The dumbing down of the youth

[Cognitivedissonance]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...books-expected-reading-age.html#ixzz1FXS6ilvY

Bertrand Russell wrote about ‘education’ in the 1930’s when he said in his book: ‘The Scientific Outlook’ published in 1954. Remember Russell was one of the elites of his day and his books are still praised in academic circles by the same social class to this day. This must be taken seriously in light of what we see in our children today as regards ‘education’. I urge you to read the full chapter and come to your own conclusions. If nothing else it should be fairly clearly to you how it just happens that the same class of people always end up in power and indeed all appear to speak in the exact same manner as eachother and behave like eachother in every aspect. They are like clones.


The Scientific Outlook – Bertrand Russell

CHAPTER XV

EDUCATION IN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY

EDUCATION has two purposes: on the one hand to form the mind, on the other hand to train the citizen. The Athenians concentrated on the former, the Spartans on the latter. The Spartans won, but the Athenians were remembered.

Education in a scientific society may, I think, be best conceived after the analogy of the education provided by the Jesuits. The Jesuits provided one sort of education for the boys who were to become ordinary men of the world, and another for those who were to become members of the Society of Jesus. In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play. Children will be educated from their earliest years in the manner which is found least likely to produce complexes.

Almost all will be normal, happy, healthy boys or girls. Their diet will not be left to the caprices of parents, but will be such as the best biochemists recommend. They will spend much time in the open air, and will be given no more book-learning than is absolutely necessary. Upon the temperament so formed, docility will be imposed by the methods of the drill-sergeant, or perhaps by the softer methods employed upon Boy Scouts. All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “co-operative,” i.e. to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.

Their education throughout will be in great part manual, and when their school years come to an end they will be taught a trade. In deciding what trade they are to adopt, experts will appraise their aptitudes. Formal lessons, in so far as they exist, will be conducted by means of the cinema or the radio, so that one teacher can give simultaneous lessons in all the classes throughout a whole country.

The giving of these lessons will, of course, be recognized as a highly skilled undertaking, reserved for the members of the governing class. All that will be required locally to replace the present-day school teacher will be a lady to keep order, though it is hoped that the children will be so well-behaved that they will seldom require this estimable person’s services.

Those children, on the other hand, who are destined to become members of the governing class will have a very different education. They will be selected, some before birth, some during the first three years of life, and a few between the ages of three and six. All the best-known science will be applied to the simultaneous development of intelligence and will-power.

Eugenics, chemical and thermal treatment of the embryo, and diet in early years will be used with a view to the production of the highest possible ultimate ability. The scientific outlook will be instilled from the moment that a child can talk, and throughout the early impressionable years the child will be carefully guarded from contact with the ignorant and unscientific. From infancy up to twenty-one, scientific knowledge will be poured into him, and at any rate from the age of twelve upwards he will specialize on those sciences for which he shows the most aptitude. At the same time he will be taught physical toughness ; he will be encouraged to roll naked in the snow, to fast occasionally for twenty-four hours, to run many miles on hot days, to be bold in all physical adventures and uncomplaining when he suffers physical pain. From the age of twelve upwards he will be taught to organize children slightly younger than himself, and will suffer severe censure if groups of such children fail to follow his lead. A sense of his high destiny will be constantly set before him, and loyalty towards his order will be so axiomatic that it will never occur to him to question it. Every youth will thus be subjected to a threefold training: in intelligence, in self-command, and in command over others.

If he should fail in any one of these three, he will suffer the terrible penalty of degradation to the ranks of common workers, and will be condemned for the rest of his life to associate with men and women vastly inferior to himself in education and probably in intelligence. The spur of this fear will suffice to produce industry in all but a very small minority of boys and girls of the governing class.

Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements. As those upon whom all progress depends, they must not be unduly tame, nor so drilled as to be incapable of new ideas. Unlike the children destined to be manual workers, they will have personal contact with their teacher, and will be encouraged to argue with him. It will be his business to prove himself in the right if he can, and, if not, to acknowledge his error gracefully. There will, however, be limits to intellectual freedom, even among the children of the governing class. They will not be allowed to question the value of science, or the division of the population into manual workers and experts. They will not be allowed to coquette with the idea that perhaps poetry is as valuable as machinery, or love as good a thing as scientific research. If such ideas do occur to any venturesome spirit, they will be received in a pained silence, and there will be a pretence that they have not been heard.

A profound sense of public duty will be instilled into boys and girls of the governing class as soon as they are able to understand such an idea. They will be taught to feel that mankind depends upon them, and that they owe benevolent service especially to the less fortunate classes beneath them. But let it not be supposed that they will be prigs far from it.

They will turn off with a deprecating laugh any too portentous remark that puts into explicit words what they will all believe in their hearts. Their manners will be easy and pleasant, and their sense of humour unfailing.

The latest stage in the education of the most intellectual of the governing class will consist of training for research. Research will be highly organized, and young people will not be allowed to choose what particular piece of research they shall do. They will, of course, be directed to research in those subjects for which they have shown special ability. A great deal of scientific knowledge will be concealed from all but a few. There will be arcana reserved for a priestly class of researchers, who will be carefully selected for their combination of brains with loyalty. One may, I think, expect that research will be much more technical than fundamental. The men at the head of any department of research will be elderly, and content to think that the fundamentals of their subject are sufficiently known. Discoveries which upset the official view of fundamentals, if they are made by young men, will incur disfavour, and if rashly published will lead to degradation. Young men to whom any fundamental innovation occurs will make cautious attempts to persuade their professors to view the new ideas with favour, but if these attempts fail they will conceal their new ideas until they themselves have acquired positions of authority, by which time they will probably have forgotten them.

The atmosphere of authority and organization will be extremely favourable to technical research, but somewhat inimical to such subversive innovations as have been seen, for example, in physics during the present century. There will be, of course, an official metaphysic, which will be regarded as intellectually unimportant but politically sacrosanct.

In the long run, the rate of scientific progress will diminish, and discovery will be killed by respect for authority.

As for the manual workers, they will be discouraged from serious thought : they will be made as comfortable as possible, and their hours of work will be much shorter than they are at present ; they will have no fear of destitution or of misfortune to their children. As soon as working hours are over, amusements will be provided, of a sort calculated to cause wholesome mirth, and to prevent any thoughts of discontent which otherwise might cloud their happiness.

On those rare occasions when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it.

In normal cases, children of sufficiently excellent heredity will be admitted to the governing class from the moment of conception. I start with this moment rather than with birth, since it is from this moment and not merely from the moment of birth that the treatment of the two classes will be different.

If, however, by the time the child reaches the age of three, it is fairly clear that he does not attain the required standard, he will be degraded at that point.

I assume that by that time it will be possible to judge of the intelligence of a child of three with a fair measure of accuracy. Cases in which there is doubt, which should, however, be few, will be subjected to careful observation up to the age of six, at which moment one supposes the official decision will be possible except in a few rare instances. Conversely, children born of manual workers may be promoted at any moment between the age of three and six, but only in quite rare instances at later ages. I think it may be assumed, however, that there would be a very strong tendency for the governing class to become hereditary, and that after a few generations not many children would be moved from either class into the other. This is especially likely to be the case if embryological methods of improving the breed are applied to the governing class, but not to the others. In this way the gulf between the two classes as regards native intelligence may become continually wider and wider. This will not lead to the abolition of the less intelligent class, since the rulers will not wish to undertake uninteresting manual work, or to be deprived of the opportunity for exercising benevolence and public spirit which they derive from the management of the manual workers.

 

[Cognitivedissonance]

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
– Edward Bernays

 

[Cognitivedissonance]

• 2011 #2. Trends that will affect the practice of TCM herbology over the next 10 years — the Internet Revolution, the "College Bubble", Chinese adulteration scandals, regulatory wars. http://www.rmhiherbal.org/review/2011-2.html
• 2003 #4. The "Dumbing Down" of American Education — implications for Chinese (TCM) herbal education. http://www.rmhiherbal.org/review/2003-4.html

In the last article above, I gave on overview of the writings of John Taylor Gatto (book: The Underground History of American Education; full text available free here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm ). Gatto's book, in my opinion, is the most important book in the last century on the subject of education. Any educator who claims to be concerned about reforming education (rather than reforming the educational system, as Gatto claims it is so broken that it cannot be fixed but must be abandoned), mustread it if they truly wish to solve the problem. Gatto is a captivating writer; unlike slogging through boring books on educational theories for creating biological robots, you will not be able to stop once having started. I suspect the many teachers to whom I've made multiple reminders to read it may fear what they will find among its pages. In a previous article, I summarized Gatto's major ideas for what is wrong with our current educational system, why it must be abandoned, and how parents, teachers, and young people themselves are creating successful alternatives.

The human robot — programmed to fail for profit
Human "resource units" who are the products of public schools have been indoctrinated to assume that for any problem that arises one should seek out an expert to fix it.

During the 19th century and especially in rural America, survival required a typical family to accomplish a wide range of tasks with little outside help. Self-reliance was the watchword. Growing a garden, assisting in childbirth, raising children and farm animals and tending to their illnesses, carpentry and building construction, plumbing, vehicle and engine repair, and repair of household gadgets are just a few of the tasks that I recall my close family members performing routinely during my childhood on a farm in western Kansas during the 1950's. In retrospect, these experiences were of greater value to my education than any years I later endured in public school.

On the farm, failure was not an option. Essential tasks absolutely demanded one's full attention until they were successfully completed. If you tried something and it did not work, you studied the problem, asked neighbors and relatives for advice, and kept trying different things until the problem was resolved.

In contrast, public schools have trained its human resource units to routinely accept failure. Students who fail to reach an arbitrary standard within a fixed time period have that failure permanently recorded in their transcript, and over many years of such negative reinforcement, students eventually take on the identity and personality that is reflected in their official records. Human products of this industrialized school system are encouraged to specialize in subjects for which the system has rewarded them with good grades and to defer to experts in all other matters. Such narrowly specialized people become reliable workers and profitable consumers in an industrial economy, because they are human robots who do not ask annoying and troublesome questions, who perform their assigned tasks predictably and repeatably, and who can be relied upon to purchase the many products output by factories comprised of other specialized human robots.

In matters of health, over-specialization and robotic behaviors are the foundational principles of our modern medical-industrial-pharmaceutical empires. Robotic programming prevents its human victims from conscious awareness of how their choices of food, consumer products, and living habits affect their health. Over-specialization has left many without the life experiences and knowledge to understand matters of health and with the belief that they are incapable of ever acquiring this understanding. Instead, they seek out pronouncements and advice from "experts", who make them pay dearly for such advice and for the medical-industrial-pharmaceutical products that have been designed to merely palliate symptoms while inducing chronic and often deadly illnesses — for a profit.

To awaken the public to how we are all being manipulated and poisoned for profit, self-education is key. In spite of the dumbing down of our public schools, millions of people have learned to access the Internet for information on health and to acquire the information and understanding that public schooling has failed to provide. Alternative health practitioners should encourage that trend, for it is a powerful and effective means of breaking the back of the disease-for-profit, medical-industrial complex.

Institutionalized dumbness
Public schooling does not stop at producing functional human robots who are good at specialized tasks; instead, it persistently suppresses critical thinking and creativity, for these latter could sprout into deadly threats to the established order.

As Gatto points out, old-fashioned dumbness, or simple ignorance, had been replaced in the 20th century by an institutional form of dumbness scientifically induced by propaganda and Skinnerian stimulus-response conditioning. Future teachers are indoctrinated in these methods at colleges of education. One can trace the history of these ideas in the West to Tavistock and its sister mind control thinktanks such as Stanford Research Institute and National Training Labs, though the history of robotic programming of human populations can be traced back thousands of years to the ancient Hindus and Babylonians. The Hindu system of education, still prevalent in India and much of Asia today (though this is changing due to rapid economic development and increasing need for engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and business entrepreneurs), was designed to buttress the rigid caste system by destroying the critical thinking abilities of the vast majority of the population who constituted the lower castes. These victims of rigid public schooling were indoctrinated by forced memorization of facts and dogmas that reinforced their inferior status in the established order. Questioning of authority, natural curiosity, individual deviation, and critical thinking were punished until these behaviors were extinguished. Only children of the highest Brahmin caste were encouraged to develop these tendencies, for these would become the priests, heads of state, and high-level government administrators.

During the early 19th century, the militaristic Prussians were among the first in the West to adopt a modified version of the Hindu system of education, stratified by caste, to public education. Prussian generals, frustrated with failure of soldiers to reliably follow orders, desired to create a system of education that would produce soldiers who would follow orders without question and without individual initiative and judgment. To accomplish this, they imposed a robotic style of education on 95% of the population; rote memorization and group recitation of dogmas and principles constituted the core techniques, supplemented by immediate punishment of individual initiative, natural curiosity, and critical thinking. Approximately 4% of the population were encouraged during their education to develop these abilities within a very limited range of subjects, for these young people would be groomed to become the lower-level bureaucrats and technicians. Only 1% of the population were encouraged during their youth to develop their maximum intellectual potential, for these people were slotted to become rulers, planners, strategists, and high-level administrators.

With the rapid industrialization of western nations during the 19th and 20th centuries, the titans of international capitalism agreed among themselves that the Prussian system of education could be adapted to producing reliable factory workers to fulfill jobs that were repetitive, boring, intolerant of deviation from rigid protocols, and often dangerous, as these were very similar to conditions imposed on European soldiers during an era in which warfare had become dependent on technology and mechanization.

http://www.rmhiherbal.org/review/2013-2.html

 

[Cognitivedissonance]

"With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority." Stanley Milgram , 1965


". . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. " Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery.

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” – Hendrick Van Loon, Author

“Truth is often hard to swallow, so we rest in comfortable lies and delusions.”
– Dorothy Anne Seese, Freelance political writer

“The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.” – Edith Sitwell (1887 – 1964) British poet, critic

"Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves." - Herbert Marcuse

"In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy." - Matt Taibbi

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." - Gore Vidal

Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas. Aaron B. O'Connell

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." - Aldous Huxley - (1894-1963) Author - Source: Forward to 'Brave New World', 1932 (Knock, knock, America, United Kingdom)

"If we took all the money we spend on political ads and used it to educate our children and feed the poor, we wouldn't be America." Mr. Klugian

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination.": - Rev. William H. Poole

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author