This book shocked me, and while I am not easily shocked, in shocking me made me realize how

even my own radical outlook (as Howard Zinn notes, a radical is someone who no longer believes
government is part of the solution) has come to accommodate, to accept, the most obvious tool of
subordination, the public school system.

First, my fly-leaf notes, and then a couple of conclusions.

Constructive quote up front (xiv):

"We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness--curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity
for surprising insight--simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids
to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take
a risk every now and then."

The author's bottom line: public schooling is a deliberate transplant from Germany that Carnegie
and Rockefeller and Ford and other foundations designed as a deliberate means of dumbing down
the mass population and segregating elite learning from mass "functional" learning devoid of
political or philosophical reflection.

Early on the author suggests that public schooling opened the way for marketing American over-
consumption by killing independent thinking and crafting group identities defined by the group and
its "lifestyle" rather than the individual's own self-awareness.

Myself being a pioneer for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and now public intelligence and open
everything, I was quite pleasantly surprised to discover that the author calls his vision of the correct
approach "open source education."

He works hard to blend in an astonishing array of both critical observers and political or
foundation/capitalist figures going back to the 1700's, which emphasis on the post Civil War era
when the Northern schooling paradigm took hold, and the early 1900's when the top educators of
America, funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller family fortunes, set out to destroy the roots of the
American dream--the self-taught frontier mentality in which there were no children, only young
people constantly in the process of learning from real-life and fulfilling adult roles as soon as their
bodies were able.

Schooling is about obedience, not about learning. The author says "Mandatory education services
children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants." (xxii).

Early on the author supports his radical critique by pointing out that literacy dropped with the spread
of mandatory schooling, from 4% going into World War II to 19% going into Korea (a mere 10
years later) to 27% going into Viet-Nam.

Further on the author expresses the view that compulsory schooling set out to destroy self-reliance,
ingenuity, courage, competence, and other frontier virtues, because they threatened management. He
explicitly relates both the "scientific method" with social control, and takes pains to show how
schooling is administrative control far removed from learning.
Across the entire book he catalogues with example and with gifted prose, the manner in which
schools separate children from themselves, their families, and reality.

In describing schools as they should be, the author discusses the purpose of his guerrilla curriculum,
to give his young adults time off to explore, to create "maps" as self-discovery tools and guides for
others, and to unlock the hidden knowledge of the elderly.

He is virulently opposed to standardized testing that he says is a tool to segregate the population into
five classes: gifted honors, gifted, special progress, mainstream, and special education. He points
out that the latter category is the cash cow for schools, and that is one reason schools rush to
"downgrade" students to that category.

He proposes that all parents and students refuse to take the standardized tests henceforth, and notes
with appreciation the number of more enlightened colleges that now do not demand such scores. He
goes on at length, with examples, to suggest that high test scores do not correlate with anything of
significance.

He makes it clear that the greatest victim of this entire government-corporate-school bureaucracy
cabal is the middle class student.

Gifted phrases abound in this book:

"fatal calculus in which real experience is subtracted from young lives."

"Incomplete men and women with a shaky grasp of the past and no capacity to visualize the future."

"Mass Testing institutionalizes dishonesty."

He is most admiring of the Amish model, and I draw many parallels between the health care and the
educational systems in the USA, both being 50% waste, fraud, and abuse.

The author considers the federally-mandated, bureacraticized and largely ineffective school system
to be both a religion--a form of state religion, the state ubber alles--and a crime in that all who
maintain the system benefit from it financially, while destroying the minds and hearts of generation
after generation.

Most telling to me, as a student of information asymmetries and data pathologies that concentrate
wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, is the author's focus on schools as a form
of "information deprivation." On pages 106-107:

"The social order to which he [Playfair] and Smithy belonged was held together by deliberately
depriving most people of information they needed to maximize opportunities."

I put this book down feeling that it is incendiary in the most positive sense of the word, a form of
creative destruction waiting to be implemented.
Our education system is not in need of reform. It is succeeding beyond it's wildest dreams. The goal
of public education is not to empower children to be successful but rather to KEEP them from
gaining any real knowledge and keep them from actually contributing any value to their community.
I love that he says "Genius is as common as dirt." Our public education system *keeps* children
from realizing their potential.

In this particular book he "focuses on mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple

imagination and discourage critical thinking. Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is
quite rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population
manageable, remove the obligation of child care from adult workers so they are free to fuel the
industrial economy and to train the next generation into subservient obedience to the state." He
contends that students are more programmed to conform to economic and social norms rather than
really taught to think