The Astounding Failure of the US Educational System

     

The article titled “The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Docile,” by John Taylor Gatto is a fine read as a complement to my latest article “Inside the Illusory Empire of the Banking Commodities Con Game.” Who is John Taylor Gatto? Mr. Gatto was the NYC “Teacher of the Year” three times, and a teacher that became highly disillusioned with the formal education system due to its failures to stimulate critical thinking in children.

I find it odd that people that find value in the information I provide to my clients as well as information that I provide publicly on my blog often desire to know of me, “Where did you go to school?” I find it even odder that many people find my attendance of an Ivy League university to be validating of my knowledge base and thinking skill set, as if attending an expensive university is responsible for the thought processes that have enabled many of my big picture, long-term predictions of the global economy to be accurate. I believe there is absolutely no correlation between the cost of an education and intelligence or even between formal education and knowledge, although oddly people believe this relationship to exist. If there is a provable relationship between formal education and intelligence, it is probably an inverse one. The more letters you have behind your name (MBA, PhD, JD, MFA, CPA) the greater level of stupidity one likely possesses, as the attainment of a higher level of education means that one has been exposed for a far longer time period than the average citizen to the indoctrination process.

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I find oddest of all, the expressions on people’s faces, when I inform them that I sincerely believe that the knowledge I gained through formal institutions of academia was detrimental to my understanding of how capital markets operate. In fact, I explain to those that inquire of my educational background that I had to rewire my brain and purge it of nearly all of the false business concepts and stupidity I learned in school because I later found the great majority of what I had learned in school to be not only downright deceptive, but also in my opinion, deliberately erroneous. Many people express genuine shock when I tell them that my formal education was, as was my education on Wall Street, almost entirely useless to any of the investment research and analysis I perform today and that my understanding of how capital markets move is entirely the result of self-education.

In fact, an article I wrote titled “Delaying a College Education in this Economy is the Right Choice” probably generated some of the most perplexed responses I have ever witnessed up close and in person when discussing the content of this article with others. Some of the responses I have heard are as follows:

But isn’t this the BEST time to send my kid to college? The economy is terrible now, so after he graduates, the economy will be much better, right?

You don’t REALLY mean that, do you? Everyone needs a diploma to fall back on. Who’s going to respect you without a college degree?

How is my child going to get ahead in life without a college degree?

Read the rest of the article

October 22, 2010