- John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New
York City Teacher of the
- Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground
History of American Education.
-
-
- I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools
in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an
expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked
the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the
same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that
they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real,
not just sitting around.
-
- They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their
subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids
were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
- Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and
anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy,
the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why
they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect.
Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only
in grades? If even that.
-
- Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same
twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students,
and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid
than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame? We all are.
-
- My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was
seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head.
He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that
if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse
and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that
were childish people, to be avoided if possible.
-
- Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of
boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on
the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found
it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness
were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy
custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
- The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly
conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave
to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been
purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer
possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort
I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to
witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than
I care to remember.
-
- By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than
enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style,
forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of
childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way.
My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn
along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we
wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures
and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling.
We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure,
resilience, the capacity for surprising insigh simply by being more flexible
about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults,
and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take
a risk every now and then.
- But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and
persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an
engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem"
with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying
in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things,
not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something
right?
-
- Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke
the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could
it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really
grows up? Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced
schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for
twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?
-
- Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as
a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that
banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number
of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our
kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington,
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them,
to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one
of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school.
-
- Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't
go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut;
inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller;
writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret
Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen
weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an
enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband,
Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that
Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
- We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country
to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent
upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either
an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the
world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system
of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why,
then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly
is the purpose of our public schools?
- Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its
teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived
of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century.
The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural
traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2)
To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.
-
- These goals are still trotted out today on a regular
basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition
of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving
them. But we are dead wrong.
-
- Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature
holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's
true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote
in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education
is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their
intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ...
is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level,
to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
-
- That is its aim in the United States... and that is its
aim everywhere else. Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we
might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm.
His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational
system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military
state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that
we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought
and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational
system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
- The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools
pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded
to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero
of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly
denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace
Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board
of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the
Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here.
-
- That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly
surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian
served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking
people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language
edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly
have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational
system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring
the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to
ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."
- It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard
for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb
project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII,
and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that
I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant,
we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing
that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools
that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine
High in Littleton, Colorado.
-
- Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's
1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more
than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools
we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between
1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct
the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles
of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through
the eyes of a revolutionary."
- Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is
named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent
was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth
column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give
the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.
-
- Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make
a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses.
Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests,
and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant
mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a
dangerous whole.
- Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose -
of modern schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough
to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional
goals listed earlier:
- 1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to
establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes
critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that
useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test
for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn,
and do, foolish and boring things.
- 2) The integrating function. This might well be called
"the conformity function," because its intention is to make children
as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of
great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
- 3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant
to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging
evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your
permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
-
- 4) The differentiating function. Once their social role
has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained
only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not
one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
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- 5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice
at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he
called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things
along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools
are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and
other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as
inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's
what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended
to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
-
- 6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied
by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end,
a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this
continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately
dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged
and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
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-
- That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public
education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank
with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should
know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself,
building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly
for an American school system designed along the same lines.
-
- Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory
schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system
was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor
force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number
of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by
cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them
Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
- There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's
conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in
the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people
down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard
them if they don't conform.
-
- Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson,
then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York
City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons
to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very
much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges
of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult
manual tasks."
-
- But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that
bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely
from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency"
is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope.
Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
- There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an
economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation
rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production
required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most
Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't
actually need.
-
- Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School
didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume
nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to
think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention
of the modem era - marketing.
- Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that
there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more
than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good
job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular
job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident.
Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children
could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and
independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed,
envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.
-
- In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public
Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised
the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood
by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite
new.
-
- This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School
of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend
and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition
of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories
in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned ....
And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the
specifications laid down."
-
- It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those
specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every
aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at
relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control;
easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself;
easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation
of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political
exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults.
-
- We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see
on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see
on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and
when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe
the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're
upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer
tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having
been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free.
-
- We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended,
has seen to it. Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind
modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School
trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders
and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your
own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low
threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll
never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up
material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology
- all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your
kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own
company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned
to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the
TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly
acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful
life, and they can.
- First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really
are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for
the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education
serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into
servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for
a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship
as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of
twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same
age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale
senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a
long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded
that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we
haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and
women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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- http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
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