Comment On American Education

A Comment On American Education 

By Alfred Lehmberg 

A pragmatic person and a retired soldier, I can, of course, see the need for *some* direction and oversight in culture and society as regards a system of education. Education is the product of some point to reality, rationality, and realism that a humanity (select portions of it, anyway) stands on the landing of a 21st Century medical and technical wonderland as much as it does! But "Direction" and "Point", as practiced currently by elitist, sociopathic, and corrupted leaderships, institutions and agencies are just additional concepts to be abused and misused—like "national security", "social security", or "homeland security"!  Then there are those—craven psychopaths in the round ever grasping and mendacious and almost guaranteeing a permanent serf class—who would do away with public education all together.

I'm a FAILED second-career public school teacher whose REAL education began, also, towards the end of a formal one, forgetting that it was the formal one which allowed me the opportunity for access to that larger, more satisfying, and more accurate informal one. ...But there's the rub.  Try to live on it.

See, an American public education system is plainly more interested in producing good, docile, and God fearing *employees* than it is in producing creatively intelligent, rational, critically thinking human beings, students and teachers. I was THERE, good reader! I know this to be true! Indeed it is among the unjust reasons I was summarily relieved from a public school teaching position.

When John Dewey, the FATHER of American education, condemned the rank and file American man and woman to creative slavery in the service of this authoritarian elite of the corporate arbitrary, he was acting upon the strident and unabashed sociopathy of his times.  This is not an excuse.  We had evolved from that... and slip back! 

Dewey's was a time when the mighty white was more than right and the mongrel brown of needs leave town! This was a time of an appallingly applied eugenics and enforced sterilization (even annihilation!) on persons of color. This was a time of an abject lack of meaningful protection from corporate criminals selling substandard consumables and enriching themselves on planet destroying planned obsolescence continuing uncontrolled today!

We begin to see the error of these blighted and shortsighted ways?

Another dean of American education, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, observed that the poor must be TRAINED to their poverty. The poor (anyone outside a privileged elite) are very broadly defined. Additionally, the reader can readily reason that if the poor can be so trained to accept their lot in cruel life the RICH can be trained in a similar, but opposing, manner. The general reader can bet that THOSE are the kids being trained to be the leaders in this twenty-first century even as your children are not. No—their kids are being trained in a manner clearly described by John Taylor Gatto (a minor god in my personal pantheon) to be the artless SHEEPLE so written about: expendable motes as dry as the chalk dust in their pitiable and threatened classrooms.

I was not REMOTELY interested in producing sheeple-aping employees, but in each individual achieving the creative and self-actualizing personal goals of which they were able. Somehow, I had convinced myself that this was the overriding goal of the America I believed in, an America that was the envy of the world, I thought—an America that I had served so well on its flawed battlefields. I would move that battlefield to America's classrooms. Ha.  It is no wonder I would be torpedoed...

I am a very highly decorated retired military officer and combat veteran with impeccable credentials and bulletproof references who could not make it public education.  Can the reader entertain, along with me, the idea that the problem was not all mine?  I made the dollar commitment, graduated Summa... some place could have been found for me in a system necessarily vast.  No... in the place of the remotest consideration, a 16th Century shunning.

We are better than this.  We are better than our manipulators. We see the demonstrated value in our individuality. We resent our trained poverty, our dearth of respect from society and culture, and the lack of aggregate humanity from our corporate overlords... we will drag these hijackers of the mainstream screaming from their ivory towers eventually, perhaps sooner rather than later. Even a "sheeple" can only be expected to take so much. The individual IS key, and the REAL power behind anything else, after all.

The denial of that may be our shared social abomination only getting more abominable as time marches on.