“We get three educations. The first is from our parents; the second is from our schoolmasters. The third is from life. The last makes liars of the first two.”–Montesquieu ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montesquieu   ).

My sister got the strap the first day she went to school. She was six.

Why did she get it?

She did what I told her.

For two years she had watched while I left home and went to school.

Now it was her turn.

As we approached the school the principal walked in the front door.

My sister player with her niece who lived across the road from us.

The thing is my family was dirt poor. Although they would never say it to our faces we were seen as trash.

“Say, ‘Hello,'” I told my sister.

When I met her at noon to bring her home her face was red with tears.

I have no love for our education system.

There is not much we can do at eight when we see our sister beaten.

There is one thing we can do.

We can remember.

As I passed through the school system I saw the many crippled by it.

Some, thinking they could never succeed, killed themselves.

I have long known about the Indigenous dead.

When I read books outside the ones the school gave us I learned the government broke treaties the day they were signed. Though our government treated them better than did that south of the border the bureaucrats sent to administer the treaties had much in common with the principal who gave the strap to my sister.

“Of all the teachings of history the clearest is this: that those who seek to realize ideal aims by force of law are always unscrupulous and always cruel.”–Lord Eustace Percy, JOHN KNOX.

Years ago in a diary written long ago the author wrote of the people native to this continent when we got here, “In the way they treat their children one would almost think them human.”

“You have the wrong attitude. If you leave this school today you will starve in two two weeks. Where do you think you are going? I have not given you permission to leave,” my high school principal said to me on my last day in school. I replied, “To see if you are right.”

In 1968 the family of Robert and Jane Jacobs came into my life. It was a rainy Saturday. It had rained all day. I was showing silent movies 39 steps above a pool hall at the end of Yorkville on the east side of Yonge Street in a venue I called THE PUBLIC ENEMY. I thought no one would come out because the rain was so heavy. I went anyway. There I saw five human beings huddled under umbrellas. They came every week after that.

When I learned Mrs. Jacobs had written a book titled THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES I bought it. I read it. Not once. Many times. I still read it.

In an interview in THE GLOBE AND MAIL Mrs. Jacobs stated, “I had wonderful teachers in the first and second grades who taught me everything I know. After that, I’m afraid, the teachers were nice, but they were dopes…I have a lack of ideology, and not because I have an animus against any particular ideology; it’s just that they don’t make sense to me…they get in the way of thinking. I don’t see what use they are…University and uniformity, as ideals, have subtly influenced how people thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything…We are misled by universities and other intellectual institutions to believe that there are separate fields of knowledge. But it’s clear there are no separate fields of knowledge. It is a seamless web.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-8WF_Ke1_8

Yes, it is a seamless web.

That web is stronger than all the forces brought against it.

The last book by Mrs. Jacobs is aptly titled DARK AGE AHEAD.

People said she was wrong when the book was first published.

She was not. She is not.

The movie the Jacobs family came to see that rainy Saturday in 1958 was the 1923 Lon Chaney version of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME which I first learned of in the pages of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.

Unable to see the film I bought and read the book by Victor Hugo. When I finally got to see the film I learned the only thing in the movie faithful to Hugo was Lon Chaney’s portrait of Quasimodo, the hunchback.

The real monster is the priest who manipulates him whose child he may have been.

Hugo wrote the book as an attack on the Roman Catholic church. We would not know that from the many film versions of his novel.

Between the convents and the monasteries were often found tunnels. In those tunnels were found the bodies of infants.

This is what happens when bureaucracies rise.

Bad as the Roman Catholics were the Protestants with their loveless “faith without miracles” were worse.

Paul wrote to Timothy that down the road men would practice faith without power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUQYpbqHXE4 .

“School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”–Ivan Illich.

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very great mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”—Albert Einstein.
“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.’_George Bernard Shaw.
“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”–Bertrand Russell.
“School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”–Ivan Illich.

“The American educational process prepares those with second-rate intellects to thrive in a bureaucratic environment. Obedience, rote memorization, and neatness are enshrined as intellectual achievements…Like the belief of the terminally ill in medicine the belief of the legitimately frightened in the educational process is a comforting lie.”—David Mamet, TRUE AND FALSE.

“Most teachers say you should go to school to get your degree to have something to fall back on. Aside from being a huge lie, that also creates a very high level of mediocrity, because nobody who really believes that is going to take the leap of faith required to be a serious artist. Stay out of school.”–Ellis Marsalis to his sons Branford, Delfeayo and Wynton.

Had I not walked out of high school the moment I did I would have starved.

Read John Taylor Gatto’s THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION: https://lvassembly.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/underground-history-of-america-education.pdf .

If that is daunting read his essay AGAINST SCHOOL (How public education cripples our kids and why) : https://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm   .

I end with these words from David Mamet: “Invent nothing. Deny nothing. Stand up. Speak up. Stay out of school.”

In the story of White Buffalo Woman one of the two men to first see her desires to rape her. A cloud of smoke rises. He is left behind as ashes.

Men have raped the earth to get the riches they desired. The fruit of that rape is now clear for all to see.

As fires rage all over the earth we see brutality everywhere. In the name of what they believe we see people murdering everywhere. Everywhere we see violence.

Do not be alarmed.

From the ashes of the old the new is rising.

–Reg Hartt 2021–06–27.

Not many people got fan letters from Jane Jacobs. I got several. Here are two.

Reading this I learned of the vision of Crazy Horse. I am seeing his vision unfold.

“You will encounter in your travels folks of your own age who chose the institutional path, who became administrators rather than doers. These folks chose to serve an institutional authority in exchange for a paycheck, and these folks are going to be with you for the rest of your life, and you who come up off the street, who live without certainty day to day and year to year are going to have to bear with being called children by these institutional types; you will, as Shakespeare tells us, endure ‘the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.’ “It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.”– David Mamet, TRUE AND FALSE. (Edited)

Jane Jacobs’ last book is a warning ignored about the mass dumbing down we now find ourselves mired in.

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