[Speaker rubs hands]
America's education system is broken
Do you all agree?
[Expression indicates that most do]
Education in America looks like 'Banking Education'.
Banking? You're probably envisioning a building you enter and deposit money.
Depositing [Banking] is akin to opening the brain and depositing information in it.
Does it mean we think, review, analyze, discuss, challenge, and question information?
Nope.
We passively accept the information as it is spoon-fed to us.
[chewing]
That's the analogy. Does it mean that we eagerly and excitedly question, think,
and be excited to go to school?
Many have dropped out and have gone astray.
America's education does not work.
The Banking system is run and supported by white hearing men in positions of power
and money desiring control and profits.
Now moving onto deaf education. I need to hold onto that concept and
give you all a history lesson before explaining the current situation
Now, starting with public education, which had three goals.
First goal encourages acceptance and practicing the policies set forth by the
people in power.
Second goal is to worship. Not challenging the policies set forth.
The third goal is to encourage shopping and swallowing information.
That's all the three goals. How are those three goals accomplished?
Back in 1800's &1900's during the Industrial Revolution, the economy changed
cultures changed. The era promoted growth and came up with mass production methods.
For mass production to work, you must have mass consumption to exhaust the supply.
If you have all the supply and nobody buys it? Overstock!
The demand needs to be generated, with the ultimate goal of profit by those in control.
The ultimate goal is to generate as much profit as possible.
In the 1800's and 1900's lives were simple. People were farmers, growers, tailors
and were self-sustaining. Not by any means wealthy.
Mass production brought in the concept of buying things that people did not need.
In order to convince people to buy mass produced goods, they turned to the school
systems. To manipulate it and to set the goal of encouraging students to buy
the mass produced goods. With this, the system has turned to an environment for
students to not to think. Do you remember as a kid you had questions? Were you ever
told that you asked too many questions? Those who asked too many questions were
considered troublemakers. This fosters an environment to not to think.
This in turn, makes students passive and gullible. With this in place, the concept
of marketing emerged. Targeting those to buy items that they did not need.
People are led to believe the items are cool and must-haves. But really, don't need.
NOW, with policies and systems established by who? Not the government, not the people,
but the small elite rich community. One is the Rockefeller Foundation and the other
the Carnegie Institute.
For public education, in the past, students were not required to go to school.
Policies were established to force every student to go to school.
This was to ensure that the system would work as designed.
This would squelch students of their enthusiasm for learning.
Making them meek, timid, and passive. Thus, easier to control.
A person named Inglis analyzed and identified six major functions of public
education. Three of the six functions matched deaf education.
The first, differentiating function, secondly, selective function. The third, propaedeutic
function. For the differentiating function, labels were generated to divide based on
social economic status, disability, and so on. Each person has a label.
The selective function, with all labeling done, made sure there were no overlaps of
similar labels. To further separate the labeled groups and isolate them.
For propaedeutic, to have the labeled elite, rich, selective people to be given
education to how to control the other groups. The goal is to keep the power and
wealth within that elite group. To give them the tools to control and manipulate
other groups not within their group.
This leads to a large workforce of passive laborers from other groups to
be controlled by the elites.
With time, schools have become a chemical experiment.
For those who were troublemakers, along came Ritalin.
[mimics a docile student]
Other prescription experiments were done. All under the purpose of control.
We have standardized testing for the purposes of fixing policies as needed.
Studying behavior and other experiments, schools have become labs.
Eugenics, a man named Francis Galton in England was fascinated and studied
the passing down of successful and bright academics, physically fit soldiers who've
become leaders, poets, all passed down from their family bloodline.
He also studied the impoverished, the ne'er do wells, troublemakers,
and criminals. He studied both lineages, and came to the conclusion that it was
pre-determined by genetics. This applied to both successful and unsuccessful groups
With this, he dis-encouraged the inter-mingling of both groups.
America prospered with this concept, only accepting the best of the best to grow.
on track to successful growth.
Alexander Graham Bell embraced this concept. In 1929, A.G. Bell moved up the
ranks and became a leader of Eugenic Record. In 1884, A.G. Bell published
an article, singling out deaf people who married deaf people as deplorable.
Married deaf couples would have deaf babies, throwing the order of the world
into chaos. He wanted to prevent those acts and find a cure. A.G. Bell was funded by
people, two of them being Rockefeller and Carnegie.
With that, money were invested in both public education and deaf education from
the same people.
The 1% percent of our society, the rich and elite.
Controlling 99% percent of the general population
We've been discussing public education, the history, the Industrial Revolution,
Now to discuss deaf education among those topics. How does it fit in?
In 1790, with the French Revolution underway,
a battle of the people against the monarchy and churches
who were part of the elite, and controlling information.
The common people would go to those sources for their information.
Knowing that information was controlled, the people revolted. Be-headings
were done to Kings, Queens, and Church leaders. The battle was bloody.
With the systematic institutions of the elite overthrown and their sources of
information and knowledge gone, slowly began emerging schools, trainings,
and colleges. Where students became the teachers, teaching their peers.
At the same time, in Paris, France, St. Jacques Institution, the first public deaf
institution in the world was established. Jean Massieu, Charles-Michel de l'Épée,
Laurent Clerc all attended.
A man, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, considered as the father of
audiology, worked at the institute as a physician. He experimented on deaf
students including Clerc. He performed experiments quite gruesome.
Including nailing through the nose and cheek,
some students died as result of his experiments.
He took notes of his experiments following Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, a
French philosopher's analytic methods and approaches. Condillac's approach was
a disassociated, neutral person focusing solely on the objectives
Feelings and emotions of the subjects of the experiments were not noted or cared for.
Jean Marc Gaspard Itard also toured the newly founded schools, universities, and
training programs to teach how deaf-mutes could talk, how deaf-mutes could hear.
Those attending Itard's programs later became doctors, joining their elite group,
where in their communities, doctors were viewed in esteem, with their wealth of
knowledge. Remember kings, queens, and church leaders are already gone at this time.
Doctors were now viewed as the top of the knowledge foundation, and even considered
as a god. Nobody dared to question or challenge them. With this, the blending of
the medical community and the education community started to happen.
This overlap of two communities generated a new category: special education.
One of the many categories under special education is deaf education
Now I want to ask you, what's the real goal of deaf education?
Public schools? Charter schools? Institutions?
All of them share the same thing, to control the minds, esteem, self-worth of
deaf students. To make them question their contribution to the world as a whole.
The world is looking down on them, with the purpose of elimination.
Pedagogy, the philosophy of education, aims to have deaf students to view hearing people
as their superior. You have hearing teachers for the deaf, teaching them to adapt to
the hearing world. The real world. All of this leads to the deaf student's goals
and aspirations to become a hearing person.
Our goals, self assessments, identity, aspirations, negotiations,
power literacy(?) are eliminated and ignored. We are instead told
to be hearing.
[Speaker recites a quote by Paulo Freiere which isn't clear]
(?) "Those in power tends to make the people want to be like them" (?)
For deaf people, this is interpreted as, "In order for deaf people to have power,
we must be hearing."
So, deaf education, summed up is your soul and your mind under control.