George Carlin: Why Schools Will Always Suck
Can anyone dispute what he's saying? Warning: quite a bit of coarse language involved. Play video at your own risk. Do not play at work or around children.
posted by J. Kendrick McPeters | 1:06 AM
25 Comments:
Nobody can tell it quite like George....I've been listening to him since the 70's and back then i just thought he was funny & got away with saying all those bad words you aren't allowed to use but as i've gotten older, i realize that the words are just for the shock value. If you take them out of the way, what he says makes you stop and say "Wait he just made an excellent point"
Anonymous, August 02, 2007 10:10:00 AM, said:
Nobody can tell it quite like George....I've been listening to him since the 70's and back then i just thought he was funny & got away with saying all those bad words you aren't allowed to use but as i've gotten older, i realize that the words are just for the shock value. If you take them out of the way, what he says makes you stop and say "Wait he just made an excellent point"
I agree. And in this particular case -- his claim that plutocrats are responsible for the sorry state of the government schools -- it's actually quite easy to PROVE that he's right!
In fact, a teacher with 30 years of experience, John Taylor Gatto, researched the history of American education, and discovered (and documented) what can only be described as a conspiracy to dumb America down. He presented his findings in a big thick book, "The Underground History of American Education," which is available both in hard copy and online, here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
Gatto proves, using incriminating quotes from the conspirators themselves, that plutocrats were responsible for dumbing down our schools. Quoting an article by Gatto:
Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Sounds like George Carlin without the cussing, doesn't it? Let's not forget that the plutocrats and politicians never intended to subject their children to the poisoned curriculum that they forced on the masses. Oh no! Their precious offspring attended private prep academies, where they received rigorous instruction in critical thinking.
Educator (and future President, responsible, thanks to his nitwit foreign policy, for the deaths of literally millions of people) Woodrow Wilson, speaking before a crowd of educrats in New York in 1909, confessed the awful truth: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Children really have no hope in this current society, do they? Between the politicians wanting them unable to think for themselves (which might lead them to questioning the bullstuff shoveled by politicos during elections) and the teacher's unions, which demand maximum pay for the least exertion, with no accountability for teachers whatsoever, not giving a damn about them, and the plutocrats who "own the country" wanting kids dumbed down so they'll have a compliant, low paid work force... it doesn't look like there's anyone with political clout, who wants them to reach the highest pinnacle of intellectual achievement, that they might be capable of reaching.
You know what government schooling really is? Nothing but child abuse. As a society, we'd be much better off if all the government schools were bulldozed to the ground, and the land they once stood on was covered with salt.
It'll never happen though; too many people benefit from the current Godawful mess of a system. That is, too many people with money and influence, who benefit from seeing the brains of most children effectively lobotomized.
Perhaps the children could form a union, and demand better treatment? That might do the trick. After all, Albert Shanker, the long time head of the American Federation of Teachers, once said: “When school children start paying union dues, that 's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.”
For those of you with sensitive ears, presented below is the most important part of George Carlin's rant on government education, with the profanity removed. Read it, and see if you can dispute the truth of what he has to say:
There's a reason for this... There's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never, ever, ever get fixed. It's never going to get any better -- don't look for it -- just be happy with what you've got.
Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now -- the big wealthy business interests that control things, and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice.
You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, the City Halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They've got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves, and less for everybody else!
But I tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests.
That's right. You know something? They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting f***ed by a system that threw them overboard thirty f***ing years ago. They don't want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly s***ier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your f***ing retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later. Cause they own this f***ing place. It's a big club... and you ain't in it! You and I are not in the big club.
Here's what Wikipedia says about John Taylor Gatto:
John Taylor Gatto (born John Gatto) is an American retired school teacher of 29 years 8 months and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions.
Gatto was born in the Pittsburgh area steel town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. In his youth he attended public schools throughout the Pittsburgh Metro Area including Swissvale, Monongahela, and Uniontown as well as a Catholic boarding school in Latrobe. He did undergraduate work at Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia, then served in the U.S. Army medical corps at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Following army service he did graduate work at the City University of New York, Hunter College, Yeshiva, the University of California, and Cornell.
He worked as a writer and held several odd jobs before borrowing his roommate's license to investigate teaching. He was named New York City Teacher of the year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991[1]. In 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living". He then began a public speaking and writing career, and has received several awards from libertarian organizations, including the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom in 1997. He promotes homeschooling, and specifically unschooling. After learning from another teacher named John Gatto that he was regularly confused with him, he added Taylor to his name.
Inspired by Ken Burns's Civil War, Gatto is currently working to produce a 3-part documentary about compulsory schooling, titled The Fourth Purpose.
The Public School Nightmare:
Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?
by John Taylor Gatto
I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up--and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children's lives and away from their homes and families and neighbourhoods and private explorations--gets in the way of education.
That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. And yet last year in St. Louis, I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy. Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do with that.
Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and seconds grades here is that they don't want to pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers at home too early.
It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can't be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn't 12 years, either--it's nine. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the US would be $75-100 billion, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek an education.
Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbour with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from you?
One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. That's because school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned--as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once-brilliant teachers found out.
The guild reality cannot be broken without returning primary decision-making to parents, letting them buy what they want to buy in schooling, and encouraging the entrepreneurial reality that existed until 1852. That is why I urge any business to think twice before entering a cooperative relationship with the schools we currently have. Cooperating with these places will only make them worse.
The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.
So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
1. Obedient soldiers to the army;
2. Obedient workers to the mines;
3. Well subordinated civil servants to government;
4. Well subordinated clerks to industry
5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.
Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty-six years after this form of schooling began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, as the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own.
You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose--which was to create a form of state socialism--gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.
In Prussia the purpose of the Volksshule, which educated 92 percent of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8 percent of the kids participated. But for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles.
Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.
There were many more techniques of training, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with policy makers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively.
One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic "All Quiet on the Wester Front" tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling.
It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically--schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the moral will as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped.
We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, and fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shores. If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence.
In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's "Republic", a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple sentence, "I know nothing"--hence the popular label attached to the secret society's political arm, "The American Party."
Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this--the children who could afford to be privately educated.
It's important to note that the underlying premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children--the State is sovereign over the family. At the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted.
How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in American schools? Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th century and brought home the Ph. D. degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins.
Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous "7th Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these.
By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. It that year the US Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent "over-education" from happening. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role.
In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations--not by their own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts.
Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers were produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams.
Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." Hall was one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.
Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point.
Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that this has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.
When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their children. I note with interest the growth of daycare in the US and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds. The movement toward state socialism is not some historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children's lives, and even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that this control requires.
A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.
While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defence Department. Both of these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies. This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School people are in a position to outlast any storm and to keep short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.
An overview of the short history of this institution reveals a pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case.
After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good, some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. It relentlessly marginalizes all significant change. There are no incentives for the "owners" of the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition.
What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favourable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast.
But the future is not so clear. Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood, can be called to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people.
Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a generation.
AGAINST SCHOOL
How public education cripples our kids, and why
by John Taylor Gatto
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
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.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Well, the above essays ought to be enough Gatto to last for a while!
Giles County school teachers, please remember that you can post anonymously here, without fear of retribution from Tee Jackson and his central office drones. So why not post your honest thoughts on what John Taylor Gatto has to say?
If you could wave a magic wand, and change the school system, what would you do, and why?
Dang, Kendick...you shore do like to hear yourself talk, don't ye? I shore do hope that one day I can git as smart as you are. I mite even B one of them there bloggers with my very own web site.
11:45
why do u read this if it bothers u so much? does kinda seem dumb to me.to waste time just posting ignorant comments about Kendrick & complain about how much he bothers u by his post. Stop reading this blog & go make ur own blog where you can post whatever your little heart desires and show us how intelligent u really are instead of posting all ur put downs and showing us how small minded you really are...or is it cos' it's Friday nite & you have no date??
Bam broke ur face!
LMAO here!!!!!!!
Anonymous, August 03, 2007 11:45:00 PM, said:
Dang, Kendick...you shore do like to hear yourself talk, don't ye?
Actually, if you'd pay a tad bit closer attention to this thread, you'd see that the vast majority of what I posted was written by other people-- John Taylor Gatto (mostly) and George Carlin.
I shore do hope that one day I can git as smart as you are.
I hope you can, too. Maybe while we're hoping, we can also hope that you grow a pair of nads, so that you'll be able post your content free drivel under your own name. That would be cool, don't ya think?
I mite even B one of them there bloggers with my very own web site.
Let's hope you gain the cognitive ability to make this unlikely dream come true! And if you do, I promise I won't waste your time or mine by posting stupid, off-topic, not-even-funny, comments in a lame attempt to ridicule you. Plus, as I'm not a gutless coward, I'll always post under my own name.
When you get that brain transplant, let me know, okay?
do you really think anybody took the time to read all that? if you do, than your missing some brain cells. most people arent on here to be enlightened. their on here to whine and post negative comments about people they dont like.
I read it all, and appreciated the information. Thanks Allen Barrett
anonymous (1:03)
I totally agree with you about the people who use this blog as a forum for whining and attempting to hurt those they dislike. And then we are called names when we point out what they are doing.
08/05/8:31& 08/044:17
Why do you keep reading these post if they disgust you so much???
why keep pointing out what "they" are doing & getting called names when you could just not come here & read or post anything???
it makes no sense to repeat the same mistakes & expect different results does it???
Profound stuff - unfortunately true to the mark. If one sifts through the newsreels of WWII Germany - (rise & fall) we see the same PR & hype, with degrees, pedigrees, & trophies for all, from the most mentally handicapped to the chosen few who get to run the light show.
It's no longer a mental game. It's a free for all hog sloppin money machine.
Did you know there is $1.3 million in the 2007-8 budget for medicators, mind programmers, and literary imprinters? Did you know your little bundle of joy will be learning to appreciate the values of Teddy, Barney, & the ACLU?
has anyone seen the new parking lot at the high school?? Pay to park..the gravel parking lot is next then it will be pay to park.
hope it cuts down on the pot dealing that goes on there every afternoon. There is an old Bob Seger song about "Feel like a number" that was exactly what poppped in my head when i saw the parking lot.
excuse me that's popped....
Anonymous, August 05, 2007 10:17:00 PM, said:
Profound stuff - unfortunately true to the mark.
The whole subject of "education" is both infuriating and depressing to me. Infuriating, to know that the schools don't suck "by accident," but by deliberate conspiratorial plot... and depressing, to think of all the lives ruined, and all the human potential that's gone unrealized. (And that especially goes for the "minorities" who are "served" by the government school monopoly!)
If one sifts through the newsreels of WWII Germany - (rise & fall) we see the same PR & hype, with degrees, pedigrees, & trophies for all, from the most mentally handicapped to the chosen few who get to run the light show.
It only makes sense that our system would, by now, bear a strong resemblance to the Nazi school system. After all, American government schools with mandatory attendance and a dumbed down curriculum, were based on the Prussian (ie, German) schools of the 1840's-- which were, of course, also the root of the Nazi school system. If you start with the exact same seed, you should wind up with the exact same fruit, right?
It's no longer a mental game. It's a free for all hog sloppin money machine.
Boy can you say that again!
The Giles County School System is the tail that wags the Giles County dog. Tee Jackson has more hirelings than any other local "business," and given how school employees (plus their family members) tend to vote monolithically, it's no surprise that Jackson can get away with almost anything he pleases. (Including building a new office that nobody wanted but him!) Tee is the man with the money, after all, and "his" money funds all sorts of patronage positions in this county.
This much, everyone with a half a brain already knows. Everyone knows that the schools are bleeding the taxpayers dry, and that schoolteachers "vote their paycheck," and pretty much determine the results of every local election.
What's really amazing, is that most people put up with this state of affairs, because they are sympathetic toward teachers, and assume that the bulk of the "educational" money goes to pay them. People here, like most everywhere, naively believe that their school money is being spent "in the classrooms," as they like to say.
But it's not!
During the 2004-2005 school year, Giles County's classroom teachers got only 38.8% of the total school spending! Transportation, food service, plant maintenance, and plant operations all put together made up another 18.8% of school spending. And the remaining 42.2% -- totaling $12,722,213 -- was spent on.... what, exactly? Building a bureaucratic empire? Waste, fraud and abuse? It certainly wasn't spent on "the kids," that's for darn sure!
Anyway you slice it, Giles County's government schools are costing an enormous amount of money, especially considering the mediocre quality of their "product." Today's "high school" graduates only have to demonstrate middle school proficiency, in order to receive a diploma.
For a real eye-opener, check out what used to be expected of eighth graders in the dark ages of the late Nineteenth Century:
http://mwhodges.home.att.net/1895-test.htm
Did you know there is $1.3 million in the 2007-8 budget for medicators, mind programmers, and literary imprinters?
(shudder) I sure am glad I missed out on all of that! I found school to be a monumental bore, and spent most of my class time daydreaming. I'm sure I'd have been stuffed full of Ritalin, had they been handing it out back then to boys like party favors, as they do nowadays.
Funny, isn't it, how the same government that will kick your door down, and start indiscriminately shooting, in order to "bust" you for "possession" of a natural organic substance created by God (eg, marijuana)... will, without even a sense of irony, compel little boys to take mind warping Ritalin (and other drugs), simply to tranquilize away the natural reaction which little boys have toward boredom and regimentation? The government says, "Drugs are bad, mmm'kay? Don't do drugs, mmm'kay? Except, you know, for Ritalin and Xanax and the other drugs sold by Big Pharma... we'll make you take those, mmm'kay?"
They had a great episode of "The Simpsons" where Bart was put on "Focusyn" to calm him down. Alas, all I can find on the net is this short two minute snippet:
http://snipurl.com/1p8vz
Did you know your little bundle of joy will be learning to appreciate the values of Teddy, Barney, & the ACLU?
Well, isn't that really one of the big "points" of having the government run the schools? The powers that be know what values are best, and they use their school curriculum to shove those values down the throats of our children.
So, homosexuality is promoted, from a very early age, in the name of non-judgmental "toloerance," along with Earth Worship (aka environmentalism), Government Worship, Unquestioning Darwinism, and the "moral relativism" that is part and parcel of the government school's "official religion"-- secular humanism. It's amazing that the "schools" have any time for "readin', ritin' and rithmatic," given how much effort is expended every day drumming in the "appropriate" attitude and values.
Oh well. As long as the government employed school teachers are satisfied to get forty cents out of every dollar of the blood money which is extorted from the taxpayers at the point of a gun..., then I don't guess it's likely to get any better, anytime soon. Seeing as how the teachers are in charge of all things educational, rather than the taxpayers or (God forbid!) the parents, and all.
And how do you suppose things will go, in the very long run? To answer that, you need merely rent and watch Mike Judge's recent (suppressed) film, "Idiocracy." Here's a short, and somewhat funny, clip:
http://snipurl.com/1p8xa
Anonymous said...
Forgot to mention: The opening page of T Jackson's 2007-8 budget -we find some of the "Techy" stuff in the school's arsenal of "edukayshun". It's the bar charter! What's a "bar chart?" depnds on which bar we're talking about! How about the no behind left status, in the race to confusion & chaos? Let's call it "Academic Achievement"!
How about English !! - with the state total stated as 90.3 above a bar one notch high. Then we see GC next to it with 98.3 above a bar 4 notches higher than the state. Eyes don't deceive, the GC results are four times better than the state - 400% better! For those of you who believe 8 percentage points (.08 roughly) is really 4 times better (400%? or 4.00), you are ready for a new Reedy, Lovell, & Holt tax plan.
Then there is GC Algebra 1 with a "79.5" bar 3 clicks high compared to a "75.9" state bar 1 click high. This time 4% points is 2 times better than the state. Or, is 80 twice more better between 76? It's all relative?
Then comes Biology 1 with a 97.2 bar 3 clicks higher than the 95 state. (enhanced relativity?)
All of this is topped off with Giles County k-8 "Value added grades" (a solid "B", as in BS")
If you get the point, you should be mad - but, if you have been halucinating in 12 years of no tolerance tolerance & ridlin, the focus switch is off.
Reality is too bizzare to quantify - perhaps Mr Jacksin can tell us how this works at his next budget meeting - matter of fact, why not bring the whole school board in to help him explain what they are "on".
"Thou shalt not steal ... bear false witness ... covet ..." Is it three for the price of one ... if you repent after 4 years? What if it keeps getting worse? Repent?
"If a man shall steal an ox, or a sheep, and kill it (consume it), or sell it; he shall restore five oxen for an ox and four sheep for a sheep."
But, there are no oxen, sheep, nor ass left to render! The spoils are consumed. The fattened belly cries for more, not less! Those enabled to take, continue taking.
Now we know why the Bible is banned from pubic education. If they do fold their hands, close their eyes & cross their fingers, I'll bet it's more like, "please don't let anyone know what we're doing to them!!!" I wonder if they're hoarding asbestos suits?
Evidently you had a bad experience in school.
evidently anonymous you had a bad experience when you tried to think
Sorry.....I am trying to think, but I don't understand why you wrote what you wrote.........
I'm reposting the following from another thread, in hopes that the lame smear artists on this blog will read it, come to realize the idiocy of their off-topic posts, and make some sort of attempt to start dealing with the facts. -- JKM
Anonymous, August 08, 2007 7:18:00 PM, said:
Evidently you had a bad experience in school.
And evidently, you don't have the slightest clue as to the making of a logical argument! So let me offer you a free lesson in remedial logic, okay?
I've posted many, many facts in this and other threads -- such as a claim that Giles classroom teachers only get 36.4% of the money spent on "education" -- and yet, not one person has even attempted to dispute, let alone refute, the claims I've made. Without exception, every one of my "critics" -- and I use that term very, very loosely -- has simply tried to steer the "debate" away from facts and issues related to the subject being debated, and on to me, as a person, and my alleged deficiencies.
But that is a really, really STOO-PID way to try and engage in a "debate." It is, quite simply, childish in the extreme, and shows the utter intellectual impotence, of those who dislike what I am saying.
I am making many claims, on many threads, most of which would be considered "controversial" by the average person, and yet.... nobody on the other side makes any attempt to refute them. Instead, all you folks can do is sputter that I'm "an idiot" or "very dangerous" or the like.
But the truth is, facts stand or fall on their own, irrespective of who happens to bring them up in a debate. Thus, my factual claims are either right or wrong, and it simply doesn't matter whether I'm short or tall, fat or thin, black or white, happy or sad, married or single, gay or straight, religious or atheist, wealthy as Bill Gates or poor as Job's turkey, crazy as a loon or totally sane, educated in an Ivy League school or completely raised in the woods by a pack of wild timber wolves, and so forth.
NONE... OF... THAT... STUFF... MAKES... ANY... DIFFERENCE... IN... AN... HONEST... DEBATE... BETWEEN... GROWN-UPS... WHO... ARE... CAPABLE... OF... RATIONAL... THOUGHT!!!!!!!
Do you understand what I'm saying, or do I have to repeat myself, even slower and louder?
Tell ya what, I'll just turn over the floor to "Wikipedia," and see if it can drum some basic grasp of elemementary logic, into your apparently thick skull:
An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim. It is most commonly used to refer specifically to the ad hominem abusive, or argumentum ad personam, which consists of criticizing or personally attacking an argument's proponent in an attempt to discredit that argument.
Other common subtypes of the ad hominem include the ad hominem circumstantial, or ad hominem circumstantiae, an attack which is directed at the circumstances or situation of the arguer; and the ad hominem tu quoque, which objects to an argument by characterizing the arguer as being guilty of the same thing that he is arguing against.
Ad hominem arguments are always invalid in syllogistic logic, since the truth value of premises is taken as given, and the validity of a logical inference is independent of the person making the inference. However, ad hominem arguments are rarely presented as formal syllogisms, and their assessment lies in the domain of informal logic and the theory of evidence.
On the other hand, the theory of evidence depends to a large degree on assessments of the credibility of witnesses, including eyewitness evidence and expert witness evidence. Evidence that a purported eyewitness is unreliable, or has a motive for lying, or that a purported expert witness lacks the claimed expertise can play a major role in making judgements from evidence.
Argument ad hominem is the converse of appeal to authority, in which the arguer bases the truth value of an assertion on the authority, knowledge or position of the person asserting it. Hence, while an ad hominem argument may make an assertion less compelling, by showing that the person making the assertion does not have the authority, knowledge or position they claim, or has made mistaken assertions on similar topics in the past, it cannot provide an infallible counterargument.
A (fallacious) ad hominem argument has the basic form:
Person A makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Person A
Therefore claim X is false
Ad hominem is one of the best known of the logical fallacies usually enumerated in introductory logic and critical thinking textbooks. Both the fallacy itself, and accusations of having committed it, are often brandished in actual discourse (see also Argument from fallacy). As a technique of rhetoric, it is powerful and used often because of the natural inclination of the human brain to recognize patterns.
An ad hominem fallacy consists of asserting that someone's argument is wrong and/or he is wrong to argue at all purely because of something discreditable/not-authoritative about the person or those persons cited by him rather than addressing the soundness of the argument itself. The implication is that the person's argument and/or ability to argue correctly lacks authority. Merely insulting another person in the middle of otherwise rational discourse does not necessarily constitute an ad hominem fallacy (though it is not usually regarded as acceptable). It must be clear that the purpose of the characterization is to discredit the person offering the argument, and, specifically, to invite others to discount his arguments. In the past, the term ad hominem was sometimes used more literally, to describe an argument that was based on an individual, or to describe any personal attack. However, this is not how the meaning of the term is typically introduced in modern logic and rhetoric textbooks, and logicians and rhetoricians are in agreement that this use is incorrect.
[herein ends Wikipedia extract]
If the above wasn't enough to make you "see the light," then there's much more -- including some pretty diagrams! -- right here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominen
Please, for the love of God, give up the foolish and utterly lame use of ad hominen, and start dealing with the substance of the arguments I present here. Many thanks in advance!
I really like George Carlin but am I the only one who realizes he is a comedian not to be taken seriously? He is not a commentator who does research on a subject and tells things for the truth. Carlin may take a portion of the truth but he stretches it way out of proportion which is what makes him funny. NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY!!!
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