Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
I'd be interested in seeing how the UK regulation approaches this. I would have thought that the primary purpose of education was to present the facts and build reasoning ability.
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<homeschooler rant>The focus of public schools in the US is to be "
an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends."
The methods were strongly influenced by
Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education (apologies for the Comic Sans for anyone who follows the link):
Quote:
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Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
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Teaching kids how to think, and giving them a good foundation in several subjects, has always been secondary to teaching them how to sit down & shut up & do as they're told, in US public schools.
</rant>