The Manipulative Purposes of the Modern School System, Animation (Video)

The Manipulative Purposes of the Modern School System, Animation (Video) | Third Monk

John Taylor Gatto is a retired American school teacher with nearly 30 years experience in the classroom, and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling, and of what he characterizes as the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions.

The Origin of the School System

School was to be a surgical incision into which the class based management theories of England were to be inserted to interdict the liberty traditions. England’s multi layered social class is simply a modern day representation of Julius Cesar’s advice that “when you’re overwhelmed by the enemy, you divide them and conquer them that way by setting them against each other.”

The method was to be by the infiltration of the minds of children, out of sight of their parents. The well read here won’t be shocked, theorists from Plato to Frederick of Prussia knew and taught explicitly that if children could be kept childish beyond its term in nature, if they could be coddled in a society of children without any real responsibility except obedience. If the imminence of death and certainty of pain and loss could be removed from daily consciousness.

If the profound reflections of one’s own death could be replaced with the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy and fear, young people would grow older but they would never grow up and the great enduring problem of supervision would be solved. For who could argue the truth that childlike people are far easier to manage than critical thinking, self reliant ones.

The Six Functions of Modern Schooling By Alexander Inglis, (Harvard Professor)

1. Adjustive, Adaptive Function

Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. Notice that this precludes critical judgment completely. Notice that requiring obedience to stupid orders is a much better test of function one that following sensible orders ever could be. You don’t know whether people are flexibly obedient unless they’ll march right off the cliff.

2. Diagnostic, Directive Function

School is to determine each student’s proper social role, logging the evidence mathematically and anecdotally with cumulative records.

3. Sorting, Differentiating Function

School sorts children by treating individuals only so far as their likely destination in the social machine. Not one step beyond. So much for making kids their personal best.

4. Conformity, Integration Function

As much as possible, kids are made to be alike. Whatever background they come from, they are to be made alike. This is done so their future behavior will be mathematically predictable in service to market and government research. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

5. Hygenic, Selective Function

This nothing to do with individual health but it has a lot to do with the health of the race. Hygiene is a polite way of saying that school is expected to accelerate natural selection by tagging the unfit. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes.

6. Propaedeutic Function

A small fraction of lucky kids will quietly be taught how to take over management of this continuing projection. Guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered childlike in order for government and economic life to be managed with a minimum of hassle.

 

The Effects of Modern Schooling

Gatto states the following assertions in “Dumbing Us Down“:

It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.

It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.

It makes them indifferent.

It makes them emotionally dependent.

It makes them intellectually dependent.

It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).

It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised

Gatto is currently working on a 3-part documentary about compulsory schooling, titled The Fourth Purpose

Jacque Fresco – Money Corrupts Our Bond with Nature

Jacque Fresco - Money Corrupts Our Bond with Nature | Third Monk image 2

Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project gives a talk on how the monetary system prevents society from progressing into the future. 

Connection with Nature is the Most Important Human Relationship

All people would be trained or educated to understand our relationship to nature. If you violate that relationship, it won’t work. All man made laws are artificial. We have to study our relationship with nature:

If we damage the air, we damage ourselves.

If we damage the oceans, we damage ourselves.

If we cut down the forests, we damage our ability to maintain health.

Profits of Corruption and War

As long as the monetary system survives, you’re going to have problems. Money, yes it does produce incentive. It also produces incentive for corruption, embezzlement, taking care of your friends, and taking care of yourself.

When people seek advantage by money, you can’t have a decent world. When you have wars and people make billions of dollars off submarines and aircraft carriers, then war becomes a terrific business.

A Future Without Waste

People would study whatever they want. There would art centers, music centers, cultural centers open to everyone, without a price tag. There would be:

No Banks

No Investment Brokers

No Advertising

No Commercials

No Armies

No Navies

No Prisons

No Police

When people have access to the necessities of life, they do not steal.

If you don’t understand, imagine people living near a big water fall with lots of fresh water. No one comes at night to steal water.

Schools Kill Creativity – Sir Ken Robinson Ted Talk (Video)

Schools Kill Creativity - Sir Ken Robinson Ted Talk (Video) | Third Monk

Sir Ken Robinson shares many uplifting ideas and stories to support his movement for a drastic change in our method of educating all humans. Intelligence is diverse. Education at the moment uses more of an assembly line method of teaching by stream lining what is “important”. Human’s become a valuable part of a whole when they understand their individual value, skills and passions.

Schools Kill Creativity Lecture – Notable Quotes

Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?

Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.

You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.

Is it ADHD or Untapped Potential?

I’m doing a new book at the moment called “Epiphany,” which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of; she’s called Gillian Lynne –have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.” She’s wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, “Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer?” And she said it was interesting; when she was at school,she was really hopeless. And the school, in the ’30s,wrote to her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate;she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930s,and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point.It wasn’t an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that.

Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother,and she was led and sat on this chair at the end,and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it –because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight — in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian, I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.” He said, “Wait here. We’ll be back; we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer.Take her to a dance school.”

I said, “What happened?” She said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think. They did ballet; they did tap; they did jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company — the Gillian Lynne Dance Company — met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history; she’s given pleasure to millions; and she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

Calvin and Hobbes – Stars and Infinity (Comic Strip)

Calvin and Hobbes - Stars and Infinity (Comic Strip) | Third Monk

Calvin and Hobbes Look Out Into the Stars and Ponder Infinity.

Calvin: If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.

Hobbes: How so?

Calvin: Well, when you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.

George Carlin, Jacque Fresco – Children Should Be Taught to Question Everything (Video)

George Carlin, Jacque Fresco - Children Should Be Taught to Question Everything (Video) | Third Monk

George Carlin and Jacque Fresco discuss the dangers of feeding bullshit to the impressionable minds of children.

A Mind Without Questions is a Slave

Bullshit is the glue, that binds us as a nation. Where would we be without our safe, familiar, American bullshit? Land of the free, home of the brave, the American dream, all men are equal, justice is blind, the press is free, your vote counts, business is honest, the good guys win, the police are on your side, god is watching you, your standard of living will never decline… and everything is going to be just fine— The official national bullshit story.

I call it the American okie doke. Every one, every one of those items is provably untrue at one level or another, but we believe them because they’re pounded into our heads from the time we’re children. That’s what they do with that kind of thing—pound it into the heads of kids, ‘cause they know the children are much too young to be able to muster an intellectual defense against a sophisticated idea like that, and they know that up to a certain age children believe everything their parents tell them.

And as a result, they never learn to question things. Children should be taught to question everything. Children should taught to question everything they read, everything they hear. Children should be taught to question authority.

Older Isn’t Always Wiser

When I was a young man growing up in New York City, I refused to pledge allegiance to the flag. Of course I was sent to the principal’s office. And he asked me, ‘Why don’t you want to pledge allegiance? Everybody does!’

I said, ‘Everybody once believed the Earth was flat but that doesn’t make it so.’ I explained that America owed everything it has to other cultures and other nations. and that I would rather pledge allegiance to the Earth and everyone on it.

The Game is Corrupt

Then came the crash of 1929, which began what we now call “The Great Depression”. I found it difficult to understand why millions were out of work, homeless, starving while all the factories were sitting there. The resources were unchanged.

It was then that I realized that the rules of the economic game were inherently invalid.

Shortly after, came World War II where various nations took turns systematically destroying each other. I later calculated that all the destruction and wasted resources spent on that war could have easily provided for every human need on the planet.

Joe Rogan – Nationalism is Primitive, Society is Funded by War (Video)

Joe Rogan - Nationalism is Primitive, Society is Funded by War (Video) | Third Monk

Joe Rogan delivers an important message about uplifting society to a higher consciousness that can see through the illusions that divide us.

Artificial Boundaries Are Used to Manipulate the Uninformed

We all have this desire to have someone lead us. We all have this feeling where we need someone smarter, wiser to represent us. The problem is really dumb people have a say too and they’re subject to a lot of tricks. They’re subject to nationalism, they’re subject to these ridiculous rah rah America speeches that don’t say jack shit. They say nothing, it’s all just this fucken cheerleading event. They can’t help it, they’re dumb, they don’t know that they’re being bullshited. They grew up with dumb people, they go to work with dumb people, there’s no one in their family that’s interesting or asks any questions at all, and they just get sucked in right into it.

The Sacrifice of Many for the Pleasure of the Few

This society is so greedy, we’re willing to go to war. We’re willing to go places and send these big metal machines that kill people and fuck people up just so we can make more money. And the way our society is set up, I’ve heard it argued, and argued successfully that our society runs on war. It runs on the domination of other parts of the world. Literally, that’s how they control a large chunk of the world, they have to keep everyone down.

Joe Rogan – How Hemp Became Illegal, DMT Reset Button (Video)

Joe Rogan - How Hemp Became Illegal, DMT Reset Button (Video) | Third Monk

Cannabis is illegal because of the economical effects it would have on cigarette sales, alcohol sales and as a viable alternative for many pharmaceutical drugs. Hemp is also useful for paper production and in the textile industry. Joe Rogan also explains the purpose of DMT, “the spirit molecule” that acts as a gateway to other realms of reality.

Hemp Became an Economic Threat to Various Industries

William Randolph Hearst who owned all these newspapers and paper mills, it was going to cost him millions of dollars to convert over to hemp. So instead he started printing stories in his paper about some new drug called “marijuana”. Marijuana wasn’t even a slang term for cannabis yet, it was used to describe a Mexican wild tobacco, completely unrelated. They got it illegal by saying people are smoking it, blacks and Mexicans are raping white women. Congress outlawed this new drug “Marijuana”, with no idea that they were outlawing hemp, which had been in use for thousands of years.

DMT, Psychedelics Isolates the Mind From Cultural Conditioning

It’s not about something that kills you. You won’t be able to absorb propaganda the way you do now. You won’t be able to look at the news the way you do now. You won’t be able to look at common cultural conditioning and predetermined patterns of behavior. None of that no longer makes sense after you’ve gone through a psychedelic experience. Any psychedelic experience is like pressing CTRL ALT DELETE on your brain.

Terence McKenna – DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video)

Terence McKenna - DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video) | Third Monk image 1

Terence Mckenna – DMT Revelations, Usage and Experiences


Terence McKenna describes a method to getting the most out of your DMT experience along with an anecdotal composite of over 40 of his DMT trips.

 

Terence Mckenna – DMT Hypothesis

Okay hypothesis one, DMT is not a drug, it is an extraterrestrial communication device. These are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from us that they come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan but in drug molecules that are dinky. So we are in contact here with some kind of extraterrestrial technology and these are true aliens of some sort. And God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the hypothesis.

Okay second hypothesis. There is a parallel universe, unsuspected by most human beings. It’s right here, all the time. It’s inhabited. These things have their own hopes, fears, problems, so forth. And somehow this drug just erases this boundary and then you find yourself in the elf nest.

Next hypothesis. These things, because they have great affection for me, because they seem intent on the task of communicating, perhaps they are human beings from the distant future. Perhaps this is what we are fated to become. You know, there’s always, since we were kids, the cliché ‘beings of pure energy’. Well it’s always been a little hard to wrap your mind around what that would look like, but, low and behold here appear to be creatures of pure energy. But there are a lot of problems with hypothesizing a future human technological breakthrough which would allow them to actually manipulate the past. Logical paradoxes and that sort of thing.

Well so then here’s another possibility. They are human beings. But they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the past. They are in the pre-natal and post-life phase. In other words these are either the unborn waiting in some limbo like dimension to descend into matter. Or they are in fact people who have had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence, and now have moved on. Let me not kid you, we’re talking about dead people here in that case. Well if you go to the shamans who access these places through Ayahuasca or the Virola snuffs or something like that. They will say ‘Well these are our ancestors. Didn’t you read Mircea Eliade. Don’t you know that shamanism works through ancestor magic?’ Well “ancestor” is a tremendously sanitized term for “dead people”. And if what is actually happening here, is that the much argued about soul is actually made visible by this pharmacological strategy… I mean god knows why, but god knows why anything else is the way it is…. Then this is truly big new. This is the confounding of rationalism. If what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology we discover a way to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead, then this is a 180 degree turn on the evolution of culture that not even the most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate. And over time, I’ve sort of come to incline to the idea that this is what is in fact going on. And the reason it’s so hard to bring anything out of the DMT flash is because at the center of the flash you find out something so unexpected, so appalling, and so existentially convincing in the moment of confronting it, that you simply immediately block it out and obliterate it.

Terence McKenna – DMT Vs. 5-MEO-DMT

This clip is taken from a talk titled “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism -Part 5” Podcast 191. In this clip Terence gives us his take on the difference between 5-MeO-DMT and nnDMT and his preference for nnDMT.

Some people do not prefer 5-MeO-DMT, I imagine this has to do with the ego death aspect of it…but the potential of both in a spiritual symbiosis may be exactly what the shaman ordered.

From Terence Mckenna Food of The Gods

“The DMT Experience”


What can be said of DMT as an experience and in relation to our own spiritual emptiness? Does it offer us answers? Do the short-acting tryptamines offer an analogy to the ecstasy of the partnership society before Eden became a memory? And if they do, then what can we say about it?

What has impressed me repeatedly during my many glimpses into the world of the hallucinogenic indoles, and what seems generally to have escaped comment, is the transformation of narrative and language. The experience that engulfs one’s entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before one’s eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the furnace of one’s birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of incoming sensory data?

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.

The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there — the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.

This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. What we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension — frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find.

Terence McKenna – Return to Our Stoned Shaman Core of Mystery and Imagination (Video)

Terence McKenna - Return to Our Stoned Shaman Core of Mystery and Imagination (Video) | Third Monk

Terence McKenna talks about the diseases of modern society, the archaic revival, the psychedelic mystery, culture and transformation from the question and answer session of his lecture entitled ‘Eros And The Eschaton’.

The idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of disease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless.

I applaud all of this; because it’s an impulse to return to what is felt by the body – what is authentic, what is archaic – and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That’s what the world is.

Woody Harrelson – Thoughts From Within, a Stoner Poem on Society (Video)

Woody Harrelson - Thoughts From Within, a Stoner Poem on Society (Video) | Third Monk

Woody expresses his stoner observations on the world, our environment, the government and his hope for change.

Morality is legislated
prisons over-populated
religion is incorporated
the profit-motive has permeated all activity
we pay our government to let us park on the street
And war is the biggest money-maker of all
we all know missile envy only comes from being small.

I sometimes feel like an alien creature
for which there is no earthly explanation
Sure I have human form
walking erect and opposing digits,
but my mind is upside down.
I feel like a run-on sentence
in a punctuation crazy world.
and I see the world around me
like a mad collective dream.

An endless stream of people
move like ants from the freeway
cell phones, pc’s, and digital displays
“In Money We Trust,”
we’ll find happiness
the prevailing attitude;
like a genetically modified irradiated Big Mac
is somehow symbolic of food.

Morality is legislated
prisons over-populated
religion is incorporated
the profit-motive has permeated all activity
we pay our government to let us park on the street
And war is the biggest money-maker of all
we all know missile envy only comes from being small.

Politicians and prostitutes
are comfortable together
I wonder if they talk about the strange change in the weather.
This government was founded by, of, and for the people
but everybody feels it
like a giant open sore
they don’t represent us anymore
And blaming the President for the country’s woes
is like yelling at a puppet
for the way it sings
Who’s the man behind the curtain pulling the strings?

A billion people sitting watching their TV
in the room that they call living
but as for me
I see living as loving
and since there is no loving room
I sit on the grass under a tree
dreaming of the way things used to be
Pre-Industrial Revolution
which of course is before the rivers and oceans, and skies were polluted
before Parkinson’s, and mad cows
and all the convoluted cacophony of bad ideas
like skyscrapers, and tree paper, and earth rapers
like Monsanto and Dupont had their way
as they continue to today.

This was Pre-us
back when the buffalo roamed
and the Indian’s home
was the forest, and God was nature
and heaven was here and now
Can you imagine clean water, food, and air
living in community with animals and people who care?

Do you dare to feel responsible for every dollar you lay down
are you going to make the rich man richer
or are you going to stand your ground
You say you want a revolution
a communal evolution
to be a part of the solution
maybe I’ll be seeing you around.

~ Woody Harrelson

Terence Mckenna – Free Yourself From Ideology, Nobody is Smarter Than You Are (Video)

Terence Mckenna - Free Yourself From Ideology, Nobody is Smarter Than You Are (Video) | Third Monk

In my humble opinion, ideology is only going to get in your way. Nobody understands what is happening. Not Buddhists. Not Christians. Not government scientists. Not… you know. No one!… understands what is happening. So, forget ideology. They betray. They limit. They lead astray. Just deal with the raw data and trust yourself.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you? People walk around saying ‘Well, I don’t understand quantum physics but somewhere somebody understands it’. That’s not a very helpful attitude towards observing the insights of quantum physics.

Inform yourself. What does inform yourself mean? It means transcend and mistrust ideology. Go for direct experience.

What do YOU think when YOU face the waterfall?

What do YOU think when YOU have sex?

What do YOU think when YOU take psilocybin?

Everything else is unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably lies.

So, liberate yourself from the illusion of culture.

Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.