Gatto exposed mandatory education

If you've never heard of John Taylor Gatto, prepare to be shocked.

Gatto is the author of numerous books, including the stunning "Underground History of American Education," and a former public school teacher. His book exposes the primary purpose of American public education, which is not to educate or to create people who know how to think, but instead to create obedient citizens who can work at mindless jobs and follow orders.

In case you'd rather listen than read, here's a YouTube clip of a 30-minute radio interview Gatto did:



Did you know, for example, that since the beginning of mandatory public education in the 1840s, the literacy rate in this country has never been as high as it was before then?

Did you know that President Woodrow Wilson said that only 3 percent of people were worthy of being trained to do independent thinking?

Read Gatto.

Where this all came from was Prussia. In the Napoleonic wars, the Prussians were defeated because many of their soldiers were too independent and not quick enough to follow orders. So the system was changed to create good soldiers, capable of following orders without thinking.

Most of you probably went to public schools. Remember the emphasis? It wasn't on what you learned, it was on how well you followed the rules.

I have a young nephew who has an extremely high IQ. When I was talking with his father about Gatto a couple of years ago, we called his son -- 7 at the time -- over to ask him a simple question. I asked him which was more important to his teachers -- getting the right answers or following the rules.

"Following the rules," he said without hesitation.

Remember back to when you were in school. Which kids had the most problems getting along? Aside from the total misfits, it was usually the ones who kept asking "Why do we do it this way?"

In this country, it was all about the industrial revolution. In an 1859 speech, Abraham Lincoln pointed out one of the strengths of America. Nearly 75 percent of working people were their own bosses, either as farmers, small businessmen or artisans. They didn't take orders from anyone. They were independent thinkers.

The industrial revolution changed all that. Companies wanted workers who would follow orders without question, who were essentially interchangeable cogs in a big machine. They didn't want people who would ask questions, unless that question was "How high do you want me to jump, sir?"

Why is so much of education based on rote memorization, on true-false, multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blanks testing? Because it teaches people that there is a right answer to everything, and if you know the right answers, you succeed.

When I was in 12th grade in 1966, I did something I don't think had ever been done at my school. I called a teacher a racist.

It could have been worse, I suppose.

I could have called her a Nazi.

She was German, and this was at the height of the Civil Rights movement. She told an all-white class that the problem with black people was that they didn't want to work and only wanted handouts. I told her that was a racist thing to say.

Of course in the overall scheme of things, I was the one who lost. She spent the rest of the year getting back at me.

Kids just weren't supposed to talk to teachers that way.

So listen to the interview. Read Gatto's book, or at least part of it. The link given earlier is to a PDF version of it online.

I guarantee it will shock you.

It certainly shocked me.

'Derangement syndrome' now 3-for-3

My friend Gordon Campbell, who is a wonderful political cartoonist despite being somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun, did an interesting cartoon a few years back.

He showed an elephant and a donkey at a bar together, with the donkey totally livid over something then-President Bush -- Dubya, not Poppy -- had done. The elephant, smiling and lifting his drink, points to his friend and comments.

"Was I ever that bad about Clinton?"

My guess is Gordon wouldn't want to revisit the topic, but if he did, the elephant would be going nuts about President Obama while the donkey smiled.

"Was I ever that bad about Bush?"

Actually, yeah. Wing nuts on both sides have been going crazy for nearly 17 years now, and the current group can be pretty well summed up in the cartoon by Don Wright. Just as the right went after Bill Clinton with such ridiculous things as "The Clinton Chronicles," which claimed the president had dozens of people murdered, the left was after Bush for his Saudi connections, among other things.

Those two are in the past, though.

The Obama stuff is all too present, whether it's the "birthers," the folks who claim the president is a Muslim, or the ones who say Obama is actually a puppet taking orders from ... wait for it ... the Taliban.

We also hear he's implementing the agenda of radicals such as Saul Alinsky or Bill Ayers. I got a lot of people angry at me last year when I suggested Ayers should be considered more a hero than a villain for his efforts to stop the war in Vietnam.

Rush Limbaugh calls Obama not just a terrorist, but a totalitarian.

Of course, folks on the left said Bush had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that he allowed them to happen to further a neocon agenda.

I know most this stuff is coming only from the fringes -- maybe 10 percent on the far left and 10 percent on the far right, but what's ridiculous is that between talk radio, the Internet and 24-hous cable news stations, everybody hears it.

And the problem with that is that with so few people taking the trouble to read or to investigate some of these claims, too many people believe these ridiculous allegations.

Did then-Gov. Bill Clinton has dozens of people killed to further his own criminal agenda, as the film claims?

Hardly.

Did George Dubya know in advance that 911 was coming?

Hard to believe.

Is Obama controlled by the Taliban?

Don't make me laugh.

Are we ever going to have another president that the "loyal" opposition gives half a chance to?

Let me check my Magic 8-ball.

Try again later.

Increased mobility a mixed blessing

A hundred years or so ago, most Americans did not live in cities.

A majority of Americans spent their entire lives living in one place, many of them never traveling more than 50 miles from where they were born. Even if they did move somewhere else when they came of age, they were usually able to return home and visit their parents, who were living where they had always lived.

Most of us have not had lives like that.

With the exception of a couple of years in Buffalo, N.Y., my grandparents lived in a small town in north central Ohio from 1895 until their deaths in 1985 and 1990. My uncle and my mother were born in Crestline, Ohio, and only one of them left the state as an adult.

Until my grandmother died at age 94, we always had the house in Crestline to return to. I remember being inside that house -- the source of so many wonderful memories -- for the last time the day of her funeral. I remember a conservation with my cousin Pete Kindinger.

"It's very strange," he said. "Strange to think that we will never be inside this house again."


Strange, yes. Also very sad.

The first real home I remember was Huber Heights, Ohio. We moved there when I was 7, into one of the great new subdivisions of the postwar era. For all the talk of the different Levittown communities, Huber Heights billed itself as the world's largest community of all-brick homes. By the time we moved away in 1963, there were 8,000 homes.

It was totally a bedroom community, with most of the commuters going to work either in Dayton or at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just outside Fairborn. Dayton was a pretty big city in those days, nearly 250,000 people in the 1960 census.

We moved to Washington, D.C., in January 1963 when my dad was promoted to a job at the Pentagon, and my parents bought a house in Fairfax, Va., that my mother still occupies until this day. I lived there for the better part of 12 years, which turned out to be the longest I ever lived anywhere until I married Nicole and moved to La Canada, Calif., in the fall of 1992.

So I'm from everywhere -- and nowhere.

I've lived in California for 19 years now, and I was actually born here as well. But the places that seem more like "home" are the ones that bring back childhood memories, and most of those come from Ohio and Virginia.

I suppose my life might have been very different if we hadn't left Ohio. I'd have attended Anthony Wayne High School instead of W.T. Woodson, and I quite possibly would have wound up at Ohio State for college.

I probably wouldn't have stayed. I've always had a certain wanderlust, and even when I was 12 years old and listening to the radio, California was calling me. There was something about me that wanted to be here.

But it's really impossible to say. Maybe I would have formed strong enough friendships in the area. Maybe I would have married someone from my high school -- lovely blonde-haired Diane McClish, my third-grade girlfriend ever so briefly, or beautiful dark-haired Claudia Dunaway.


Maybe I would still be living in the Dayton area. Maybe I would have been taking my children and grandchildren to ride the roller coasters at Le Sourdesville Lake or to our summer cabin at Indian Lake. Maybe we'd be making the 60-mile drive down to Cincinnati to see the Reds play, or over to Columbus for OSU football.

I would be a very different person, but I would definitely have a sense of place that I have never really had as an adult.

I don't know how many places the average American lives in a lifetime, but I know I'm past that -- San Diego, Chicago, Crestline, Dayton, Fairfax, Vienna, Austria, Gastonia, N.C., Anderson, S.C., St. Louis, Greeley, Colo., Reno, Nev., and now Southern California.

That's 12, and if you figure in three more residences in the Dayton area, four additional ones in Northern Virginia and four here in California, that makes 23. Two apartment changes in Gastonia, one in Reno and one in Austria lifts the total to 27, making at least 26 times in my life I have moved from one home to another.

Yes, increased mobility is definitely a mixed blessing.

Giving credit where credit is due

I'm not a fan of Sarah Palin, although there are people I admire who like her very much.

All that said, you have to give credit where credit is due, and Palin's people came up with a classic response to an attack by fellow Republican Mitt Romney.

When he was told Palin had been selected as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people for 2009, Romney asked if that was the most influential or the most beautiful. Palin's camp responded with this ad, a classic retake of Ronald Reagan's 1984 "Bear in the Woods" campaign ad.



I love the scream, the hokey music, the speeded-up version of Romney running. But most of all, I loved the little "take" that Palin does in the final shot. The woman really is a natural performer.

There's actually an interesting irony in the controversy. Despite what Romney said, he was the one selected recently as one of People magazine's 50 most beautiful people.

Of course, that was before he ran away from a bear.

Boy, do we miss Travis McGee

This is going to be sort of a different blog.

I was recently rereading one of John D. MacDonald's wonderful Travis McGee novels. This one came out in 1965, when Castro's Cuba was still new enough and the Cold War was in full swing. MacDonald, who always managed to work a message into the books, said something about the Cold War that to me applies equally well to the struggle with radical Islam.

"That's why they can never make it. They kill off the good ones. They gut their dreamers. Their drab stone discipline is a celebration of mediocrity. If we can restrain ourselves from killing off our own rebels, our doubters and dreamers, all in the name of making ourselves strong, then we can prevail. But if we use their methods, then any victory will be but the victory of one iron symbol over another, and mankind will have lost the battle whichever way it goes."

I'll leave you with that.

Music for a simpler place and time

Remember when you were 16?

Remember what it felt like to fall in love for the first time ... and then to have your heart broken?

Most of the kids who came of age in the '60s, at least in this country, may have loved and appreciated the Beatles. But for most of us, the group that seemed to sing the best songs about what it was like to be a teenager with all of a teenager's problems was the Beach Boys.

Whether it was "In My Room" and its haunting melody, "I Get Around" with its bouncy upbeat feeling or "Wouldn't it Be Nice" with its age-old yearning to be older, so we "wouldn't have to wait so long," the boys from Hawthorne, California, nailed the subspecies known as Teenagerus Americanus.

Every 2-3 months while I was in high school, just as one hit was falling down the charts, a new one came along to pick up my spirits. "Wendy," "Dance Dance Dance," "Help Me Rhonda," "Don't Worry Baby," "California Girls" ... The hits really did just keep on coming.

And along the way, they made at least one East Coast kid yearn for that warm California sun and the beaches full of surfers and all those lovely California girls.

But there was one Beach Boys song. almost forgotten because it wasn't a hit record, that was so beautiful it still brings a tear to my eyes. It was the B-side of "Do You Wanna Dance," which was itself a remake of an old '50s hit by Bobby Freeman.

Brian Wilson's "Please Let Me Wonder" was the story of a guy sitting and talking to a girl he loves. He knows it isn't going to work out, so he asks to be spared. He says, "Please let me wonder if I was the one you loved, if I knew your dreams."

As with almost anything else these days, I found it on YouTube.



I was 15 when it came out, falling in and out of unrequited love every week or two. I'm long past that now. I had my own "Please Let Me Wonder" moment in 1979 when my first marriage fell apart, and I had several in the decade after that.

It's still a beautiful song, and the Beach Boys' music can take me back to a simpler place and time like none other can.

Plenty of memories, lots of smiles

A friend of mine on Facebook asked an interesting question:

What is the one memory that always makes you smile whenever you think about it?

There are so many, and nearly all of them are connected with my children. I know I've annoyed some of you before when I've bragged on them, suggesting that I have the two most amazing kids in the world. Well, all I can say is I'm sorry, but don't expect me to stop, because they keep getting better every year.

I'm not their biological father, which reminds me of the old Rodney Dangerfield joke where he said his kids were good looking. "Thank God my wife cheats on me."

I suppose I could make a similar joke, except for one thing. I think I'm better looking -- or at least I can be -- than the other guy. I suppose I should say thank God the kids take after their lovely mother.

They're both amazingly good-looking, although it's Pauline who has blossomed the most as she has gotten older. She went from cute to pretty in high school and since having her first child last year, she has gotten all-out beautiful.

The funny thing is, that's probably the least of her assets. She's as hard working and dogged at her job as her mother, which is really saying something. Her latest performance evaluation on her job sounded more like a rave review than an evaluation.


And she is a great mother. She has put so much effort into that job the last eight months that her daughter -- my granddaughter Maddie -- has got to feel like one of the most loved, appreciated children in the world. I have never seen her raise her voice, let alone lose her temper, and she seems never to get frustrated in some situations that would have left me screaming.

I've mentioned the videos we get to see on her Facebook account. I'm trying to get her to send me at least one so that I can post it here for everyone to see.

Maddie was born in Beijing last September, and when Pauline's two-year tour ends early this summer, the two of them and husband/father Ryan will be back in the states for a year or so for another round of language training.

It was the last time they were in Washington that Pauline gave me the memory that always makes me smile when I remember it.

All during the time she was growing up, Pauline always introduced me to her friends as her stepfather. A big part of it was loyalty to her dad; Pauline was 12 when Nicole and I got married, a difficult time for a girl.

And while Virgile, who was five years younger, always called me "Dad," Pauline never did. Our relationship was different. She and I didn't have Boy Scouts, youth sports and the high school band to get closer.

But when we were visiting Pauline and Ryan in Washington for Christmas 2006, a friend of hers from work stopped by their apartment. Pauline introduced us. "This is my mom, and this is my dad."

Amazing.


It's harder to pick one with Virgile. He was an adorable little kid, and he did all sorts of funny, goofy things. But there were two things that happened in roughly the same year that I'll always remember with a smile.

In June 2003, just before graduating from high school, Virgile was part of a concert where the top senior musicians performed extended solos. With an orchestra backing him, and an arrangement he wrote, Virgile played George Gershwin's "Summertime" on the tenor sax. I don't think I've ever heard a high school musician play better.

That fall, during his freshman year at Cal State Northridge, one of Virgile's roommates came up to me and wanted to say something.

"I just wanted you to know that Virgile is the nicest person I have ever met in my life."

I can't imagine a nicer compliment.

I know long-time readers will remind me that I've written about these things before, but I'm not sure you can ever give people enough positive reinforcement.

I don't credit myself for them being the people they are, and I certainly don't consider myself a better person -- or even a better parent -- because they turned out well.

They're just two people I am very proud to know, and they have brought a lot of smiles to my life.