Books about Compulsory from Amazon.com

With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto's "guerrilla teaching."

John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).

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Holt's most direct and radical challenge to the educational status quo and a clarion call to parents to save their children from schools of all kinds..
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One of the ravages of war has always been rape, but in the 1930s and '40s the Imperial Japanese Forces made it systematic, forcing thousands of women into sexual slavery for their soldiers at highly organized "comfort stations." Drawn mostly from Korea (which was then ruled by Japan), the "comfort women" who tell their horrific stories in this book were shipped to the front lines and all over the war zones, often arriving in the same shipments with munitions and food. Like those staples, their sexual services were intended to keep an army working and alive; a common superstition among the troops was the belief that sex before battle could magically ward off injury. This searing, painful chapter in history was uncovered in part by a Japanese journalist, who came across photos of the women in classified documents. --Francesca Coltrera.
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John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of familiar schooling that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization drills. Gatto's earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put that now-famous expression of the title into common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against schooling.

Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate, following high-level political theories constructed by Plato, Calvin, Spinoza, Fichte, Darwin, Wundt, and others, which contend the term "education" is meaningless because humanity is strictly limited by necessities of biology, psychology, and theology. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable.

Realizing that goal demands that the young be conditioned to rely upon experts, remain divided from natural alliances, and accept disconnections from the experiences that create self-reliance and independence.

Escaping this trap requires a different way of growing up, one Gatto calls "open source learning." In chapters such as "A Letter to Kristina, my Granddaughter"; "Fat Stanley"; and "Walkabout:London," this different reality is illustrated.

John Taylor Gatto taught for thirty years in public schools before resigning from school-teaching in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal during the year he was named New York State's official Teacher of the Year. Since then, he has traveled three million miles lecturing on school reform.

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"This volume is a long overdue endeavour to tackle the thorny and delicate issue of the compulsory population exchange . . . The argumentative force of the volume lies in the careful analysis of the contradictory and ambiguous ramifications of the convention." -The Greek Review of Social Research Following the defeat of the Greek Army in 1922 by nationalist Turkish forces, the 1923 Lausanne Convention specified the first internationally ratified compulsory population exchange. It proved to be a watershed in the eastern Mediterranean, having far-reaching ramifications both for the new Turkish Republic, and for Greece which hadto absorb over a million refugees. Known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe by the Greeks, it marked the establishment of the independent nation state for the Turks. The consequences of this event have received surprisingly little attention despite the considerable relevance for the contemporary situation in the Balkans. This volume addresses the challenge of writing history from both sides of the Aegean and provides, for the first time, a forum for multidisciplinary dialogue across national boundaries. Renée Hirschon was educated at the universities of Cape Town, Chicago and Oxford. Intensive fieldwork among the Asia Minor refugees settled in Piraeus resulted in the monograph "Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe". She has been Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, and Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of the Aegean. She is currently Research Associate of the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, and Lecturer, St Peter's College, University of Oxford..
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First published 20 years ago, A Place Called School is the revolutionary account of the largest on-scene study of U.S. schools ever conducted Carried on over four years, trained investigators entered more than 1,000 classrooms nationwide to talk to teachers, students, administrators, parents, and other community members. The result is this report. Written by one of the nation's most astute and experienced educators, Goodlad's message of optimism and his agenda for improvement have only grown in importance since the book's original publication.

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DESCRIPTION: In Separating School & State, Sheldon Richman effectively and comprehensively analyzes the failures of public schooling in America and explains the ideas and ideology behind the case for compulsory education. But beyond a historical interpretation and a critical evaluation of the state of public education in America today, Mr. Richman offers a vision of what a fully privatized educational system might look like--and in what ways it would solve many, if not most, of the problems that parents, students, and even a sizable number of professional educators see as the fundamental shortcomings of the present system. This book moves the debate over education in America to a higher and more fruitful level of discussion..
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What is it about today's school system that so many find unsatisfactory? Why have so many generations of reformers failed to improve the educational system, and, indeed, caused it to degenerate further and further into an ever declining level of mediocrity?

In this radical and scholarly monograph, out of print for two decades and restored according to the author's original, Murray N. Rothbard identifies the crucial feature of our educational system that dooms it to fail: at every level, from financing to attendance, the system relies on compulsion instead of voluntary consent.

Certain consequences follow. The curriculum is politicized to reflect the ideological priorities of the regime in power. Standards are continually dumbed down to accommodate the least common denominator. The brightest children are not permitted to achieve their potential, the special- needs of individual children are neglected, and the mid-level learners become little more than cogs in a machine. The teachers themselves are hamstrung by a political apparatus that watches their every move.

Rothbard explores the history of compulsory schooling to show that none of this is accident. The state has long used compulsory schooling, backed by egalitarian ideology, as a means of citizen control. In contrast, a market-based system of schools would adhere to a purely voluntary ethic, financed with private funds, and administered entirely by private enterprise.

An interesting feature of this book is its promotion of individual, or home, schooling, long before the current popularity of the practice.

As Kevin Ryan of Boston University points out in the introduction, if education reform is ever to bring about fundamental change, it will have to begin with a complete rethinking of public schooling that Rothbard offers here..
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