!*"Children Working for Peanuts"*!

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I was thinking about when testing and measuring of children began to be so normal. I think it started after WWII, from the 1940's onwards. And realised that it coincided pretty much with countrywide schooling for almost all children in the western , mainly white, developed/industrialised countries.

And I remembered how Ivan Illich says in his book, "Deschooling Society", that schools make a commodity of education/knowledge, all the better ( for some in society) to sell it. They turn simple "information" into something with higher status, with greater perceived power, which people are prepared to pay for; lawyers are a good case in point.

In other words could say that schools are factories/sweatshops for children from the age of 5/6, who work for peanuts ( tiny amounts of knowledge/some information, and not much idea about how to get any more themselves/independently either), and what they produce is a lot of wealth for a minority of the adult population, who can sell their knowledge at a higher price , because children have been slaving away adding value to it. Some children grow up to take advantage from/benefit from this system. But most will become clients, having been most efficiently disempowered, discouraged, almost brain-washed into fear of using, manipulating, or even finding information.

And I thought perhaps that's also why children who do not cooperate with this, who in fact seem inadvertently inclined to sabotage efforts to add profitable value to knowledge in this way, children who show that knowledge does not need to be bought, who pick it off the trees where it grows wild, are being labelled dysfunctional, deficient, with such urgency, because in fact they risk toppling the illusion that need to pay for knowledge, and that it is difficult to come by on ones own, without an expert to help you.

Maybe children who are curious and dedicated and passionate about knowledge, who make teachers look redundant, are the new revolutionaries! And they have got to be discredited FAST. How about... " They're suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorders" ?

60 years of massive investment, and a huge industry and huge private concerns depend on people thinking they can not find out things for themselves. The internet has begun to cast doubt on this already, witness also how often people say that homeschooling is easier now , "with the internet".

Children DO already go out to work in the West, and it is sweat shop labour, called schooling. They have almost no rights there. They work for hours and hours, for weeks and months, for many years, transforming "information" into the far more valuable/higher priced "knowledge". All those children going off day after day to make profits for those who make money from "expertise".

If children did not spend all those hours on education, frowning with concentration, chewing their pencils, suffering, bored, struggling, people might think that information, even knowledge , could be found for free, at every corner, in groups independently etc.

In fact maybe as more and more people have gained access to information, which happened BEFORE mass schooling ( a bit like drops in disease happened in many places before vaccinations, because of sanitation, cleaner water, more hygenic practices in hospitals, etc), the privileged "experts" of society were at risk of losing their livelihoods, and so factories to addd value to info were set up, with children as the very poorly paid workers ( and it's piece work). School was already a reaction to loss of power on part of experts.

Now under strain from internet etc, it attacks the ones who make school look silliest and least adapted to human requirements. Anything rather than admit that schools actually teach children very little that don't forget as soon as leave, or that couldn't have taught themselves, or learned in a pleasanter setting, in a hundredth of the time. Or less.

And i was feeling very angry at the trick pulled on people, the exploitation of children involved as a result of people believing schools are "for" their children.

Actually, maybe it's more that children with "difficulties" are useful for reinforcing the system. What do you think?

If there weren't any they would invent them......! ! , because if some children fail it means that it can't be as simple as all that. If children were all doing well at school people might think it was because is actually easy to "learn".
But when there are so many struggling, failing, in difficulty, it justifies/validates school. The more there are, up to a point, with complicated problems, the more it looks like school is doing some thing important. And frightens many into thinking their child must go to school aswell, because it is obviously such a complicated and precarious thing, learning, that had better leave it to the professionals. The end product becomes more precious too. Scarcity/risk to source.

Children labelled AS are maybe like unpaid advertising for the value of schooling.

And parents fighting about their childs education are actually fighting about a childs employment rights.

I love you hypothesis; it is bazaar, creative, and wonderfully colorful.

Nonetheless, I have to disagree with you. It seems to ignore the history of schooling (people have been demanding educations long before they were taught in schools to respect one), but more importantly seems economically suspect. In terms of markets, I would like to see better examples of people selling their knowledge at an inflated price. I just can't see how it's operating. Lawyers sell their "knowledge" at the price they do because they can, which isn't due to some illusion of value, its due to the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of modern nations.

Although somehow mentioning Kafka sets my weary gears turning. It reminds me how thoroughly the people in Das Schloss were intellectually subjugated by their belief in the validity of the work of the Castle's bureaucrats...

Now I am going to have to reread Kafka. Thanks.

I anticipated your response!...and completely failed to plan a retort. Seems reasonable I guess.

This is a great post, because not only is this the process with education, this is the process of big business and large beaurocracies downloading the public minds. They do it through school, church, hell even television, music, and other such entertainment.
Intelligence is treated as dysfunction because we live in a society that is being taught to value ignorance over intelligence, conformity has became the name of the game in modern society, and the thinker stands out because the thinker does not conform to anyone, in the name of group think and group identity, common since has taken a back seat, and people hate when you shoot holes in their paradigms....... Individuality is strongly discouraged in schools, because most of the efforts of the education system are to teach kids to assimilate, conform, like a "good cog" in the machine. It is a small minority of wealthy elites looking to fatten their wallets just a little bit more and gain more control, who pull the strings, as you mentioned.

This is more true after Sputnik, the hunk of bleeping communist tin foil that terrified the western world. Americas became obsessed with competing in the global marketplace rather than turning out competent kids.

http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm

WOW! Thank you, Everchanging, for those extraordinary quotes, and the link.

I am gobsmacked by how honest and frank about it the powers that be were at that time about their real goals/aims. Completely astonishing.

Huge thanks for the link. .....The Senate Committee on Education in 1888 saying " We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent in recent years amongst the laboring classes.", because small, non-mandatory, non-standardised neighbourhood schools were being set up like co-ops, by people, independently of any state control, to teach the children to read, sometimes to very advanced levels, and understand history, and think for themselves.

WOW!

And the psychologist Bruce Levine, talking to a teacher in 2001 about a gifted 8 year old boy in her class, diagnosed with ADHD, suggesting that he might not have a disease at all but simply be bored, to which the teacher, ( a "pleasant woman"!) replied, agreeing, "yes, but we were taught at a state conference that school is preparing them for work, and they need to learn to do without stimulation, otherwise they will not keep a job".

John Dewey, the great library man himself (! !), saying, 100 years ago, "Every teacher should realise that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and securing the right social growth"

Apparently the book from which much or some of this is taken, by John Taylor Gatto, is free to read online, at :
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

Just checked the site out. More WOWs. A brilliant dissection and exposure of the state education system, its real purposes, etc. THANK you again, Everchanging.

This page particularly of the prologue of "An Underground History of Schooling" made me cry, it's so sad.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/undergro ... logue5.htm

It's poem by a boy who committed suicide, about school, called " Square Inside and Brown".

Followed by a mothers story about her sons medication, and treatment, as ADHD etc, before she took him out of school, and isn't ADHD anymore.

The whole book is brilliant, and terrible.

Bruce Levine is brilliant, ouinon. His stinging exposé of Eli Lilly ( here ) is essential for anyone who wants to defend themselves against pressure from parents or the industry to go onto AD's.

Quite speechless.

I am on chapter one right now and its coverage on the civil war heroes and their education can fill up my entire report!! The Underground History is hundreds of times more educating than a standard textbook.