So now I'm about to get into number seven. In order to provide an antidote for this imaginative destruction, the elite private boarding schools offer familiarity with the master creations of music, dance, painting, design, architecture, literature, drama, etcetera -- the master creations which has stood the test of time; not the modern fads, not the liberal promiscuity of 'yes, those are beautiful colors -- what is that exactly that you've done?' The master creations, because they're a record of the breadth and the depth of the human imagination, distilled in a way that future generations, who've moved onto something else, still preserve and respect. So that's number seven.
Number eight -- and this can only be developed independently -- is to create a capacity in the mind of a camera and a tape recorder. That is, the powers of objective observation and objective recording -- it's exceedingly difficult to do because all of us, quite naturally, tend to put our own spin on what we see and what we hear. Now there's no way to prevent that, but you can temporarily discipline your mind and the rules of court procedure are an attempt to distill the objective from the subjective.
Number nine, again, can only be developed in independent study -- developing and testing your own judgment so that you don't have to take somebody else's word for what's best and what's second best, what's good and what's bad; they have to be tested against reality. If anybody ever bothered to test the A+ students and the people who get perfect SAT scores, they would realize why every year Princeton turns down 4,000 people who have perfect SAT scores and perfect grade point averages; Stanford turns down about 3,000 a year; Cal Tech about 2500 a year; Harvard turns down 80% of all the valedictorians who apply; why do you need some old guy from western Pennsylvania to tell you what ought to be common property? How can you make decisions unless you know this quite verifiable information?
Okay, number ten -- this probably flies in the face of what we lately have called liberal. You need the ability to master your own natural aversions. You can't possibly know what the people who are detestable to you are thinking and saying and planning unless you can, for intervals, identify with them and listen very hard to what they're saying, and figure out why they're saying it. They're not evil, they're motivated just as you are by a different set of values -- and unless you know what that is, you end up with endless name calling. How will you ever become a surgeon if you can't slice open a fellow human being and look at all that awful stuff in there and find the piece that needs modification? Well, I don't think you learn that naturally. You master what you dislike by rubbing your own face into it -- and it certainly is, to my way of thinking, a dead giveaway that you're in the presence of an educated person. So that's number ten.
Number eleven...
Rob: Wait, wait, wait, wait...I just want to ask you...so is this why the members of the House and the Senate say to each other, 'my friend on the other side of the aisle,' because they've learned how to rub their face in it and live with it, and deal with what they detest?
JTG: Oh yeah, that's a reflexive response that's picked up in...one way or another but it's often picked up in privately boarding schools. Look when my first essay was reprinted in a congressional record, the sponsors of the reprinting were Ted Kennedy and somebody, I'm sorry....from the extreme right wing; they had joined together to reprint my essay, and while Howard Zinn gave me a blurb that said Underground History -- which your listeners are welcomed to read absolutely free on my website www.johntaylorgatto.com, 300,000 words long, and it's really worth it if you like the two shorter books -- anyway when they reprinted that thing, they had gotten together just exactly the way, if you look at the campaign contributions of the republican and democratic party, they're very largely congruent. You know, I mean there's some local variations, but we don't have a two-party system -- we have a one-party system that understands which side the bread of the managers is buttered on. So they can talk out of two different sides of this one mouth, but when push comes to shove, they intermarry with one another; they're a class, a political class -- they're not the highest class -- the policy class that gives them their orders, who come largely from the corporate world are the highest class, but the political class make sure that things remain stable there. Why on earth did the current president, and I'm not being critical, why did the current president -- he was elected by the passion of the young, that I don't think is deniable -- why was his first action in office to enlarge a phony war at the mountains of Afghanistan, which nobody on earth could tell you what victory will look like in? Well, you have to pay off the munitions makers and the defense contractors. And if you think this is just another leftist rant, recall it's one of the founders of the New York State Conservative Party. I mean it's so obvious that the contradictions, turning over the economy to the people who crashed it, to Goldman Sachs & Company -- how does that square with the fantasy narrative of who the current president is? Now he may very well in good conscience feel that he had to do those things or there wouldn't be any cooperation, but it's hard for me to see where the cooperation as a quid pro quo has come from.
Well, anyway...number eleven is quite wonderful. If you didn't send your kid to school and didn't teach him to read, and your kid had gone through one or more of these challenges -- a horse to care for, a hundred mile bike trips to make, starting a business when you were a teenager -- when you accept a significant challenge and you independently pursue that challenge, probably to the exclusion of many other worthwhile things, I think the effect is beneficial, lifelong, and furthermore, the examples of people who've done this are all around us. The 22nd wealthiest man in the world, Richard Branson, you know Virgin Atlantic Air, Virgin Records and so on, dropped out of school (without a high school diploma, never went to college), but by the time he was 12 years old he was on his own making a hundred mile bike trips to the beach at Bournemouth; and when he was 4 years old -- let me just repeat that, 4 years old, 4 years old -- his mother drove him miles from their home, asked him if he could get home alone from there...he's 4 years old, he said yes; she said well open the door and do so then, and she drove off -- not to a safe distance and watched him...she drove home. And he says in his autobiography, when he got back 8 or 9 hours later, he realized that nothing in the world was an obstacle too high to climb. And by 12 he's taking a hundred mile trips, he doesn't waste his time in college any more than Bill Gates wasted his time in college; any more than Steve Jobs wasted his time in college; any more than Michael Dell wasted his time in college; any more than Ted Turner, the only international television channel that exists, wasted his time in college; no more than Warren Avis, who created auto rentals at airports, wasted his time in college. I mean how much has to go on under our noses before we wake up to the deceitful narratives that are disseminated by good people -- by teachers and churches and responsible television shows. What are we doing?
The last...
Rob: Are you saying...wait, are you say that college is a waste?
JTG: I'm saying that for almost everybody, and I'm not saying that it discriminates good or bad, it's largely a waste of time. What it teaches that has value could be squeezed down into a number of months and taught as an institute would teach, for a certificate. The cost of colleges removes so much money from the productive economy in order to create a jobs project for precisely the kind of people who would be revolutionaries otherwise, as Germany proved between the first and the second world war when it had the largest college population on planet earth by far, by a magnitude of 5 times, and it's widely acknowledged -- certainly not in popular history, but in the kind of histories written for historians -- it's widely acknowledged that the extreme degree of schooling in Weimar, Germany led to the second world war because the expectations couldn't be met for these people, nor can the expectations of present college attendees be met -- and let me tell you that that's acknowledged among the management of the United States....let me cite a reference for that: The Trilateral Commission subsidized the book published in 1975 by New York University Press called The Crisis of Democracy. Without wearing out your patience I'll just tell you that the crisis is if people actually believe that democracy has any influence over what happens -- that's the crisis. Too many people have been taught in school that it matters, and what will have to be done, says The Crisis of Democracy, is to lower the expectations by making the college population aware that they're no better off or hardly any better off than they were with a high school diploma; that what the Branson crowd proves, and there are many -- the founder of IKEA dropped out of elementary school -- and I don't mean to be overemphatic here, but who are we kidding? The only one of the 20 largest economies on planet earth, which today, this month is in the black, is Brazil; and Brazil is run by a fourth grade dropout from the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore Brazil will be, this year, utterly free of fossil fuels in operating their internal combustion engines -- they've been working on it for ten years largely under the direction of a fourth grade dropout. How come every single day this isn't the headline? And instead we hear this immense crock of sh*t, 'you're in a lot of trouble if you don't go to college.' Well, from my point of view with 2 ivy league degrees, you're in a hell of a lot of trouble if you do go to college -- you've wasted vital time, you've wasted a fortune in resources, and you are now much more dependent than you ever were coming from your ordinary background. You're owned lock, stock and barrel; you're subject to being disciplined for everything -- the way you dress, where you live, where you bank -- all of this is available to everyone listening to your show in mosaic form, that is to say each of the little details that go together to make up the synthesis I've given you are public knowledge -- they're part of the public record.
The reason that your listeners are unaware of these things isn't because a teacher like me didn't tell them that, it's that they've been brainwashed not to see what's under their noses, or to see it and grumble about it and say 'golly, there's nothing I can do about it.' What this cuckoo minister from Florida almost plunged us into an international crisis -- he was going to have a book burning....maybe he still will, although let's pray not, huh? But the power that's available to ordinary people -- thanks I would say largely to the existence of the internet there...but nevertheless even without the internet -- the power that's available to ordinary people is immense; you have to be carefully instructed not to see that you have that power. One cuckoo ex-marine out in...was it Kansas City? Anyway, he knew what every American knew in the year 1900...I mean every American -- the formulas were published in reference books and in encyclopedias, that if you mixed number 2 diesel oil with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, you could create a bomb powerful enough in those days, to dig a pond without effort, to break rocks so that they could be moved, to reshape the landscape -- that was common knowledge; but he knew it and he brought down the Murrah office building...it was Kansas City...all by himself, you know....few hundred dollars worth of materials, I think it was a rented truck -- I may be wrong about the rented...it was the people who tried to bring down the World Trade Center that rented the truck and got caught when they returned it for the deposit. Oh man...we live in a house of mirrors and your escape is in your own hands. Do not rely on any international movement or new party to do it for you because as soon as competitive power succeeds in showing its head, it's bought off -- that's what happens. Principles vanish in return for a sack full of good stuff. But you can do it.
Rob: Well let me ask you about that....let me ask you a little bit about this. Now, I call my show the Bottom Up Radio Show because I believe we're in a transition from a top-down culture and world to a more bottom up one, and you've talked about in your books about how central approaches to education are bad news; and you've talked about how the idea, that you just said, as soon competitive power succeeds and showing its own head it's bought off so that changes, like you're advocating, cannot happen with a big organization and has to happen at a grassroots level.
JTG: Absolutely.
Rob: So I wrote down...I copied something that you mentioned here, I just wanted to read it to you: "Too much money and power is involved to allow the necessary legislative action, and that means taking to the streets," you said. That's what you said in the end of your book Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now you're talking...
JTG: That's a metaphor. Taking it in the streets obviously stopped the Vietnam war -- nothing else; and of course we had to find somebody else to attack who didn't have an army , a navy, or an air force -- and Afghanistan and Iraq served. But it was the end of the Vietnam war, taking it to the streets, that led to the newest tightening -- the grip of standardized testing on the schools so that you could constantly threaten not the kids so much as their parents, that your son or daughter will not have opportunity, they won't be employable unless they jump through these testing hoops; and yet there's abundant evidence around that isn't so. The easiest way to get rich in the United States has always been, and is today, through sales and almost every CEO in America has come up through the sales route, not through the other aspects of corporate life. Well what do you need to be a good salesman? I think you need insight into human nature and strong competency in the active literacies of speaking and writing -- exactly what's denied to your sons and daughters through institutional schooling because there's plenty of people who get that training elsewise to fill up all the available spots.
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