[D66] The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

[R.O.]

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  The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

by John Taylor Gatto <http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/>
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Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach 
best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't 
know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. 
Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we 
now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - 
but dumbness was transformed.

Now dumb people aren't just ignorant; they're the victims of the 
non-thought of secondhand ideas. Dumb people are now well-informed about 
the opinions of Time magazine and CBS, The New York Times and the 
President; their job is to choose which pre-thought thoughts, which 
received opinions, they like best. The élite in this new empire of 
ignorance are those who know the most pre-thought thoughts.

Mass dumbness is vital to modern society. The dumb person is wonderfully 
flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government 
policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The 
more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to 
predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is 
think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling 
crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't 
supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking 
gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow 
rules of scientific precision.

Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - 
which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful 
thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies 
but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only 
by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of 
independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a 
social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a 
schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to 
allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - 
although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, 
sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are 
set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the 
best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning 
they can tolerate.

The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more 
dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought 
control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual 
mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking 
becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the 
intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's 
The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of 
Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in 
standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, 
careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed 
custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of 
substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption 
of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until 
his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most 
influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far.

The great theological scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised this issue of 
the new dumbness in his brilliant analysis of Nazism, in which he sought 
to comprehend how the best-schooled nation in the world, Germany, could 
fall under its sway. He concluded that Nazism could be understood only 
as the psychological product of good schooling. The sheer weight of 
received ideas, pre-thought thoughts, was so overwhelming that 
individuals gave up trying to assess things for themselves. Why 
struggle- to invent a map of the world or of the human conscience when 
schools and media offer thousands of ready-made maps, pre-thought thoughts?

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle and upper-middle-class 
people, who have already been made shallow by the multiple requirements 
to conform. Too many people, uneasily convinced that they must know 
something because of a degree, diploma, or license, remain so convinced 
until a brutal divorce, alienation from their children, loss of 
employment, or periodic fits of meaninglessness manage to tip the 
precarious mental balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn 
adult lives.
Listen to William Harris again, the dark genius of American schooling, 
the man who gave you scientifically age-graded classrooms:

The great purposes of school can be realized better in dark, airless, 
ugly places than in beautiful halls. It is to master the physical self, 
to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to 
withdraw from the external world.

Harris thought, a hundred years ago, that self-alienation was the key to 
a successful society. Filling the young mind with the thoughts of others 
and surrounding it with ugliness - that was the passport to 
self-alienation. Who can say that he was wrong?

II

I want to give you a yardstick, a gold standard, by which to measure 
good schooling. The Shelter Institute in Bath, Maine will teach you how 
to build a three thousand square-foot, multi-level Cape Cod home in 
three weeks' time, whatever your age. If you stay another week, it will 
show you how to make your own posts and beams; you'll actually cut them 
out and set them up. You'll learn wiring, plumbing, insulation, the 
works. Twenty thousand people have learned how to build a house there 
for about the cost of one month's tuition in public school. (Call Patsy 
Hennon at 207/442-7938, and she'll get you started on building your own 
home.) For just about the same money you can walk down the street in 
Bath to the Apprentice Shop at the Maine Maritime Museum [now in 
Rockport - ed.] and sign on for a one-year course (no vacations, forty 
hours a week) in traditional wooden boat building. The whole tuition is 
eight hundred dollars, but there's a catch: they won't accept you as a 
student until you volunteer for two weeks, so they can get to know you 
and you can judge what it is you're getting into. Now you've invested 
thirteen months and fifteen hundred dollars and you have a house and a 
boat. What else would you like to know? How to grow food, make clothes, 
repair a car, build furni-ture, sing? Those of you with a historical 
imagination will recognize Thomas Jefferson's prayer for schooling - 
that it would teach useful knowledge. Some places do: the best schooling 
in the United States today is coming out of museums, libraries, and 
private institutes. If anyone wants to school your kids, hold them to 
the standard of the Shelter Institute and you'll do fine.

As long as we're questioning public schooling, we should question 
whether there really is an abstraction called "the public" at all, 
except in the ominous calculations of social engineers. As a boy from 
the banks of the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania, I find the 
term insulting, a cartoon of social reality. If an institution that robs 
people of their right to self-determination can call itself "public", if 
being "public" means it can turn families into agents of the state, 
making parents spy on and harass their sons and daughters because a 
schoolteacher tells them to; if the state can steal your home because 
you can't pay its "public" school taxes, and state courts can break up 
your family if you refuse to allow the state to tell your children what 
to think - then the word public is a label for garbage and for people 
who allow themselves to be treated like slaves.

A few weeks is all that the Shelter Institute asks for to give you a 
beautiful Cape Cod home; a few months is all Maine Maritime asks for to 
teach you boat-building and rope-making, lobstering and sail-making, 
fishing and naval architecture. We have too much schooling, not too 
little. Hong Kong, with its short school year, whips Japan in every 
scientific or mathematical competition. Israel, with its long school 
year, can't keep up with Flemish Belgium, which has the shortest school 
year in the world.

Somebody's been lying to you. Sweden, a rich, healthy, and beautiful 
country, with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything, won't 
allow children to enter school before they're seven years old. The total 
length of Swedish schooling is nine years, not twelve, after which the 
average Swede runs circles around the over-schooled American. Why don't 
you know these things? To whose advantage is it that you don't?

When students enroll in a Swedish school, the authorities ask three 
questions: (l) Why do you want to go to this school? (2) What do you 
want to gain from the experience? (3) What are you interested in?

And they listen to the answers. Can you build a house or a boat? Can you 
grow food, make clothing, dig a well, sing a song (your own song, that 
is), make your own children happy, weave a whole life from the everyday 
world around you? No, you say, you can't? Then listen to me&emdash;you 
have no business with my kid.

In my own life, with my own children, I'm sorry I lacked the courage to 
say what Hester Prynne, the wearer of the scarlet letter, said to the 
Puritan elders when they tried to take away her daughter. Alone and 
friendless, dirt poor, ringed about by enemies, she said, "Over my dead 
body." A few weeks ago a young woman called me from Stroudsburg, 
Pennsylvania to tell me the state had just insisted she stop 
home-schooling her little girl, Chrissie. The state was going to force 
her to send Chrissie to school. She said she was going to fight, first 
with the law, although she didn't know where the money would come from, 
and then by any means she had. If I had to bet on this young, single 
mother or the State of Pennsylvania to win, I'd bet on the lady because 
what l was really hearing her say was, "Over my dead body." I wish I'd 
been able to say that when the state came to take my own children. I 
didn't. But if I'm born again I promise you that's what I will say.
A few days ago I got a call from a newspaper that wanted some advice for 
parents about how to launch their children into school. All the reporter 
wanted was a sound byte from a former New York State Teacher of the 
Year. What I said was this:

Don't cooperate with your children's school unless the school has come 
to you in person to work out a meeting of the minds - on your turf, not 
theirs. Only a desperado would blindly trust his children to a 
collection of untested strangers and hope for the best. Parents and 
school personnel are just plain natural adversaries. One group is trying 
to make a living; the other is trying to make a work of art called a 
family. If you allow yourself to be co-opted by flattery, seduced with 
worthless payoffs such as special classes or programs, intimidated by 
Alice in Wonderland titles and degrees, you will become the enemy 
within, the extension of state schooling into your own home. Shame on 
you if you allow that. Your job is to educate, the schoolteacher's is to 
school; you work for love, the teacher for money. The interests are 
radically different, one an individual thing, the other a collective. 
You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time 
and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, a herd, or 
an anthill.

III

How did I survive for nearly thirty years in a system for which I feel 
such disgust and loathing? I want to make a confession in the hope it 
will suggest strategy to other teachers: I did it by becoming an active 
saboteur, in small ways and large. What I did resolutely was to teach 
kids what I'm saying here - that schooling is bad business unless it 
teaches you how to build a boat or a house; that giving strangers 
intimate information about yourself is certainly to their advantage, but 
seldom to your own.

On a daily basis I consciously practiced sabotage, breaking laws 
regularly, forcing the fixed times and spaces of schooling to become 
elastic, falsifying records so the rigid curricula of those places could 
be what individual children needed. I threw sand in the gears by 
encouraging new teachers to think dialectically so that they wouldn't 
fit into the pyramid of administration. I exploited the weakness of the 
school's punitive mechanism, which depends on fear to be effective, by 
challenging it in visible ways, showing I did not fear it, setting 
administrators against each other to prevent the juggernaut from 
crushing me. When that didn't work I recruited community forces to 
challenge the school - businessmen, politicians, parents, and 
journalists - so I would be given a wide berth.
Once, under heavy assault, I asked my wife to run for school board. She 
got elected, fired the superintendent, and then punished his cronies in 
a host of imaginative ways.

But what I am most proud of is this: I undermined the confidence of the 
young in the school institution and replaced it with confidence in their 
own minds and hearts. I thumbed my nose at William Torrey Harris and 
gave to my children (although I was well into manhood before I shook off 
the effects of my own schooling) what had been given to me by the green 
river Monongahela and the steel city of Pittsburgh: love of family, 
friends, culture, and neighborhood, and a cup overflowing with 
self-respect. I taught my kids how to cheat destiny so successfully that 
they created a record of astonishing success that deserves a book 
someday. Some of my kids left school to go up the Amazon and live with 
Indian tribes to study on their own the effects of government 
dam-building on traditional family life; some went to Nicaragua and 
joined combat teams to study the amazing hold of poetry on the lives of 
common people in that land; some made award-winning movies; some became 
comedians; some succeeded at love, some failed. All learned to argue 
with Fate in the form of social engineering.

IV

I hope you saw the news story a while back about a national milk 
price-rigging scheme in schools from Florida to Utah. Fifty-six arrests 
have already been made in a caper that's existed most of this century. 
Schools pay more for milk than any other bulk buyer. Does that surprise 
you? Ask your own school administrator what unit price he pays for 
school milk and he'll look at you like your marbles are gone. How should 
he know, why should he care? An assistant principal once said to me, 
"It's not your money. What are you getting excited about?"

What if I told you that he was the second best school administrator I 
met in thirty years? He was. That's the standard we've established. The 
waste in schools is staggering. People are hired and titles created for 
jobs nobody needs. There's waste in services, waste in precious time 
spent moving herds of children back and forth through corridors at the 
sound of a horn. In my experience, poor schools waste much more than 
rich schools, and rich schools waste more than you could believe.

The only public aspect of these places is that they function as a jobs 
project, although large numbers of these jobs are set aside as political 
patronage. Public schools can't understand how the average private 
school can make profit on a per-seat cost less than half the "free" 
public charge; they can't understand how the average religious school 
makes do on even less. Homeschooling is the biggest puzzle of all. A 
principal once said to me, "Those people must be sick to spend so much 
time with children and not get paid for it!"

Consider the fantasy of teacher certification. Teachers are licensed and 
paid as though they are specialists, but they rarely are. For example, a 
science teacher is almost never actually a scientist - a man or woman 
who thinks about the secrets of nature as a private passion and pursues 
this interest on personal time. How many science classes in this country 
actually make any serious attempt to discover anything or to add to 
human knowledge? They are orderly ways of killing time, nothing more.

Kids are set to memorizing science vocabulary, repeating well-worn 
procedures certain to work, chanting formulas exactly as they have been 
indoctrinated to chant commercials from TV. The science teacher is a 
publicist for political truths set down in state-approved science textbooks.

Anyone who thinks school science is the inevitable precursor of real 
science is very innocent, indeed; of a piece, I think, with those poor, 
intelligent souls who, aware that television destroys the power to think 
by providing pre-seen sights, pre-thought thoughts, and unwholesome 
fantasies, still believe somehow that PBS television must be an 
exception to the rule.

If you would like to know how scientists are really made, pick up a 
wonderful book called Discovering, published in 1989 by Harvard 
University Press. In it you'll learn from a prominent scientist himself 
that not one major scientific discovery of this century, including 
exotica like superconductivity, came from an academic laboratory; or a 
corporate or govemment laboratory, or a school laboratory. You could 
have guessed the last, but I surprised you with the others, didn't I? 
All came from garages, attics, and basements; all were managed with 
cheap, simple equipment and eccentric, personalized procedures of 
investigation. School is a perfect place to turn science into a 
religion, but it's the wrong place to learn science, for sure.

HARRIS THOUGHT, A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THAT SELF-ALIENATION WAS THE KEY TO 
A SUCCESSFUL SOCIETY. WHO CAN SAY THAT HE WAS WRONG?

The specialists in English, math, social studies, and the rest of the 
rainbow of progressive subjects are only marginally more competent, if 
at all. If three million teachers were actually the specialists their 
licenses claim, they would be a major voice in national life and 
policy-making; if we are honest, we must wonder how it is possible for 
an army so large to be so silent, of such little consequence, in spite 
of the new hokum being retailed about "schoolbased management." Don't 
misunderstand me: teachers are frequently good people, intelligent 
people, talented people who work very hard. But regardless of how bright 
they are, how gracefully they "schoolteach," or how well they control 
children's behavior (which is, after all, what they are hired to do; if 
they can't do that, they are fired, but if they can, little else really 
matters) - the net result of their efforts and our expense is surely 
very little or even nothing indeed, often it leaves children worse off 
in terms of mental development and character formation than they were 
before being "taught." Schools that seem to be successful almost always 
are made to appear so by selective enrollment of self-motivated children.

The best way into the strange world of compulsory schooling is through 
books. I always knew real books and schoolbooks were different, but I 
didn't become conscious of the particulars until I got weary one day of 
New York City's brainless English curriculum and decided to teach Moby 
Dick to mainstream eighth-grade English classes. I discovered that the 
White Whale is too big for the forty-five-minute bell breaks of a junior 
high school. I couldn't make it "fit." But the editors of the school 
edition of Moby Dick had provided a package of prefabricated questions 
and nearly a hundred interpretations of their own. Every chapter began 
and ended with a barrage of these interventions. I came to see that the 
school edition wasn't a real book at all but a disguised indoctrination. 
The book had been rendered teacher-proof and student-proof.

VI

This jigsaw fragmentation, designed to make the job site safe from its 
employees, is usually credited to Frederick Taylor's work of sinister 
genius, Scientific Management, written at the turn of this century. But 
that is wrong. The system was really devised before the American 
Revolution, in eighteenth-century Prussia, by Frederick the Great, and 
honed to perfection in early nineteenth-century Prussia after its 
humiliating defeat by Napoleon in 1806. A new system of schooling was 
the instrument out of which Prussian vengeance was shaped, a system that 
reduced human beings during their malleable years to reliable machine 
parts, human machinery dependent upon the state for its mission and 
purpose. When Blucher's Death's Head Hussars destroyed Napoleon at 
Waterloo, the value of Prussian schooling was confined.

By 1819, Prussian philosophy had given the world its first laboratory of 
compulsory schooling. That same year Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, 
the story of a German intellectual who fabricated a monster out of the 
parts of dead bodies: compulsory schooling was the monster she had in 
mind, emblemized in the lurching destruction caused by a homeless, 
synthetic creature seeking its maker, a creature with the infinite inner 
pain that ambiguous family brings.

In the nineteenth century, ties between Prussia and the United States 
were exceedingly close, a fact unknown these days because it became 
embarrassing to us during the World Wars and so was removed from history 
books. American scholarship during the nineteenth century was almost 
exclusively German at its highest levels, another fact conveniently 
absent from popular history. From 1814 to 1900, more than fifty thousand 
young men from prominent American families made the pilgrimage to 
Prussia and other parts of Germany to study under its new system of 
higher education based on research instead of "teaching." Ten thousand 
brought back Ph.D.'s to a then-uncredentialed United States, preempting 
most of the available intellectual and technical work.

Prussian education was the national obsession among American political 
leaders, industrialists, clergy, and university people. In 1845, the 
Prussian emperor was even asked to adjudicate the boundary between 
Canada and the United States! Virtually every founding father of 
American compulsory schooling went to Prussia to study its clockwork 
schoolrooms flrsthand. Horace Mann's Seventh Report To The Boston School 
Committee of 1844 was substantially devoted to glowing praise of 
Prussian accomplishments and how they should become our own. Victor 
Cousin's book on Prussian schooling was the talk of our country about 
the same time. When, only a quarter-century later, Prussia crushed 
France in a brief war and performed the miracle of unifying Germany, it 
seemed clear that the way to unify our immigrant classes - which we so 
desperately sought to do - was through Prussian schooling.

By 1905, Prussian trained Americans, or Americans like John Dewey who 
apprenticed at Prussian-trained hands, were in command of every one of 
our new institutions of scientific teacher training: Columbia Teacher's 
College, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, the University of 
Wisconsin, Stanford. The domination of Prussian vision, and the general 
domination of German philosophy and pedagogy, was a fait accompli among 
the leadership of American schooling.
You should care about this for the compelling reason that German 
practices were used here to justify removal of intellectual material 
from the curriculum; it may explain why your own children cannot think. 
That was the Prussian way - to train only a leadership cadre to think.

Of all the men whose vision excited the architects of the new 
Prussianized American school machine, the most exciting were a German 
philosopher named Hegel and a German doctor named Wilhelm Wundt. In 
Wundt's laboratory the techniques of psychophysics (what today we might 
call "experimental psychology") were refined. Thanks to his work, it 
took only a little imagination to see an awesome new world emerging - 
for Wundt had demonstrated convincingly to his American students that 
people were only complex machines!

Man a machine? The implications were exhilarating, promising liberation 
from the ancient shackles of tradition, culture, morality, and religion. 
Adjustment became the watchword of schools and social welfare offices. 
G. Stanley Hall, one of Wundt's personal protégés (who as a professor at 
Johns Hopkins had inoculated his star pupil, John Dewey, with the German 
virus), now joined with Thorndike, his German-trained colleague at 
Columbia Teacher's College, to beat the drum for national standardized 
testing. Hall shrewdly sponsored and promoted an American tour for the 
Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud so that Freud might popularize his theory 
that parents and family were the cause of virtually all maladjustment - 
all the more reason to remove their little machines to the safety of 
schools.

In the minds of disciples of German educational thought, scientific 
education was primarily a way of forcing people to fit. With such a 
"technical" goal in mind, the future course of American schooling was 
determined, and with massive financial support from the foundations - 
especially those of the Rockefeller and Carnegie families - new 
scientific colleges to share teachers were established. In Prussia these 
were aptly called "teacher seminaries," but here secular religionists 
were more discreet: a priesthood of trained professionals would guard 
the new school-church and write its canonical text into state law. Thus 
the Torah of twentieth century compulsory schooling was in its Ark by 
1895, one third of the way through the reign of William Torrey Harris as 
U.S. Commissioner of Education.

Teacher training in Prussia was founded on three premises, which the 
United States subsequently borrowed. The first of these is that the 
state is sovereign, the only true parent of children. Its corollary is 
that biological parents are the enemies of their offspring. When 
Germany's Froebel invented Kindergarten, it was not a garden for 
children he had in mind but a garden of children, in which 
state-appointed teachers were the gardeners of the children. 
Kindergarten is meant to protect children from their own mothers.

The second premise of Prussian schooling is that intellectual training 
is not the purpose of state schooling - obedience and subordination are. 
In fact, intellectual training will invariably subvert obedience unless 
it is rigidly controlled and doled out as a reward for obedience. If the 
will could be broken all else would follow. Keep in mind that 
will-breaking was the central logic of child-rearing among our own 
Puritan colonists, and you will see the natural affinity that exists 
between Prussian seeds and Puritan soil - from which agriculture our 
compulsory schooling law springs. The best-known device to break the 
will of the young, practiced for centuries among English and German 
upper classes, was the separation of parent and child at an early age. 
Here now was an institution backed by the police power of the state to 
guarantee that separation. But it was not enough to compel obedience by 
intimidation. The child must be brought to love its synthetic parent. 
When George Orwell's protagonist in 1984 realizes that he loves Big 
Brother after betraying his lover to the state, we have a dramatic 
embodiment of the sexual destination of Prussian-type schooling; it 
creates a willingness to sell out your own family, friends, culture, and 
religion for your new lover, the state. Twelve years of arbitrary 
punishment and reward in the confinement of a classroom is ample time to 
condition any child to believe that he who wields red pen-power is the 
true parent, and they who control the buzzers must be gods.

The third premise of Prussian training is that the schoolroom and the 
workplace shall be dumbed down into simplified fragments that anyone, 
however dumb, can memorize and operate. This solves the historical 
dilemma of leadership: a disobedient work force could be replaced 
quickly, without damage to production, if the workers required only 
habit, not mind, to function properly. This strategy paid off recently 
during the national strike of air traffic controllers, when the entire 
force of these supposed "experts" was replaced overnight by management 
personnel and hastily trained fill-ins. There was no increase in 
accidents across the system! If anyone can do any particular job there's 
no reason to pay them very much except to guarantee employee loyalty and 
dependency - a form of love which bad parents often extort from their 
young in the same way.

In the training ground of the classroom, everything is reduced to bits 
under close management control. This allows progress to be quantified 
into precise rankings to track students throughout their careers - the 
great irony being that it's not intellectual growth that grades and 
reports really measure, but obedience to authority. That's why regular 
disclosures about the lack of correlation between standardized test 
scores and performance do not end the use of these surveillance 
mechanisms. What they actually measure is the tractability of the 
student, and this they do quite accurately. Is it of value to know who 
is docile and who may not be? You tell me.

Finally, if workers or students have little or no idea how their own 
part fits into the whole, if they are unable to make decisions, grow 
food, build a home or boat, or even entertain themselves, then political 
and economic stability will reign because only a carefully screened and 
seasoned leadership will know how things work. Uninitiated citizens will 
not even know what questions should be asked, let alone where the 
answers might be found.

This is sophisticated pedagogy indeed, if far from what mother and 
father expect when they send Junior to school. This is what the 
religious Right is talking about when it claims that schooling is a 
secular religion. If you can think independently of pre-thought thoughts 
and received wisdom, you must certainly arrive at the same conclusion, 
whatever your private theology. Schooling is our official state 
religion; in no way is it a neutral vehicle for learning.

The sheer craziness of what we do to our children should have been 
sufficient cause to stop it once the lunacy was manifest in increased 
social pathology, but a crucial development forestalled corrective 
action: schooling became the biggest business of all. Suddenly there 
were jobs, titles, careers, prestige, and contracts to protect. As a 
country we've never had the luxury of a political or a religious or a 
cultural consensus. As a synthetic state, we've had only economic 
consensus: unity is achieved by making everyone want to get rich, or 
making them envy those who are.

Once a splendid economic machine like schooling was rolling, only a 
madman would try to stop it or to climb off its golden ascent. True, its 
jobs didn't seem to pay much (although its contractors did and do make 
fortunes), but upon closer inspection they paid more than most. And the 
security for the obedient was matchless because the institution provided 
the best insurance that a disturbing social mobility (characteristic of 
a frontier society) could finally be checked. Horace Mann, Henry 
Barnard, William Harris, Edward Thorndike, William James, John Dewey, 
Stanley Hall, Charles Judd, Ellwood Cubberly, James Russell - all the 
great schoolmen of American history - made endless promises to 
industrialists and old-line American families of prominence that if the 
new Prussian scheme were given support, prospects of a revolution here 
would vanish. (What a great irony that in a revolutionary nation the 
most effective motivator of leadership was the guarantee that another 
one could be prevented!)

Schools would be the insurance policy for a new industrial order which, 
as an unfortunate by-product of its operations, would destroy the 
American family, the small farmer, the landscape, the air, the water, 
the religious base of community life, the time-honored covenant that 
Americans could rise and fall by their own efforts. This industrial 
order would destroy democracy itself, and the promise held out to common 
men and women that if they were ever backed into a corner by their 
leaders, they might change things overnight at the ballot box.

I hope you can see now that this Prussian theory of workplaces and 
schools isn't just some historical oddity, but is necessary to explain 
customary textbook structure and classroom procedures, which fly in the 
face of how people actually learn. It explains the inordinate interest 
the foundations of Rockefeller and Camegie took in shaping early 
compulsory schooling around a standardized factory model, and it sheds 
light on many mysterious aspects of modem American culture: for 
instance, why, in a democracy, can't citizens be automatically 
registered at birth to vote, once and for all?

Compulsory schooling has been, from the beginning, a scheme of 
indoctrination into the new concept of mass man, an important part of 
which was the creation of a proletariat. According to Auguste Comte 
(surely the godfather of scientific schooling), you could create a 
useful proletariat class by breaking connections between children and 
their families, their communities, their God, and themselves. Remember 
William Harris's belief that self-alienation was the key to successful 
schooling! Of course it is. These connections have to be broken to 
create a dependable citizenry because, if left alive, the loyalties they 
foster are unpredictable and unmanageable. People who maintain such 
relationships often say, "Over my dead body." How can states operate 
that way?

Think of govemment schooling as a vast behavior clinic designed to 
create a harmless proletariat, the most important part of which is a 
professional proletariat of lawyers, doctors, engineers, managers, 
government people, and schoolteachers. This professional proletariat, 
more homeless than the poor and the sub-poor, is held hostage by its 
addiction to luxury and security, and by its fear that the licensing 
monopoly might be changed by any change in governance. The main service 
it renders - advice - is contaminated by self interest. We are all dying 
from it, the professional proletariat faster than anyone. It is their 
children who commit literal suicide with such regularity, not the 
children of the poor. ...

VII

Printing questions at the end of chapters is a deliberate way of dumbing 
down a text to make it teacher-proof. We've done it so long that nobody 
examines the premises under the practice or sees the permanent reduction 
in mental sovereignty it causes. Just as science teachers were never 
supposed to be actual scientists, literature teachers weren't supposed 
to be original thinkers who brought original questions to the text.

In 1926, Bertrand Russell said casually that the United States was the 
first nation in human history to deliberately deny its children the 
tools of critical thinking; actually Prussia was first, we were second. 
The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had 
to throw it away. Real books don't do that. They let readers actively 
participate with their own questions. Books that show you the best 
questions to ask aren't just stupid, they hurt the intellect under the 
guise of helping it, just as standardized tests do.

Well-schooled people, like schoolbooks, are very much alike. 
Propagandists have known for a century that school-educated people are 
easier to lead than ignorant people - as Dietrich Bonhoeffer confirmed 
in his studies of Nazism.

It's very useful for some people that our form of schooling tells 
children what to think about, how to think about it, and when to think 
about it. It's very useful to some groups that children are trained to 
be dependent on experts, to react to titles instead of judging the real 
men and women who hide behind the titles. It isn't very healthy for 
families and neighborhoods, cultures and religions. But then school was 
never about those things any-way: that's why we don't have them around 
anymore. You can thank govemment schooling for that.

VIII

I think it would be fair to say that the overwhelming majority of people 
who make schools work today are unaware why they fail to give us 
successful human beings, no matter how much money is spent or how much 
good will is expended on reform efforts. This explains the inevitable 
temptation to find villains and to cast blame - on bad teaching, bad 
parents, bad children, or penurious taxpayers.

The thought that school may be a brilliantly conceived social engine 
that works exactly as it was designed to work and produces exactly the 
human products it was designed to produce establishes a different 
relation to the usual demonologies. Seeing school as a triumph of human 
ingenuity, as a glorious success, forces us to consider whether we want 
this kind of success, and if not, to envision something of value in its 
place. And it forces us to challenge whether there is a "we," a national 
consensus sufficient to justify looking for one right way rather than 
dozens or even hundreds of right ways. I don't think there is.

IX

Museums and institutes of useful knowledge travel a different road than 
schools. Consider the difference between librarians and schoolteachers. 
Librarians are custodians of real books and real readers; schoolteachers 
are custodians of schoolbooks and indentured readers. Somewhere in the 
difference is the Rosetta Stone that reveals how education is one thing, 
schooling another.

Begin with the setting and social arrangement of a library. The ones 
I've visited all over the country invariably are comfortable and quiet, 
places where you can read rather than just pretend to read. How 
important this silence is. Schools are never silent. People of all ages 
work side by side in libraries, not just a pack of age-segregated kids. 
For some reason, libraries do not segregate by age nor do they presume 
to segregate readers by questionable tests of reading ability. Just as 
the people who decoded the secrets of farming or of the forests and 
oceans were not segregated by age or test scores, the library seems to 
have intuited that common human judgment is adequate to most learning 
decisions.

The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me the sequence 
of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. Librarians act as 
if they trust their customers. The librarian lets me ask my own 
questions and helps me when I need help, not when the library decides I 
need it. If I feel like reading in the same place all day long, that 
seems to be OK with the library. It doesn't tell me to stop reading at 
regular intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its 
nose out of my home, too. It doesn't send letters to my mother reporting 
on my library behavior; it doesn't make recommendations or issue orders 
on how I should use my time spent outside of the library.

The library doesn't have a tracking system. Everyone is mixed together 
there, and no private files exist detailing my past victories and 
defeats as a patron. If the books I want are available, I get them by 
requesting them - even if that deprives some more gifted reader, who 
comes a minute later. The library doesn't presume to determine which of 
us is more qualified to read that book; it doesn't play favorites. It is 
a very class-blind, talent-blind place, appropriately reflecting our 
historic political ideals in a way that puts schools to shame.

The public library isn't into public humiliation the way schools seem to 
be. It never posts ranked lists of good and bad readers for all to see. 
Presumably it considers good reading its own reward, not requiring 
additional accolades, and it has resisted the temptation to hold up good 
reading as a moral goad to bad readers. One of the strangest differences 
between libraries and schools, in New York City at least, is that you 
almost never see a kid behaving badly in a library or waving a gun there 
- even though bad kids have exactly the same access to libraries as good 
kids do. Bad kids seem to respect libraries, a curious phenomenon which 
may well be an unconscious response to the automatic respect libraries 
bestow blindly on everyone. Even people who don't like to read like 
libraries from time to time; in fact, they are such generally wonderful 
places I wonder why we haven't made them compulsory - and all alike, of 
course, too.

Here's another angle to consider: the library never makes predictions 
about my general future based on my past reading habits, nor does it 
hint that my days will be happier if I read Shakespeare rather than 
Barbara Cartland. The library tolerates eccentric reading habits because 
it realizes that free men and women are often very eccentric.

And finally, the library has real books, not schoolbooks. Its volumes 
are not written by collective pens or picked by politically correct 
screening committees. Real books conform only to the private curriculum 
of each writer, not to the invisible curriculum of some German 
collective agenda. The one exception to this is children's books - but 
no sensible child ever reads those things, so the damage from them is 
minimal.

Real books are deeply subversive of collectivization. They are the best 
known way to escape herd behavior, because they are vehicles 
transporting their reader into deep caverns of absolute solitude where 
nobody else can visit: No two people ever read the same great book. Real 
books disgust the totalitarian mind because they generate uncontrollable 
mental growth - and it cannot be monitored!
Television has entered the classroom because it is a collective 
mechanism and, as such, much superior to textbooks; similarly, slides, 
audio tapes, group games, and so on meet the need to collectivize, which 
is a central purpose of mass schooling. This is the famous 
"socialization" that schools do so well. Schoolbooks, on the other hand, 
are paper tools that reinforce school routines of close-order drill, 
public mythology, endless surveillance, global ranking, and constant 
intimidation.

That's what the questions at the end of chapters are designed to do, to 
bring you back to a reality in which you are subordinate. Nobody really 
expects you to answer those questions, not even the teacher; they work 
their harm solely by being there. That is their genius. Schoolbooks are 
a crowd-control device. Only the very innocent and well-schooled see any 
difference between good ones and bad ones; both kinds do the same work. 
In that respect they are much like television programming, the function 
of which, as a plug in narcotic, is infinitely more powerful than any 
trivial differences between good programs and bad.

Real books educate, schoolbooks school, and thus libraries and library 
policies are a major clue to the reform of American schooling. When you 
take the free will and solitude out of education it becomes schooling. 
You can't have it both ways.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[This is the text of a speech Gatto delivered several years ago at the 
University of Texas in Austin.]

Twenty-six years of award-winning teaching have led John Gatto to some 
troubling conclusions about the public schools.

A seventh-grade teacher, Gatto has been named New York City Teacher of 
the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year. Praised by leaders as 
diverse as Ronald Reagan and Mario Cuomo, he's a political maverick 
whose views defy easy categorization.

Gatto is also a local legend on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he 
grows garlic, plays chess, writes songs - and once won a Citizen of the 
Week Award for coming to the aid of a woman who had been robbed. A 
collection of his essays - Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum Of 
Compulsory Schooling - was published earlier this year by New Society 
Publishers.

Gatto has appeared twice before in The Sun: "Why Schools Don't Educate" 
[Issue 175] and "A Few Lessons They Won't Forget" [Issue 186]. Nothing 
else we've printed has generated as many reprint requests.

Reprinted from The Sun

Written by: John Taylor Gatto <http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/>
26 August 2005
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