We live in a city of dreams? Schooled to have no inner life at all?

It's that time of year scholars. Crawford is going to start in on his whole "City of Dreams" thing. consumer critique. awareness of your role in consumer culture and the commodification of your adolescent rebellion. Here's something to get you started:


John Taylor Gatto (from a Harper's magazine forum on education)

Three years ago, in a summer issue of Foreign Affairs, Mortimer Zuckerman laid out the proposition that no one in the world, for a hundred years, would be able to catch the American economy--not because we had any particular technological advantage but because we had an enormous human advantage. And then he began to detail the characteristics of the American worker. He said, and I'm extrapolating here, that American workers define themselves by what they buy, and so they will continue to maintain the only reliable domestic market in the world. He said that American workers, including management, including district superintendents, live in a state of low-grade fear of being fired and replaced. Reading this, I thought, "How could we have gotten this way, that we're such wonderful fits for the economic machine?" Slowly it began to dawn on me that the schools I'd worked in for thirty years were the factories that produced this perfect fit. We have been schooled to have no inner life at all.





Article: SCHOOL ON A HILL.(education)
Article from:
Harper's Magazine
Article date:
September 1, 2001
Author:
GATTO, JOHN TAYLOR; JORDAN, KRISTIN KEARNS; SIZER, THEODORE; STEWART, THOMAS