An interview with John Taylor Gatto. He talks a bit slow but he's interesting, and some of the stuff he talks about here isn't in any of his books. 19 parts, in a playlist.

Ten classes that I think should be taught in elementary/high school, but usually aren't:

The U.S. Constitution.
Epistemology.
Personal finance.
International studies.
Economics.
Logical fallacies.
Protection from Propaganda.
Productivity/ergonomics/self-discipline.
Comparative religion.
Law.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/24/notes102407.DTL

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad. [...]

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single [high school] student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph.

I've noticed this too. Even just my generation (I'm 29) was a lot better than this current one. I don't exactly know how much of this is intentional and how much isn't (and it has to be at least partly intentional) but it's pretty horrible to watch. At least I can be grateful that every country isn't going through this, a lot of them still have an education system which does more good than harm.

Dream of school again; I was just mentioning to someone yesterday that I have a nightmare about school practically every week and that I think it's post-traumatic stress disorder or some such; but that very night that I said that I ironically had one of the best dreams about school I can remember. Okay, it wasn't about school, but it was in school. Unfortunately I was woken up from it too soon.

In it, I went through every grade as a ghost and imagined what it'd be like if I acted differently with the knowledge of things I had today (e.g. an adult's memory in a kid's body going through school once again), and it was much better. I was woken up when I got to the 10th grade.