a concise summary: Gatto's Dumbing Us Down

Mahdi Lock, a  Muslim blogger in Morocco has a concise summary of John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down.  This is a tightly written piece with many facets including a mention of the Islamic prohibition of alcohol and the US attempt at prohibition. Worth a read.

For the record, Gatto's Seven Things Schools Teach are (Lock's summary):

• Confusion 
• Class Position
• Indifference
• Emotional Dependency
• Intellectual Dependency
• Provisional Self-Esteem 
• One Can't Hide

From the post:

In the next chapter, ‘The Psychopathic School’, Gatto enumerates eight pathologies of the children he teaches, which are: they are indifferent to the adult world, they have almost no curiosity, they have a poor sense of the future, they are ahistorical (i.e. have no understanding of how the past has affected the present), they are cruel to each other, they are uneasy with intimacy or candour, they are materialistic, and, last but not least, they are dependent, passive and timid in the presence of new challenges.