“By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables – and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways – network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, and not parents.” John Taylor Gatto
Vains You May Not Believe In Vains… 7" (No Threes Records, 1980) |
Vains – School Jerks
Get it here.
“In the North American system men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process. Certain principles contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, radio, television, churches, and especially schools. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it. He cannot grow or mature. This sort of conspiracy cannot help but provoke violent individual rebellions.” Octavio Paz
The Dead Milkmen Big Lizard In My Backyard LP (Enigma Records, 1985) |
The Dead Milkmen – Violent School
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.” John Taylor Gatto
Victimz Of Society Wicked Rock Music Is Killing Our Children LP (1986) |
Victimz Of Society – Somebody Lied
Get it here.
“How can happiness be bestowed? My own answer is: Abolish authority. Let the child be himself. Don’t push him around. Don’t teach him. Don’t lecture him. Don’t elevate him. Don’t force him to do anything.” A.S. Neill
The Donnas Da Doo Ron Ron 7" (Super*Teem!, 1996) |
The Donnas – I Don't Wanna Go To School
“They will be schools no longer; they will be popular academies in which neither pupils nor masters will be known, where the people will come freely to get, if they need it, free instruction, and in which, rich in their own experience, they will teach in turn many things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack. This then will be a mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity.” Mikhail Bakunin
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For further reading, please check out John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down and Tom Hodgkinson's The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids.
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