A highly praised bestseller for over a decade, Dumbing Us Down is a radical treatise on public education that concludes that compulsory government schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in a machine.

John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award.

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The School of Athens painted by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael

How I wish my parents sent me to this School instead of a public school that only wanted to educate me into becoming a dumb ignorant automaton for those in power to profit from.

Anyway, more to come on this apparent attempt by the educational system to dumb down the youth of today and the many generations to come.

The School of Athens painted by Raphael as described on Wikipedia:

The “School of Athens” is one of a group of four main frescoes on the walls of the Stanza (those on either side centrally interrupted by windows) that depict distinct branches of knowledge. Each theme is identified above by a separate tondo containing a majestic female figure seated in the clouds, with putti bearing the phrases: “Seek Knowledge of Causes”, “Divine Inspiration”, “Knowledge of Things Divine” (Disputa), “To Each What Is Due”. Accordingly, the figures on the walls below exemplify Philosophy, Poetry (including Music), Theology, and Law.[2] The traditional title is not Raphael’s, and the subject of the “School” is actually “Philosophy”,[3] or at least ancient Greek philosophy, and its overhead tondo-label, “Causarum Cognitio” tells us what kind, as it appears to echo Aristotle’s emphasis on wisdom as knowing why, hence knowing the causes, in Metaphysics Book I and Physics Book II. Indeed, Aristotle appears to be the central figure in the scene below. However all the philosophers depicted sought to understand through knowledge of first causes. Many lived before Plato and Aristotle, and hardly a third were Athenians. The architecture contains Roman elements, but the general semi-circular setting having Plato and Aristotle at its centre might be alluding to Pythagoras’ circumpunct.

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Columns of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece

If you travel northwest from Athens, on the road to Corinth, you will come to the ruins of the once great city of Delphi. Delphi is the place once thought by the Greeks to be the center of the world. Here, in the 6th century B.C., the Oracle in the Temple of Apollo, was at its busiest, as it was called upon to dispense wisdom and to give answers to some of the pressing questions of the day. But, the Oracle of the classical world was silent before the age old questions like Who am I? Why am I here? What should I be doing? and Where am I going?

From the beginning of time man has been trying to make sense of himself and his world. He has been seeking understanding. But as time marches on, man isn’t getting the understanding he seeks, he isn’t happier, and he hasn’t been able to conquer his own nature.

What’s wrong? With all the great minds and thinking that have gone before us, with all the lessons of history left for us to examine, it is difficult to imagine why we aren’t further along than we are. Why are we asking the same questions in our search for meaning, the Greeks were asking 2600 years ago. Do we not yet have enough information available to us?

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Since its first publication in 1945? Lord Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy has been universally acclaimed as the outstanding one-volume work on the subject — unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, its clarity, its erudition, its grace and wit. In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the twentieth century. Among the philosophers considered are: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Plotinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Benedict, Gregory the Great, John the Scot, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey, and lastly the philosophers with whom Lord Russell himself is most closely associated — Cantor, Frege, and Whitehead, co-author with Russell of the monumental Principia Mathematica.

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Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century explores the rise of mechanistic philosophy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarchical systems. Topics covered include behaviorism, scientific management, work-place democracy, schooling, frustration-aggression hypothesis and human experimentation. Scott Noble, the filmmaker behind the extraordinary and informative documentary Psywar, has made another revelatory and important documentary, available free to the public, called “Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century.”

“Essentially,” says Scott, “this film is about the rise of mechanistic philosophy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarchical systems.” The film includes original interviews with: “Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rebecca Lemov (“World as Laboratory”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”), George Ritzer (“The McDonaldization of Society”), Morris Berman (“The Re-enchantment of the World”), John Taylor Gatto (“Dumbing us Down”), Alfie Kohn (“What does it mean to be well educated?”) and others.”

Read David Ker Thomson’s review of the film. He writes: “It answers the significant events of the last century the way a glass answers the implicit questions of a man who peers into its reflective surface–point for point. It corresponds, in short, to reality.”

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In 1572 Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding ‘essays’, inspired by the ideas he found in books from his library and his own experience.

He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. Above all, Montaigne studied himself to find his own inner nature and that of humanity. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature. An insight into a wise Renaissance mind, they continue to engage, enlighten and entertain modern readers.

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