The Biggest Problem
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the
maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly —
the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories
"in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...
manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

Massive redistribution of wealth to one percent of the population
aided and abetted by many of the victims because the school system
didn't help them learn how to know when they were being taken is *not* 
good.


And it's not an accident that the school system doesn't help:

'While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote
that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational
system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative
who were altering the nature of the industrial process."'



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Anthony Watson from neo-liberalism.org writes:

    Kids.....(Easy scapegoats aren't they?)

[...] Here we have a bunch of “holier than thou” academics scapegoating the “kids” for education’s failures. 
There they are in their public sector ivory towers, tenured and protected by their unions.  Poor private sector parents
paying enormous amounts of money for tuitions may have a case for their entitlement ideas given the amounts of money
 they are shelling out.   I could go and on about the advantages that educators have over private sector workers,
but I have not the time given my own private sector pressures.  Like trying to pay the mortgage while paying into an enormous
black hole called social security too, a black hole most educators manage to avoid through public sector pension funds that will actually be there when they retire.

On issue after issue, a dead body can be put at the doorstep of professional educators…let me count the ways. 
Favoring foreign students over domestic, because they pay larger tuitions.  Or creating the huge conservative
backlash by making the 1970’s and 80’s university so hostile to any free thought.  If you did not bow down to
liberal dogma as a student in these years you were flunked out and drummed out of academia.  Or perhaps
the “Political Science” for a buck that allowed the global climate change debate to remain unresolved until
there is barely a North Pole left.  Or the “I’ll do anything to get my research to be funded” mentality even if
it means taking DARPA money that makes my scientific research classified and used to make weapons
rather than really better the state of humanity.

 
Interestingly, this thread reminds me of Bill Gates blaming schools and kids for the messed up state of
America and its education system.  Here is Bill Gates’ critique of dumb American kids and the rules
he thinks American kids fail to live by, because educators are too soft on them!  
<<<<<<<<<
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both .
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it “Opportunity”.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now.  They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you
talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the Parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES
as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF.  Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to Nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 
Really though in defense of education, I would say the following

What does Bill Gates know about helping schools teach children to be successful in business? 
First and foremost, Bill Gates got his entree to the IBM boardroom through his Mom's contacts.
She was on the Board of Directors.   He is not quite the self-made man, he would want us all to
believe he is.  He never flipped burgers.  He had intellectual property, which he ripped off from an
older developer.    His Mom was on IBM's board and got him the meetings that got him the sales
of his pirated operating system.   DOS was licensed exclusively to the giant corporation and he
made a mint.   He keeps telling Congress that he needs to hire more foreigners to work at Microsoft. 
He keeps pushing for greater increased H1B visas quotas while laying off American programmers.
 
The American school system is producing less and less high tech engineers and developers,
not because American kids are stupid.  It is because they are SMART!  They can see what
happened to American programmers in the dotcom flameout.  They see the government making
 trade deals with India that include promises to allow more foreign workers.  They see Indians all
over the engineering and programming jobs, having the inside track.  If you are smart, why would
you go through the pain and suffering that an engineer goes through to get his degree only to get
outsourced or have to train your H1B visa replacement.  Instead if you are a smart American
student you become a lawyer or a doctor or even a plumber, jobs that will not be outsourced.

Bill Gates is the most UNPATRIOTIC S.O.B., I can imagine and so are the sniveling and sniping
educators on this thread.  Bill Gates sells America's future for today's profits while destroying the
American middle class by importing foreign workers that he can pay less.  He is a master of labor
arbitrage.  Many educators sit in their ivory towers and blame the students for the mess that is the
American education system rather than looking at their own commitment to the kids, they are supposed to be educating.
 
The kids are not the problem!!!!  It is the adults in positions of power that do little else, but blame the
kids for their own failures.  You are either part of the solution or part of the problem and blaming
American kids, THIS COUNTRY’S FUTURE GENERATION, is in no way productive.  [...snip]
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12th Grade Seniors Going To College Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says