Road Construction
There will be road construction beginning the 1st week of October on Crotty Ave and Boynton Road.
The construction is expected to be complete by the end on November.
Please use caution during construction hours of 7:AM – 3:PM Monday thru Friday. Use an alternate route if possible.
If you have questions or concerns, please call the highway department @ 978-939-8666
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ReplyDeleteHere is what our new school will be bringing us.
ReplyDelete192. What Really Goes On: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
What Really Goes On
School wreaks havoc on human foundations in at least eight substantive ways so deeply
buried few notice them, and fewer still can imagine any other way for children to grow
up:
1) The first lesson schools teach is forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they
taught themselves important things like walking and talking. This is done so pleasantly
and painlessly that the one area of schooling most of us would agree has few problems is
elementary school — even though it is there that the massive damage to language-making
occurs. Jerry Farber captured the truth over thirty years ago in his lapidary metaphor
"Student as Nigger" and developed it in the beautiful essay of the same name. If we
forced children to learn to walk with the same methods we use to force them to read, a
few would learn to walk well in spite of us, most would walk indifferently, without
pleasure, and a portion of the remainder would not become ambulatory at all. The push to
extend "day care" further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists
the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders.
2) The second lesson schools teach is bewilderment and confusion. Virtually nothing
selected by schools as basic is basic, all curriculum is subordinate to standards imposed
by behavioral psychology, and to a lesser extent Freudian precepts compounded into a
hash with "third force" psychology (centering on the writings of Carl Rogers and
Abraham Maslow). None of these systems accurately describes human reality, but their
lodgement in university/business seven-step mythologies makes them dangerously
invulnerable to common-sense criticism.
ReplyDeleteNone of the allegedly scientific school sequences is empirically defensible. All lack
evidence of being much more than superstition cleverly hybridized with a body of
borrowed fact. Pestalozzi's basic "simple to complex" formulation, for instance, is a
prescription for disaster in the classroom since no two minds have the same "simple"
starting point, and in the more advanced schedules, children are frequently more
knowledgeable than their overseers — witness the wretched record of public school
computer instruction when compared to self-discovery programs undertaken informally.
Similarly, endless sequences of so-called "subjects" delivered by men and women who,
however well-meaning, have only superficial knowledge of the things whereof they
speak, is the introduction most kids get to the liar's world of institutional life. Ignorant
mentors cannot manage larger meanings, only facts. In this way schools teach the
disconnection of everything.
3) The third lesson schools teach is that children are assigned by experts to a social class
and must stay in the class to which they have been assigned. This is an Egyptian outlook,
but its Oriental message only begins to suggest the bad fit it produces in America. The
natural genius of the United States as explored and set down in covenants over the first
two-thirds of our history has now been radically degraded and overthrown. The class
system is reawakened through schooling. So rigid have American classifications become
that our society has taken on the aspect of caste, which teaches unwarranted self-esteem
and its converse — envy, self-hatred, and surrender. In class systems, the state assigns
your place in a class, and if you know what's good for you, you come to know it, too.
4) The fourth lesson schools teach is indifference. By bells and other concentration-
destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some
arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically. If nothing is worth
finishing, nothing is worth starting. Don't you see how one follows the other? Love of
learning can't survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors and
ceremonial grades which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children
to outside approval and nonsense rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real
power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals. Schools alienate the winners as
well as the losers.
5) The fifth lesson schools teach is emotional dependency. By stars, checks, smiles,
frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional
dependency. It's like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known to animal
trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth-
century Leipzig and incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of
ReplyDeletethe early twentieth century in America. Haifa century later, by 1968, it had infected
every school system in the United States, so all-pervasive at century's end that few
people can imagine a different way to go about management. And indeed, there isn't a
better one if the goal of managed lives in a managed economy and a managed social
order is what you're after.
Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and
denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this
way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed
into privileges not to be taken for granted.
6) The sixth lesson schools teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a
teacher to tell them what to do. Good people do it the way the teacher wants it done.
Good teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or textbook to tell them
what to do. Principals are evaluated according to an ability to make these groups conform
to expectations; superintendents upon their ability to make principals conform; state
education departments on their ability to efficiently direct and control the thinking of
superintendents according to instructions which originate with foundations, universities,
and politicians sensitive to the quietly expressed wishes of powerful corporations, and
other interests.
For all its clumsy execution, school is a textbook illustration of how the bureaucratic
chain of command is supposed to work. Once the thing is running, virtually nobody can
alter its direction who doesn't understand the complex code for making it work, a code
that never stops trying to complicate itself further in order to make human control
impossible. The sixth lesson of schooling teaches that experts make all important choices,
but it is useless to remonstrate with the expert nearest you because he is as helpless as
you are to change the system.
7) The seventh lesson schools teach is provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in children
must be made contingent on the certification of experts through rituals of number magic.
It must not be self-generated as it was for Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers,
Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford. The role of grades, report cards, standardized tests,
prizes, scholarships, and other awards in effecting this process is too obvious to belabor,
but it's the daily encounter with hundreds of verbal and nonverbal cues sent by teachers
that shapes the quality of self-doubt most effectively.
8) The last lesson school teaches I'll call the glass house effect: It teaches how hopeless it
ReplyDeleteis to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you
want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you should be watched even more
closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it that there is no
private time, no private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no
bruise not inspected by medical policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols.
The most sensitive children I had each year knew on some level what was really going
on. But we choked the treacherous breath out of them until they acknowledged they
depended on us for their futures. Hard-core cases were remanded to adjustment agencies
where they converted themselves into manageable cynics.