THE HOOD SCHOLAR

"Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them". -Peter Senge "The Fifth Discipline"

What do you want your future incorporate? Wealth, fame, fortune, poverty, destitution, squalor. Well, the way you think determines where you will be in the future hands down. Thought, whether it be conscious or subconscious, is the essential building block of all human action and activity. Genocide and reproduction, poverty and wealth, violence and peace - all start as thoughts in one's mind before they become realty. The use of one's thought can steer people into any future they see fit; however, people tend to ignore their thoughts. This allows entities external from one's self to steer one's mind, haphazardly. For instance, the use of propaganda in Germany during WWII provided the masses with just enough thought stimuli to place the in an acquiescent state of complacence; or more currently, the flow of commercials that program phone numbers in one's mind. "Can anyone tell me what number this is? 877-393-4448". One's thought can be controlled and directed just as a glass of soda can be replaced with water - using the flow of a different substance or a different flow of information.

Attainment of the control of one's own thoughts is not hard. Gaining control of one's thoughts requires a slight increase in one's use of self-discipline. Step one, figure out which thoughts to implant in one's own mind. Step two, eliminate all sources of negative thoughts (television, movies, et cetera). Step three, replace those influences with other sources of information that are conducive to your end result. This is something that should not be taken for granted, and should be incorporated into a plan of action towards a desired end result.

Your end game determines the thoughts you must implant. Your thoughts create your future; therefore, the future you want to create must create your thoughts from now on. You must refer to successful individuals that are doing something that may interest you ...

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:

The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.

In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.

The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!

In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.

Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.

I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.

The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.

We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.

Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.

None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no "international competition" that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.

How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.

Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.

Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.

With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.

"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.

Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.

At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.

After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.

Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

I recently became introduced to Pimpin' Ken Ivy on a hip-hop site (www.worldstarhiphop.com). Pimpin' Ken - in the below video - interviews 50 Cent. 50 Cent describes his transition from being a one-hit wonder, to being nowhere but back in the hood, to being in the upper echelons of society. I thought thi would be good for yall lil' nigguhz. Uno.

The world is fu*ked up. It's like I'm starting not to like the future. The hip-hop masses' personality, style, and overall level of attention deficit disorder is dictated and influenced by media. A long time ago, the fans of music had real people to model themselves after.
We had:

Frank Sinatra
"Alcohol is the enemy, but the bible says, 'Love your enemies'"

Johnny Cash
"Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money"

Miles Davis
"If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow"

Mohammed Ali
"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

These are the options we had. Real swagger, before when clothes didn't make the man.

But now, we have:

Kanye West
"Gays really be knowing how to dress .. cause if people see you lookin' at 'em ... so I look at the quick then I gotta look away." - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W83hVi8jBNg

Little Wayne
"I kiss my daddy."

The effects on my hip-hop demographic, alone, has been devastating. We have men wearing women's jeans. We have women wearing men's jeans.

You have entertainers, admittedly, dressing like homosexuals (as seen in the link above), which starts to synthesize my favorite music genre (hip-hop) with homosexuality. So now, the dudes, dress and act, less 'man' like. The women notice this change, subconsciously. Hmmm. It may be a coincidence that women seems to be more bi-curious lately; or maybe because a lot the 'fly' dudes all dress like homosexuals.

I am telling you sh*t is ugly out here. You have people fighting against gay marriage. Why? Not because they are homophobic, but because once the state condones homosexuality. They become obligated to create "pro-tolerance" sex-ed programs in schools - to reduce hate crimes in the state (due to the increase in homosexual voter presence in that state) - which teach children, at a young age, that homosexuality is okay. Don't heterosexuals have rights nowadays?

I don't have an issue with the homosexuality; what people do in their private time is their business. I just see the entire country is becoming demoralized and blinded to this transformation. Perceptions and the mind have become hypermutable to the repetitious whims and desires of those who decide they want to impose their debased "auto-tuned" ideologies on the rest of society.

Why am I so livid?

I got turned down at a bar filled with beautiful women and cheap drinks for not wearing skinny jeans!

WTF.

~~~~~~~

Don Duval Patterson
Series 2009 D

Hey. I know yall may thing I am a little crazy for this one; but every morning, I watch Mike Tyson knockouts before I prepare my day. I have a creed taped to my mirror, I read every morning and night as a result of this. I thought I'd share it with you. As many of you may or may not know, I am in a preparation phase right now. I want to be intellectually on the level to not just graduate an Ivy League, but dominate it. Slowly and quietly while lames criticize just like in LaGuardia CC.

Anyways, here it is.

I'm the best ever. I'm the most brutal, most vicious, and most ruthless student there's ever been. There's no one can stop me. Other students, conquor? No, Im Alexander. They're no Alexander. Im the best ever. There's never been anyone as ruthless. I'm Sonny Liston. I'm Jack Dempsey. There's no one like me. I'm from Marcy. There's no one that can match me. My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable, and I'm just furious. I want the professor's heart. I want to eat their children. Praise be to Allah.

"When we go to decide upon a subject without really troubling to examine what it is, then at best we only inform ourselves of what is said about it; and our judgment of it will be founded on nothing more than a sort of pretense or imagination not reflected by the facts. If there is error in the reports we rely upon, then that error becomes our own; and this again in its turn confirms error in others. The mistake of one becomes a public mistake, and then it is consecrated; so that he must be a bold man who would question it, or even refuse it subscription"(Mason 5).

A lot of people live life as everlasting tyro. Never questioning the established doctrines, uniform schedules, and 'natural' order of things. The study of chess and application of that study to the approach of one's life, I believe, can change how one thinks and looks at life. When I say study, I do not mean play as an amateur. I mean, to really study the game as all the constants are exactly the same in human life - limited resources (pieces or people), limited space (corporate building, target market, or chess board), limited force (range of available motion between two bodies), limited time (amount of moves available before successful or failed completion of a desired goal, or amount of moves available before checkmate or before being checkmated).

The study of chess allows people to see the world with more foresight than the average acquiescent individual.

This movie is crack. Definitely.