"So what, then, is the primary objective of compulsory education?"

Nerdshit » Blog Archive » Dumbing Us Down: An Interview With John Taylor Gatto:

"The primary objective is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people (the religious purpose), to make good citizens (the public purpose) and to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.

...Reflexive obedience is at the heart of the thing. The principal way this is measured is through testing, and most recently through standardized testing. Other vital attributes of a model modern citizen—each necessary to the health of a mass production economy—are an indifferent or poor ability to speak in a public forum or to write cogently (hence rendering all protest ineffective and short-lived) and an inability to think critically (which opens the mind to receptivity to various forms of coercion, like advertising).

Few of us stop to consider the message of school bells, for instance, though many of us are aware that rats and dogs have been trained to respond to such signals for a century and more. If, at the clang of a gong or the sound of a buzzer we must stop whatever it is that we are doing and go to another cell where we begin doing something entirely different, the constant repetition of these drills over the years sets up an internal state where, for many, nothing is worth beginning because the natural predilection to continue or finish will be frustrated.

...State-approved standardized curriculum acts the way blinders do on a horse—they focus attention narrowly on a body of data arranged in a particular way by invisible employees of the political state. This data cannot be argued with, substituted for or amended. The dialectical processes with which thinkers like Aristotle were familiar thousands of years ago—and elite private boarding schools like Groton and St. Paul’s are quite conversant with today—simply don’t exist for public school students.

...As I said before, standardized tests measure the degree of obedience obtained by individual students. They pretty much rank every kid in the nation from first to last. They justify wholesale exclusions from professional study even though they have never been shown to correlate with future behavior in any professional area. Most of us don’t know this, but the rough and ready test of everyday behavior in regard to these instruments should be enough to open anybody’s eyes. Has anyone reading these words ever asked a doctor, lawyer, architect, babysitter, barber or what have you—even once—what their grades or test scores were? Has anyone even thought to do so? Case closed. Schools don’t teach the way children learn. Children learn by observation, experience, trial and error and involvement, not by confinement and thin abstractions.