Flowery Platitudes and Cliches

Beware of flowery platitudes that sound wise and spiritual, while actually articulating nothing at all. They are generalizations that lack context, and are meant to easily unite people together without the need to provide depth or substance. Spirituality is able to go intellectually, emotionally, and physically deeper, and does so through providing the proper context, it answers a myriad of key questions, and it promotes further questioning—thus spirituality furthers our […] Read more »

The Art of Asking Essential Questions

The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our thinking. The quality of our thinking, in turn, is determined by the quality of our questions, for questions are the engine, the driving force behind thinking. Without questions, we have nothing to think about. Without essential questions, we often fail to focus our thinking on the significant and substantive. When we ask essential questions, we deal with what […] Read more »

Argument from Ignorance

I just saw a comment on a YouTube video of mine that amounted to this, “since science has not proved the existence of a soul, it must not exist”. This is a self-deceived argument though, as it is a fallacy in informal logic called the “Argument from Ignorance”. Many people use this argument to further their materialistic, “God doesn’t exist” worldview, as they have an emotional need to rationalize away […] Read more »

The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 4), by John Taylor Gatto

Where did the American school system come from? And what are its true purposes? These are excerpts from John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education Chapter Seven: The Prussian Connection, Section 93: “The Technology of Subjection” and Section 94: “The German/American Reichsbank” Get the book: http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf For Part 1, CLICK HERE. For Part 2, CLICK HERE. For Part 3, CLICK HERE. Read more »

Why Is it Important to Avoid Compromise?

Why should we avoid compromise and meeting in the middle as a means of solving our problems? We’ve all heard the adage that “we each have our own subjective truth”, and while this may be true, it does not negate the reality of an objective truth’s existence. There are gradients of truth, just as there are gradients of lies. Subjective truth and objective truth are very different, whereas subjective truth […] Read more »

The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 3), by John Taylor Gatto

Where did the American school system come from? And what are its true purposes? This is an excerpt from John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education Chapter Seven: The Prussian Connection, Section 90: “The Prussian Reform Movement” and Section 91: “Travels’ Reports” Get the book: http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf For Part 1, CLICK HERE. For Part 2, CLICK HERE. For Part 4, CLICK HERE. Read more »

The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 2), by John Taylor Gatto

Where did the American school system come from? And what are its true purposes? This is an excerpt from John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education Chapter Seven: The Prussian Connection, Section 89: “The Long Reach of the Teutonic Knights” The second installment in the second phase of the School Sucks Project’s Best of John Taylor Gatto series. For Part 1, CLICK HERE. For Part 3, CLICK […] Read more »

The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 1), by John Taylor Gatto

Where did the American school system come from? And what are its true purposes? This is an excerpt is from John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education Chapter Seven: The Prussian Connection, Section 88: “The Land of Frankenstein” The first installment in the second phase of the School Sucks Project’s Best of John Taylor Gatto series Get the book: http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf (the video looks like it was removed, […] Read more »

Teaching is Like Crafting a Sculpture

“In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction. In other words, I dropped […] Read more »

Pronoun Magic! Tips For Aspiring Politicians/Criminals

“We” is a powerful and dangerous word. And peaceful people should avoid using it when talking about the actions of violent strangers. Imagine you lived in a neighborhood controlled by a violent gang… What if you started using first-person plural pronouns, like “we,” “us'” and “our” when discussing the gang and their activities, even though you were not in the gang, you didn’t know anyone in the gang, and no […] Read more »

John Gatto on the Prussian Education System

John Taylor Gatto (born December 15, 1935) is an American retired school teacher of 29 years and 8 months and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and of what he characterizes as the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions. Gatto was born in the Pittsburgh-area steel town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. In his youth he attended public schools throughout […] Read more »

Why do we Experience Jealousy?

Jealous people may feel that they are justified in their jealous actions, or they may feel guilty for being jealous, but jealousy is always an effect of the inability to go deeper in a relationship. If a person is jealous sexually, it is only because they are unable to go deeper into their own sexuality, and thus unable to deepen with their partner(s). Emotional, spiritual, physical, and intellectual depth also […] Read more »