for kids of all ages. The name comes from the idea that only about 5% of Americans are comfprtable speaking in public (I'm certainly not!) so that 5% might as well be made up of as many Christians as possible.
Anyway, it is a fabulous interview - I'm happy to see that it is still up on youtube, and I hope you will be able to watch it.
oops, I messed up that link. Hopefully this is correct:
ReplyDeletehttp://lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto7.1.1.html