Tuesday, September 03, 2013

Automata

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual...

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

--"The Philosophy of Education" (1906) by William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906

Quoted in "Weapons Of Mass Instruction" by John Taylor Gatto, p. 11

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