Extraordinary Discourse 140 Special

 Back to (ugh!) School

A bag of anti-school cookies, fresh out of the oven!

This podcast is dedicated to the school teachers I happen to love.

Come sup with the great mavericks of "education." People who loved kids more than their careers. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Edgar Z Friedenberg, Jean Houston, Robert Anton Wilson, Marshall McLuhan, and more!

Thanks to London Real for Tim Freke and much else besides.

Here's the Unplugged Mom podcast


This is the second in this podcast series to examine schooling. More of the same and different here.


I recently received a beautiful paper from a school teacher who spent twenty-five or thirty years right in the front-line trenches, in the classroom. She gives the perspective that armchair generals sitting back in their ivory towers just don't have. Her title tells it all: "Torch This Tower." She states there is no facet of the American school situation which is at all redeemable and believes we ought to eradicate the entire thing down to the very rock bottom, clear the grounds totally, and rethink what do we do from here. This has been my position for years and years.

If we look at any system and find that it has an error within it, we can address the error and consider the possibilities of correction. But, if the entire system from beginning to end is one whole, integrated, total error, then there is nothing that can be done. There is nothing, zero. That, I believe, is the American school situation today. Nothing can be done.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, 1998