Homeschooling Slavery

It has always been the tendency for people to lord it over each other and for one portion of people to become elitists and use the rest of the people for their own ends. However, it is one thing to be in bondage physically, and another to be in bondage in one’s soul. This post will be dealing specifically with homeschooling slavery.

Here is the question:

Are we rearing slaves or freemen?

Our world system, what Jesus referred to as the “cosmos” in Greek, is based on a slavery system. Yes, even today our world is in bondage.

I owe, I owe, so off to work I go…

Because of this, our education system is not about learning things, it is about training in servitude.

I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.
John D. Rockefeller

There are a number of compelling evidences and arguments for this point. Among them are the book by B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (which you can read for free online here) and John Taylor Gatto’s expose, The Underground History of American Education (which you can read for free online here).

B.F. Skinner was what we refer to as a “behaviorist.” He and his ilk took an atheistic, materialist view of reality. In his above mentioned book, he outlines how we viewed mankind. To his thinking, a human being is a danger to himself; if given freedom he will self-destruct. Humans must, therefore, be trained to make correct choices, and whether a choice is correct or not is to be determined by more evolved, more intelligent overseers.

Thus, humanity must be trained in obedience to these superiors, and this training is accomplished via positive and negative reinforcement. He sites the experiments we commonly refer to as “Pavlov’s dogs” to justify his premise.

Here are a few excerpts from his diabolical book:

B. F. Skinner has been named (by Time magazine) ‘the most influential of living American psychologists and the most controversial figure in the science of human behaviour’. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1904 and gained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard. Since 1948 he has taught at Harvard, where he is now Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology. The author of the classic Utopian novel Walden Two (1948), Professor Skinner is famous for his laboratory work with pigeons, bringing animal experimentation to a quantitative scientific level. He is known as the father of the teaching machine and programmed learning, and his inventions include the Air Crib, a mechanical baby-tender, and the Skinner Box, a research instrument designed to trace changes in animal behaviour. Among the many honours he has received are the National Science Award and the Distinguished Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, the summary of his life’s work in the scientific analysis of behaviour, has been called by Science News ‘one of the most important happenings in twentieth century psychology’.
Publisher’s Introduction

Whether or not he could have foreseen the damage, man must repair it or all is lost. And he can do so if he will recognize the nature of the difficulty. The application of the physical and biological sciences alone will not solve our problems because the solutions lie in another field. Better contraceptives will control population only if people use them. New weapons may offset new defences and vice versa, but a nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. New methods of agriculture and medicine will not help if they are not practised, and housing is a matter not only of buildings and cities but of how people live. Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned…What we need is a technology of behaviour.
Chapter 1

An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behaviour from autonomous man to the environment – an environment responsible both for the evolution of the species and for the repertoire acquired by each member. Early versions of environmentalism were inadequate because they could not explain how the environment worked, and much seemed to be left for autonomous man to do. But environmental contingencies now take over functions once attributed to autonomous man, and certain questions arise. Is man then ‘abolished’? Certainly not as a species or as an individual achiever. It is the autonomous inner man who is abolished, and that is a step forward. But does man not then become merely a victim or passive observer of what is happening to him? He is indeed controlled by his environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own making. The evolution of a culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia. But no theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been. And a new theory may change what can be done with its subject matter. A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
Ending Paragraph

Skinner’s analysis is godless, hopeless and an excuse for totalitarian control. No wonder he became the darling of Progressives.

J. T. Gatto had a lot to say about Skinner and other “scientific manipulators like him. Below are a few excerpts from the above-mentioned book:

Walden Two (1948) [another book written by] B.F. Skinner.

This utopist is a psychologist, inventor of a mechanical baby-tender, presently engaged on experiments testing the habit capacities of pigeons. Halfway through this contemporary Utopia, the reader may feel sure, as we did, that this is a beautifully ironic satire on what has been called “behavioral engineering”…. Of all the dictatorships espoused by utopists, this is the most pro found…. The citizen of this ideal society is placed during his first year in a sterile cubicle, wherein the onditioning begins…. In conclusion, the perpetrator of this “modern” Utopia looks down from a nearby hill of the community which is his handiwork and proclaims: “I like to play God!” —
Negley and Patrick, The Quest For Utopia

Speaking of boxes, Skinner commanded boxes of legal tender lecturing and consulting with business executives on the secrets of mass behavior he had presumably learned by watching trapped rats. From a marketing standpoint, the hardest task the rising field of behavioral psychology had in peddling its wares was masking its basic stimulus-response message (albeit one with a tiny twist) in enough different ways to justify calling behaviorism “a school.” Fat consultancies were beginning to be available in the postwar years, but the total lore of behaviorism could be learned in about a day, so its embarrassing thinness required fast footwork to conceal. Being a behaviorist then would hardly have taxed the intellect of a parking lot attendant; it still doesn’t…

In the decades prior to this Malthusian assessment, a whole psychological Institute for Social Cookery sprang up like a toadstool in the United States to offer recipe books for America’s future. Even then they knew that 80 percent of the next generation was neither needed nor wanted. Remedies had to be found to dispose of the menace psychologically.

Skinner had wonderful recipes, better than anyone’s. Not surprisingly, his procedures possessed a vague familiarity to readers listed in the Blue Book or the Social Register, people whose culture made them familiar with the training of dogs and falcons. Skinner had recipes for bed wetting, for interpersonal success, for management of labor, for hugging, for decision-making. His industrial group prepackaged hypotheses to train anyone for any situation. By 1957, his machines constituted the psychological technology of choice in institutions with helpless populations: juvenile detention centers, homes for the retarded, homes for wayward mothers, adoption agencies, orphan asylums — everywhere the image of childhood was most debased. The pot of gold at the end of Skinner’s rainbow was School [emphasis mine].

The Underground History of American Education, chapter 13, The Empty Child, John Taylor Gatto

It is obviously evident the powers-that-be have adopted his dystopian ideals. Around the year 2016 I watched a clip where the supporter of a famous female presidential said, “We really appreciate the efforts you are making to capture the hearts of Americans,” to which she replied in a matter-of-fact manner, “We don’t believe people have hearts.”

Let that one sink in.

The point?

Like a mass of rats in a huge laboratory, we have been trained to respond to the “bells” of the elite. In fact, we hear those bells ringing in our ears almost every day.

Here is a great article which looks further into this idea:

Hack Education: The History of the School Bell

And also in Gatto’s book, Weapons of Mass Instruction, which you can read for free here.

We have been trained to think of learning separated in tiny boxes of unrelated information separated by constant interruption. Consider this:

The Cauldron of Broken Time

When time is tightly scheduled, we are compelled to attend more to the appearances of attention and concern than to the reality of those qualities; without uninterrupted time you haven’t a prayer of synthesizing the fact bits thrown at you. It’s possible to memorize the official meaning of those bits, but in the time available no possibility remains of arriving at your own careful conclusions. After years of study, we know that uninterrupted sleep time is essential for precision in thought, but as Claire Wolfe, a west coast writer once taught me, uninterrupted waking time is similarly essential. When you can’t concentrate, its hard to make sense of things. Rather than persist in trying, its easier just to quit.

The destruction of uninterrupted time is a major weapon of mass instruction. Schools are a rats maze of frantic activity: bells, loud speakers, messengers pounding on classroom doors, shrieks from the playground, official visitors, unofficial visitors, toilet interruptions coming and going, catcalls, bullyings and flirtings — you never know when the next interruption will appear. Try to reckon the psychological effect of being plunged into a cauldron of broken time…again and again for 12 years (in the students case) and even longer in the teacher’s.
John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, page 168

So, when we bring our children home to learn, we have a lot of trouble breaking the habit of the bell.

This is especially obvious on Monday mornings. Most of us enjoy a lot of different, family-centered activity on the weekends. We might go on hikes, do home improvement projects, and attend church. The house is usually neglected on the weekends, and being off schedule can cause little children to be out of sorts. This means we have a lot to catch up on and attend to come the first day of the work week.

But we don’t stop and tend to the urgent things before us, we trudge forward, oftentimes losing our composure with our dear ones, and making everyone miserable.

We need to stop. We need to pull out from our home and go way, way up so we can view our situation from miles in the sky. From this viewpoint, we will be able to see the true picture.

For one thing, our weekend was not “slacking,” it was filled to the brim with actual, important learning. The home improvement projects, the hikes, the talks, church time, it was all educationally meaningful.

Why? Because we are not running a regimented school governed by the state, we are involved in a discipleship program run by God.

And God loves people, and God wants us to love and enjoy each other and our lives together.

What if, instead of keeping to the “schedule,” we created an altogether different paradigm? What if we woke up slowly, tended to the needs of the little ones, had a late breakfast, took an hour to get the house in order. Then we could sit and talk about our weekend, look up some interesting things on the Internet, read a book aloud, even fill out a notebooking page on what we did over Saturday and Sunday.

We could dive deeply into academics on Tuesday, and that would be just fine. Actually, John Taylor Gatto (New York City and New York State teacher of the year) has said that acquiring the necessary skills to learn everything you need to know takes only about 50 contact hours (of direct teacher/pupil attention).

When you put that into the context of 13 or more years of education, that’s not much, is it? (Makes one wonder why we are financing so many years in schooling, doesn’t it?)