These works help reveal how public education, intentionally or not, is the education of workers and slaves. These writings do not necessarily reflect the views of Monsieur Mitchell, but they are in the ballpark.
Labor,
Leisure, and Liberal Education
by Mortimer J. Adler
"All of this, I think, leads directly to the heart of the matter:
that vocational training is training for work or labor; it is specialized
rather than general; it is for an extrinsic end; and ultimately it is
the education of slaves or workers."
Textbook
America by Walter Karp
"Something had to be done quickly or democracy might one day break
out. Educational leaders quickly worked out a solution. Let the secondary
schools teach the children of workers what was fit only for workers.
As Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, sternly advised the Federation
of High School Teachers: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal
education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class
of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education
and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.' Since
there was no way to stop 'the masses' from entering high school, the
only way to meet the crisis, in short, was to prevent them from learning
anything liberating when they got there."
Why
Johnny Can't Think by Walter Karp
"What the public schools practice with remorseless proficiency,
however, is the prevention of citizenship and the stifling of self-government.
When 58 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment
for Educational Progress think it is against the law to start a third
party in America, we are dealing not with a sad educational failure
but with a remarkably subtle success."
LINKS
The Vocabula Review "Even today -- subjected as we are to the apotheosis of popular culture -- using the English language respectfully helps us maintain a sense of ourselves and our values. To do otherwise, to disregard the ways of our words, is to forsake our humanity and, perhaps, even forfeit our future. A society is generally as lax as its language. And in a society of this sort, easiness and mediocrity are much esteemed."
Check out The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt educational organization whose purpose is to convey to successive generations of college youth a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free society.
They are doing to Math what they are doing to Language. Check out the Mathman.
Ursula Stange has put up several UG issues in Acrobat Reader format so people can see what the original newsletters look like.
Check out Torsten Seemann's Richard Mitchell's Publications Online. He has taken the texts the books and recast them into several printible formats.
Check out Jason Molenda's Richard Mitchall Page in which he reproduces some of the original writings of THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN.
Also, Robert Kern Curtis has Several Essays from some of the more recent issues of The Underground Grammarian (c.1984-1990).
Mike Moore has Several Essays and reprints a Speech given by Richard Mitchell shortly after the publication of The Gift of Fire.
History of American Education Web Project
Surfing
the Education Waves
Education
Information
A
Nation At Risk
Homeschooling
Internet Resources
The
Sokal Affair "In the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, a gossip
magazine for academic humanists, physicist Alan Sokal revealed that he
had just perpetrated an elaborate hoax on Social Text, perhaps the foremost
cultural studies journal in North America. He managed to publish an impeccably
documented article that purported to derive postmodern cultural implications
from contemporary work in physics. The story quickly circulated throughout
the world's media after it made the front page of The New York Times on
18 May. While The Times made a point of airing both sides of Sokal's story
by speaking to the editors of Social Text, most other coverage has typically
presented only Sokal's side -- the only side aired in the original Lingua
Franca piece -- and sometimes even endorsed Sokal's side, as The Washington
Post has done in its indignant editorial of 29 May."
Richard
Lederer's Verbivore A web site "woven for wordaholics, logolepts,
and verbivores. Carnivores eat meat; herbivores eat plants and vegetables;
verbivores devour words. If you are heels over head (as well as head over
heels) in love with words, tarry here awhile to graze or, perhaps, feast
on the English language."
Suffer
The Children Ursula Stange is "a mad-as-hell parent. I'm also
a concerned citizen of a country whose future will soon be in the hands
of the young people sitting today in thousands of classrooms; classrooms
in which far too much time is wasted, far too much curiosity is thwarted,
far too much potential is squandered, far too much intelligence is misled,
far too much creativity is inhibited, and far too much brightness is dimmed."