People From Pittsburgh

"Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled."

"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."

"I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience"

"It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does."

"I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community."

"Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for ‘basic skills’ practice is a smoke screen"

"People learn to read, write and do arithmetic just fine anyway. There are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total."

"Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid."

"It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors."

"Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human."

"There isn’t a right way to be educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen — that probably guarantees it won't."

"How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum, or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn, or deliberate indifference to it."

"Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."

"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents... The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid."

"There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen – that probably guarantees it won't... We don't need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it."

"I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us... I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."

"When American schooling stopped being primary for mental development and character training,.. it became a training ground to supply the existing economy with a particular kind of labor and customers that it needed. One buried byproduct of this shift was to sabotage free market principles. Because by conditioning children to what is, instead of what could be, it heavily subsidized existed commerce and social political dispositions."

"The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives."

"I’ve taught public school for 26 years but I just can’t do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn’t hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I’m going to quit, I think. I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in."

"I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true."

"I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free."

"Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education, I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable."

"Regimentation, methodization, systematization, standardization , organization, coordination, disciplined arrangements, conformity - these things are at the very heart of our national state policies, and are the poison that has killed our families and left individual survivors in a numbed, angry, nearly hysterical condition."

"A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people—and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools."

"Imprisonment schooling has no justification in science, common sense, or history. Get your children out of such schools if you want them to be educated. School means living up to the expectations of total strangers; education involves meeting your own expectations—GOAL SCHOOLS ARE UTTERLY INDIFFERENT TO."

"Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference."

"Limiting the power of government, in order to liberate the individual, was the great American revolutionary insight. Too much cooperation, avoiding conflict from ordinary people, these things aren’t acceptable in America although they may suit China, Indonesia, Britain, or Germany just fine. In America the absence of conflict is a sign of regression toward a global mean, hardly progress by our lights if you’ve seen much of the governance of the rest of the world where common people are crushed like annoying insects if they argue."

"I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."

"Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within…"

"[M]andatory public education in this country … was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending such a herd via public education."

"School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently."

"The campaign I’m donating my rotten face for is ‘Dead things should be buried, not eaten.’ Being a vegetarian, it kind of shows how gory it is to see ripped off arms and ripped off hands of people of our own species. But I think it brings a campy, disturbing and grotesque realization to the fact that that’s how animals are being treated, especially in commercial farming. … There’s been a lot of focus on cannibalism. Which is funny, because if you treat all creatures the same, then a lot of Americans are cannibals."

"We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil."

"If Veblen failed to develop an evolutionary methodology, he also failed to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory to explain in detail how institutions evolve in the cultural environment and what sorts of interaction occur between economic activity and institutional structures. Veblen was something of an intellectual butterfly, and he often lacked the patience to elaborate his ideas into a coherent system. But he teemed with fragmentary insights, and these can be pieced together to suggest the outlines of a Veblenian scheme of cultural evolution - what might be called a ‘pre-theory’ of cultural change."

"One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly."

"Standard economists don't seem to understand exponential growth. Ecological economics recognizes that the economy, like any other subsystem on the planet, cannot grow forever. And if you think of an organism as an analogy, organisms grow for a period and then they stop growing. They can still continue to improve and develop, but without physically growing, because if organisms did that you’d end up with nine-billion-ton hamsters. There is a great video on this."

"The 2008 financial meltdown is the result of under-regulated markets built on an ideology of free market capitalism and unlimited economic growth. The fundamental problem is that the underlying assumptions of this ideology are not consistent with what we now know about the real state of the world. The financial world is, in essence, a set of markers for goods, services, and risks in the real world and when those markers are allowed to deviate too far from reality, “adjustments” must ultimately follow and crisis and panic can ensue. To solve this and future financial crisis requires that we reconnect the markers with reality. What are our real assets and how valuable are they? To do this requires both a new vision of what the economy is and what it is for, proper and comprehensive accounting of real assets, and new institutions that use the market in its proper role of servant rather than master."

"Ecology, as it is currently practiced, sometimes deals with human impacts on ecosystems, but the more common tendency is to stick to 'natural' systems."

"This new model of development would be based clearly on the goal of sustainable human well-being. It would use measures of progress that clearly acknowledge this goal. It would acknowledge the importance of ecological sustainability, social fairness, and real economic efficiency. Ecological sustainability implies recognizing that natural and social capital are not infinitely substitutable for built and human capital, and that real biophysical limits exist to the expansion of the market economy."

"Real economic efficiency implies including all resources that affect sustainable human well-being in the allocation system, not just marketed goods and services. Our current market allocation system excludes most non-marketed natural and social capital assets and services that are critical contributors to human well-being. The current economic model ignores this and therefore does not achieve real economic efficiency. A new, sustainable ecological economic model would measure and include the contributions of natural and social capital and could better approximate real economic efficiency."

"Ecological Economics studies the ecology of humans and the economy of nature, the web of interconnections uniting the economic subsystem to the global ecosystem of which it is a part."

"The long term solution to the financial crisis is to move beyond the ‘growth at all costs’ economic model to a model that recognizes the real costs and benefits of growth."

"Ecologists and economists made unlikely partners -- indeed, these disciplines have often appeared at odds with, and determined to ignore, each other. As Robert Costanza, the founding president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, acknowledged in the inaugural issue of Ecological Economics, "Ecology, as it is currently practiced, sometimes deals with human impacts on ecosystems, but the more common tendency is to stick to 'natural' systems."5 The modeling of ecological communities or systems seemed purposely to leave out the human economy.6 At the same time, economists either took for granted or ignored the principles, powers, or forces that ecologists believed governed the world's natural communities. The market mechanism, or competitive equilibrium, that mainstream economists studied assigned no role to the natural ecosystem.7 Ecological economics sought to embed the study of economics within a larger understanding of how ecosystems work."

"The teaching of Russell is contrary to all the accepted standards of faith, both Protestant and Catholic. He denies not only the fundamentals of the Bible regarding the God-given plan of salvation, but admits that his views stand against the whole of Christendom, without exception, and denounces every creed and every orthodox church from the beginning of his dispensation to the present. He claims that he is the only one who has the proper understanding of the Scriptures, and condemns, without exception, the translators of the Bible and all ministers as untrue and deceitful. He does this only to attract attention to himself and his cult. For a man to condemn all other men as liars, deceitful and cowards, as Russell is doing for the purpose of exalting himself, makes him a deceiver and a false prophet, and one who is not to be trusted in matters of religion, to say nothing of morals."

"Instead of using religious activity to acquire material wealth for himself, Brother Russell spent all his resources in the Lord’s work. After his death it was reported in The Watch Tower: “He devoted his private fortune entirely to the cause to which he gave his life. He received the nominal sum of $11.00 per month for his personal expenses. He died, leaving no estate whatsoever.”"

"The modern Witness believes that Russell was selected and used by God because of his understanding of the various facets of the return of Christ and the end of the age. The evidence proves otherwise. The doctrinal system he developed was nothing more than a rehash of concepts and beliefs derived from other people whose theories had been in existence for a long time. Probably the only unique feature about Russell was the he took all these borrowed concepts and applied smart merchandising methods to spread them far and wide."

"Russell referred quite openly to the assistance in Bible study he had received from others.... C. T. Russell used the Watch Tower and other publications to uphold Bible truths and to refute false religious teachings and human philosophies that contradicted the Bible. He did not, however, claim to discover new truths.....What about other Bible doctrines that were discussed in the Watch Tower and other publications? Did Russell take full credit for uncovering these gems of truth? Explained Russell: “We found that for centuries various sects and parties had split up the Bible doctrines amongst them, blending them with more or less of human speculation and error . . . Then how did Russell perceive the role that he and his associates played in publishing Scriptural truth? He explained: “Our work . . . has been to bring together these long scattered fragments of truth and present them to the Lord’s people—not as new, not as our own, but as the Lord’s. . . . We must disclaim any credit even for the finding and rearrangement of the jewels of truth.” He further stated: “The work in which the Lord has been pleased to use our humble talents has been less a work of origination than of reconstruction, adjustment, harmonization.”"

"An examination of Russell's eschatalogy reveals that he was an avid reader, and if not a plagiarist, certainly was given to "creative adaptation". The current leadership of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society likes to claim a special spiritual authority from God that they trace back to Russell. They would have the world believe that Russell uniquely understood the "times and seasons" that he had found himself in, and that he was led by God to understand the element of chronology that is the backbone of their belief system to this day. Although the vast majority of millenarian groups ultimately abandoned their theories, the Watch Tower system is basically a carryover of stale nineteenth-century Adventism."

"Charles Taze Russell left a legacy of prophetic speculation, pseudoreligious theology, and pseudoscientific, pseudomedical quackery that persists in the present-day Watch Tower organization with continued change and adaptation (a hallmark of Watch Tower policy). His life was plagued by lawsuits, controversy, a disintigrated marriage, and the failure of all his prophecies. In his lifetime he played many roles, some of which were ascribed to him by his followers - businessman, orator, writer, teacher, Bible exegete, scholar, historian, medical advisor, and, above all, prophet of God."

"The two most prominent messengers, are the first and the last - St. Paul and Pastor Russell."