Wednesday
May152013
Student Annihilates Teacher: 'Enough Freaking Packets!'
MODERN EDUCATION EXPOSED
Youtube viral video with more than 1.2 million views in just the last 6 days. Jeff Bliss gives an unforgettable lesson to his teacher at Duncanville High School in Texas.
May 15, 2013 at 12:32 PM
Reader Comments (32)
" honey I'm leaving for work to sit on my fat ass" and hand out packets.
I bet the teachers lounge is nice though...
I have thought of what i learnt in school that i use today..Not much,i could have had half the schooltime and produced instead of sitting listening at lame ass teachers.
http://guydinmore.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/top-executives-arrested-in-italy-wind-farm-probe/
International Power of the UK, the largest operator of wind farms in Italy in 2008 with a market share of about 15 per cent, acquired in 2007 its Maestrale portfolio of wind farms for 1.8bn euros from Trinergy, an Irish company which had bought them from IVPC two years earlier.
more to come...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/20/us-usa-tax-apple-idUSBRE94J0U320130520
If you have a hard time believing that this revolution in the contract ordinary Americans had with their political state was intentionally provoked, it’s time for you to meet William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. No one, other than Cubberley, who rose out of the ranks of professional pedagogues ever had as much influence as Harris. Harris both standardized and Germanized our schools. Listen to his voice from The Philosophy of Education, published in 1906:
Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
~ The Philosophy of Education (1906)
Listen to Harris again, giant of American schooling, leading scholar of German philosophy in the Western hemisphere, editor and publisher of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy which trained a generation of American intellectuals in the ideas of the Prussian thinkers Kant and Hegel, the man who gave America scientifically age-graded classrooms to replace successful mixed-age school practice. Again, from The Philosophy of Education, Harris sets forth his gloomy vision:
The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
~ The Philosophy of Education (1906)
Nearly a hundred years ago, this schoolman thought self-alienation was the secret to successful industrial society. Surely he was right. When you stand at a machine or sit at a computer you need an ability to withdraw from life, to alienate yourself without a supervisor. How else could that be tolerated unless prepared in advance by simulated Birkenhead drills? School, thought Harris, was sensible preparation for a life of alienation. Can you say he was wrong?
In exactly the years Cubberley of Stanford identified as the launching time for the school institution, Harris reigned supreme as the bull goose educator of America. His was the most influential voice teaching what school was to be in a modern, scientific state. School histories commonly treat Harris as an old-fashioned defender of high academic standards, but this analysis is grossly inadequate. Stemming from his philosophical alignment with Hegel, Harris believed that children were property and that the state had a compelling interest in disposing of them as it pleased. Some would receive intellectual training, most would not. Any distinction that can be made between Harris and later weak curriculum advocates (those interested in stupefaction for everybody) is far less important than substantial agreement in both camps that parents or local tradition could no longer determine the individual child’s future.
Unlike any official schoolman until Conant, Harris had social access to important salons of power in the United States. Over his long career he furnished inspiration to the ongoing obsessions of Andrew Carnegie, the steel man who first nourished the conceit of yoking our entire economy to cradle-to-grave schooling. If you can find copies of The Empire of Business (1902) or Triumphant Democracy (1886), you will find remarkable congruence between the world Carnegie urged and the one our society has achieved.
Carnegie’s "Gospel of Wealth" idea took his peers by storm at the very moment the great school transformation began — the idea that the wealthy owed society a duty to take over everything in the public interest, was an uncanny echo of Carnegie’s experience as a boy watching the elite establishment of Britain and the teachings of its state religion. It would require perverse blindness not to acknowledge a connection between the Carnegie blueprint, hammered into shape in the Greenwich Village salon of Mrs. Botta after the Civil War, and the explosive developments which restored the Anglican worldview to our schools.
Of course, every upper class in history has specified what can be known. The defining characteristic of class control is its establishment of a grammar and vocabulary for ordinary people, and for subordinate elites, too. If the rest of us uncritically accept certain official concepts such as "globalization," then we have unwittingly committed ourselves to a whole intricate narrative of society’s future, too, a narrative which inevitably drags an irresistible curriculum in its wake.
Since Aristotle, thinkers have understood that work is the vital theater of self-knowledge. Schooling in concert with a controlled workplace is the most effective way to foreclose the development of imagination ever devised. But where did these radical doctrines of true belief come from? Who spread them? We get at least part of the answer from the tantalizing clue Walt Whitman left when he said "only Hegel is fit for America." Hegel was the protean Prussian philosopher capable of shaping Karl Marx on one hand and J.P. Morgan on the other; the man who taught a generation of prominent Americans that history itself could be controlled by the deliberate provoking of crises. Hegel was sold to America in large measure by William Torrey Harris, who made Hegelianism his lifelong project and forced schooling its principal instrument in its role as an unrivaled agent provocateur.
Harris was inspired by the notion that correctly managed mass schooling would result in a population so dependent on leaders that schism and revolution would be things of the past. If a world state could be cobbled together by Hegelian tactical manipulation, and such a school plan imposed upon it, history itself would stop. No more wars, no civil disputes, just people waiting around pleasantly like the Eloi in Wells’ The Time Machine. Waiting for Teacher to tell them what to do. The psychological tool was alienation. The trick was to alienate children from themselves so they couldn’t turn inside for strength, to alienate them from their families, religions, cultures, etc., so that no countervailing force could intervene.
Carnegie used his own considerable influence to keep this expatriate New England Hegelian the U.S. Commissioner of Education for sixteen years, long enough to set the stage for an era of "scientific management" (or "Fordism" as the Soviets called it) in American schooling. Long enough to bring about the rise of the multilayered school bureaucracy. But it would be a huge mistake to regard Harris and other true believers as merely tools of business interests; what they were about was the creation of a modern living faith to replace the Christian one which had died for them. It was their good fortune to live at precisely the moment when the dreamers of the empire of business (to use emperor Carnegie’s label) for an Anglo-American world state were beginning to consider worldwide schooling as the most direct route to that destination.
Both movements, to centralize the economy and to centralize schooling, were aided immeasurably by the rapid disintegration of old-line Protestant churches and the rise from their pious ashes of the "Social Gospel" ideology, aggressively underwritten by important industrialists, who intertwined church-going tightly with standards of business, entertainment, and government. The experience of religion came to mean, in the words of Reverend Earl Hoon, "the best social programs money can buy." A clear statement of the belief that social justice and salvation were to be had through skillful consumption.
Shailer Mathews, dean of Chicago’s School of Divinity, editor of Biblical World, president of the Federal Council of Churches, wrote his influential Scientific Management in the Churches (1912) to convince American Protestants they should sacrifice independence and autonomy and adopt the structure and strategy of corporations:
If this seems to make the Church something of a business establishment, it is precisely what should be the case.
If Americans listened to the corporate message, Mathews told them they would feel anew the spell of Jesus.
In the decade before WWI, a consortium of private foundations drawing on industrial wealth began slowly working toward a long-range goal of lifelong schooling and a thoroughly rationalized global economy and society.
Cardinal Principles