http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Apr-23-Sun-2006/opinion/6595142.html
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The purpose of government schooling, Gatto learns from Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, "Principles of Secondary Education," is "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."
The result? "We have become a nation of children," Gatto offers as our cultural epitaph, "happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults."
This week and last, I have cited many sources, though necessarily in much abbreviated form, on literacy during the era of the Founding Fathers, which is generally held to have ended with the deaths of Adams and Jefferson in 1826.
Surely whether a reader chooses to seek them out and study them at more length, or responds by harrumphing that, "I certainly don't agree with those facts," will best allow us to judge whether he or she truly "wants to learn" why our government youth internment camps are producing an ever higher percentage of functional illiterates …
Just as they were intended to.
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Vin Suprynowicz (vsuprynowicz@reviewjournal.com) is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the new novel "The Black Arrow.." His column appears Sunday.
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A pretty compeling indictment. But how do we move from "gummamint publik skools" back to prive schools?
Reinke Faces Life 