AnAngryHedgehog comments on Here's an idea: Why don't Public K-12 Schools teach courses on Logical Reasoning?
AnAngryHedgehog 31 points32 points33 points 1 day ago[-]
If you bothered to research the public school system in the United States, you'd find some nifty books by Upton Sinclair, 'The Goose-Step' (about higher education) and 'The Goslings' about K-12 education. Sinclair, most famous for writing 'The Jungle' and exposing the horrible conditions suffered by people working in the meat-packing industry in Chicago, tackled just about every major institution in American society in the early 20th century, and discovered that (ta-da!) the rich controlled everything, and set things up to benefit themselves.
The public schools were never intended to educate the masses in classical liberal style (look up 'The Trivium') in which the pupil isn't taught 'what' to think, but rather 'how' to think. With the coming industrial age, what was needed was not an educated populace, but one educated just enough to get jobs and work, and earn money to consume, as the major problem of industrialization was 'overproduction.'
John Taylor Gatto, former New York City schoolteacher of the year, has written a few books about the history of education in America, the best of which is 'The Underground History of Education,' which is available to read for free online. His most recent book, 'Weapons of Mass Instruction,' actually includes a quote from an article by H.L. Mencken which describes the educational system of the 1920s as being as I described above (not for education but for training). What Gatto leaves out (I think because of his primary market being the 'home-school' crowd, which are typically of a libertarian bent) was that Mencken's article was actually a book review of 'The Goslings' by Sinclair, a well-known socialist agitator.
Anyone who has children should acquaint themselves with these books and learn the Prussian history of our educational system and its true aims and motives.
One interesting thing Sinclair said about college in the 1920s: A lot of the students drink heavily BECAUSE there is so little teaching of actual value going on!
