if i were going to see waiting for superman, i think i would need to see it alone. my reaction is likely to be severe, and no one i know even vaguely agrees with any of my positions on these things. everyone operates from within the same set of assumptions. barack and bush's positions on education are identical. it's perfectly legitimate to infer from this that their position is absurd.  i believe quite sincerely that the current approach to education in a technocracy entirely justifies armed insurrection. i want you to come back from that movie and tell me it's not simply an argument for totalitarianism.

typepad's indent, font, and quote functions are completely unusable, but what follows is a quote from gail collins: "I’m still haunted by a debate I stumbled across in the Texas Legislature a decade ago in which conservatives repelled any attempt to impose accountability standards on the state’s charter schools, even after only 37 percent of the charter students passed state academic achievement tests, compared with 80 percent of the public schoolchildren. There’s something about an unfettered school that lifts the hearts of the Born Free crowd."

all i can say is that puts y'all on the other side: the born enslaved crowd, the aficionados of fetters: and standardized pre-k will soon be followed by standardized gestation. the constant resort to the terms "standards" and "accountability" pretends that the standardized testing regime measures antecedent facts. what it does is deploy culture-wide a model of knowledge (ridiculously wrong), impose a national curriculum, and institute new, elaborate, and thorough authority, wielded over everyone in the entire system. if michelle rhee or arne duncan think they are in the business of measuring facts, they are living in a world of hallucinations; they are doing all day every day the opposite of what they claim to be doing: they are not measuring anything; they are manufacturing facts. that they are accumulating for themselves an insane level of power over everyone's children is obvious.

if you are sitting here with tom friedman actually worrying that our kids have lower standardized test scores than the finns or something, i say you have floated outside the realm of actual human beings or real children or anything relevant to learning. really is this an education program, or is it a project for world conquest? these people give you the impression of each nation's children as a kind of army, in a war with all the other nations' children to dominate the future. try to become aware of how fantastical and optional that is as a way of representing reality. but try to be aware too of what a picture like that entails about how we actually treat children.

seriously the people running education are pod people. they have ceased to be human in any dimension, and they insist on manufacturing a population in their own image. for them, truth is automatism. what amazes me is that the whole culture seems to be proceeding on their assumptions. except maybe the "born free crowd." waitin for kryptonite, bitch.

helpin janie with her homework last night; she was working on the mason-dixon line, which more or less runs through my house (well a couple miles south). but the procedure was simply mechanical. the first sentence re-states the question. re-state this, fuckhead. the next three give details from the text, in support (of your restatement of the question?). she didn't actually get to compose a single sentence, much less express some sort of independent response. it has to be mechanical to be measurable: the tests seek to create their takers in their own image. illiteracy is preferable, or this just is a new form of illiteracy.

by the time i'm teaching them as freshmen, they just want to be told what procedures to follow to get their 'A.' they really are often disappointed that i don't tell them how to compose each sentence. ( a few weirdos still slip through, of course.)

Comments

[Jared]

Couldn't agree more Crispy, I'm just surprised that so few people comprhend the level of complete and utter servitude that public education "teaches" or forces if you prefer down your throat. Part of me is glad my short stay in this state sponsored hell hole is almost over but the other part is actually worried that I might well actually care about what they have to say if only to serve my own selfish tendencies and not get raped in the ass when I get to college cause my gpa didn't quite suck the administrators off the right way.

[Bush 41]

I'm genuinely curious: What would you like children to be taught, either at home or at a public school? What would Sartwell's curriculum look like?

[Stephen]

The late great Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented the creation of the Department of Education. He knew that this would lead to standardization of education in the US. After all, why should a child in NYC be given the same education as a child in Antelope, North Dakota? How about we just be givien the exact same curriculum as Finns and just be taught in Finnish?

[mp]

I just finished teaching a class in which a freshman begged me to tell her what I thought, so she could get an "A."

Anyway, Blake had this covered without quite knowing it: why should there be one law for the lion and the ox?

[1littlewho]

APAs spectacularly suck!!!

[Andrew Dobbs]

I believe all kinds of crazy things--I don't like Jesus, America, capitalism or TV. Nothing, however, seems to get people quite as riled up as when I tell them that I'm an education abolitionist, and that I believe formal education is organized child abuse. Right on the money here, Crispy.

I can remember when I went from a straight A student to not giving a shit. It was in the 8th grade when my English teacher told us every essay had to have precisely 5 paragraphs--intro, three supporting grafs and a conclusion--and each paragraph had to have precisely 5 sentences. If you could make your point in three sentences, you got marked. If you needed 6 to make the point, you got marked. I was born to write, but it made me hate writing and I've never forgiven her or the system that forced such ugly garbage down my throat.

[crispy]

yo bush 41! your presidency sucked. but anyway, i guess the first thing i'd do is simply open the doors. i realize that compulsory universal education was once a progressive idea. among other things it reveals the authoritarian heart of progressivism: you have a vision of progress: now the only question is, how can we develop a sufficiently coercive machine to impose it? honestly the only people who actually can read, even now, are the people who want or need to read, because of some incomprehensible internal compulsion or because they have to to make a living. i'd start by returning to a scribe culture. meanwhile i'd re-train people like arne duncan's children and other such genetic defectives to communicate using hoots, grunts, and gesticulations, or by holding up pictures or something.

[CF Oxtrot]

Dig the original post, Prof Crispy.

Also dig Andrew Dobbs' comment.

[Solerso]

"That puts you on the other side, the born enslaved crowd"..

A bit off topic but it reminds me of series of letters between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis wherein they discuss the accusation of certain critics that Tolkiens work is escapsim, and therefore bad. I find it wonderful to watch the two Oxford Dons tag team the critics. Finally they reduce the conversation to the question, "who has the most to fear from escape"? and both conclude "jailors".

[Solerso]

One other thing. I think its probably true that individuals with higher intelligence score higher on standardized test than less intelligent ones, but that has little to do with school. I did almost nothing in high school and scored 680 on the verbal part of the SAT (a long long time ago, 1974). Its because i started reading when i was 4, and continued reading through high school. I was reading for high comprehension and was accustomed to seeing good writing. They cant work hard to keep us stupid, and then turn around and blame teachers for making us stupid. The capitalist American culture fosters, and inculcates stupidity.There are plenty of cute, wealthy white kids, in well funded suburban schools who are fucking morons,semi-literate incompetents, because that is encouraged by a culture that values conformity and consumption over all other activities.

[TGGP]

"i believe quite sincerely that the current approach to education in a technocracy entirely justifies armed insurrection"
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/1860-view-of-school.html

[Moose]

"but the procedure was simply mechanical."

That reminds me of the Ascians from Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.