training passivity

Homeschoolers will not be surprised to read about how schools train passivity and compliance.  The homeschool community is a diverse group with diverse views but the ability to think for yourself and form independent conclusions has never been more essential in a time of mass media and polarization.

Changing the structure of schooling in the US could ensure a more stable society and could allow more independent solutions to arise to common problems, solutions not on the lists of corporate political parties.

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance | Activism & Vision | AlterNet:

"3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed."

And there is more:

"The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade. "

The author does not note the effects of peer-dependence and groupthink, both accentuated by raising kids in mass settings and a possible cause of the so-called political polarization where politicians depend inordinately on reacting to each other's views instead of forming more independent opinions.

And there is still a large component of physical punishment in US schools that is also not examined.

background posts
a concise summary: Gatto
Gatto: state-controlled consciousness
undermining the family and the child
sanctioned violence in our schools
voluntary attendance
make public schools truly public