The Family: the real story of the Bush dynasty

by: Kitty Kelley

ISBN: 0385503245  hardcover edition

Hot off the presses, Sept. 2004. The story of the Bush family.  Bushes have been senators, congressmen, governors, presidents and financiers.  They have molded federal agencies like the CIA, have controlled the Republican party, and been involved in illegal financial deals with Nazis.  This book provides us with an unauthorized biographical screening of the Bushes, it gives us the dirt and airs the dirty laundry.  Some family secrets are unconfirmed, like the author's claim that George W. Bush did drugs while his father was president, but many other facts are solid. Worth reading, if for no other reason, than to at least, get a glimpse into the Bush "mind-set".

EDUCATION

Dumbing Us Down, the hidden curriculum in compulsory schooling

by: John Taylor Gatto, 1992

ISBN: 086571231x

"School as it was built is an essential support system for a model of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control.  School  is an artifice that makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable, although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution... The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum... such a curriculum produces physical, moral and intellectual paralysis..." (p.14-15)

 

"According to [Bertrand] Russell, mass schooling produced a recognizably American student; anti-intellectual, superstitious, lacking self-confidence, and with less of what Russell called 'inner freedom' than his or her counterpart in any other nation he knew of, past or present.  These schooled children became citizens, he said, with a thin 'mass character' holding excellence and aesthetics equally in contempt, inadequate to the personal crises in their lives." (p.78)

 

"Monopoly schooling is the major cause of our loss of national and individual identity.  It has institutionalized the division of social classes and acted as an agent of caste--repugnant to our founding myths and to the reality or our founding..." (p.100)

John Taylor Gatto is an award winning teacher who taught in the New York City Public School system for 26 years before he resigned as a method of protest.  He later joined the Albany Free School, where he implemented his system of education with great success.  Mr. Gatto has found that independent study, community service, large doses of solitude engages and promotes free thought. 

In this short book he expounds his theory that the current state of American education stamps out self-knowledge, curiosity, and instead produces mass conformity.  In such a system children learn to merely obey orders and become functioning cogs in the industrial machinery of society.

Last Updated  April 01, 2005

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