From Part 2: Toto, Curtain #7: ‘Botting’ Junior
[Excerpt from The Truman Prophecy, due for publication 12/25/15.]
Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer: these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. — John Taylor Gatto
___________________4Q 2015
With a reluctance bred of long familiarity, yet firmly Troy Barlow came on board. He realized that TV and compulsory state schooling were the 1-2 sacred-cow PUNCH designed by the Men of the Power Sickness to knock out the last hopes of Independent humanity.
Troy, standing on the shoulders of giants of reform John Taylor Gatto and George ‘Longwalker’ Meegan, saw that the days of forced factory schooling for ‘the masses’ were coming to an end. Or… if not, the human race surely would.
Barlow—what most people called him—also had the insider knowledge of American so-called public education, here in the Lansing area where he had been high school physics and chemistry teacher, then principal, then district board member, finally being kicked upstairs to administration at the Michigan Department of Education (MDE).
Each position opening his eyes successively more.
The thing that struck you—even as a longtime compulsory schooling advocate-apologist—was the impenetrable bureaucracy of the beast. According to budget numbers you can find on the Web, the State of Michigan budgets about $12 billion for K-12 schools and another $0.5 billion to higher education—which numbers include the administrative costs incurred at Lansing MDE headquarters.
All Troy could say was good luck in trying to find out exactly where all these $billions actually go, to whom and for what. It’s all shrouded in mazes and mystery.
He could see it first hand all along his career path, first as a physics and chemistry teacher. First of all, it was his experience that people who became government school teachers—say, as opposed to private school, home school, or even especially Montessori School teachers—found the regimentation comforting: Lesson plans, facilities, class lectures, homework, scheduled breaks, even sports were all pretty much decided on high and filtered down without deviation.
To be candid, Troy, himself, found the regimentation somewhat comforting… heck, it cut down on real work, all you needed to do was follow a script. At the same time, despite the normal human tendency to take the easy way out, he often liked to branch off into his own line of thinking.
Prompted in the classroom, typically, by someone asking a stimulating or topical question that was off script. As in the movie Pleasantville, where someone may pipe up:
“What’s at the end of Main Street?”
“Why do mom and dad sleep in separate beds?”
The material for physics and chemistry tended to be fully orthodoxed in stone by now. Funny, though, how new ideas still were always cropping up challenging old paradigms, such as the concepts of Free Energy or crop circles and more evidence of other intelligent beings (OIBs).
… or in formal medicine the exposure of the AMA cartel and suppressed cures for cancer and infectious disease… or the cartel’s push for mandatory vaccination, despite overwhelming evidence of damage and ineffectiveness. … or benefits of cannabis as pain reliever and cancer stopper.
Etc., etc.
What Troy noticed, as he did his own independent research on the Web and alternative science sites, is virtually all the questions of standard conventional views bore directly on the issue of psychological independence, freedom of the mind… as well as political freedom of the body.
Inquisitive by nature and upbringing, Barlow also became increasingly curious about the process that created the scientific consensus curricula in classrooms. It had to go through thousands if not tens of thousands, countrywide, of the proper authorities…
… Like raining down from manna from the High Priests and God itself, every educational bureaucrat from the federal department of education—annual budget ~$100 billion (!!)—to the MDE in Lansing, to the local school boards and the textbook selection committees. Barlow did not even want to know the true cost of the process… or how much real wealth was squandered or paid under the table or over the table to people doing jack, while building ostentatious lives on the backs of the productive class.
Never have the people paid so much for so little.
You could make the argument, and still can, that because of local control through elected school boards, the government school system is responsive to the needs of actual parents and children.
[Of course, virtually all candidates for school boards are part of the ‘education’ mob, who don’t advance or enjoy six-figure salaries with a trophy home in Milford, a cottage up north, (and access to the best private academies). Moreover, all the big decisions about what gets into the classroom, and how high, are socialized through the state bureaucracy and increasingly the federales.]
Like any compulsory ‘service,’ Barlow quickly learned that the school racket is just that, the biggest con, possibly, in human history. Brainwashing 102 supported by Brainwashing 101: the unchallenged altruistic mantra that “we’re from the government and we’re here to help the children.”
Or else!
You don’t get an analog opt out for the government schools… well, you do, you can pay someone else to do the teaching for your children, but you still have to pay for sending everyone else’s kids into the mindcrushing machinery of the local dinosaur mausoleum fed by the yellow busses. Choice? Not for most people.
But hold on! It gets worse.
The waste and sloth and mind control stand to become federalized very shortly, via a federal-corporate sponsored brainmold-ology called Common Core (Collectivist Collapse, CC). CC is compulsory state education on steroids; it makes the agenda crystal clear: nation-state collective mind control.
Probably the best attribute of CC is that to fulfill its worst attribute (i.e. creation of obedient cannon fodder and consumers for the Fatherland) will require MUCH MORE MONEY. In other words, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, homey!”
As Yogi Berra says, “You can look it up!”
Barlow saw all this coming a decade ago.
That’s when he walked outside the box and read John Taylor’s magnum opus, The Underground History of American Education… which laid out the radical vision of decoupling the teaching and learning of children from the state… especially removing any force or coercion of the equation. Also, presenting a unique set of ideas for full flowering of the average child’s mind, consistent with many of Maria Montessori’s innovations… only bigger.
He tried to apply Gatto’s insights—in fact, Montessori’s, too—as best he could to his own Hinterland schooling circumstances. Gatto, himself, was thrice Teacher of the Year in New York City, then twice Teacher of the Year for New York State. And the students began to respond to ‘Dr. Barlow,’ as they called him… because, mainly, he challenged them and, so, well-fit the archetype of caring, knowledgeable educator (from educare: to draw out).
As a consequence of his special efforts, Barlow won the highly coveted Teacher of the Year Award for Okemos, Michigan. 🙂 But he knew, in this case especially, the exception proved the rule: all his applied virtue and the value it engendered for a lucky few individuals were accomplished despite the system, not because of it.
Hard lesson: The precious lives and learning of 99.9% of the remaining 1.5 million Michigan government school students would be restored and advanced immensely with a benevolent second grand act of ‘Abolition.’ Namely, once and for all, ending—today not tomorrow—the antihuman monstrosity called compulsory state education.
Note: As a transition, the government might keep a handful of ‘schools of last resort’ for kids whose parents cannot afford for them to be minimally educated.
Nor is such a notion of Abolition all that big a pill.
Especially, when you consider that by the MDE’s own records, the percentage of Michigan state school attendees grades 3 thru 8 with proficiency in math and reading for 2014-15 is a whopping 38.5%. [On an optimistic note: up 0.7% from the previous year.]
What really troubled Barlow was not the dry stats, but the destruction of minds and even souls. What the system seemed calculated and intended to do was deliver to any parent-child combination forced to walk through its doors the message: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here!”
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall. — Pink Floyd
Yet the propaganda machine behind so manifestly evil a practice was so well oiled! When Barlow first took aim at the symptoms from the inside, he had to be very careful. [It reminded him of that Woody Allen movie (Stardust Memories: 1980) scene where his character approaches a group of aliens with some deep philosophical inquiries. To which they reply in unison: “These are not the right questions!”]
Thus, for the most part, Barlow had to stay on the QT, keep his opinions to himself. Even when he won the schoolboard position, eight years hence, the politics would never have enabled him to declare his desire to remove the state from public schools.
For the past two years, Barlow had been well-employed as a lead analyst with the Career and College Readiness project. Candidly, another government fiefdom where good ideas and people are sacrificed to the lowest common denominator of any government enterprise: petty squabbles over authority.
“THERE IS NO WAY TO FIX THIS!” he wanted to scream.
“BLOW IT UP AND START OVER,” of course if he’d said anything like that, here in (Governor) Snyderville, a SWAT team would come to the office and drag him off in chains… “Hi, Maria,” call to wife, “yes, I’m being detained for ‘danger speech,’ and have no idea where I am or where they’re taking me. They won’t take the hood off… and keep dunking me in dishwater.”
So he laid low. Bided his time. Barlow loved to teach and to learn. He was certain the new voluntary education system would sprout wings and come a callin’ for solid talent like his. Until then, he would work with Toto Worldwide and help Hiram Chance—Chance, who had married his wife’s sister, was like extended family—found and build the Healthy Minds Toto Affiliate and 1st Chapter.
Thus Barlow, having read and appreciated Chance’s After 9/11 Truth activist book (and also the Toto Worldwide prospectus), was reasonably well versed in the Toto concept and process. He knew the four basic elements:
- A short explanatory booklet of the Toto truth
- A personal letter of persuasion of the Toto truth
- A list of obvious official story contradictions
- A questionnaire of 10-12 Toto truth questions
Great source material existed for them all, and Barlow knew that Chance was on board and ready to help launch. As for Item #1, Barlow had read both Gatto’s major work (Underground History), then more recently, in the past two years, he became aware (through Chance who published the work) of an equally watershed book by a native Englishman named George ‘Longwalker’ Meegan: Democracy Reaches the Kids!
Meegan’s middle nickname coming from a prodigious achievement that few today have even heard of… which by itself is harsh testimony to the lack of true human learning worldwide: George Meegan, a sailor in the British version of the merchant marine, set out to walk the entire length of the South American/North American continents—from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow, Alaska (more than 19,000 miles, the longest unbroken walk of all recorded history)—and SUCCEEDED! Eight Guinness World Records!
He wrote the book, The Longest Walk [his initial effort in the 80s to publish via Dodd Mead fell flat due to the company’s bankruptcy; a paperback was assembled in 1989 via Paragon House, which published a few thousand copies; finally George arranged to put out a print-on-demand version via Amazon-Createspace in 2014]. Late in coming, but a pure and transcendent masterpiece epitomizing the modern world adventurer… including the inexplicable fade from popular attention.
What Barlow wanted to do in preparation for his meeting with Chance and production of the initial letter of persuasion and questionnaire was to lay out some of the key observations of both men: John Taylor Gatto (who precociously lays out the general problem with modern schooling) and George Meegan, who presents a remarkably specific, while expansive, worldwide solution… in Democracy Reaches the Kids!
The two men know, and truly love, each other.
In fact, let’s start out with a passage from Mr. Gatto in the Democracy foreword, in which Gatto writes a recommendation for George Meegan for a position at an educational institution in Ecuador:
JT Gatto’s Recommendation of Meegan to Ecuador
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
I have no hesitation in offering Professor George Meegan my highest recommendation for the position advertised in PROMETEO, Ecuador. His adult life has been spent in the celebration of unique, complex cultures, and his unusual accomplishments in this regard, as explorer, writer, filmmaker, coach, teacher and father make him a distinct asset as a contribution to the nation of Ecuador and its Peoples.
I have known the applicant by reputation for 30-years, and in person for the last ten. As a New York City schoolteacher I encountered his astonishing book. The Longest Walk in the 1980s, and would read aloud to New York City teachers to illustrate that poverty, unpromising circumstances and lack of advantages could be overcome by a spirit that refuses to be beaten.
Mr. Meegan was an ordinary British seaman, when he set himself at the age of 23 the most extraordinary challenge – to undertake alone the longest walk in recorded history, almost 20,000 miles across deserts, across the Andes, across the trackless Darien Gap, to the far shores of the Arctic Ocean.
He had NO money, NO specialized equipment, NO support team, only his courage and intelligence to relay upon, yet in spite of everything he succeeded. And was honoured by The Guinness Book of World Records, and by the legendary Explorers Club in New York City.
Far from a mere feat of endurance, my classes came to see this walk as an intellectual tour de force, one involving endless calculations and day by day decisions upon which health, progress, and actual survival depended for the years it took to make the journey. It was a testament to unaided human potential, an inspiration for us all.
In recent years I came to know Mr. Meegan as friend, and was delighted to learn that he found additional ways to add value to the human community. At the turn of the Millennium he staged an international ceremony … (John put ´North Pole.´ Accurately it was at the northernmost village in the world Barrow – Eskimo – having embarked years before from the southernmost, in Patagonia.) … bearing the flags of his journey to greet the New Century and to honour the Native Peoples; he inspired his daughter to star in a documentary film in which she walked the Japanese islands between cheering crowds drawn from the main traditional cultures in the archipelago; he developed a culture based curriculum at Kobe University in Japan.
The priceless cultural Heritage of Nations like Ecuador are in grave danger at present from forces of global commercialism intent on commodifying it, preserving it (if at all) in a diluted form. Whatever short term profits this offer, this process ultimately leaves incoherence in its wake, and indigenous cultures in despair. In such a dangerous climate men like George Meegan are worth their weight in gold.
Please feel free to contact me should you require additional elaboration.
Respectfully submitted,
Signed:
John Taylor Gatto
New York City Teacher of the Year 1989, 1990, 1991
New York State Teacher of the Year 1990, 1991
Author: Dumbing Us Down (1992)
The Underground History of American Education (2002)
Weapons of Mass Instruction (2008)
Barlow then recorded some characteristic work of the consummate New York Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, from a recent presentation as follows:
Advice from Harvard: 10 Skills for Success in the Global Economy, by JT Gatto
As I have often said, and proved with documentation, forced institutional schooling was never a home-grown American phenomenon, but from the beginning was an importation from a socialist European military state by our industrial leadership, an import imposed by force on our population which, in many locations reacted violently to what was widely seen as a coup by financial interests, a coup intended to prepare our future citizen base to abandon its dream of independent livelihoods in favor of competing for “good” corporate “jobs,” employment subservient to managers.
It was a transformation noted with horror by Abraham Lincoln, who thought it signified a re-assertion of the British social class system on our shores, brought back by British bankers financing the westward expansion of the U.S., in the middle 19th century, men made uneasy by the voice given by America to ordinary families and working class individuals; men determined to end popular interference in management by infiltrating, and weakening the minds of future citizens. According to a brilliant American scholar, Anthony Sutton, writing in a book I highly recommend, entitled, “America’s Secret Establishment,” schooling was inserted into America by an elite German secret society, working through Yale University and Johns Hopkins to gradually infiltrate every institution, directing all policy toward the end of American sovereignty. Sutton supplies chapter and verse of this sophisticated conspiracy, tracking it through its inception at the University of Berlin and the Prussia of Von Bismarck and following it through the thousands of American young from wealthy families studying in Prussia for the coveted PhD degree, granted only there in the 19th century, not in the states.
To achieve this ambitious goal of national domination, the common American population, according to the plan was to be converted from an independent citizenry into a proletariat, a landless, lightly-rooted ignorant rabble, one freed from religious faith, an inactive, indifferent mass, one content to be taken care of by a paternalistic government, one stripped of religion and traditions of liberty, independence, self-sufficiency, family ties, and concern for politics, content to cede all such matters to bankers, lawyers, business interests and the American counterpart to Britain and Germany’s upper classes.
A mass man dedicated to the proposition that a person got ahead in life by pleasing higher authorities, and by surrendering any personal principles disfavored by one’s superiors. These are the core principles taught by mass institutional schooling, habits drummed in by 12 years of confinement. If they were serviceable, according to what history shows to be America’s unique genius—invention and innovation, this coup might not be so objectionable, but obviously they directly contradict what earned us our wealth and leadership position among nations—ingenuity, inventiveness and common ambition.
I.e. mind control extraordinaire. — ed.
The children I taught had been deliberately infected with the delusion that an entity called “mass man” actually exists, that human individuality is largely a reflection of economic and social class, and that it can be scientifically engineered by bureaucracies interlinked with one another– the great socialistic fantasy, an ultimate statement of materialism. Socialist politics rejects individual enterprise as an enemy of collectivism; socialism holds that all human beings are the same at the core, without any proper claim to individualized treatment in preparation for maturity. In such a reality, only the political state can direct the training of young people. But because state prescriptions are too rigid to fit everyone, children rebel, listen less and less; their disobedience is a natural defense of their unique spirits. The delusion that people can be treated as a mass leads inevitably to types of organization and procedure which drive people literally insane because it bleeds significance from everyday choices, makes a mockery of free will; this mental distress is a legacy of bureaucratic schooling, a byproduct of efficiency engineer Frederick Taylor’s notion that societies can be “scientifically managed” as if they were factories or coal mines, not much different than machinery.
But crucial differences exist, whether one believes in divine destiny or not; machinery can only be improved by interventions from outside while education only happens when much of the directing force is generated from inside the student; people only improve in limited ways from outside interventions. Individual growth has to be struggled for, to be taken. Nobody can do it for you.
A few years back, the School of Government at Harvard issued advice to those planning a career in the global economy of the future; it said that school credentials would be devalued compared to real world skills acquired by experience; it identified 10 qualities to acquire to meet the changing standards, none of which are usually found stressed by public schooling:
1. Ability to define problems without a guide.
2. Ability to ask questions that challenge common assumptions.
3. Ability to work without guidance.
4. Ability to work absolutely alone.
5. Ability to persuade others that yours is the right course.
6. Ability to debate issues and techniques in public.
7. Ability to re-organize information into new patterns.
8. Ability to discard irrelevant information.
9. Ability to think dialectically.
10. Ability to think inductively, deductively, and heuristically.
How could schools even function if children were encouraged to challenge prevailing assumptions? If you want your kids to follow Harvard’s advice, you’ll have to arrange a work plan by yourself, expect no help from your school district.
A math book common in the northeast U.S. in the 1830’s was The Self-Taught Mathematician, the story of an 18 year old boy who taught himself geometry, Latin, and physics, having learned to read at the age of 8, after which, one by one, he acquired scholar textbooks, and by asking questions of adults, self-taught a college-level curriculum. The message was that if he could do it, so could you. And if Harvard is right about its 10 precepts, so had you better.
One final sign of educational deterioration is to examine the first three subjects George Washington studied, without a school to assist him. They were: 1) geometry 2) trigonometry, and 3) surveying. By age 11 he was official surveyor for Culpepper County, Virginia, earning the contemporary equivalent of $100,000 a year, a base from which he built the largest fortune in the colonies. Force-feeding young minds with stimulating intellectual challenges is part of the time-honored formula of classical education repudiated by institutional forced compulsion schooling that seeks a different end-result than traditional educational purposes that lead to an active citizenry– the last thing wanted in a socialist state.
The philosophical debate between warring visions of the best future society should be understood by anybody seeking education because the reality of both sides in the debate must be dealt with by anyone growing to adulthood in societies divided against themselves; a price must be paid by those who deviate from the leadership point of view, and that must be weighed in decision-making. Educated men and women understand every side of an argument and are careful to stay away from one-sided presentations which customarily distort half of every issue. Mastering all points on the political/social compass demands toleration of perspectives one may not like much, but which must be confronted.
If you can successfully predict what your source of data is going to say, that is cause enough to dismiss it as accurate or fair-minded– which is why CNN, FOX News, and partisan talk radio commentators are held in low regard by educated people. Some years ago, a famous satire in Harper’s Magazine by its editor, Lewis Lapham, reported at length on the Republican Party political convention without even attending it! That was a flagrant example of so relentlessly broadcasting a biased point of view that one’s message is discredited in advance of being heard.
For devotees of television serial dramas like “Law and Order” and “CSI Miami” or followers of genre fiction like westerns, horror movies or science fiction, the formulas followed are so rigid that artistic insights into the human condition are unlikely and even unwelcome, so any educational value is strictly limited. Once a commercial formula for storytelling is established, the tendency of financial investors in “popular culture” projects is to demand repetition of what worked in the past, making mass entertainment in movies, music, and drama virtually devoid of artistic insights and thus of educational value, reducing their value to time-killers.
For these reasons, and because time to learn is limited, prudent seekers of intellectual development often focus their investigations to time-tested “classics,” acknowledged by respected critics to contain artistic value. This is to illustrate the Harvard principle that the best minds screen irrelevant material from their attention, principle number eight on the list above; of course, in institutional schooling one attends to what is ordered by superiors, no selectivity is allowed to students. Merely disliking material is insufficient reason to avoid it, a case proving its irrelevancy must be mounted and accepted by authorities, Harvard principle number five in action. Finding ways to practice all 10 of these assertions will be a useful tool for all your students to use in demonstrating an educated command of mind.
© 2015 John Taylor Gatto, Janet MacAdam Gatto
www.JohnTaylorGatto.com
So there you are, more or less a statement of the problem of public and higher education. Here’s a little more specific history from Mr. Meegan himself in Democracy:
Prussia’s Victory and the End of Thinking
By the 1800s educational authority had in some places seeped to the People. Well, not really the People, but anyway at least those who used (actually high-jacked) the People’s name, namely the various forming bureaucracies of the time. The teaching ‘profession’ counts as its roots Paris’s Ecole Normale, 1794. It was reserved for men, of course. Modern schooling as we know it goes back to 1819 exactly and owes its birth in the modern form to Prussia’s latest military defeat.
After its debacle at the Battle of Jena (1806) the Prussian royalty came to the conclusion that in order to start winning wars again it must get “back to basics.” (Heard that expression anywhere before?) The then king, Frederick the Great—also (helpfully) known as Grave Digger—knew precisely how they were going to deal with this: in a word, schooling. (Categorized by Kagan as ‘splendid educational system,’ Origins of War.) The purpose, the goal, was brazenly stated in 1819 and in these graceful terms:
- Obedient soldiers to the army
- Obedient workers to the mines
- Well subordinated civil servants to the government
- Well subordinated civil servants to industry
- Citizens who (all) thought alike on (all) major issues
“When is the last time you spent time with people who are exactly as you are?” So there it is, School. We can thank again Prussia for this borrowed technique.
Importantly, this Germanic way of education reached the USA via new fangled German educated Ph.D.s, such as G. Stanley Hall and even the famous John Dewey—though I understand Dewey believed in real democracy as a way of life. These cohorts, anyway, carried the seeds of the above into Great Democracy USA, resulting in a massive piece of social engineering. For example, during the early part of the 19th century, some Massachusetts mill owners set up schools for themselves with these stated goals:
- the teaching of ‘literacy’
- the teaching of ‘obedience’
All the better of course to produce the docile factory fodder, then needed for the burgeoning industrialization of the region.
The ‘Program’ of Democracy
Barlow wasn’t sure whether anyone had summarized the program of general K-12 and subsequent education proposed by Mr. Meegan… perhaps because the style of Democracy is sprinkled Alvin Toffler[1] like with flowing observations and quick morsels of insight (i.e. not written in a boring textbook style). So Barlow thinks he’ll have a go at the main ‘solutions’ proposed.
The long and short of ‘the Democracy Program,’[2] if that’s what you want to call it, are two subprograms pertaining to a) what we would refer to as K-12 education in the States, and then b) college education through the typical four years leading to a bachelor’s degree.
Meegan’s designations for a) and b) are as follows:
A. The Basic Requirement (B Req)—corresponding to the high school graduation marker. The B REq consists of the following six ‘Requirements:”
Number 1 Requirement—
Fluency in one’s mother tongue, language; communication training should be intense, saturation, and a higher standard than is common today.
Number 2 Requirement—Computer Literacy.
Self-explanatory. Also be wary of too much use of computers, as in the degeneration of social life into video games and texting.
Number 3 Requirement—Environment.
As the climate engineering high-crime and less intentional factors exhaust planet earth’s ability to sustain life, start children off with local awareness, such as:
- following the origins of tap water
- discovering nearby river ecology
- chatting with zoo workers
- taking a look at factory farming
- studying the disposal of garbage
Number 4 Requirement—Culture
Local and the world. Culture ~ the way individuals do things traditionally in community—esp. tied to native language. High points for preservation and advancement of.
Number 5 Requirement—The Physical.
“Our youth, we all, should touch as many sports and pursuits as possible. Why should just the jocks alone become heroes, why not everybody? Education 2000—physical (with its cultural overtones) would become a perfect place to restore the zillions of lost or dying sports….”
Number 6 Requirement—Social.
“‘Social’ is the place of many things, anything from public speaking to social manners (which fork to use), courtesy in speech, that sort of thing…. Manners save the world!”
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. [Good manners, consideration] … and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as ’empty,’ ‘meaningless,’ or ‘dishonest,’ and scorn to use them. No matter how ‘pure’ their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best. — From the ‘Sayings of Lazarus Long,’ Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein
To keep correspondence to the current high school graduation, some minimal competence will need to be demonstrated using a point system, details to be worked out as the market develops. [Hint: it will be far more rigorous than current public high school graduation requirements, at the same time individualized across the board (and across all ages, ethnicities, economic status, what have you).]
B. The Basic Personal Graduation (BPG)—Meegan’s idea for advanced education, where a bachelor’s degree corresponds to so many points. (George suggests 2000, in tribute to the new century.)
The BPG is George Meegan’s ultimate vision for higher learning, and with it some marvelous innovations, such as a life learning scroll replacing the static diploma.
It must be stated immediately that the cost to ‘society’ of the Democracy Program is zero… while the benefit is astronomical. Rates for teaching are decided by negotiation in the marketplace. In essence, humanity gets a fresh start, almost immediately. The entire world becomes teachers and learners, simultaneously… and each person becomes both.
Next stop, Mars and the moons of Jupiter.
Wrapup: Healthy Minds Toto Affiliate/Chapter Build
So Barlow and Chance would be working together on this most critical founding, probably in January of the next year. Because the government’s school system was so solidly rooted in the West, and in the US particularly, as universal classic mind control, it was doubly difficult for the non Independents to see it as a core problem. That would change.
Barlow was stoked about the Prophecy when it came to teach-learn… even after all the decades of mind control from the Prussian model of schooling, followed by Edward Bernays and his sophisticated tools for manufacturing consent in the early 20th century (through the 1950s), and then supercharged by TV—the scourge of the literary, conceptual faculty.
The Independents would walk.
No more botting[3] junior or anyone else.
The first tentative questionnaire that they devised appears below. Although one can make the case that the intentful subjugation of great masses of individual human minds—for the purpose of furthering a system of blind obedience to authority—is one of the highest crimes against humanity imaginable. Therefore, anyone responsible should be subject to grand jury indictment… followed by trial, conviction, and sentencing to life in prison… in an ant farm.
But those who perpetrated the original Grand Crime are long dead. Perhaps we can grand jury the current lot of manipulators who are using tax money to perpetrate Common Core and other inflictions on the mind.
The Healthy Minds Toto Affiliate will encourage innovative solutions to these sorts of conundrums. Until then, we should simply be happy to remove the Threat ASAP.
The Healthy Minds Toto Questionnaire—Starter Kit
Drawn mostly from a presentation[4] of John Taylor Gatto—NY City Teacher of the Year and NY State Teacher of the Year, author of The Underground History of American Education.
Did you know that…
1) We live in a time of great school crisis?
Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom.
2) Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850?
It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population. The last outpost was in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.
3) Before compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98%?
After compulstory education the figure never again reached above 91% (where it stood in 1990).
4) The homeschooling movement has quietly grown to a size where 1,500,000 young people (~2 million today) are being educated entirely by their own parents in community?
… the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.
5) Schools were designed by Horace Mann and some other men to be means for scientific management of a mass population?
Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
6) Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic?
It has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
7) Well-schooled people are irrelevant?
They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.
8) The daily misery around us is in large measure caused by the fact that we force children to grow up absurd?
Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities:
a) It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class?
That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.
b) It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings?
…or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
c) t is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy?
…and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its ‘homework.’
9) Two institutions at present control our children’s lives – television and schooling, in that order?
Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a neverending, nonstop abstraction.
In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what they really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.
10) Children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework, a total of 45 hours + 55 hours watching TV (out of 112 waking hours)?
During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours (9 if you allow for meals) a week out of which to create a unique consciousness.
Role of the Toto Project in Walk of the Independents
The foundation of the Truman Prophecy and its fulfillment lies in the individuals who come together as a team to, first, reveal the truth (per Toto). Part 2 of the book shows how several key Toto Affiliates and Chapters were founded and built.
The followon justice aspect is what’s important. The revelations and those doing the truthing, to a person, support the Dorothy phase, which is where all the action lies… leading up to Declaration Day and a full blown benevolent World Society of Independents.
The Dorothy phase at its core constitutes a grand jury process for processing the high-criminals (revealed via Toto) out of civil society… whether to send them to prison or to have them pay reparations or to simply to require them to renounce their crimes and lies and be relegated to subsistence living, obscurity, with no further access to public affairs.
Those who volunteer and create the Toto instances are heroes of the fulfillment, because like the little dog in the Wizard of Oz, they fearlessly pull back the curtain for all to see. Cheers and kudos to the hundreds and thousands of them to come.
Truth, Justice, Liberty.
Toto, Dorothy, Coming Home.
[1] Alvin Toffler: author of culture-bending Future Shock (1970)
[2] Meegan refers to the whole enchilada as Education 2000.
[3] Bot is short for robot, used to designate automated mindless, dependent behavior. Hence ‘Botting Junior,’ the subtitle of this Curtain.
[4] Gatto accepting the NY City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990.
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