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<h1>The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling</h1>
by <a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/">John Taylor Gatto</a>
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<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
Listen to William Harris again, the dark genius of American
schooling, the man who gave you scientifically age-graded
classrooms:<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
II<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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:<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
III<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
IV<br>
<br>
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?"<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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!"<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
HARRIS THOUGHT, A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THAT SELF-ALIENATION WAS THE
KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL SOCIETY. WHO CAN SAY THAT HE WAS WRONG?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
VI<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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!<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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!)<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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.
...<br>
<br>
VII<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
VIII<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
IX<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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!<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.
<hr>
<p>[This is the text of a speech Gatto delivered several years ago
at the University of Texas in Austin.]</p>
<p>Twenty-six years of award-winning teaching have led John Gatto to
some troubling conclusions about the public schools.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.</p>
<p>Reprinted from The Sun</p>
Written by: <a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/">John Taylor
Gatto</a><br>
26 August 2005
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