I'm an outcast in my own party

The Democratic Party I grew up in actually put great value in the intellect of its people. I can remember being proud that I was part of a party that recognized intellect and gifted individuals as people to be admired; education was valued and higher education and rewards for excellence were to be aspired to.

Remember all the talk about how Kerry was so great in the debates compared to shrub and his mumbling, stumbling and (possibly) prompted mutterings. The Democrats were the "thinking man's" (and later, the "thinking woman's") party. JFK, RFK, MLK and today RFK, Jr., Randi Rhodes, Janine Garofalo and so many others. So many talented and gifted writers and actors and artists and sports figures; many of whom have discussed the problems they've confronted in their lives trying to conform to the dominant society's definition of normal.

The repubs were always labeling us "elitist" and "snobs" and "arrogant" because we value our gifts and the gifts of our members when all we were doing was trying to debate issues which included the nuanced and subtle language required to fully understand an issue rather than 30 second sound-bites of "black and white" pablum.

And now, because a group of those very same people within our party and on this board want to come together to discuss how those very same attacks and ideas influenced their lives, for good and ill, and I read with amazement the same words, "elitist," "snob" and "arrogant."

Well, okay, then...welcome to shrub's amerika. I'm so proud.

Education - It wasn't so blatant in the past

In the past, it was more covert:

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes." (emphasis mine)

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." (emphasis mine)

Several years later, 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. (emphasis mine)

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." (emphasis mine)

Excerpts from an article stored at The Memory Hole: The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile discussing 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).