"Public schooling is the antithesis of democracy": war on kids

Derridata, I have to reproduce your latest email here, hope you don't mind. But we've been exchanging so much stuff in email I can't always keep track of it all, as I still know blogger's functionality better than gmail's. We've had some really indepth dialogues in our emails, as well as just touching on other stuff worth checking out. They're so meaty they'd have made great blog content! Seeing not much was posted on Acheron last month, thought I'd add this (which I think complements the earlier Ivan Illich post too):

Saw this documentary on Colbert Nation and had to check it out. Features Henry Giroux AND video footage of that incredible "armed police invade high school" that featured on Russ Kick's Memory Hole in 2003. I still remember the chilling line accompanying the security photos: "Uncommented upon in news accounts is the presence of this military man".

Check the quote below from Woodrow Wilson. The following would be the most appropriate title for a blog dedicated to exposing business culture- On Being Hateful of Business Schools:

http://www.thewaronkids.com/MAIN.html

http://www.thememoryhole.org/policestate/stratford-raid.htm

I think War on Kids also draws on John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001). It is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. It can be ordered or read for free online from
Gatto's Website:

johntaylorgatto.com

Check this quote from p74 of Bruce E Levine's excellent book Commmonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).
President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen: We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'" While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."