he should have died decades ago.
As someone once said. "I have never wished another man dead, but I have read many an obituary with extreme satisfaction"
"Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."
- Ch. 10 "Child Training"
- The last line here has sometimes been misquoted as "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure." It has also been attributed to, among others, Mark Twain and Winston Churchill. The misquoted version also frequently begins, "I've never wished a man dead..." or "I never wanted to see anybody die..."
Clarence Darrow - Wikiquote
Incidentally, he is one of the proponents of modern compulsory government schooling, the notion that the government has the right to force you to surrender your child to the state to be brain washed. A truly despicable character. There are several posters at this site that would probably greatly admire him. He is one of the first American atheists.
In the November 18, 1915 edition of the Washington Post, Darrow stated: “Chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.”
Clarence Darrow - Wikipedia
Some attribute my version of the quote to Twain, but I wasn't sure if that was real or not.
Yeah, Darrow seems to be a bit of a prick.
I'd heard that mis-attributation as well. I think that is purposeful in many respects, because Twain is so highly regarded in America, while the truth of Darrow is not widely known. If it were, school reform would be a high priority.
Most folks cannot imagine that modern schooling works precisely as it is intended to. Elites in both parties do not want to see any change.
Take a look at who Trump has picked for education secretary. While Betsy DeVos may seem like they are giving more freedom and autonomy to parents and local communities, the truth is, education standards, and the right to oversight of education will still not be up to the parents. This is an opportunity for huge profits for corporations, and really, at this point, can private enterprise do any worse? Look at the privatized prison system. If anything, we will see attacks on homeschooling and truancy as privatization seeks competition for more students. Schools will even more resemble prisons than they already do, it will be an absolute nightmare.
It will be fobbed of to corporations for profit. This is really switching the education model from a state socialist model, to a national socialist model. Either way, it is still enslaving the minds of the populace and ensuring that only the upper caste, the only ones who have a truly different set of laws, will have freedom from the caste system. Basically, they want to do to education what Obama did to healthcare.
How public education cripples our kids, and why
Against School, by John Taylor Gatto
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
We blame Chuck for being a monster, but the truth is, he was trained by compulsory education. A child institutionalized, isolated, alone, if tormented and teased, with a genius IQ with no love is bound to turn into either monster or a saint.
National Training School for Boys - Wikipedia
