John Taylor Gatto

I agree, I've observed myself that we keep the elderly and the young away from sight. I find that very troubling.

A couple of quotes from John Taylor Gatto today......
Gatto was a teacher in New York City's public schools for over 30 years and is a recipient of the New York City Teacher of the Year award and New York State Teacher of the Year. Gatto's teaching experiences led him to the sad conclusion that compulsory government schooling has little to do with education. New to his books? You might start with Dumbing Us Down -- a short read with lots of food for thought.

"We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found -- in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built -- then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material 'sufficiency' which our global 'experts' are so insistent we be concerned about."
"This great crisis that we witness in our schools is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the term 'community' hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who sleep on the streets."
-Excerpts from Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto