Ex Sedda – from the chair

I finished reading Weapons of Mass Instruction a couple of weeks ago.  Gatto indirectly explains the deterioration of our democracy and commonwealth. It is often said that in order for a democracy to work we need an informed electorate, but it seems to me this is highly insufficient; at least as “informed” is currently understood. What is needed is something that used to be taken for granted – capacity to think for oneself. It really matters less what one ends up with and more that those thoughts and ideas are arrived at by one’s own thinking. Gatto insists there is a hidden aim in the mandatory public education which was deliberately designed into the system early on. At first I was struggling with accepting fully this premise, but I am now convinced Gatto is right. The vast majority was to be dumbed down by design because it was in the interest of elites to have citizens who do not ask unnecessary questions about the order of things about them.  The system did not need self-employed and thinking people; it needed to create uprooted lumpen proletariat as mass labor for the factories and pliable consumers of goods they did not need. The system delivered both.

One question remains in my mind. Does the current system still deliberately or consciously work on dumbing us down or were the processes unleashed in the early stages so well incorporated into the system that they still continue to deliver the same results even if we are completely unaware of them? This question is just the matter of my personal curiosity. The end result is the same.

You don’t need to buy the book to learn  from Gatto’s wisdom. There are many of his videos available on Youtube. Here is a result of a simple search:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=John+Taylor+Gatto&search_type=