Against School, by John Taylor Gatto
AGAINST
SCHOOL
How public education
cripples
our kids, and
why
By John Taylor
Gatto
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.
He was a
participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a
Hill,"
which appeared in the
September 2003 issue.
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 t~at 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 insightsimply 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 11 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 modem 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 modem 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.
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.
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.
Tre 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, lib, erty, 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.
