Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto

Author:John Taylor Gatto
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: EDU040000
ISBN: 9781550924244
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

7

Weapons of Mass Instruction

Only 31 percent of college-educated Americans can fully comprehend a newspaper story, down from 40 percent a decade ago.

— National Commission on the Future

of Higher Education, August, 2006

35 percent of the young regret their university experience and don’t consider the time and money invested worth it; more than half said they learned nothing of use.

— Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2006

A Moral Odor

At the age of sixteen, a blind French teenager named Jacques Lusseyran became head of an underground resistance group of 600 during WWII. Lusseyran arranged dynamiting, assassinations, and other violent forms of sabotage to free his country from the Germans, a story told in his autobiography, And Then There Was Light. In chapter four, he talked about his early schooling, calling the classroom experience a moral disaster:

. . .there is such a thing as moral odor and that was the case at school. A group of human beings that stay in one room by compulsion begins to smell. That is literally the case, and with children it happens even faster. Just think how much suppressed anger, humiliated independence, frustrated vagrancy and impotent curiosity can be accumulated by boys between the ages of ten and fourteen. . .

Lusseyran was able to murder large numbers of men just a few months after he left school “where the world of reality with all its real moral questions was entirely lacking. “ We become what we behold. It’s something to remember, Columbine.

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