Quick-Think and Onthe-Spot Debate
Topics
(Ideas from Dumbing Us Down – J.
Gatto)
What is education for?
If educational institutions are
so demonstrably successful,
why are we always hearing
about their failures?
 The job that is held by the largest
number of people and that has shown
the greatest growth in the past 30 years=
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Wal-Mart clerk
McDonald’s burger flipper
Burger King burger flipper
Elementary school teacher
 Why are home-schooled
children 5-10 years ahead of
their public-schooled peers?
The aim of totalitarian
education has never been to
instill conviction but to destroy
the capacity to form any.
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Hannah Arendt
The national curriculum of
schooling was designed as if
someone had set out to prevent
children from learning how to
think and act, to coax them into
addiction and dependent
behavior…
 The very stability of our economy is
threatened by any form of education that
might change the nature of the human
product schools now turn out: the
economy schoolchildren currently expect
to live under and serve would not survive
a generation of young people trained, for
example, to think critically.
The lesson of report cards,
grades, and tests is that
children should not trust
themselves or their parents but
rely on evaluation of certified
officials. People need to be told
what they are worth.
 Seven Lessons of Schooling:
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Confusion
Class position
Indifference
Emotional and intellectual dependency
Conditional self-esteem
Surveillance
All lessons prime training for
permanent underclasses,
people deprived of finding the
center in their own special
genius.
Individuality is a contradiction to
class theory.
What is so wrong with self-
education?
(It didn’t hurt Benjamin Franklin!)
 Using school as a sorting
mechanism, we appear to be on the
way to creating a caste system,
complete with untouchables who
wander through the subway trains
begging and who sleep on the
streets.
Children and old people are
penned up and locked away
from the business of the world
to a degree without precedent:
nobody talks to them anymore
and without them mixing in daily
life.
Caring means more than simple
companionship or even the
comradeship of share interests.
How we think about social
problems depends on our
philosophy of human nature:
what we think people are, what
we think they are capable of,
what the purposes of human
existence may be.
 Whatever an education is, it should make you a
unique individual, not a conformist; it should
furnish you with an original spirit with which to
tackle the big challenge; it should allow you to
find values which will be your road map through
life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person
who loves whatever you are doing, wherever
you are, whomever you are with; it should teach
you what is important: how to live and how to
die.
 A community is a place in which
people face each other over time in
all their human variety: good parts,
bad parts, and all the rest. Such
places promote the highest quality
of life possible – lives of
engagement and participation.
 It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a
system that compels you to sit in
confinement with people of exactly the
same age and social class. That system
that effectively cuts you off from the
immense diversity of life and the synergy
of variety; indeed it cuts you off from
your own past and future, sealing you in
a continuous present much the same
way television does.
Only self-teaching has any
lasting value.