Is school and college just a liberal propeganda tool?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Suib, Feb 6, 2008.

  1. Suib

    Suib Musical Journeyman

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    I'm still in school and my classes are very real world and politicaly based. A couple of my techers have been spewing false information to all of us and most of the other students are believeing it. Some of the stuff we're being "taught" is compleate bull shit and i'm tierd of it. Does anyone else see this in the way I do?
     
  2. zenloki

    zenloki Member

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    i heard a history teacher called Ron Paul a liberal. apparently she didn't know what a liberal is.

    i'm curious what your teacher is telling you that's not true? if it is why don't you go back to school the next day and call him/her on it? just make sure that you have facts to back up what you're saying.
     
  3. Suib

    Suib Musical Journeyman

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    Different things. Unfortunatly i do not have "the facts" to back myself up with but an example i will use is that we were told Exxon Moble, the gas company, payed less than $100 in taxes last year. He went on for over 10 minutes bashing big coorperate America and how all big companys shouldnt exist. We all know that there is no way a big multi billion dollar company can pay under $100 in taxes. This is just one example.
     
  4. Pressed_Rat

    Pressed_Rat Do you even lift, bruh?

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    Public schooling and college most certainly is an indoctrination tool. It doesn't serve to educate, but to mold children/young adult's minds according to the wishes of the contollers of the system they're living under. This goes all the way back to Plato, who suggested there be two forms of education. One form for the aristocrisy, or ruling class, who would be the holders of real knowledge, and one for the "commoners." This is a theme that has been repeatedly mentioned throughout history, by people such as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, the father of modern education in America. What we have today is outcome-based education. This is mostly derived from the Prussian system, which was lated updated by the Soviets and has since been adopted by the US and many other western countries. The powers that be want a public that does at it's told, which can regurgitate whatever it's told without thinking about what they parrot. The last thing they want is people that think for themselves, and one of the main objectives of modern education is to eliminate free-though and creativity by shaping people so they are predictable and uniform.

    I suggest looking into the work of John Taylor Gatto. He's written two very excellent books about modern education.
     
  5. Pressed_Rat

    Pressed_Rat Do you even lift, bruh?

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    This is taken from my blog. It features quotes from John Taylor Gatto's excellent book, The Underground History of American Education by very prominent people throughout modern history.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    "In our dream...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way." - John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, Occasional Letter Number One (1906)




    John Taylor Gatto notes that, "Although this statement was first publicly disclosed in an obscure book (The World's Work, 1912) and republished as part of a collection printed by Rockefeller's GEB in 1913 for its selective readership, it had apparently circulated at the Foundation much earlier. Various guesses place its origin from 1913, a year after the GEB was formed to 1906."





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    "This subject [mass psychology] will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity... It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician's paradise." - Bertrand Russel, The Impact of Science on Society (1952) page 41





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    "[Administration] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd." - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)





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    "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 this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven." - John Dewey's Pedagogic Creed, 1897





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    "That erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence....Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its am everywhere else." - H.L Mencken, The American Mercury, April 1924





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    "Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality—and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated." - Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children" (1862)





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    "Today’s corporate sponsors want to see their money used in ways to line up with business objectives.... This is a young generation of corporate sponsors and they have discovered the advantages of building long-term relationships with educational institutions." - Suzanne Cornforth of Paschall & Associates, public relations consultants. As quoted in The New York Times, July 15, 1998





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    "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson, 1909





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    "They [the "un-intelligent"] are amenable to any reasonable treatment that we may prescribe for them and whenever society is ready to eliminate them from the main group and to provide for them in ways that will make them happy and as efficient as they, with their limited intelligence can be made, we will at least have increased the total efficiency to an almost unbelievable extent. It is said that the busy bee, so often held up to us as a model of industrious work, actually works twenty minutes a day. The explanation of the great amount that he accomplishes is said to be in the fact of the perfect organization of the hive. Perhaps it would be wiser for us to emulate the bee's social organization more and his supposed industry less." - Henry Herbert Goddard, Human Efficiency (1920), page 61-62





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    "Ignorance was widespread and formal education did not flourish in the Chesapeake. This condition was not an accident. It was deliberately contrived by Virginia's elite, who positively feared learning among the general population." - David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed
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    This excerpt is from page 192 of The Underground History of American Education:


    In the Congressional Record of January 26, 1917, for instance, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon entered these words:


    They are moving with military precision all along the line to get control of the education of the children of the land.



    Senator Poindexter of Washington followed, saying:



    The cult of Rockefeller, the cult of Carnegie...as much to be guarded against in the educational system of this country as a particular religious sect.



    And in the same issue, Senator Kenyon of Iowa related:



    There are certain colleges that have sought endowments, and the agent of the Rockefeller Foundation or the General Education Board had gone out and examined the curriculum of these colleges and compelled certain changes....It seems to me one of the most dangerous things that can go on in a republic is to have an institution of this power apparently trying to shape and mold the thought of the young people of this country.



    Senator Works of California added:



    These people...are attempting to get control of the whole educational work of the country.
    If it interests you, take a look. It’s all in the Congressional Record of January 26,1917

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    "The ideology that lies behind these texts [school textbooks] is rather difficult to define.... it does not fit usual political patterns....the texts never indicate any line of action....authors avoid what they choose to and some of them avoid main issues....they fail to develop any original ideas....they confuse social sciences with science....clouds of jargon....leave out ideas....historical names are given no character, they are cipher people....there are no conflicts, only "problems"." - Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised
     
  6. Aristartle

    Aristartle Snow Falling on Cedars Lifetime Supporter

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    Eh. If you are interested in learning the evolution of education, especially North America, I suggest you look into the history of women in teaching. The public school systems were ran and founded by women.
     
  7. Pepik

    Pepik Banned

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    But the US school system does produce free thinkers and creative people, there might be the odd failure who believes in moronic anti semetic conspiracy theories but look around, you are saying there are no free thinking creative people in America compared to other countries? Have you ever even been to another country?
    You are right, that's crap. They paid more than $27 billion in taxes.
     
  8. SunLion

    SunLion Lifetime Supporter Lifetime Supporter

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    Your spelling teacher sure does suck, that much is certain! :)
     
  9. Sitka

    Sitka viajera

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    I wouldn't drop out of English class just quite yet.

    You have to know the "bullshit propoganda" to disbelieve it. Ignorance isn't a virtue.
     
  10. Shane99X

    Shane99X Senior Member

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    To answer your topic question, no it's not liberal propaganda, but it is statist and socialist propaganda.


    Stay a committed free-thinker and you'll make it through, or convince one of your parents to allow you to homeschool, one or the other.

    This is the information age, you don't need brick buildings and bureaucrats to learn anything, and everything they try to indoctrinate you with can be fact checked fairly quickly. suspicion is a good thing.
     
  11. Pepik

    Pepik Banned

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    Besides its not like school is 8 hours a day of politics. There's math, english, dodgeball, and learning how not to get beat up.
     
  12. zenloki

    zenloki Member

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    i still say call him out, present the facts.

    in 2006 Exxon paid 27billion in taxes at a rate of 41% which doesn't sound right since the top corporate rate is 35% and by the way Exxon doesn't pay the tax. the people who buy their product pay the tax.
     
  13. SunLion

    SunLion Lifetime Supporter Lifetime Supporter

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    "...it's not liberal propaganda, but it is statist and socialist propaganda."

    Oh kewl, someone else who was there. What exactly did this teacher say, and what was the full context?
     
  14. XBloodyNailPolishX

    XBloodyNailPolishX Forgetful Philosopher

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    this kid is 14, and seems to be very pro-pig, pro corporation, etc. and yet he can't provide any facts about what happened or what his teacher said.
     
  15. Suib

    Suib Musical Journeyman

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    actually, im a big liberal. My parents are both big conservatives and i share their same opinion on maybe 4% of the issues. I just don't like bieng lied too I'll update this when he says something else
     
  16. TheMadcapSyd

    TheMadcapSyd Titanic's captain, yo!

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    Even though many people like to believe that the fact is Exon payed billions in taxes last year.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/63131-exxon-s-2007-tax-bill-30-billion

    $30 billion in taxes to be exact, 41% of it's income.

    Conclusion: In other words, just one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers, which is 65,000,000 people! Further, the tax rate for the bottom 50% is only 3% of adjusted gross income ($27.4 billion / $922 billion), and the tax rate for Exxon was 41% in 2006 ($67.4 billion in taxable income, $27.9 billion in taxes).
     
  17. gardener

    gardener Realistic Humanist

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    I think you need to read the counter editorial argument to the one you are quoting:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judy-dugan/all-hail-exxon_b_86918.html

    Yet in the 30 billion supposedly paid by Exxon, that is all global taxes and incompasses all taxes paid to all governments. Seems like selective accounting and comparison to me.
     
  18. wa bluska wica

    wa bluska wica Pedestrian

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    school and college are in fact capitalist propaganda tools

    drop out and be free
     
  19. SunLion

    SunLion Lifetime Supporter Lifetime Supporter

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    "You're taught that you can't. They even teach you the words. They give you the words. Take all the words away, and don't think in "right and wrong" just think in truth. All the answers are there. The sound of one hand clapping is simply the sound of one hand clapping- there are no big answers! All the big colleges that we've been building? It's taking people the other way. The smartest people in the world are really the most cut-off. It's the common people, man. The soul." -Charles Manson
     
  20. Number6

    Number6 Member

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    When I was in the public school system, I had good teachers and bad teachers. What you are describing to me sounds like a bad teacher, rather than a conspiracy to make you into a commie sympathizer. The job of the school system is not just to teach you read, writing and arithmetic. It is also suppose to make you a well rounded citizen, ready to enter the work force and adult life. This means you need to learn something about history and civics. Some schools do this well, others do not. Some teachers do this well, others do not. If you have a bad teacher, it is your job to question him and force him to prove his claims, if he can not or will not, then you need to tell your parents and ask them to speak with the teacher or bring up the issue at the next PTA meeting.
     

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