Author Alain Bonnet Sentenced To 60 Days In Jail By Swiss Court For Calling Journalist a "Fat Lesbian"
Pandemic of hospital protocols and deadly kickbacks..
Pharma Giants Combine Forces to Fight New M&A Rules
more below…
"Why The United States Should Pull Out of the World Health Organization. And Canada, and Australia, and and and"
below…
How Can Dads Save Their Kids From a Wicked Culture? (Video)
below…
Supreme Court Rejects Final Effort To Obtain Justice In Aborted Baby Body Parts Case – Leaves Those Who Exposed Planned Parenthood’s Crimes Owing More Than $18 Million
below…
DIGITAL ID AGENDA
Gates Foundation Wants Help to Create Digital ID and Payments System
"Financial inclusion" seems to be the buzzword that proponents of digital IDs, payments, and data exchange have picked for their PR sloganeering in favor of something that is, objectively, very controversial.
And where better to "test" something of that kind than among those who due to their economic circumstances don't have much of a say - like a number of African countries.
But don't expect those behind the effort, juggernauts like Mastercard or the (Bill) Gates Foundation, to ever spell it out in those stark terms. After all, it's genuine concern for other humans, equity, equality, and kindness that's been behind the billions, if not trillions of dollars they have amassed thus far, right?
Clearly not.
But what are they up to now?
"Stakeholders" they call themselves - self-appointed though, and their goal - other than, ostensibly, to keep the "global south" in check - is to make sure that digital public infrastructure projects, "including digital IDs," get as much traction as possible in developing countries (first).
Both Mastercard, and the Gates Foundation, are telling us this is part and parcel of their selfless global fight against poverty and other ills plaguing humankind.
Their resume, though, these last couple of years/decades, does speak for itself - specifically, otherwise.
Right now, Mastercard, that little person's best friend /s, has come up with something called Community Pass. "Farm Pass" - apparently a "sub-project," is another term being thrown around.
Reports say it's "a platform for digital IDs aimed at individuals such as business owners and farmers."
And wouldn't you know it, it's one that happens to focus on African countries.
There's no lack of ambition here, of course: Mastercard wants to register 15 million people in Africa by 2027. And Asia-Pacific region should not rest on any independence or self-determination laurels, either. Mastercard is after you as well - the same number of people, by the same date, is the stated goal.
In Africa - Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mauritania - 2.5 million people are aid to be on board, and Ghana and Ethiopia might easily be next, as the global payments behemoth tests the levels of these farmers' financial desperation.
Ostensibly - for testing comprehensive Digital IDs, for the whole world.
Are you excited? Michael Wiegand, director of Financial Services for the Poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, suggests he is.
"It's time for a new approach to financial inclusion (to) to move beyond basic banking services (...) One of the most exciting advancements in global development is the expansion of financial services."
Enter "digital public infrastructure (DPI)," as per Wiegand.
"This concept (...) underpins inclusive financial systems. Foundational DPI is based on three core, interoperable components: digital identity (ID), payments and data exchange. In practice, this gives countries and people the ability to digitally verify identities, securely and instantly send and receive money, and safely exchange information."
Tl;dr: Good luck to us all.
Reclaim The Net accepts no advertising and is funded entirely by the community. If you support free speech, the eradication of cancel culture, and restoring privacy and civil liberties, please become a supporter here.
Thank you.
Did You Know The "New" Anthrax Vaccine Is Here?
It's called Cyfendus
In 1995, the centennial of Pasteur's death, The New York Times ran an article titled "Pasteur's Deception". After having thoroughly read Pasteur's lab notes, the science historian Gerald L. Geison declared Pasteur had given a misleading account of the preparation of the anthrax vaccine used in the experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort.[6][7][8] The same year, Max Perutz published a vigorous defense of Pasteur in The New York Review of Books.[9][10][11]
CO-OPTING THE POST OFFICE
New Bill Plans To Co-Opt USPS To Distribute Digital IDs
Under the pretense of fortifying digital security in the United States, newly proposed legislation seeks to transform the United States Postal Service (USPS) into a hub for digital IDs. Senators Ron Wyden, a Democrat, and Bill Cassidy, Republican, have put forth the bill known as the Post Office Services for Trustworthy Identity Act. The proposed legislation opens new discourse on digital privacy and the potential for abnormal surveillance measures, sparking debate over the delicate balance between biosecurity and preserving citizens' fundamental rights.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The proposed legislation comes in response to the piecemeal approach taken towards biometric identification in America. Historically, disjointed programs have been created by different states and separate agency undertakings, giving rise to the necessity for a more coherent national strategy. The Post Office Services for Trustworthy Identity Act could mark a landmark shift, focusing on service provision rather than overarching digital ID strategy.
However, the legislation's journey to fruition remains undetermined, often met with hesitation from Postal Service officials who previously exhibited resistance toward such plans.
The bill, if enacted, would license the USPS to initiate an in-person program. It is critical to point out, however, that the Postal Service's adoption of the service remains optional. At least for now.
If executed, the USPS, spearheaded by the postmaster general, could impose a fee for the digital ID services among other options.
The protective angle of this bill is not without its critics, who cite potential issues related to privacy and overbearing surveillance.
HYPOCRITICAL
UK Conservatives Vow To Protect Free Speech, Days After Passing Online Censorship Law
It seems the UK's Conservative Party would like to sit on two chairs when it comes to some key, and very controversial policies - at once appearing to support people's right to free speech, but then also actively undermining it.
Case in point: while apparently determined to stop the practice of "debanking" UK citizens just because of their publicly expressed political views, the Conservative government is also passing legislation such as the Online Safety Bill, widely criticized as anti-free speech.
On Monday, the country's Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt announced that banks would have to, going forward, adhere to more strict rules that would prevent them from cutting off customers from services and closing their accounts purely based on these people's politics.
It was former member of European Parliament and prominent British politician Nigel Farage whose case brought a lot of media attention to the "debanking" practice (= the first cousin of other censorship tools, particularly demonetizing on social platforms.)
During the Conservatives conference in Manchester, Hunt stated that his party's position is that, "nobody should have their bank account closed because somebody else decides they're not politically correct."
At the same time, the minister promised to "tighten" the law which is currently apparently loose enough, in terms of being fit for a true democracy, to allow for such behavior in the first place.
The apparent deadline for these changes to take place will be 2024.
Meanwhile, let's look at what civil rights groups are saying about other Conservative initiatives, such as the Online Safety Bill which was finally passed in the British parliament.
One of them, Open Rights Group (ORG), spelled it out in no uncertain terms to say it was a piece of legislation "threatening our privacy and undermining our freedom of expression."
The bill - one of the "think-of-the-children" laws cropping up across the globe lately - has been consistently denounced as using the front of caring for online well-being of young people simply to facilitate more censorship and more effective mass surveillance, affecting everybody - those that it's supposed to protect, included.
"An overblown legislative mess that could seriously harm our security by removing privacy from internet users" - that's how ORG's Campaigns Manager James Baker put it.
The gist of the bill that has since been adopted is the scanning of private messages - and the gist of the opposition to it is that it simply cannot be done safely.
"These are powers more suited to an authoritarian regime not a democracy and could harm journalists, and whistle-blowers, as well as parents, domestic violence victims and children who want to keep their communications secure from online predators and stalkers," Baker warned.
JAILED
Author Alain Bonnet Sentenced To 60 Days In Jail By Swiss Court For Calling Journalist a "Fat Lesbian"
A verdict handed down by a Swiss court recently has made headlines for its implications surrounding free speech and the court's stance on what it deemed to be a crime.
French-Swiss writer Alain Bonnet, known more widely as Alain Soral, has been sentenced to 60 days in jail because of his remarks, referring to a journalist as a "fat lesbian." Notably, his comments directed against Catherine Macherel, a correspondent for the estimable Swiss dailies, Tribune de Geneve and 24 Heures, were made in a Facebook video.
Soral, while criticizing Macherel's work, went on to designate her as being “unhinged.” This was recounted by the Switzerland's public broadcaster, RTS, and stirred up considerable legal attention in the country.
His conviction has generated much talk concerning censorship and the rights of free speech.
Prominent Lesbian activist, Murial Waeger, hailed this legal decision as a breakthrough moment for the rights of LGBTQI individuals as well as justice in Switzerland. "The conviction of Alain Soral is a strong signal that homophobic hatred cannot be tolerated in our society," she concluded.
The writer's conviction forces him to pay his legal expenses and fines amounting to several thousands of Swiss francs, alongside his incarceration time. As per the lawyer representing Soral, Pascal Junod, this was a conviction for a “crime of opinion.”
According to Junod, Soral would appeal against this verdict to the Swiss federal court and, if required, to the far-reaching European Court of Human Rights.
BIPARTISAN ONLINE DIGITAL ID LAW
Elizabeth Warren, Josh Hawley, Support Bill Calling For Online Digital ID Age Verification
If you were one of few pinning your hopes for Senator Elizabeth Warren to have your back as a user of the free internet - the latest legislative efforts she has been heavily backed might just burst your bubble.
The same goes for those who had the same hopes regarding the activities of Senator Josh Hawley. These two - a prominent Democrat, and a Republican of the same stature - have thrown their weight behind what's known as the Kids Online Safety Act.
Online age verification through digital ID is one of its proposed provisions - a topic, and practice, at this point historically burdened with controversies regarding endangering internet users' privacy and safety, while cynically asserting to be "solving" just the very problem.
Some reports contend that the KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) is there with the express purpose to "suppress LGBTQ+ voices." How damning, for any Democrat putting themselves out there - if right.
Those who interpret KOSA to have this ultimate goal in mind - (and we unfortunately by now know, via many examples, that pretty much every declaratively "think-of-the-children" act around the world these days, does have that as simply a vector to introduce something quite different under the guise of legitimate concerns) - cite the Heritage Foundation.
This is a group - interestingly enough, in context - that describes itself as having a mission of formulating and promoting public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.
Well.
Warren's - ostensible supporters - are now very disappointed with the senator adding her name to the list of KOSA sponsors. Unlike that of Hawley, who is pretty much portrayed in reports as staying true to himself - Warren is basically accused of betraying - whatever those who believed her to be in the first place.
It's now the job of voters to figure out - has this person ever had any genuine allegiance - or is it just another politician going whichever way the wind currently blows.
A pandemic of testing, hospital kickbacks & medical malpractice
February 28, 2022
There’s nothing more dangerous than doctors, hospitals, and the medical industry
March 4, 2022
Pharma Giants Combine Forces to Fight New M&A Rules
Meet the anti-antitrust coalition.
With a looming overhaul of US merger-and-acquisition law set to reshape the economics of the M&A-heavy pharmaceutical industry, 31 of its biggest players — including Merck, Amgen, Abbvie, and Gilead — formed an alliance to fight the reforms. Their chief enemy? Khaaaaaaaaaaan!
Khan’t Stop Me Now
In July, Lina Khan’s FTC and the Department of Justice proposed new M&A rules, including potential guidelines declaring that mergers should not “eliminate a potential entrant in a concentrated market,” “eliminate substantial competition between firms,” or “entrench or extend a dominant position.” You know, all the reasons giant companies acquire rivals in the first place.
But now the new coalition, dubbed the Partnership for the U.S. Life Science Ecosystem, or PULSE, is arguing that the new power-checking rules would likely stifle innovation. That’s because the path to actually delivering a drug to market — years of R&D, followed by long phases of clinical trials, all with only about a 12% success rate, according to the Congressional Budget Office — is so arduous and expensive the only way for biotech startups to often survive is to fold into a larger organization. It takes more than 10 years and $2.6 billion to successfully bring the average new drug to market, according to the Journal of Health Economics.
But regulators still see competition problems with pharma M&A, and recent antitrust action may hint at what exactly the regulators are trying to prevent:
• In September, the FTC settled its lawsuit with Amgen that attempted to block its $27.8 billion merger with Horizon Therapeutics. Amgen was prevented from “bundling” any of its products with Tepezza or Krystexxa, Horizon’s chief medications that respectively treat thyroid eye disease and chronic refractory gout.
• Pharma “bundling” is when drug developers leverage their large portfolio of must-have blockbusters to push insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers to give special treatment to other drugs on offer, either in the form of heavy rebates or prioritized recommendations. According to some critics, it can create anticompetitive landscapes that ultimately drive up costs for consumers.
The proposed rule changes remain theoretical for now. Their unveiling in July kickstarted a 60-day period for public comment, with feedback now under review and an implementation date still to be determined.
You Report, We Forgive: Regulators take with one hand, give with the other. The DoJ unveiled a new policy on Wednesday that shields companies from legal action if they disclose misconduct committed by a business they are buying. Companies must disclose misconduct within six months of an acquisition, and then must rectify the issue within a year of the deal’s closing — presumably after the teams that conducted the poor due diligence have been defenestrated.
- Brian Boyle
Few who consider the recent history of medicine are surprised by the heavy-handed tactics of health regulatory agencies and the attempt by international organizations to dominate the formation of medical policies.
Recent developments are a culmination of practices implemented over many years, that have been and continue to be — strikingly apparent.
The ethos of modern healthcare is exemplified in an anecdote about Dr. Max Gerson when he first came to the United States. Dr. Gerson was a respected physician in Europe, who had great success in treating arthritis, tuberculosis, and cancer with diet. He escaped from Nazi Germany just as his knowledge and techniques were being hailed as effective and revolutionary. Dr. Gerson’s reputation preceded him, and many doctors were seeking his opinion and assistance — until he was confronted by the mentality of the American medical establishment.
Dr. Gerson was called to New York as a consultant for a wealthy industrialist who had arthritis. He had successfully treated the patient’s brother-in-law in Europe. In a Park Avenue penthouse, he joined the house physician and another consulting specialist to see the patient. After the examination, the three physicians retired to discuss the case. Dr. Gerson proceeded to explain the treatment for arthritis he had so successfully used in Europe, then described the manner in which he expected the patient to recover. There was an awkward pause. Finally, one of the other doctors said, “Dr. Gerson, you don’t understand. This man is a wealthy member of the W.R. Grace family. They own steamship lines, banks, chemical companies, and so on. You don’t cure a patient like this, you treat him.”
This simple, insidious message drives most aspects of the medical world. The motivation to keep people healthy is completely undermined by the permeation of profiteering throughout a deeply corrupted industry that depends on the vulnerability of the suffering.
Dr. Gerson’s conclusion that most illness is related to poor diet — and thus correctible, particularly in the early stages of disease — continues to be minimized and ridiculed.
Conclusion: This Is Organized Crime
It is no secret that money is the primary driver of the pharma and medical industries; monopolizing healthcare is the priority of investors. This obvious defect of modern medicine in facing human suffering and disease is rarely discussed. Within the ceaseless debate about overhauling the healthcare bureaucracy, few dare to mention how orientation toward profits has completely corrupted the ethics of medicine.
More ←
Supreme Court Rejects Final Effort To Obtain Justice In Aborted Baby Body Parts Case – Leaves Those Who Exposed Planned Parenthood’s Crimes Owing More Than $18 Million
We are faced with growing injustice in the US and it’s because the People have allowed it to go on for decades, emboldening those who are supposed to serve the People to attack them. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of the united States decided not to render justice but to allow a great injustice to stand.
Remember when Planned Parenthood was exposed for engaging in illegal baby parts trafficking and the murder of the born? Instead of people like then-Attorney General Kamala Harris going after the real criminals, she and others went after those that exposed the crimes of Planned Parenthood.
Well, SCOTUS dropped the ball on this one big time and now the guilty are demanding the innocent pay them in the millions of dollars!
Troy Newman has the press release on the outcome at Operation Rescue.
Washington, DC – In an act of injustice and failure to protect independent citizen journalism, the United States Supreme Court refused to provide certiorari in several related appeals filed by pro-life activists, including Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. This decision ends the defendants’ efforts to obtain justice after Planned Parenthood’s use of lawfare resulted in a judgment and fees totaling more than $18 million.
The activists were wrongly convicted in a San Francisco Federal Court under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) after Planned Parenthood sued them for the 2015 release of a series of undercover videos detailing the Abortion Cartel’s secret participation in what appeared to be illegal profit-taking from the trafficking of tissue and organs harvested from the bodies of babies aborted at Planned Parenthood facilities.
Troy Newman, the lead defendant in Newman vs. Planned Parenthood, said, “This injustice is years in the making. Planned Parenthood has gamed the system to cover up their crimes and punish those of us who came forward to expose the heinous nature of what really happens behind the closed doors of America’s Abortion Cartel. However, in the end, Planned Parenthood has lost, because no matter what is levied against me, I will never stop speaking the truth to the American people about the barbarity of abortion and corruption that exists within the abortion industry, the current government, and the legal system that aids, abets, and protects the vicious shedding of innocent blood.”
The undercover video series showed clear evidence of Planned Parenthood officials admitting they harvested and sold aborted baby remains. The videos also contained eyewitness claims that many babies survived abortions, only to have their organs cut from their bodies as they struggled for life. This was done for the purpose of supplying the freshest samples, which could obtain the highest price from middle-man procurement companies and so-called “research” labs world-wide.
However, despite the evidence and two Congressional investigations that both resulted in Planned Parenthood’s criminal referrals to the U.S. Department of Justice, the corrupt FBI refused to investigate, and the DOJ declined to prosecute.
During Newman’s trial, a federal judge’s refusal to allow key evidence unduly influenced the trial’s outcome. An “unpublished” decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals essentially guaranteed that the Supreme Court would not take the case.
Yesterday’s decision permanently saddles Newman and the other defendants with a judgment of millions of dollars now owed to Planned Parenthood. RICO does not allow the defendants to discharge the judgment in bankruptcy, so they will be forever in debt, unable to own any personal property.
“In the end, the real losers are the women and babies who have been criminally exploited by the Abortion Cartel, the First Amendment that is meant to provide protections to journalistic free speech, and the American people who have been lied to and prevented from hearing a narrative that is critical of the pro-abortion ideology and actions supported by corrupt forces within our government,” said Newman.
Either You’re Serious, Or You’re Not
Then they spend 40 hours a week in the public schools, where all the “fairy tale” stories they’ve heard in Childrens’ Church are dispelled as nonsense and superstition and what little they heard about God is replaced with things like evolution, sex education, “social justice” and atheism.
We all know the verse, “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Today so many wonder why their child has become a heathen, an atheist, an anarchist and a God-hater. If you hear nothing else of what I’m telling you today, understand this: there is NO SUBSTITUTE for genuine Christianity. Calling yourself a Christian while living like the world and having no time for God but plenty of time for hobbies, parties, vacations, television, and Facebook is nothing short of taking the Lord’s name in vain. Our kids watch everything we do.
By Rob Pue
https://newswithviews.com/either-youre-serious-or-youre-not-2/
The Light Of Reality
A drink often has a clearing effect on the mind, but the person who is dependent on a drink for this effect is not able to handle what he sees, so he only becomes more upset than he was before.
By Late Roy Masters
https://newswithviews.com/the-light-of-reality/
Doctrine of Imminence
The Coming Storm, The Digital Currency, the Great Reset, the Mark of the Beast Is coming AFTER the Rapture of the Church. These coming events are clouds on horizon we are seeing just before the storm breaks. We do not need to be fearful of the imminently coming time where no man can access his digital dollar bank account without the chip in his right hand or forehead.
By Lewis Brackett
https://newswithviews.com/doctrine-of-imminence/
Up to June 16th, 2023, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) included 1,569,668 adverse event reports associated with COVID-19 vaccines, including 35,487 deaths, 27,229 myocarditis and pericarditis, and 20,184 heart attack reports (US domestic/foreign).
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Meissner reported that 86% of VAERS entries were completed by medical personnel or vaccine manufacturers and only 14% were made by the patient or their family. Thus, VAERS has demonstrated a very strong crude signal for myocarditis as an accepted complication of COVID-19 vaccination, however, additional information can be gleaned from autopsy in cases of death that are suspected to be caused by COVID-19 immunization. In fact, Walach et al stated that all deaths after COVID-19 vaccination should be investigated with an autopsy to better our understanding of the vaccines deleterious mechanisms on the human body. Autopsies represent one of the most powerful diagnostic methods in medicine, ascertaining causes of death and elucidating the pathophysiological mechanisms of disease. COVID-19 vaccines exhibit multiple mechanisms of injury to the cardiovascular system and are associated with a considerable number of adverse event reports, thus representing an exposure that is causally linked to death in some cases.
Krauson et al, from Department of Pathology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, performed a very small number of autopsies on patients who died after vaccination. They found found mRNA from the COVID-19 vaccines in human heart tissue out to 30 days. There was an insufficient sample to determine how long the synthetic genetic code stays in the heart. Unfortunately, Krauson’s stain for Spike protein yielded “nonspecific” results. However, if appropriately stained as done by Baumeier et al, it is anticipated that Krauson indeed would have shown Spike protein in close proximity to mRNA as the genetic code continues to churn out the deadly protein and cause inflammation.
The Great Dumbing
An Introduction to John Taylor Gatto and The Purpose of Schooling
It happens rarely, but whenever I do read a newspaper, listen to the radio, or watch television, on a variety of topics, I find myself wondering, “How? How can this happen? How can people be so gullible?” Gatto has an answer and it is disturbing as well as compelling: 20th Century US education. His argument renews gratitude to my father for having given me the chance to dodge full immersion in the homogenizing machine, and makes me more determined than ever to pass this gift of becoming an individual on to my own children. - TANIA AEBI, author of Maiden Voyage; and world record holder, first circumnavigation of the world by a solo female sailor
Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification. – John Taylor Gatto
Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. – John Taylor Gatto
There are so, so, so many great people I had no idea existed.
Why would I?
They have been purposely placed into my blind spot, as what they have to say is a threatening inconvenience to those who wish to go about their gradual, long-term and oh so patient project.
And so it is that I have finally found John Taylor Gatto.
I found him via the following sequence:
Greenwood (180 Degrees), then Plummer (Tragedy & Hope 101), then Richard Grove then Gatto. 4 steps.
It’s Gatto’s voice in the wonderful, animated video in the masthead.
Once you listen to Gatto and realise the thrust of his work and the point he is trying to teach us, I think you’ll appreciate why I’m so interested in what he has to say. He is teaching us about things way, way up the river in which we swim. It’s fountain knowledge.
Nothing about “how” we have been “schooled” is accidental. At a certain level, that would seem like an obvious point. But if we accept that to be true, then the question becomes one of purpose and intent.
What is the purpose of the schooling we endured?
What was the intent woven into its every cloth?
Who’s intent was it?
I suspect you are not going to like the answers.
We have been socially engineered, with a particular “product” in mind.
Nobody likes to be told that they are the product of a designed manufacturing process.
No free-spirited libertarian hen wants to hear that she exists but for one egg-laying purpose. That she has been homogenized and standardized. That her “own thoughts” and her “own way of thinking” are not her own.
Some of us have fared better than others under the designed psychological onslaught that was our schooling.
When I look around at how people behaved during the last 3 years, much of what didn’t make sense to me now makes more sense through Gatto’s insights about the incisions made into the global mind. For what was imported, developed, and fine-tuned in America, has been exported, via Empire, to the rest of the world.
Thankfully there is plenty of Gatto content online, still, and I ended up listening to this lecture of his from 2000. I think it’s as good as any to start to get to know the man and his work.
A former New York teacher of the year, Gatto was probably the most interesting writer and speaker of his time on education. He showed that our bureaucratic schools and our bureaucratic society just get in the way of learning. He often contrasted modern America with 19th century America, where family, work, and democratic self-government let people educate themselves. His knowledge of the key players in the history of education was, and probably still is, unparalleled.
In memory of a Great American: John Taylor Gatto December 15, 1935 to October 25, 2018
Read more:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/
In case you don’t get to listen to his wonderful lecture, here is what the Arabs would say is a “useful summary[i]”.
Comprehensive Summary
The video features a lecture that critically examines the American education system, dissecting its historical roots, underlying motives, and the societal implications of its current structure. Gatto, who is well-versed in the intricacies of the system, argues that modern schooling in the United States serves as a mechanism for producing obedient citizens who are conditioned to accept authority and fit into predefined social roles.
Historical Roots and Influences
Gatto begins by tracing the historical roots of the American education system, pointing out that it has been heavily influenced by private corporate foundations. He mentions the Walsh Commission and the Reece Committee[ii], two significant investigations that concluded that American schooling is not designed for the benefit of the individual but rather serves the interests of these private entities. Gatto also discusses the influence of German educational models, which were designed to suppress self-reliance and promote obedience. He argues that the American system has been modeled after these German systems, incorporating their focus on authority and conformity.
Economic Factors and Industrial Influences
The lecture delves into the economic factors that have shaped the American education system. Gatto talks about the late 19th-century industrial utopia, a period of unprecedented wealth and technological advancement. However, he argues that this came at the cost of personal liberty. The system was designed to produce workers for factories and obedient citizens who would not question the status quo. He also discusses the role of influential industrialists in shaping economic laws and consumer wants, effectively manipulating supply and demand to serve their interests.
The Functions of Schooling
One of the most critical parts of the lecture is the discussion on the functions of schooling as outlined by Alexander Inglis. According to Inglis, the education system serves six primary functions. The first is the adjustive function, which aims to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. The second is the diagnostic function, where the school determines each student's social role. The third is the sorting function, which sorts children based on their likely roles in society. The fourth is the conformity function, designed to make children as alike as possible to predict their future behavior. The fifth is the hygienic function, which aims to tag the 'unfit' to prevent them from reproducing. The sixth and final function is the propaedeutic function, where a small fraction of students are trained to manage and perpetuate the system.
This sixth function reminded me of this quote from Chris Bray (thanks Toby!):
My argument is not ‘the news media lies,’ or ‘there’s a lot of misleading discourse.’ My argument is that whole overlapping layers of high-status America — in academia, in media, and in politics — are psychotic, fully detached from reality and living in their own bizarre mental construction of a fake world. I don’t mean this figuratively, or as colorful hyperbole. I mean that the top layers of our most important institutions are actually, literally populated by people who are insane, who have cultivated a complete mental descent into a fake world.
Psychological and Societal Implications
Gatto also discusses the psychological impact of this system. He talks about the low threshold of boredom that the system instills in students, conditioning them to require constant novelty and making them more susceptible to advertising and consumer culture. He also discusses the limited mental training provided by the system, arguing that students are not trained to use their minds to their full potential. This, he argues, is a deliberate attempt to produce citizens who are easy to manage.
Contradictions and Paradoxes
The lecture concludes by highlighting the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the American education system. Gatto points out the paradox of a democratic republic attempting to be an empire, arguing that the contradictions between American ideals and the realities of the system are not resolvable. He also criticizes the term "human resources," arguing that it is dehumanizing and reduces children to mere commodities.
Conclusion
The video serves as a comprehensive critique of the American education system, questioning its underlying motives and exposing its many flaws. It argues that the system is designed to produce obedient, conforming citizens rather than independent thinkers. Gatto calls for a reevaluation of the system and a return to the founding principles of America, which value individual liberty and critical thought over managed consensus and obedience. The lecture serves as a wake-up call, urging the audience to recognize these paradoxes and contradictions and to seek alternatives that align more closely with democratic principles and individual freedoms.
21 Key Takeaways:
1. Origins of Modern Schooling: Gatto traces the roots of the American education system to private corporate foundations.
2. Walsh Commission and Reece Committee: These investigations concluded that the U.S. education system is heavily influenced by private foundations.
3. Economic Leadership: Gatto questions why leaders who claim to be committed to capitalist principles have supported an education system that suppresses individuality.
4. Planetary Governance: Gatto suggests that the elite aim for a form of governance that is more aligned with the British Empire than with American traditions.
5. Industrial Utopia: The late 19th-century promise of unlimited energy and mass production led to unprecedented wealth, but at the cost of personal liberty.
6. Bill of Rights Obstacle: Gatto argues that the Bill of Rights and traditional American ideals stand in the way of this new form of governance.
7. German Models: The U.S. education system is said to be modeled after German systems that aim to suppress self-reliance and promote obedience.
8. Sputnik Crisis: This event was a turning point that led to the full realization of the modern American education system.
9. Functions of Schooling: According to Alexander Inglis, schools serve six functions, including adjustment to authority and sorting by social role.
10. Conformity Over Individuality: Schools aim to make students as similar as possible to predict future behavior.
11. Hygienic Function: Schools are expected to tag the 'unfit' to prevent them from reproducing.
12. Propaedeutic Function: A small fraction of students are trained to manage and perpetuate the system.
13. Obedience to Irrational Commands: Gatto argues that well-schooled people are trained to obey any command, rational or not.
14. Low Threshold of Boredom: The system conditions students to require constant novelty.
15. Limited Mental Training: Students are not trained to use their minds to their full potential.
16. Manipulating Supply and Demand: Gatto discusses how industrialists have rewritten economic laws to control consumer wants.
17. James Bryant Conant: This Harvard president is credited with shaping the modern American high school.
18. Argument vs. Consensus: Gatto argues that America was founded on the principle of argument, not consensus.
19. Human Resources: The term is criticized as dehumanizing, reducing children to mere commodities.
20. Democratic Republic vs. Empire: Gatto points out the paradox of a democratic nation attempting to be an empire.
21. Cost of Security and Ease: Gatto concludes that the comfort achieved through this system comes at the cost of individual souls.
Standout Quotes
*"The establishment of fixed habits of reaction to authority is more important than reading, writing, and arithmetic."
*"You can't trust people who obey only commands grounded in good sense."
*"The security and ease so achieved is purchased at the price of our souls."
*"Our children are not human resources; they are not a workforce."
*"America was given to the world as a place of argument, not as a laboratory of managed consensus."
*"The contradictions between what we say we believe and what we do are not resolvable."
*"Gatto concludes that the comfort achieved through this system comes at the cost of individual souls."
*"To make those things happen requires that most of us will never grow up."
Lastly, I’d like to leave you with Chapter 1 of Gatto’s important book:
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum... book by John Taylor Gatto (thriftbooks.com)
I know that you will read it with your own schooling in mind, and you should.
You may read it with your children’s schooling in mind, maybe even your grandchildren’s. Again, you should.
But I ask that you also read it with the last 3 years, the GMC, in mind, and with this passage from the great Jeffrey Tucker, in your ear:
The Great Demoralization ⋆ Brownstone Institute
This was the onset of the great demoralization. The message was: your property is not your own. Your events are not yours. Your decisions are subject to our will. We know better than you. You cannot take risks with your own free will. Our judgment is always better than yours. We will override anything about your bodily autonomy and choices that are inconsistent with our perceptions of the common good. There is no restraint on us and every restraint on you.
This messaging and this practice is inconsistent with a flourishing human life, which requires the freedom of choice above all else. It also requires the security of property and contracts. It presumes that if we make plans, those plans cannot be arbitrarily canceled by force by a power outside of our control. Those are bare minimum presumptions of a civilized society. Anything else leads to barbarism and that is exactly where the Austin decision [shutting down South-by-Southwest] took us.
With thanks and gratitude to the late John Taylor Gatto.
“In South Africa, I wrote a teacher training course back in 1997 and hired a team of highly educated ex teachers to go to schools and teach it. It was how to get the willing cooperation of every child in the class. It was so successful we got into several newspapers. I approached the education department and asked if I could teach all the headmasters. After a while, I was called to a meeting with some of the top brass and I was thrilled, till I got there. Three men in suits with stern faces told me straight that my course empowers people and they are having enough trouble already with compliance with the rules from both teachers and headmasters. They explained in no uncertain terms that school was there to create citizens, not to teach the curriculum, and empowered teaches and headmasters would lead to anarchy and chaos.” - @terriannlaws2749 - 6 years ago
Dumbing Us Down
The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling
Chapter 1
The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher
This speech was given on the occasion of the author being named “New York State Teacher of the Year” for 1991.
CALL ME MR. GATTO, PLEASE. Thirty years ago, having nothing better to do with myself at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I have certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach English; I teach school — and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach; these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.
1. Confusion
A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana, the other day:
What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn’t idiosyncratic — that there is some system to it all and it’s not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That’s the task, to understand, to make coherent.
Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer languages, parents’ nights, staff- development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world ... What do any of these things have to do with each other?
Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, a host of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.
Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning. Behind the patch- work quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and theories, the age-old human search for meaning lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple relationship between “let’s do this” and “let’s do that” is just assumed to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned how little substance is behind the play and pretense.
Think of the great natural sequences — like learning to walk and learning to talk; the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; the ancient procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; or the preparation of a Thanksgiving feast. All of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifying itself and illuminating the past and the future. School sequences aren’t like that, not inside a single class and not among the total menu of daily classes. School sequences are crazy. There is no particular reason for any of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized, since everything must be accepted. School subjects are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the catechism or memorize the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism.
I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making a scheme of order. In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work, or because of too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny. That’s the first lesson I teach.
2. Class Position
The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. I don’t know who decides my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of numbers they carry. Numbering children is a big and very profitable undertaking, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don’t even know why parents would, without a fight, allow it to be done to their kids.
In any case, that’s not my business. My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at least to endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else because I’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
In spite of the overall class blueprint that assumes that ninety-nine percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless make a public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test success, hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a reward. I frequently insinuate the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though my own experience is that employers are rightly indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and schoolteaching are, at bottom, incompatible, just as Socrates said thousands of years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and that there is no way out of your class except by number magic. Failing that, you must stay where you are put.
3. Indifference
The third lesson I teach is indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that; it impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in any class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.
Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
4. Emotional Dependency
The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the pre- destinated chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because rights do not exist inside a school — not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled — unless school authorities say they do. As a schoolteacher, I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a pass for those I deem legitimate and initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. Individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children and teenagers, so my judgments come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.
Here are some common ways in which individuality shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels, or they steal a private instant in the hallway on the grounds they need water. I know they don’t, but I allow them to “deceive” me because this conditions them to depend on my favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in pockets of children angry, depressed, or happy about things outside my ken; rights in such matters can- not be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.
5. Intellectual Dependency
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.
Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for. Actually, though, this is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs — why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are tested procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kids have respectable parents who come to their aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. No middle- class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid’s school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent in many years of teaching. That’s amazing, and probably the best testimony to what happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons.
Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent: the social services could hardly survive — they would vanish, I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, the prepared food industry, and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically downsized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, as well as the clothing business and schoolteaching, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.
Don’t be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do. It’s one of the biggest lessons I teach.
6. Provisional Self-esteem
The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. If you’ve ever tried to wrestle into line kids whose parents have convinced them to believe they’ll be loved in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.
A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into a student’s home to elicit approval or mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be. The ecology of “good” schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematical records, the cumulative weight of these objective-seeming documents establishes a profile that compels children to arrive at certain decisions about themselves and their futures based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
7. One Can’t Hide
The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide. I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by me and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts exactly three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file reports about their own child’s waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.
I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, The City of God, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, New Atlantis, Leviathan, and a host of other places. All the childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band.
It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. “The kids have to know how to read and write, don’t they?” “They have to know how to add and subtract, don’t they?” “They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job.”
Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government sticking its nose into and measuring every aspect of our lives, without institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and feel. We were something special, as individuals, as Americans.
But we’ve had a society essentially under central control in the United States since just after the Civil War, and such a society requires compulsory schooling — government monopoly schooling — to maintain itself. Before this development schooling wasn’t very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, of whom twenty percent were slaves and fifty percent indentured servants.
Were the Colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things — it really isn’t very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the seven lessons I’ve just described to you.
The society that has come increasingly under central control since just before the Civil War shows itself in the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast, all of which are the products of this control. So too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, and cruelty, as well as the hardening of class into caste in the United States, products of the dehumanization of our lives, of the lessening of individual, family, and community importance — a diminishment that proceeds from central control. Inevitably, large compulsory institutions want more and more, until there isn’t any more to give. School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life — in fact, it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts — and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are near a school or an old people’s reservation if you wish a demonstration.
School, as it was built, is an essential support system for a model of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. School is an artifice that makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable, even though such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution. From Colonial days through the period of the Republic we had no schools to speak of — read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography for an example of a man who had no time to waste in school — and yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient pharaonic dream of Egypt: compulsory subordination for all. That was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in The Republic when Glaucon and Adeimantus extort from Socrates the plan for total state control of human life, a plan necessary to maintain a society where some people take more than their share. “I will show you,” says Socrates, “how to bring about such a feverish city, but you will not like what I am going to say.” And so the blueprint of the seven-lesson school was first sketched.
The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.
None of this is inevitable. None of it is impossible to overthrow. We do have choices in how we bring up young people: there is no one right way. If we broke through the power of the pyramidical illusion we would see that. There is no life-and-death international competition threatening our national existence, difficult as that idea is even to think about, let alone believe, in the face of a continual media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient, including in energy. I realize that idea runs counter to the most fashionable thinking of political economists, but the “profound transformation” of our economy these people talk about is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built — then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material “sufficiency” which our global “experts” are so insistent we be concerned about.
How did these awful places, these “schools,” come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But “modern schooling” as we now know it is a by-product of the two “Red Scares” of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line “American” families were appalled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance toward the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called “school” must have been the consternation with which these same “Americans” regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.
Look again at the seven lessons of school teaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. All of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its original purpose: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy as well as the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution’s original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, that of preempting the teaching function, which, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, school children who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools — like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ — would last very long before being torn to pieces. In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking the schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that powerful interests cannot afford to let it happen. You must understand that first and foremost the business I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting contracts. We cannot afford to save money by reducing the scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to help children grow up right. That is the iron law of institutional schooling — it is a business, subject neither to normal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition.
Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I’m trying to describe a free market in schooling exactly like the one the country had until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them even if that means self-education. It didn’t hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see. These options exist now in miniature, wonderful survivals of a strong and vigorous past, but they are available only to the resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. The near impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the shattered families of the poor or for the bewildered host camped on the fringes of the urban middle class suggests that the disaster of seven-lesson schools is going to grow unless we do something bold and decisive with the mess of government monopoly schooling.
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass schooling is its only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education. All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love — and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
Thirty years ago these lessons could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families has swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture that will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of nonmaterial experience; a future that will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life that is economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Thanks for being here.
Please consider a paid subscription. You will get nothing more for your support, as everything is made freely available. The money goes towards covering the costs of this work, medical freedom causes and support for the vaccine injured.
I am always looking for good, personal GMC, covid and childhood vaccination stories. You can write to me privately: unbekoming@outlook.com
If you are Covid vaccine injured, consider the FLCCC Post-Vaccine Treatment
If you want to understand and “see” what baseline human health looks like, watch (and share) this 21 minutes
If you want to help someone, give them a book. Official Stories by Liam Scheff. Point them to a safe chapter (here and here), and they will find their way to vaccination.
Here are all eBooks and Summaries produced so far:
FREE Summary: The Great Cholesterol Con by Dr Malcolm Kendrick
FREE Summary: The Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold (Abiogenic Oil)
FREE eBook: A letter to my two adult kids - Vaccines and the free spike protein
[i] GPT4 assisted
[ii] The Walsh Commission
The Walsh Commission, formally known as the Commission on Industrial Relations, was created in 1912 in the United States. It was headed by Senator Frank P. Walsh and aimed to investigate labor disputes and the role of philanthropic foundations and industrial organizations in these disputes. One of the most well-known subjects of its inquiry was the Rockefeller Foundation's involvement in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and the Ludlow Massacre.
Sources:
The Commission on Industrial Relations, 1912–1915, Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrial and Labor Relations Review JSTOR Link
The Reece Commission
The Reece Commission was an investigation initiated by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1952, headed by Congressman B. Carroll Reece. This commission aimed to investigate tax-exempt foundations to determine if they were engaged in activities that could be considered un-American or subversive. Although the commission did find some instances where foundations supported controversial causes, the investigation ultimately led to minimal legislative action.
Sources:
Tax-Exempt Foundations: Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, U.S. House of Representatives, 82nd Congress, Second Session on H. Res. 561 (1952).
Robert Kennedy Jr Admits His Campaign Has Done Polling on Running Independent and He Takes More General Election Votes from Donald Trump Than Joe Biden…
Nerd Out: Read up on how a collaborative effort from a team of researchers in Germany has led to the development of a novel method that allows laser beams to bend by using sound waves and no mirrors whatsoever, adding a new layer to the mystery of how sound and light are interconnected
Ancient Mayan culture referred to the Orion Nebula as the cosmic fire of creation.
Contemporary scientists see that enormous cloud of gas and dust in space in a somewhat similar way. The vast baby star nursery, south of Orion's belt, is about 1,350 light-years away, making it the closest large star-forming region to Earth. Because of its proximity, it's a prime target for astronomers to study the births of stellar objects.
"The United States Should Pull Out of the World Health Organization"
Lack of Benefit: "We don't derive any benefit from the WHO. It doesn't provide us any technology that we need. Its health recommendations are superfluous."
Infamous Funding Sources: Dr. McCullough pointed out that "at this point in time, WHO is largely funded by the Chinese and the Gates Foundation. Gates' and CCP's intentions are questionable at best. And this is very concerning for most Americans.
Broad Authority: Dr. McCullough expressed concern about the WHO's aspirations for global governance. He said, "The World Health Organization aspires to have dominion over all humans, animals, and plants in terms of decisions with respect to their biologic care or health care." Dr. McCullough also warned, "If we don't pull out, they [WHO] have binding authority over the U.S. by international law. And we don't want that."
is one of the most published cardiologists ever in America.
For those wary of spike protein shedding or the long-term effects of the shot, Dr. McCullough has recently published the first-ever spike protein detoxification protocol in a US medical journal: