[John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions; he is the author of several books, including State Controlled Consciousness.
YouTube video: State Controlled Consciousness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ;
Web article: THE PUBLIC SCHOOL NIGHTMARE: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought? http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Educate/publicschoolnightmare.htm;
Web page: The Odysseus Group/John Taylor Gatto/Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/]
Kall (cont.): There is so much room for making schools better now. We certainly are seeing, with 50% drop out rates in high school and college, that they're not working for so many people.
Schwartz: They're not even working for the people who finish high school and go to college. They're working better, but, again, we're kind of settling for mediocrity rather than aspiring to excellence. I think that's right, it was designed to create an obedient and diligent work force and those days are gone we need something else. Again, now's the time to really think hard about how the system would be redesigned to get that something else, and then put resources into doing it. That's what I think.
Kall: Well, it's a great opportunity right now. I call this show the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show because I really believe that we're in the middle of a bottom-up revolution, where the culture is moving from a top-down model to a bottom-up model. Obama talks about bottom up almost every day and, if you look to the web, so many of the successful ventures there have been based on bottom-up approaches, whether it's Google or Amazon or Linux. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that, the idea that people... there's kind of the crowd sourcing, the cooperation and sharing of ideas when, even at your school, you get 40 different letters from people that help make that decision whether somebody's retained. Where does that fit into wisdom, the wisdom of the crowds, the wisdom of learning?
Schwartz: Well, look, I think that this bottom-up... the removal of barriers to entry is a good thing, making it easier for people that have no particular status to make their views known and participate in the conversation is a good thing. But it has its problems, because the one unintended consequence of this great democratization, I think, is the development of a kind of contempt for expertise. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, period. And your task now, as you surf the web, trying to find stuff out, is to sort out opinions based on some knowledge, and opinions based on what side of the bed people woke up on.
It's not easy to figure out whose opinions to take seriously. So, when it was very hierarchical and top-down, input to the public conversation was too narrow; but now that we've solved that problem, we've created a different one. And I see this students turn in papers and, God knows they've had a lot of training on how to do a research paper, but the web has become a source, not just academic journals and books, the web is a source, but they are completely helpless in separating out sources that actually have some sort of training and expertise behind them from sources that are O'Reilly. They don't know, and eventually, you do this long enough, you get burned citing somebody who doesn't know anything and you become more discerning, but on the way to that discernment, there are going to be a lot of mistakes made. So, I think it is a mixed blessing, the bottom-up transformation of society.
Kall: Well, the way it seems to be working on the web, and what books like The Wisdom of the Crowd suggest, is that people kind of vote on what is good and what is bad, and what is valuable...
Schwartz: That's true, but not everything should be decided by majority rule.
Kall: That's a good point.
Schwartz: We can't have a vote on 'how much is three times six;' sometimes there are right answers to questions and the majority may have the wrong answer.
Kall: That's true. Let me get back to this question of Jindal. Jindal and the whole right wing, the GOP theory really seems to be coming down to this, there are two things that the GOP stands for: one is reducing or eliminating taxes, and the other is shrinking or getting rid of government.
Schwartz: So those are two versions of the same thing. If you reduce taxes, de facto you shrink government.
Kall: Exactly, like Grover Norquist said, shrinking government by cutting the taxes enough so you could drown it in a bathtub.
