Actually, Alexis de Tocqueville ran into internationally famous female American authors in 1831 on his visit that resulted in his rather famous book and judging from the  ACT and SAT scores the descendents of slaves are not universally receiving the best education possible in many urban public schools.
Finally, when I quote someone and show a link to the article it is to give others the opportunity to check out the entire article for themselves.
Mr. John Taylor Gatto is an interesting source with quite a lot of challenging observations
on the educational scene.
Cheers
R.E.Reis

----- Original Message -----
From: Herb Stahlke
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 12:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: IN ANSWER TO GRETCHEN'S QUESTION


Robert,

Where do you get these misconceptions!  We had a perfectly
literate country before 1852?  Women were not educated.  It was a
crime to educate slaves.  The poor did not get educated in most
communities.  Illiteracy was rife.

You've also taken Socrates seriously out of context.  He was
speaking in a culture in which literacy was limited to the elite.
Athens was a strictly statified society in which the lower classes
were educated only if those in the upper classes wanted a
particular person educated.  Further, his criticism was aimed at
the Sophists, not at teachers in the sense we think of them.
These were people who were paid as long as they pleased their
employer, and they didn't teach in anything like what we would
consider schools.

Herb Stahlke

<<< [log in to unmask] 12/12  9:59p >>>
You and I are confronted with a great mystery: we had a perfectly
literate country before 1852 when, for the first time, we got
government schooling shoved down our throats. How we achieved this
amazing literacy is wrapped up in the secret that reading, writing
and numbers are very easy to learn -- in spite of what you hear
from the reading, writing and number establishments. We aren't in
the mess we're in today because we don't know how to do things
right, but because "we" don't want to do them right. The
incredibly profitable school enterprise has deliberately selected
a procedure of literacy acquisition which is pedagogically
bankrupt; thousands of years ago Socrates predicted this would
happen if men were paid for teaching. He said they would make what
is easy to learn seem difficult, and what is mastered rapidly they
would stretch out over a long time.
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