WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION
A SCHOOLTEACHERS JOURNEY
THROUGH THE DARK WORLD
OF COMPULSORY SCHOOLING
JOHN TAYLOR GATTO
3
Fat StanLey
and the Lancaster Amish
I Don't Take Criticism Well
Separate schooling and education into compartments, and useful distinctions jump out at you: schooling is a matter of habit and attitude
training. It takes place from the outside in. Education is a matter of
self-mastery, first; then self-enlargement, even self-transcendence -
as all possibilities of the human spirit open themselves into zones for
exploration and understanding. There are points where the two conditions inform one another, but in schooling, somebody else's agenda
is always uppermost. This mind control aspect is what makes it so unpleasant, even pornographic to some, although not to the lost souls
already broken to the game of pleasing others. You can easily compensate for a lack of schooling - the human record is full of stories
of those who have done so in the past and those who continue to do
so in the present - but without education you will stumble through
life, a sitting duck for exploitation and failure, no matter how much
money you make.
Mary Shelley wrote the story of Frankenstein at the age of 18,
nearly 200 years ago. Today, it's studied in college courses as a profound work of literature. That famous Stratford nobody, William
Shakespeare, had little seat time in a classroom, and owned no books,apparently, yet four centuries after his death he remains an icon of
global civilization. The list is a long one. Large accomplishments; little schooling. It's quite rare for an inventive person in any field to trace
success to school training. Education must be largely self-initiated, a
tapestry woven out of broad experience, constant introspection, ability to concentrate on one's purpose in spite of distractions, a combination of curiosity, patience, and intense watchfUlness, and it requires
substantial trial and error risk-taking, along with a considerable ability to take feedback from the environment - to learn from mistakes.
I once heard someone in my own family, who I once loved very much,
say,"I don't take criticism well;' as if it were a boast, and I knew at that
instant there was no way at all for her to grow in mind or character
with that self-destructive attitude.
Let me tell you a little about fat Stanley, whose path crossed mine when he was thirteen. Stanley only came to class one or two days a month, and I knew that sooner or later he would be caught in the truancy net and prosecuted. I liked Stanley, not least because he never whined when other kids bothered him because he was fat - he simply punched them so hard in the head nobody ever bothered Stanley a second time. I hoped to spare him the grim experience of becoming a social service case. So I asked him one day what he did on all those absences? What he said changed my life. I never saw school the same way after Stanley spoke.
It seems Stanley had five aunts and uncles, all in business for themselves before the age of 21. His aim was to follow in their footsteps. Even at 13, he had been made aware of time's winged chariot hurrying near, that he had only eight years to make the miracle of an independent livelihood. One of the relatives was a florist, one a builder of unfinished furniture, one a deli owner, one had a little restaurant, one owned a delivery service. Stanley cut school to work without pay for each these relatives, bartering labor in exchange for learning the businesses - and a whole lot more - working in the company of men and women who cared for him much more than any professional stranger would have.
It was a better educational package than whatever he missed cutting school, hands down. As he put it to me, man to man: "This way I get a chance to see how the different businesses work. You tell me what books I have to read and I'll read them. But I don't have time to waste in school unless I want to end up like you - working for somebody else:' When I heard that, I couldn't keep him locked up in good conscience. Besides, his mother agreed with Stanley. So I began to cover for him, logging him present when he was making floral bouquets or building furniture. None of his other teachers ever asked; I think they were glad to be rid of him. To illustrate the powerful energies at work under his fat, deceptively cheerful exterior, Stanley crossed his "t"s with a pointed spear formation, not a simple line. Right then and there I adopted his "t" cross as my own, to remind me what I learned from a truant that day.
A big secret of bulk-process schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn; a bigger secret is that it isn't supposed to teach self direction at all. Stanley-style is verboten. School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong; even if your enthusiasm is phony.
School is the first impression we get of organized society and its relentless need to rank everyone on a scale of winners and losers; like most first impressions, the real things school teaches about your place in the social order last a lifetime for most of us.
Work in classrooms isn't important work. It fails to speak to real needs pressing on the young. It doesn't answer burning questions which day-to-day experience forces upon young minds. Problems encountered outside school walls are treated as peripheral when in truth they are always central. The net effect of making work abstract - "subject" -centered - external to individual longings, fears, experiences, and questions, is to render students of this enforced irrelevance listless and indifferent.
The causes of sluggishness in the young have been well understood for a long time. I'm tempted to say forever. Growth and self mastery are reserved for those who vigorously self-direct, like Stanley: planning, doing, creating, reflecting, freely associating, taking chances, punching the lights out on your tormentors. But this is precisely the agenda school is set up to prevent. Think of school as a conditioning laboratory, drilling naturally unique, one-of-a-kind individuals to respond as a mass, to accept continual ennui, envy and limited competence as only natural parts of the human condition. The official economy we have constructed demands constantly renewed supplies of leveled, spiritless, passive, anxious, friendless, family-less people who can be scrapped and replaced endlessly, and who will perform at maximum efficiency until their own time comes to be scrap; people who think the difference between Coke and Pepsi, or round hamburgers versus square ones, are subjects worthy of argument.
As I wrote those words in February of 2008, I had just finished listening to a commercial for high-style telephones on TV. It made fun of the unfortunate fools whose telephone styling was "soooo yesterday;' as a pretty girl put it in the advertisement. It had never before occurred to me that among various inescapable worries like cancer, homelessness, unemployment, blindness, aging, poverty, crippling accidents and the like, there might actually be people so shallow the look of their telephone was an item of concern. Try to picture the "A" student who came up with that idea, and pray for his contemptible soul.
The Old Order Amish
I tried to imagine the Lancaster Amish, or any of the Old Order Amish scattered around the world, worrying whether their telephones were in fashion. The small business, small farm economy of the Amish requires different qualities from the oncoming generations than we do: they ask for broad competence and a spirit of selfreliance, for dependability, honesty, neighborliness, compassion, piety, and commitment to the common good. Were we to adopt Amish values wholesale, our economy would nosedive.
As our economy has been shaped by its architects, it relies upon encouraging frenzy for novelty, for fashion in more than clothing, all the way to telephones. It's an attitude which induces nonstop consumption in a heady atmosphere of "out with the old, in with the new;" to escape from shame, an addiction to the spirit of the Cole Porter song, Anything Goes. That's the job the incessant bells perform in our schools: they teach a Monty Pythonesque relief at escape from responsibility, as they say in bell language, "And now for something completely different" Of course, you have to have deep experience with shame to fear it. But schools are an advanced workshop in that, too. The first day I taught, an old-timer told me how to control my classes. "Humiliation;' she said. "That's the only thing they fear. Shaine them. Encourage other kids to shame them, too"
One famous insider of modern schooling back in the post-WWI days (when the model was hardening) called government schooling "the perfect organization of the hive:' That was H. H. Goddard, chairman of psychology at Princeton. Goddard believed standardized test scores used as a signal for privileged treatment would cause the lower classes to come face-to-face with their own biological inferiority. It would be like wearing a public dunce cap. Exactly the function "special education" delivers today. The pain of endless daily humiliation would discourage reproduction among the inferior, Goddard thought. Charles Darwin had implied this gently, but his first cousin, Francis Galton, had virtually demanded it of responsible politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in his own writings.
In 1930, the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association, a group then basking in reflected glory from the lessons of schooling in the new Soviet Union, declared the main purpose of schooling should be "effective use of capital" that valuable stuff through which "our unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained" Now how do you suppose that idea got into circulation among the folks at a presumably left-wing organization? Talk about a house of mirrors! For the curious, you might want to buy Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of the Soviet Union.
Think for a second how "capital" can become "more effective" Surely it happens when the stuff capital allows to be produced is actually purchased by eager consumers, and when projects financed by capital receive little public resistance. Capital operates most efficiently in climates without public opposition, where critical thinking among ordinary people is in a primitive state, so the public becomes an inept opponent. And is it so difficult to conceive of a plan which could be managed through the very institution - schooling - charged with development of the intellect? It isn't by accident the symbol of Fabian socialism is a wolf in sheep's clothing, or that Fabians were from the comfortable classes of England, not from its marginalized dregs (as was often true of revolutionary socialists). This is a matter of some significance, though never held up to scrutiny in schoolbook histories. Where industrial management was content to kill the masses with brutal treatment, Fabians, led by Beatrice Webb, aimed to kill them with kindness. Hence we got the Welfare State. But whatever the methods, aims were identical.
If school is to serve capital, then it must be a production line where children as raw material are shaped and fashioned like nails. To make capital more efficient would require capital accumulations be concentrated into fewer hands, not spread so widely among the populace. Even that the middle-class basis of American society give way a little, too. Or eventually, give way a lot.
Sixty-six years after this weirdly indiscreet slip by the NEA:s Department of Superintendence, Johns Hopkins University Press, in 1996, published a book, Fat and Mean, with surprising news about our by now well-schooled society. The book reported that while the American economy had grown massively through the 1960's, real spendable working class wages hadn't grown at all for 30 years. During the booms of the 1980's and 1990's, purchasing power had risen steeply for 20 percent of the population, but it actually declined for all the rest by 13 percent. After inflation was factored in, purchasing power of a working couple in 1995 was only 8 percent greater than for a single working man in 1905.
The steep decline in common prosperity over 90 years of intense forced schooling drove both parents from the home to work, depositing their children in the management systems of daycare and extended schooling. Despite a century-long harangue that schooling is the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred. Wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century's end than at its beginnings.
The Old Order Amish took a different road. Today a group of about 150,000 people - quite prosperous although virtually unschooled - a group held together by religion and common culture which came to the US with little more than the clothes on their backs. In his book Amish Enterprise, published in 1995, author Donald Kraybill, a specialist in Amish life and a Johns Hopkins University academic, said the Amish
challenge a lot of conventional assumptions about what it takes to enter business. They don't have high school educations; they don't have specialized training; they don't use computers; they don't use electricity or automobiles; they don't have training in how to create a marketing plan. But the resources they transfer over from the farm are: an entrepreneurial spirit; a willingness to take risks; innovativeness; a strong work ethic; a cheap family labor pool; and high standards of craftsmanship. They don't want their shops and industries to get large. This spreads entrepreneurship widely across the whole settlement.
More. The Amish are legendary good neighbors, first to volunteer in times of need in the larger non-Amish community. They open their farms to ghetto children and frequently rear handicapped children from the non-Amish world whom nobody else wants. They farm so well and so profitably without using chemical fertilizers or pesticides, without tractors and other complex machinery, that Canada, Russia, France, Mexico and Uruguay have hired them to help raise agricultural productivity outside the United States.
In Yoder v. Wisconsin (1976), the Amish did battle with the government of Wisconsin to preserve their way of doing things against bureaucratic assault. And although the decision looks like a compromise in which both parties won a little, a closer look will leave no doubt of which was the real winner.
Sick of Amish rejection of its schools, Wisconsin sought to compel Amish compliance with its secular school laws through its police power. The Amish resisted on these grounds: they said government schooling was built on the principle of the mechanical milk separator. It whirled the young mind about until both the social structure of the Amish community, and the structure of private family life, were fragmented beyond repair. Schooling demanded separation of people from daily life, it divided the world into disciplines, courses, classes, grades and teachers who would remain strangers to the children in all but name. Even religion, separated from family and daily life, was just another subject for critical analysis and testing.
And the constant competition was destructive, leaving a multitude of losers, humiliated and self-hating, a far cry from the universal commitment Amish community life requires. The Amish wanted no part of these things. As a part of any compromise with Wisconsin, community leaders demanded the following:
1. Schools within walking distance of home;
2. No school to be so large that pupils had to be sorted into different compartments and assigned different teachers every year;
3. The school year would be no longer than eight months;
4. Important decisions would be under parental control, not that of bureaucrats;
5. Teachers hired were to be knowledgeable in, and sympathetic to, Amish values and rural ways;
6. Children were to be taught that wisdom and academic knowledge were two different things.
7. Every student would have practical internships and apprenticeships supervised by parents.
What can be learned from Stanley and the Amish? One thing, to discard any belief that the concept of mass man actually describes something real. We need to realize what our fingerprints and our intuition actually proclaimed long before DNA: no two people are alike, all "averages" are lies, and nobody can be accurately contained by numbers and graphs. The use of these against those too weak to resist is the Bed of Procrustes, brought into modern life. We need to abandon the notion - and punish those who retain it - that ordinary people are too stupid, irresponsible, and childish to look out for themselves. We need to honor our founding documents and founding ideas, to accept that each one of us has the right to live as he or she deems wise, and if the way chosen would mean disaster for global corporations - as the way of the Amish and the Stanleys among us surely would - then that decision must be honored still.
Dear Murray, I enjoyed our talk last Friday about the hidden machinery in School District Three, Manhattan. You surprised me with your candor. I hope we can build on that to exchange some ideas (discreetly of course), which might prove of mutual benefit. I know official pedagogy doesn't forgive those who expose its secrets, so in light of the fact you told me you expect to work here "forever;' in what follows I've exercised some discretion in the event this falls into hostile hands. I have left my own presence intact, you'll notice. In the first place I have no intention of working here forever, and in the second place I grew up in the Monongahela Valley near Pittsburgh around the time of WWII, and I was taught by that Scots-Irish place (even in its schools), to welcome a fight with rotters, scoundrels and low-lives, all which labels fit our mutual employers.
Recently I walked through the Harvard campus in Cambridge, just for the fun of it, and on that ramble I spotted a brochure pinned to a bulletin board in one of the buildings, containing advice for students planning a career in the new international economy which it predicted was at hand. First, the brochure gave warning that academic class work and professional credentials would count for less in the future, and a track record of accomplishment which suggested competency would count for more. This seemed a way to put a bell around the neck of grade point averages and test rankings, fingering them for the frauds they are, albeit in the time-honored elliptical manner of charlatans everywhere. That caught my interest, so I read on.
The brochure identified nine qualities its author felt were essential for successful adaptation to the evolving world of work, so I'm asking you, Murray, to temporarily put aside your customary apologia for District Three's shameless schools and let me know how many of the nine you can honestly say are the priorities of the wealthy school district we work for on the Upper West side of Manhattan:
1. The ability to ask hard questions of data, whether from textbooks, authorities, or other "expert" sources. In other words, do we teach dialectics?
2. The ability to define problems independently, to avoid slavish dependence on official definitions.
3. The ability to scan masses of irrelevant information and to quickly extract from the sludge whatever is useful.
4. The ability to conceptualize.
5. The ability to reorganize information into new patterns which enable a different perspective than the customary.
6. The possession of a mind fluent in moving among different modes of thought: deductive, inductive, heuristic, intuitive, et al.
7. Facility in collaboration with a partner, or in teams.
8. Skill in the discussion of issues, problems or techniques.
9. Skill in rhetoric. Convincing others your course is correct.
Now, from where I sit, and I've been sitting in District Three for nearly three decades, we don't teach any of these as a matter of policy. And for good reason. Students so trained would destroy the structure of familiar schooling and all the comfortable hierarchies some of us depend on.
Just think for a second about the transmission of competencies. Our school population is drawn largely from families of the working poor, but we've abandoned shop and cooking programs, interscholastic athletics, school socials, art and music. Not only can't our kids read, write, or count very well; now they can't drive a nail, plane a board, use a saw, turn a screwdriver, boil an egg, or find ways to amuse themselves and stay healthy. In a few classrooms, very few, teachers know how to train the young in powers; but actually doing this has to be accomplished as a kind of sabotage because it would never be authorized by authority. Every deviation from standardized protocol has to be signed off on multiple times, making it almost impossible to teach correctly, to adapt to particular people, conditions, and opportunities.
Now, for contrast, think of David Sarnoff's school- the streets. Sarnoff, as head of RCA, has been a major power in the twentieth century, yet his early years were spent in a shtetl in Russia without schooling. Promptly upon arrival in New York City with his family, his father dropped dead - leaving David at age nine to be family breadwinner. In five short months he could read English well enough to read the daily newspapers, and to speak it well enough to earn the family living as a newsboy - half a cent for every paper sold. Was it English classes in school that inspired such facility, do you think?
Five months to operational fluency. No school. What do you make of that, Murray? At fourteen Sarnoff had his own newsstand. Without time for a high school diploma, little David read the daily papers as his texts. One day he saw an ad for an office boy at Marconi Wireless. He hurried over to the company without an appointment, barged into the office of the president unannounced, and asked for the job. Five hundred boys in line to be interviewed, but it was David who was hired on the spot. There's a lesson there, Murray. I wish our school could teach it. Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want.
After a year as an office boy, Sarnoff taught himself telegraphy just as Andy Carnegie had done in Pittsburgh at an even younger age. When Marconi Wireless was swallowed up by the Radio Corporation of America, he was on the cutting edge of the technology it needed, thanks to self teaching. Twenty three years later, age 39, he was president of the company.
How could that happen without money, family connections, a high school diploma, or a (gasp!) college degree?! Sounds like a soap opera or an Alger story. Murray, don't dare say "those were simpler times" like a parrot repeating something it heard; those were far more complicated times than this barren epoch we enjoy, stripped of human meaning by the corporatizing of everything. At age nine, Sarnoff self-taught himself into a job; at 14 into a business; at 39, into the presidency of a powerful, tech-driven corporation.
He was able to move so rapidly also because he got a chance to think about serious matters before his eighth birthday, to live a significant life before he was ten. He got a chance to add value to his family and community before he was 15, and a chance to follow his own instincts and ambitions ever after. What school do you know these days that would allow that? If we followed the same path, school would cease to be the jobs-project it really is.
You can't self-teach without inner strength and a measure of gravity, without opportunities to be alone, to have broad experience with people and great challenges. Most of us who presume to judge schools are fooled by rituals of disciplined behavior, pretty hall displays, and test scores. If we knew what to look for, we'd be horrified and angry at the empty destinies this waste of precious time arranges for us.
But looking at the school from inside for a few hours it was impossible not to see how far it fell short of standards of excellence which aren't very hard to achieve - and which once were common to schools in the steel-working Monongahela Valley where I grew up. Right near the surface I could see this famous East Harlem school was seriously hobbled by familiar constraints, many self-imposed by habit, by custom, by lack of imagination, and by the school district, too, I would imagine. The famous negative litany: You can't do this; you can't do that; time to move to something different; you better take the upcoming test seriously, etc., was alive and well at the famous school.
My guess is none of this was Debbie's doing, but realistically she had to function inside a mature bureaucracy, one very conscious just how far deviation could be allowed before top management would be called on the carpet and punished.
The most suffocating of the constraints are generated from traditional Calvinistic roots: Mistrust of children, mistrust of teachers, a reluctance to face that adolescence is a junk word, fear of looking bad, fear of scoring poorly on standardized tests, and suppression of imagination - voluntary suppression - which the collective teaching staff imposes on those of its colleagues who haven't yet lost their talent.
For weeks after that visit I felt awful. Debbie's school was clearly a better place for kids than the schools of District Three, and yet David Sarnoff wouldn't have wasted his time there, nor would the place have had anything real to offer Mr. Sarnoff. What hit me hardest was the community service program at Central Park East - community service was a requirement of attendance, and one I used extensively in my own teaching practice. It had produced stunning benefits in all areas of curriculum for me, I was a believer.
And yet at this famous school - enrolling students older than David Farragut was when he took over command of a warship; older than Washington was when he learned trigonometry, surveying, naval architecture and military science - at this famous school students were assigned to community service for two hours a week. Two hours a week. Who in their right mind would want a teenager to drop in for two hours a week, with all the bookkeeping, training, oversight, and hassle that would require? It was a way of fatally trivializing the service ideal, turning it into superficial drudgery for all concerned.
The Commissioner's Report
Once a principal in the richest secondary school in District Three - you'll know the one I mean, Murray - asked me privately if I could help him set up a program to teach critical thinking. Of course, I replied, but if w~ do it right your school will become unmanageable. Why would kids taught to think critically and express themselves effectively put up with the nonsense you force down their throats? That was the end of our interview and his critical thinking project.
Murray, you're the only individual who ever willingly spoke to me about the apparatus of pedagogy, in all 26 years I've been in the business. The only one. In the thousands of hours I've spent in teachers' rooms and teachers' meetings, not a single soul besides yourself was open to discussing anything profound about our notions of pedagogy, nothing that could get them in trouble. Surely that intellectual vacuum says something terrible about the business which has swallowed your life and my own.
My compliment is bait on the hook of my next question: At the end of 1988, our rich district was ranked statistically last by the State Commissioner of Education in a dull publication which looked like a telephone directory. You had to massage the numbers a long time to actually figure out what it was saying, but when I did, it seemed to be saying that we were the worst school district in New York State, 736th of 736, in certain key categories. But our section of the city is world famous, isn't it? We have great universities, famous research institutions, museums, centers for art, the best transportation system around ... what gives?
You know what contempt I have for the instruments used to rank the student body, but in this one case I'm going to be inconsistent and cite them as a measure of school district failure. In third-grade math and reading, we rank dead last. We are only nine places off the bottom in fifth-grade writing, sixth-grade reading, math and social studies and in seventh-grade honor math and honor biology.
Listen, friend; we can't be last or nearly last out of 736 school jurisdictions in so many metrics without being abysmal, not just bad. Last isn't an easy degree of failure to achieve; being last is a creative act. The Sarnoff family should thank its lucky stars District Three didn't get its hooks into David. This is the business you want to stay in "forever"? It boggles the mind. You ought to feel ashamed to take money for wasting the lives of these trapped children. I've gone to many school board meetings looking, like Diogenes, for one honest board member or administrator, one person who looked to be worried. But all I ever heard were waves of self-congratulation and a smug indifference to the suffering we were causing.
According to the Commissioner's Report, the average teacher in our schools has been there sixteen years, a sign of stability; yet the teacher turnover is an incredible 22% a year, almost the highest in New York State! What could account for such an anomaly? In some businesses turnover like that would cause a management shakeup. It damages morale; it causes a school to lose its memory. And yet ... and yet, we have all those teachers who stay, too! Why? Let me tell you why.
A caste system has been created by school administrators, in combination with the teachers union. Certain teachers in each of our schools have been rewarded with good programs, good rooms, good kids in exchange for their loyalty and cooperation. The power to confer these privileges will be fatally enhanced if we ever get so-called "merit" pay (who would decide "merit" except feather-bedding administrators?). These favors are rewards for those who play ball, these privileges are bought by exploiting unfortunate fellow teachers, often the newest teachers who are dumped upon with impossible workloads, and quickly leave the business.
The situation I'm describing is universal and constitutes the poison pill in merit proposals. Merit would certainly NOT go to the meritorious - as a student, parent or citizen would define merit - but as a school administrator would. When 22% of the teachers don't survive more than a year, the caste system that corrupts our schools is partially to blame. Nobody ever bothers to ask the 100 to 150 teachers who leave each year why they left. That's because everyone already knows.
The Shadow Economy of Schools
Teachers with deals don't constitute the entirety of non-laboring labor in schools, there's been such an inflation of management, both visible and invisible, as to defy imagination. For instance, what do you make of this: the student/teacher ratio in our school district is listed in state accounts as 15:1, but everywhere the number of kids in a class is 30 or more: Half of all teaching energy has been siphoned away into administrative tasks in the shadow economy of front-office politics. No healthy enterprise can afford this degree of deceit. It's the teachers who don't get paid off with these non-teaching deals you should be worrying about. They become bitter and cynical. They find ways to get even, ways to cut back on their own production. You administrators have created a catastrophe by paying off your favorites with deals.
I can't escape the conclusion that we both are involved in a social engineering project whose mission is to weaken children's minds and give them bad characters - all concealed in the sanctimony we exude on parents' night. I heard one principal (a decent man in his own estimation, I'm sure), tell a large audience that the damage to these children had already been done before they came to him in seventh grade, and that his job was to relieve their pain and make them feel good in the here and now because their limited futures were already predetermined.
Can you believe it?! The shameless brass! I couldn't make that up. Isn't it the function of morphine or crack cocaine to stupefy pain? Given a choice between those substances and school as an anodyne, you'd have to be deranged to choose school.
Two district policies in particular have destroyed the capacity for sustained thought among our kids. The first was the political decision, cooked up at the Ford Foundation, as I recall, not to control outrageous classroom behavior on the grounds that frustration causes perpetrators to have low self-esteem. While this policy was being imposed (and afterwards), the rhetoric of decent behavior was maintained, as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. Tell me how that was any different from Big Brother announcing the chocolate ration was being raised, while it was being lowered? The degree of disrespect our nation has assigned its ordinary population wouldn't be possible unless somewhere in the command centers it hadn't been decided that common men and women should be stripped of any power to rebel. And that they could be lied to without compunction, because their dignity didn't count. Or their lives.
As these conditions for chaos were being imposed, a form of triage was constructed wherein a few of the "best" classes (on the liberal West Side, that means mostly white classes) were to be held to a traditional standard. As fo~ the others, the mass of fairly well-behaved kids, was mixed with an infusion of violent, restless, disruptive students until only a primitive level of instruction was possible. In order to free school administrators from the tiresome function of helping to maintain order for the lumpen proletariat, classroom disruption was now deemed, system-wide, a problem of bad teaching. In other words, if you complained, or asked for help, you were treated with contempt and your job was in jeopardy. Mirabile dictu! The burden of discipline vanished as an administrative responsibility. And because reasonably patient children become angry at a teacher's ineffectiveness in maintaining order, many of the polite kids joined the disruptors, too. Does that surprise you, Murray? The cause and effect linkage, I mean.
Another destructive policy decision was the project to recruit disruptive children from other school districts, to conceal the shrinking enrollment in District Three - a student population decline caused by the evil reputation District Three acquired from its first policy! In 1984, after we fell to the lowest student enrollment of any district in New York City (10,000), 3,000 half-crazed children were recruited. It was like dumping the flotsam and jetsam of Cuban prisons on the United States in the boatlift days. This radical decision was taken without any consultation with parents at all, or with teachers who would be expected to manage these wild children. Incorporating them into hitherto calm classes, all hell broke loose, of course. How could it have been avoided? Principals began to lock their office doors. In short order, District Three plunged to the bottom of city statistical rankings. Then, to the bottom of the entire state! What a movie that would have made.
In 28 years of teaching, I've never seen an administrator attempt to raise the standard of what we expect from children, or what we expect from ourselves. We drown, however, in the rhetoric of high expectations which only those who wear tinfoil hats could take seriously. Changing superintendents makes no difference to the quality of schooling: some are fatter, some shriller, some black, some white, some Hispanic, some older or younger - but all dance to the same weird flute music from above. For decades I've watched a dreary parade of men and women make fine promises from the superintendent's office and everyone eventually made some false move that angered their handlers and they were gone.
In all that time only one superintendent, a man who won his job thanks to a deal with my wife (the swing vote on the School Board at that time), in which he agreed to assert independence from the cabal of influence peddlers and others who ran the district. Inside of a single year teacher morale soared - along with measures of accomplishment - and the district soared from the bottom of the city rankings to the mediocre center.
It was too much to bear. The fellow was fired for his cheek toward his betters, fired at a public meeting attended by all local politicians and political club leaders where he was denounced from the podium by a legendary West Side politician known to the media as "the conscience of the city council:' You see, Murray, too much was at stake - not just money, but careers, patronage and ideological status - to allow any changes which would actually occur. It's the invisible stakeholders in schooling who would have to approve changes, and only in a fairy tale (or special temporary circumstances), can that happen. This doesn't mean the villains of my narrative are bad people; many are quite decent and intelligent, like you, Murray. It means that the mission of ambition and survival trumps a commitment to excellence every time.
It's an ancient problem. Gym teachers and math teachers become principals and administrators because they have the least work to do in a school day, the least stress, and they pay the least emotional toll in doing it. They have time to feather their nests. Climbing the pyramid, they surround themselves with loyal friends as buffers, always careful to include representatives of any special interest that might upset the cozy arrangements.
School as Narcotic
What have we done, Murray? Filling blackboards and workbooks, running videos, cramming heads with disconnected information we have driven even the idea of quality from the field. And by constantly bathing the young in passivity, showering them with petty orders and bells for their own good, we have created a foundry where incomplete men and women are forged.
Our school products emerge with only shaky grasp of the past, with a void where comprehension should be; they have no capacity to visualize the future. Every single secondary school student in New York City is taught that North and South Vietnam are one country, divided, and all their teachers believe that, too. But the truth is that for thousands of years they were three countries - and only forced together for a short time under French domination. The civilization of the two northern countries, Annam and Tonkin, derives largely from China; the culture of South Vietnam, a country know as Champa, comes - like that of Cambodia - from India. The two regions have been fighting for nearly two thousand years. Like the Sunnis and the Shiites in the artificial country fabricated by the British called Iraq,there is no "solution" to the conflict - only violence periodically renewed. Why don't you know this, Murray? Your license says you are a "history teacher;' but what you teach is propaganda.
Nightmare children are all about us, diseased by our indifference; some have capacity to heal themselves, most don't. These are nightmare children, I say; no vital interests, creatures trained to organize their time around spasms of excitement and amusement, or escape from punishment. The maps of the road ahead they carry are false. The most curious commentary on these kids is the thousands of hours they spend in not exploring, not playing, not seeking opportunities for personal gain - but in watching other people on television,in music videos and computer games.
Sane children would never do this - the arc of anyone's life is too short to accept passivity and fantasy to this degree. Conjure with these numbers: in families where the husband and wife have never been divorced, and where the wife doesn't work, the index of spectatorship - TV and otherwise - drops to one-tenth the big-city average.
The institution you and I work for creates addiction. It addicts children to prefer thin abstraction and dull fantasies to reality. As I've grown older I've come to believe that good teachers are more dangerous than bad ones. They keep this sick institution alive.
Old friend, I'm done. I'm going to circulate this letter to the new school board in the hopes it might make some of them think. I haven't the slightest reason to believe it will, but that doesn't excuse me from trying.
I was New York State Teacher of the Year when it happened. An accumulation of disgust and frustration that grew too heavy is what finally did me in. To test my resolve, I sent a short essay to the Wall Street Journal tided, "I Quit, I Think" In it, I explained my reasons for deciding to throw in the towel, despite having no savings and not the slightest idea what else I might do in my mid-fifties to pay the rent. The essay, in its entirety, read:
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found it's "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some iron law of biology. It's a religious notion, and school is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs project, contract giver, and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed:' It has political allies to guard its marches; that's why reforms come and go without altering much. Even reformers can't imagine school being much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are thirteen, you can't tell which one learned first - the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school, I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I teach David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.
In thirty years of teaching kids, rich and poor, I almost never met a learning-disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and-talented one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values that we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
That's the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen - certification probably guarantees it won't.
How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don't need more money or a longer year; they need real free market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don't need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can't teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall, I'll be looking for work.
My little essay went off in March, and I forgot it. Somewhere along the way, I must have gotten a note saying it would be published at the editor's discretion, but if so, it was quickly forgotten in the press of turbulent feelings that accompanied my own internal struggle. Finally, on July 5, 1991, I swallowed hard and quit. Twenty days later, the Journal published the piece.
Looking back on a thirty-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent so much of my time on earth institutionalized. I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrinating and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.
School is a religion. Without understanding this holy-mission aspect, you're certain to misperceive what takes place there as a result of human stupidity or venality or class warfare. All are present in the equation; it's just that none of them matters very much - even without them, school would move in the same direction.
Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart; but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance. Now it's been transformed into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity, such as "gifted and talented;' "mainstream;' and "special ed" - categories in which learning is rationed for the good of the system and the social order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are dangerous imbeciles whose minds must be conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation for tranquilizing purposes.
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper middle-class kids already made shallow by the pressures to conform imposed by the world on their often lightly rooted parents. When these kids come of age, they feel certain they must know something, because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain convinced of this until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing, or panic attacks brought on by meaninglessness manage to upset the precarious balance of their incomplete adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said evil is a state of incompetence. If he's right, then our school adventure filled the twentieth century with evil.
Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine" It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is think for themselves or ever be at rest very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal their dependence in many ways and are easily exploited by their knowledgeable elders.
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe the dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model), or is nature's way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model), or society's way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic-elitist model), or that it's evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is necessary to address the problem of the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the many careers devoted to tending them may seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Hector, the Horse-Tamer
See thirteen-year-old Hector Rodriguez as I first saw him one cold November day: slightly built, olive-skinned, short, with huge black eyes, his body twisted acrobatically in an attempt to slip past the gate of the skating rink at the northern end of Central Park. I had known Hector for several months as his teacher, but up to that time I had never really seen him, nor would I have seen him then but for the startling puzzle he presented: he was gate-crashing with a fully paid admission ticket in his pocket. Was he nuts?
Finding Hector wedged between the bars of the revolving security gate, I yelled, "Hector, you idiot, why are you sneaking in? You have a ticket"
He gave me a look that said,"Why shout? I know what I'm doing:' He actually appeared offended by my lack of understanding.
Hector was conducting an experiment to answer a simple question: Could the interlocking bars of the automatic turnstile be defeated? What safer way to find out than with a paid ticket in hand in case he got caught?
Later, as I searched school records for clues to understanding this boy, I discovered that, in his short time on earth, he had built up a long record as an outlaw. Although none of his crimes would have earned him more than a good spanking a hundred years earlier, now they helped support a social-service empire.
At the time of this incident, Hector attended one of the lowest rated public schools in New York State, part of a select group threatened with takeover by state overseers. Of the thirteen classes in Hector's grade, a full nine were of higher rank than the one he was in. Hector was an exhausted salmon swimming upstream in a raging current that threatened to sweep away his dignity. We had deliberately unleashed the flood by assigning about eleven hundred kids to five strict categories: "gifted and talented honors;" "gifted and talented;" "special progress;" "mainstream;" and "special ed:' (These last kids had a cash value to the school three times higher than that of the others, providing a genuine incentive to find fatal defects where none existed.)
Hector belonged to the doomed category called "mainstream;' itself further divided into subcategories labeled A, B, C and O. Worst of the worst, above special ed, was mainstream O. This was where Hector reported. Since special ed was a life sentence of ostracism and humiliation at the hands of one's peers, we might even call Hector lucky to be in mainstream, though as mainstream 0, he was suspended in that thin layer of mercy just above the truly doomed. Hector's standardized-test scores placed him about three years behind the middle of the pack. He wasn't just behind the eight ball he was six feet under it.
Shortly after I found Hector breaking and entering, he was arrested in a nearby elementary school with a gun. It was a fake gun, but it looked pretty real to the school's secretaries and principal. Hector had been dismissed for the Christmas holiday that morning, at which time he had high-tailed it to his old elementary school (which was still in session), intending to turn the younger children loose, to free the slaves like a pint-sized Spartacus. I found this out at the faculty Christmas party when the principal came over to where I was camped by the potato salad and cried, "Gatto, what have you done to me?
Travel forward now one year in time: Hector is a freshman in high school On his second report card, he has failed every subject and has been absent enough to be cited for truancy.
Can you see the Hector portrayed by these implacable school records Poor, small for his age, a member of a minority, not paid much attention by people who matter, dumb in a super dumb class, a bizarre gate-crasher, a gunslinger, a total failure in high school Can you see Hector? Certainly you think you can. How could you not? The system makes it so easy to classify him and predict his future.
What is society to do with its Hectors? This is the boy, multiplied by millions, whom school people agonized about in every decade of the twentieth century. This is the boy who destroyed the academic mission of American public schooling, turning it into a warehouse operation, a clinic for behavioral training and attitude adjustment. When the Christian Science Monitor made a documentary about my class and Hector's, the principal said to the filmmakers,"Sure, the system stinks, but John has nothing to replace it. And as bad as the system is, it's better than chaos"
But is the only alternative to a stifling system really chaos? The country has been sold the idea Hector is the problem of modern schooling. That misperception is the demon we face, under its many guises and behind its shape-shifting rhetoric. Forced schooling itself was conceived to be the front line in a war against chaos, the beginning of the effort to keep Hector and his kind in protective custody. Important people believe, with the fervor of religious zealots, that civilization can survive only if the irrational, unpredictable impulses of human nature are continually beaten back and confined until their demonic vitality is sapped.
next
The Camino de Santiago
Let me tell you a little about fat Stanley, whose path crossed mine when he was thirteen. Stanley only came to class one or two days a month, and I knew that sooner or later he would be caught in the truancy net and prosecuted. I liked Stanley, not least because he never whined when other kids bothered him because he was fat - he simply punched them so hard in the head nobody ever bothered Stanley a second time. I hoped to spare him the grim experience of becoming a social service case. So I asked him one day what he did on all those absences? What he said changed my life. I never saw school the same way after Stanley spoke.
It seems Stanley had five aunts and uncles, all in business for themselves before the age of 21. His aim was to follow in their footsteps. Even at 13, he had been made aware of time's winged chariot hurrying near, that he had only eight years to make the miracle of an independent livelihood. One of the relatives was a florist, one a builder of unfinished furniture, one a deli owner, one had a little restaurant, one owned a delivery service. Stanley cut school to work without pay for each these relatives, bartering labor in exchange for learning the businesses - and a whole lot more - working in the company of men and women who cared for him much more than any professional stranger would have.
It was a better educational package than whatever he missed cutting school, hands down. As he put it to me, man to man: "This way I get a chance to see how the different businesses work. You tell me what books I have to read and I'll read them. But I don't have time to waste in school unless I want to end up like you - working for somebody else:' When I heard that, I couldn't keep him locked up in good conscience. Besides, his mother agreed with Stanley. So I began to cover for him, logging him present when he was making floral bouquets or building furniture. None of his other teachers ever asked; I think they were glad to be rid of him. To illustrate the powerful energies at work under his fat, deceptively cheerful exterior, Stanley crossed his "t"s with a pointed spear formation, not a simple line. Right then and there I adopted his "t" cross as my own, to remind me what I learned from a truant that day.
A big secret of bulk-process schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn; a bigger secret is that it isn't supposed to teach self direction at all. Stanley-style is verboten. School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong; even if your enthusiasm is phony.
School is the first impression we get of organized society and its relentless need to rank everyone on a scale of winners and losers; like most first impressions, the real things school teaches about your place in the social order last a lifetime for most of us.
Work in classrooms isn't important work. It fails to speak to real needs pressing on the young. It doesn't answer burning questions which day-to-day experience forces upon young minds. Problems encountered outside school walls are treated as peripheral when in truth they are always central. The net effect of making work abstract - "subject" -centered - external to individual longings, fears, experiences, and questions, is to render students of this enforced irrelevance listless and indifferent.
The causes of sluggishness in the young have been well understood for a long time. I'm tempted to say forever. Growth and self mastery are reserved for those who vigorously self-direct, like Stanley: planning, doing, creating, reflecting, freely associating, taking chances, punching the lights out on your tormentors. But this is precisely the agenda school is set up to prevent. Think of school as a conditioning laboratory, drilling naturally unique, one-of-a-kind individuals to respond as a mass, to accept continual ennui, envy and limited competence as only natural parts of the human condition. The official economy we have constructed demands constantly renewed supplies of leveled, spiritless, passive, anxious, friendless, family-less people who can be scrapped and replaced endlessly, and who will perform at maximum efficiency until their own time comes to be scrap; people who think the difference between Coke and Pepsi, or round hamburgers versus square ones, are subjects worthy of argument.
As I wrote those words in February of 2008, I had just finished listening to a commercial for high-style telephones on TV. It made fun of the unfortunate fools whose telephone styling was "soooo yesterday;' as a pretty girl put it in the advertisement. It had never before occurred to me that among various inescapable worries like cancer, homelessness, unemployment, blindness, aging, poverty, crippling accidents and the like, there might actually be people so shallow the look of their telephone was an item of concern. Try to picture the "A" student who came up with that idea, and pray for his contemptible soul.
The Old Order Amish
I tried to imagine the Lancaster Amish, or any of the Old Order Amish scattered around the world, worrying whether their telephones were in fashion. The small business, small farm economy of the Amish requires different qualities from the oncoming generations than we do: they ask for broad competence and a spirit of selfreliance, for dependability, honesty, neighborliness, compassion, piety, and commitment to the common good. Were we to adopt Amish values wholesale, our economy would nosedive.
As our economy has been shaped by its architects, it relies upon encouraging frenzy for novelty, for fashion in more than clothing, all the way to telephones. It's an attitude which induces nonstop consumption in a heady atmosphere of "out with the old, in with the new;" to escape from shame, an addiction to the spirit of the Cole Porter song, Anything Goes. That's the job the incessant bells perform in our schools: they teach a Monty Pythonesque relief at escape from responsibility, as they say in bell language, "And now for something completely different" Of course, you have to have deep experience with shame to fear it. But schools are an advanced workshop in that, too. The first day I taught, an old-timer told me how to control my classes. "Humiliation;' she said. "That's the only thing they fear. Shaine them. Encourage other kids to shame them, too"
One famous insider of modern schooling back in the post-WWI days (when the model was hardening) called government schooling "the perfect organization of the hive:' That was H. H. Goddard, chairman of psychology at Princeton. Goddard believed standardized test scores used as a signal for privileged treatment would cause the lower classes to come face-to-face with their own biological inferiority. It would be like wearing a public dunce cap. Exactly the function "special education" delivers today. The pain of endless daily humiliation would discourage reproduction among the inferior, Goddard thought. Charles Darwin had implied this gently, but his first cousin, Francis Galton, had virtually demanded it of responsible politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in his own writings.
In 1930, the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association, a group then basking in reflected glory from the lessons of schooling in the new Soviet Union, declared the main purpose of schooling should be "effective use of capital" that valuable stuff through which "our unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained" Now how do you suppose that idea got into circulation among the folks at a presumably left-wing organization? Talk about a house of mirrors! For the curious, you might want to buy Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of the Soviet Union.
Think for a second how "capital" can become "more effective" Surely it happens when the stuff capital allows to be produced is actually purchased by eager consumers, and when projects financed by capital receive little public resistance. Capital operates most efficiently in climates without public opposition, where critical thinking among ordinary people is in a primitive state, so the public becomes an inept opponent. And is it so difficult to conceive of a plan which could be managed through the very institution - schooling - charged with development of the intellect? It isn't by accident the symbol of Fabian socialism is a wolf in sheep's clothing, or that Fabians were from the comfortable classes of England, not from its marginalized dregs (as was often true of revolutionary socialists). This is a matter of some significance, though never held up to scrutiny in schoolbook histories. Where industrial management was content to kill the masses with brutal treatment, Fabians, led by Beatrice Webb, aimed to kill them with kindness. Hence we got the Welfare State. But whatever the methods, aims were identical.
If school is to serve capital, then it must be a production line where children as raw material are shaped and fashioned like nails. To make capital more efficient would require capital accumulations be concentrated into fewer hands, not spread so widely among the populace. Even that the middle-class basis of American society give way a little, too. Or eventually, give way a lot.
Sixty-six years after this weirdly indiscreet slip by the NEA:s Department of Superintendence, Johns Hopkins University Press, in 1996, published a book, Fat and Mean, with surprising news about our by now well-schooled society. The book reported that while the American economy had grown massively through the 1960's, real spendable working class wages hadn't grown at all for 30 years. During the booms of the 1980's and 1990's, purchasing power had risen steeply for 20 percent of the population, but it actually declined for all the rest by 13 percent. After inflation was factored in, purchasing power of a working couple in 1995 was only 8 percent greater than for a single working man in 1905.
The steep decline in common prosperity over 90 years of intense forced schooling drove both parents from the home to work, depositing their children in the management systems of daycare and extended schooling. Despite a century-long harangue that schooling is the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred. Wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century's end than at its beginnings.
The Old Order Amish took a different road. Today a group of about 150,000 people - quite prosperous although virtually unschooled - a group held together by religion and common culture which came to the US with little more than the clothes on their backs. In his book Amish Enterprise, published in 1995, author Donald Kraybill, a specialist in Amish life and a Johns Hopkins University academic, said the Amish
challenge a lot of conventional assumptions about what it takes to enter business. They don't have high school educations; they don't have specialized training; they don't use computers; they don't use electricity or automobiles; they don't have training in how to create a marketing plan. But the resources they transfer over from the farm are: an entrepreneurial spirit; a willingness to take risks; innovativeness; a strong work ethic; a cheap family labor pool; and high standards of craftsmanship. They don't want their shops and industries to get large. This spreads entrepreneurship widely across the whole settlement.
More. The Amish are legendary good neighbors, first to volunteer in times of need in the larger non-Amish community. They open their farms to ghetto children and frequently rear handicapped children from the non-Amish world whom nobody else wants. They farm so well and so profitably without using chemical fertilizers or pesticides, without tractors and other complex machinery, that Canada, Russia, France, Mexico and Uruguay have hired them to help raise agricultural productivity outside the United States.
In Yoder v. Wisconsin (1976), the Amish did battle with the government of Wisconsin to preserve their way of doing things against bureaucratic assault. And although the decision looks like a compromise in which both parties won a little, a closer look will leave no doubt of which was the real winner.
Sick of Amish rejection of its schools, Wisconsin sought to compel Amish compliance with its secular school laws through its police power. The Amish resisted on these grounds: they said government schooling was built on the principle of the mechanical milk separator. It whirled the young mind about until both the social structure of the Amish community, and the structure of private family life, were fragmented beyond repair. Schooling demanded separation of people from daily life, it divided the world into disciplines, courses, classes, grades and teachers who would remain strangers to the children in all but name. Even religion, separated from family and daily life, was just another subject for critical analysis and testing.
And the constant competition was destructive, leaving a multitude of losers, humiliated and self-hating, a far cry from the universal commitment Amish community life requires. The Amish wanted no part of these things. As a part of any compromise with Wisconsin, community leaders demanded the following:
1. Schools within walking distance of home;
2. No school to be so large that pupils had to be sorted into different compartments and assigned different teachers every year;
3. The school year would be no longer than eight months;
4. Important decisions would be under parental control, not that of bureaucrats;
5. Teachers hired were to be knowledgeable in, and sympathetic to, Amish values and rural ways;
6. Children were to be taught that wisdom and academic knowledge were two different things.
7. Every student would have practical internships and apprenticeships supervised by parents.
What can be learned from Stanley and the Amish? One thing, to discard any belief that the concept of mass man actually describes something real. We need to realize what our fingerprints and our intuition actually proclaimed long before DNA: no two people are alike, all "averages" are lies, and nobody can be accurately contained by numbers and graphs. The use of these against those too weak to resist is the Bed of Procrustes, brought into modern life. We need to abandon the notion - and punish those who retain it - that ordinary people are too stupid, irresponsible, and childish to look out for themselves. We need to honor our founding documents and founding ideas, to accept that each one of us has the right to live as he or she deems wise, and if the way chosen would mean disaster for global corporations - as the way of the Amish and the Stanleys among us surely would - then that decision must be honored still.
4
David Sarnoff's Classroom
A Letter to My Assistant Principal Dear Murray, I enjoyed our talk last Friday about the hidden machinery in School District Three, Manhattan. You surprised me with your candor. I hope we can build on that to exchange some ideas (discreetly of course), which might prove of mutual benefit. I know official pedagogy doesn't forgive those who expose its secrets, so in light of the fact you told me you expect to work here "forever;' in what follows I've exercised some discretion in the event this falls into hostile hands. I have left my own presence intact, you'll notice. In the first place I have no intention of working here forever, and in the second place I grew up in the Monongahela Valley near Pittsburgh around the time of WWII, and I was taught by that Scots-Irish place (even in its schools), to welcome a fight with rotters, scoundrels and low-lives, all which labels fit our mutual employers.
Recently I walked through the Harvard campus in Cambridge, just for the fun of it, and on that ramble I spotted a brochure pinned to a bulletin board in one of the buildings, containing advice for students planning a career in the new international economy which it predicted was at hand. First, the brochure gave warning that academic class work and professional credentials would count for less in the future, and a track record of accomplishment which suggested competency would count for more. This seemed a way to put a bell around the neck of grade point averages and test rankings, fingering them for the frauds they are, albeit in the time-honored elliptical manner of charlatans everywhere. That caught my interest, so I read on.
The brochure identified nine qualities its author felt were essential for successful adaptation to the evolving world of work, so I'm asking you, Murray, to temporarily put aside your customary apologia for District Three's shameless schools and let me know how many of the nine you can honestly say are the priorities of the wealthy school district we work for on the Upper West side of Manhattan:
1. The ability to ask hard questions of data, whether from textbooks, authorities, or other "expert" sources. In other words, do we teach dialectics?
2. The ability to define problems independently, to avoid slavish dependence on official definitions.
3. The ability to scan masses of irrelevant information and to quickly extract from the sludge whatever is useful.
4. The ability to conceptualize.
5. The ability to reorganize information into new patterns which enable a different perspective than the customary.
6. The possession of a mind fluent in moving among different modes of thought: deductive, inductive, heuristic, intuitive, et al.
7. Facility in collaboration with a partner, or in teams.
8. Skill in the discussion of issues, problems or techniques.
9. Skill in rhetoric. Convincing others your course is correct.
Now, from where I sit, and I've been sitting in District Three for nearly three decades, we don't teach any of these as a matter of policy. And for good reason. Students so trained would destroy the structure of familiar schooling and all the comfortable hierarchies some of us depend on.
Just think for a second about the transmission of competencies. Our school population is drawn largely from families of the working poor, but we've abandoned shop and cooking programs, interscholastic athletics, school socials, art and music. Not only can't our kids read, write, or count very well; now they can't drive a nail, plane a board, use a saw, turn a screwdriver, boil an egg, or find ways to amuse themselves and stay healthy. In a few classrooms, very few, teachers know how to train the young in powers; but actually doing this has to be accomplished as a kind of sabotage because it would never be authorized by authority. Every deviation from standardized protocol has to be signed off on multiple times, making it almost impossible to teach correctly, to adapt to particular people, conditions, and opportunities.
Now, for contrast, think of David Sarnoff's school- the streets. Sarnoff, as head of RCA, has been a major power in the twentieth century, yet his early years were spent in a shtetl in Russia without schooling. Promptly upon arrival in New York City with his family, his father dropped dead - leaving David at age nine to be family breadwinner. In five short months he could read English well enough to read the daily newspapers, and to speak it well enough to earn the family living as a newsboy - half a cent for every paper sold. Was it English classes in school that inspired such facility, do you think?
Five months to operational fluency. No school. What do you make of that, Murray? At fourteen Sarnoff had his own newsstand. Without time for a high school diploma, little David read the daily papers as his texts. One day he saw an ad for an office boy at Marconi Wireless. He hurried over to the company without an appointment, barged into the office of the president unannounced, and asked for the job. Five hundred boys in line to be interviewed, but it was David who was hired on the spot. There's a lesson there, Murray. I wish our school could teach it. Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want.
After a year as an office boy, Sarnoff taught himself telegraphy just as Andy Carnegie had done in Pittsburgh at an even younger age. When Marconi Wireless was swallowed up by the Radio Corporation of America, he was on the cutting edge of the technology it needed, thanks to self teaching. Twenty three years later, age 39, he was president of the company.
How could that happen without money, family connections, a high school diploma, or a (gasp!) college degree?! Sounds like a soap opera or an Alger story. Murray, don't dare say "those were simpler times" like a parrot repeating something it heard; those were far more complicated times than this barren epoch we enjoy, stripped of human meaning by the corporatizing of everything. At age nine, Sarnoff self-taught himself into a job; at 14 into a business; at 39, into the presidency of a powerful, tech-driven corporation.
He was able to move so rapidly also because he got a chance to think about serious matters before his eighth birthday, to live a significant life before he was ten. He got a chance to add value to his family and community before he was 15, and a chance to follow his own instincts and ambitions ever after. What school do you know these days that would allow that? If we followed the same path, school would cease to be the jobs-project it really is.
You can't self-teach without inner strength and a measure of gravity, without opportunities to be alone, to have broad experience with people and great challenges. Most of us who presume to judge schools are fooled by rituals of disciplined behavior, pretty hall displays, and test scores. If we knew what to look for, we'd be horrified and angry at the empty destinies this waste of precious time arranges for us.
The Mask of School Reform
I was recently a visitor to a famous alternative public school in East
Harlem which received truckloads of compliments over the past few
years. It was founded and run by a famous woman, Debbie Meier,
a lady with a reputation for plain talk and straight shooting. I had
known Mrs. Meier very slightly for about a decade before I saw her
school, and I have no hesitation saying she deserved all the nice things
said about her: she was smart as a whip, tough as nails, and generous
to a fault. But looking at the school from inside for a few hours it was impossible not to see how far it fell short of standards of excellence which aren't very hard to achieve - and which once were common to schools in the steel-working Monongahela Valley where I grew up. Right near the surface I could see this famous East Harlem school was seriously hobbled by familiar constraints, many self-imposed by habit, by custom, by lack of imagination, and by the school district, too, I would imagine. The famous negative litany: You can't do this; you can't do that; time to move to something different; you better take the upcoming test seriously, etc., was alive and well at the famous school.
My guess is none of this was Debbie's doing, but realistically she had to function inside a mature bureaucracy, one very conscious just how far deviation could be allowed before top management would be called on the carpet and punished.
The most suffocating of the constraints are generated from traditional Calvinistic roots: Mistrust of children, mistrust of teachers, a reluctance to face that adolescence is a junk word, fear of looking bad, fear of scoring poorly on standardized tests, and suppression of imagination - voluntary suppression - which the collective teaching staff imposes on those of its colleagues who haven't yet lost their talent.
For weeks after that visit I felt awful. Debbie's school was clearly a better place for kids than the schools of District Three, and yet David Sarnoff wouldn't have wasted his time there, nor would the place have had anything real to offer Mr. Sarnoff. What hit me hardest was the community service program at Central Park East - community service was a requirement of attendance, and one I used extensively in my own teaching practice. It had produced stunning benefits in all areas of curriculum for me, I was a believer.
And yet at this famous school - enrolling students older than David Farragut was when he took over command of a warship; older than Washington was when he learned trigonometry, surveying, naval architecture and military science - at this famous school students were assigned to community service for two hours a week. Two hours a week. Who in their right mind would want a teenager to drop in for two hours a week, with all the bookkeeping, training, oversight, and hassle that would require? It was a way of fatally trivializing the service ideal, turning it into superficial drudgery for all concerned.
The Commissioner's Report
Once a principal in the richest secondary school in District Three - you'll know the one I mean, Murray - asked me privately if I could help him set up a program to teach critical thinking. Of course, I replied, but if w~ do it right your school will become unmanageable. Why would kids taught to think critically and express themselves effectively put up with the nonsense you force down their throats? That was the end of our interview and his critical thinking project.
Murray, you're the only individual who ever willingly spoke to me about the apparatus of pedagogy, in all 26 years I've been in the business. The only one. In the thousands of hours I've spent in teachers' rooms and teachers' meetings, not a single soul besides yourself was open to discussing anything profound about our notions of pedagogy, nothing that could get them in trouble. Surely that intellectual vacuum says something terrible about the business which has swallowed your life and my own.
My compliment is bait on the hook of my next question: At the end of 1988, our rich district was ranked statistically last by the State Commissioner of Education in a dull publication which looked like a telephone directory. You had to massage the numbers a long time to actually figure out what it was saying, but when I did, it seemed to be saying that we were the worst school district in New York State, 736th of 736, in certain key categories. But our section of the city is world famous, isn't it? We have great universities, famous research institutions, museums, centers for art, the best transportation system around ... what gives?
You know what contempt I have for the instruments used to rank the student body, but in this one case I'm going to be inconsistent and cite them as a measure of school district failure. In third-grade math and reading, we rank dead last. We are only nine places off the bottom in fifth-grade writing, sixth-grade reading, math and social studies and in seventh-grade honor math and honor biology.
Listen, friend; we can't be last or nearly last out of 736 school jurisdictions in so many metrics without being abysmal, not just bad. Last isn't an easy degree of failure to achieve; being last is a creative act. The Sarnoff family should thank its lucky stars District Three didn't get its hooks into David. This is the business you want to stay in "forever"? It boggles the mind. You ought to feel ashamed to take money for wasting the lives of these trapped children. I've gone to many school board meetings looking, like Diogenes, for one honest board member or administrator, one person who looked to be worried. But all I ever heard were waves of self-congratulation and a smug indifference to the suffering we were causing.
According to the Commissioner's Report, the average teacher in our schools has been there sixteen years, a sign of stability; yet the teacher turnover is an incredible 22% a year, almost the highest in New York State! What could account for such an anomaly? In some businesses turnover like that would cause a management shakeup. It damages morale; it causes a school to lose its memory. And yet ... and yet, we have all those teachers who stay, too! Why? Let me tell you why.
A caste system has been created by school administrators, in combination with the teachers union. Certain teachers in each of our schools have been rewarded with good programs, good rooms, good kids in exchange for their loyalty and cooperation. The power to confer these privileges will be fatally enhanced if we ever get so-called "merit" pay (who would decide "merit" except feather-bedding administrators?). These favors are rewards for those who play ball, these privileges are bought by exploiting unfortunate fellow teachers, often the newest teachers who are dumped upon with impossible workloads, and quickly leave the business.
The situation I'm describing is universal and constitutes the poison pill in merit proposals. Merit would certainly NOT go to the meritorious - as a student, parent or citizen would define merit - but as a school administrator would. When 22% of the teachers don't survive more than a year, the caste system that corrupts our schools is partially to blame. Nobody ever bothers to ask the 100 to 150 teachers who leave each year why they left. That's because everyone already knows.
The Shadow Economy of Schools
Teachers with deals don't constitute the entirety of non-laboring labor in schools, there's been such an inflation of management, both visible and invisible, as to defy imagination. For instance, what do you make of this: the student/teacher ratio in our school district is listed in state accounts as 15:1, but everywhere the number of kids in a class is 30 or more: Half of all teaching energy has been siphoned away into administrative tasks in the shadow economy of front-office politics. No healthy enterprise can afford this degree of deceit. It's the teachers who don't get paid off with these non-teaching deals you should be worrying about. They become bitter and cynical. They find ways to get even, ways to cut back on their own production. You administrators have created a catastrophe by paying off your favorites with deals.
I can't escape the conclusion that we both are involved in a social engineering project whose mission is to weaken children's minds and give them bad characters - all concealed in the sanctimony we exude on parents' night. I heard one principal (a decent man in his own estimation, I'm sure), tell a large audience that the damage to these children had already been done before they came to him in seventh grade, and that his job was to relieve their pain and make them feel good in the here and now because their limited futures were already predetermined.
Can you believe it?! The shameless brass! I couldn't make that up. Isn't it the function of morphine or crack cocaine to stupefy pain? Given a choice between those substances and school as an anodyne, you'd have to be deranged to choose school.
Two district policies in particular have destroyed the capacity for sustained thought among our kids. The first was the political decision, cooked up at the Ford Foundation, as I recall, not to control outrageous classroom behavior on the grounds that frustration causes perpetrators to have low self-esteem. While this policy was being imposed (and afterwards), the rhetoric of decent behavior was maintained, as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. Tell me how that was any different from Big Brother announcing the chocolate ration was being raised, while it was being lowered? The degree of disrespect our nation has assigned its ordinary population wouldn't be possible unless somewhere in the command centers it hadn't been decided that common men and women should be stripped of any power to rebel. And that they could be lied to without compunction, because their dignity didn't count. Or their lives.
As these conditions for chaos were being imposed, a form of triage was constructed wherein a few of the "best" classes (on the liberal West Side, that means mostly white classes) were to be held to a traditional standard. As fo~ the others, the mass of fairly well-behaved kids, was mixed with an infusion of violent, restless, disruptive students until only a primitive level of instruction was possible. In order to free school administrators from the tiresome function of helping to maintain order for the lumpen proletariat, classroom disruption was now deemed, system-wide, a problem of bad teaching. In other words, if you complained, or asked for help, you were treated with contempt and your job was in jeopardy. Mirabile dictu! The burden of discipline vanished as an administrative responsibility. And because reasonably patient children become angry at a teacher's ineffectiveness in maintaining order, many of the polite kids joined the disruptors, too. Does that surprise you, Murray? The cause and effect linkage, I mean.
Another destructive policy decision was the project to recruit disruptive children from other school districts, to conceal the shrinking enrollment in District Three - a student population decline caused by the evil reputation District Three acquired from its first policy! In 1984, after we fell to the lowest student enrollment of any district in New York City (10,000), 3,000 half-crazed children were recruited. It was like dumping the flotsam and jetsam of Cuban prisons on the United States in the boatlift days. This radical decision was taken without any consultation with parents at all, or with teachers who would be expected to manage these wild children. Incorporating them into hitherto calm classes, all hell broke loose, of course. How could it have been avoided? Principals began to lock their office doors. In short order, District Three plunged to the bottom of city statistical rankings. Then, to the bottom of the entire state! What a movie that would have made.
In 28 years of teaching, I've never seen an administrator attempt to raise the standard of what we expect from children, or what we expect from ourselves. We drown, however, in the rhetoric of high expectations which only those who wear tinfoil hats could take seriously. Changing superintendents makes no difference to the quality of schooling: some are fatter, some shriller, some black, some white, some Hispanic, some older or younger - but all dance to the same weird flute music from above. For decades I've watched a dreary parade of men and women make fine promises from the superintendent's office and everyone eventually made some false move that angered their handlers and they were gone.
In all that time only one superintendent, a man who won his job thanks to a deal with my wife (the swing vote on the School Board at that time), in which he agreed to assert independence from the cabal of influence peddlers and others who ran the district. Inside of a single year teacher morale soared - along with measures of accomplishment - and the district soared from the bottom of the city rankings to the mediocre center.
It was too much to bear. The fellow was fired for his cheek toward his betters, fired at a public meeting attended by all local politicians and political club leaders where he was denounced from the podium by a legendary West Side politician known to the media as "the conscience of the city council:' You see, Murray, too much was at stake - not just money, but careers, patronage and ideological status - to allow any changes which would actually occur. It's the invisible stakeholders in schooling who would have to approve changes, and only in a fairy tale (or special temporary circumstances), can that happen. This doesn't mean the villains of my narrative are bad people; many are quite decent and intelligent, like you, Murray. It means that the mission of ambition and survival trumps a commitment to excellence every time.
It's an ancient problem. Gym teachers and math teachers become principals and administrators because they have the least work to do in a school day, the least stress, and they pay the least emotional toll in doing it. They have time to feather their nests. Climbing the pyramid, they surround themselves with loyal friends as buffers, always careful to include representatives of any special interest that might upset the cozy arrangements.
School as Narcotic
What have we done, Murray? Filling blackboards and workbooks, running videos, cramming heads with disconnected information we have driven even the idea of quality from the field. And by constantly bathing the young in passivity, showering them with petty orders and bells for their own good, we have created a foundry where incomplete men and women are forged.
Our school products emerge with only shaky grasp of the past, with a void where comprehension should be; they have no capacity to visualize the future. Every single secondary school student in New York City is taught that North and South Vietnam are one country, divided, and all their teachers believe that, too. But the truth is that for thousands of years they were three countries - and only forced together for a short time under French domination. The civilization of the two northern countries, Annam and Tonkin, derives largely from China; the culture of South Vietnam, a country know as Champa, comes - like that of Cambodia - from India. The two regions have been fighting for nearly two thousand years. Like the Sunnis and the Shiites in the artificial country fabricated by the British called Iraq,there is no "solution" to the conflict - only violence periodically renewed. Why don't you know this, Murray? Your license says you are a "history teacher;' but what you teach is propaganda.
Nightmare children are all about us, diseased by our indifference; some have capacity to heal themselves, most don't. These are nightmare children, I say; no vital interests, creatures trained to organize their time around spasms of excitement and amusement, or escape from punishment. The maps of the road ahead they carry are false. The most curious commentary on these kids is the thousands of hours they spend in not exploring, not playing, not seeking opportunities for personal gain - but in watching other people on television,in music videos and computer games.
Sane children would never do this - the arc of anyone's life is too short to accept passivity and fantasy to this degree. Conjure with these numbers: in families where the husband and wife have never been divorced, and where the wife doesn't work, the index of spectatorship - TV and otherwise - drops to one-tenth the big-city average.
The institution you and I work for creates addiction. It addicts children to prefer thin abstraction and dull fantasies to reality. As I've grown older I've come to believe that good teachers are more dangerous than bad ones. They keep this sick institution alive.
Old friend, I'm done. I'm going to circulate this letter to the new school board in the hopes it might make some of them think. I haven't the slightest reason to believe it will, but that doesn't excuse me from trying.
5
Hector Isn't the Problem
I Quit
During my thirtieth year as a schoolteacher in Community School
District Three, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools
in the district and crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me; after having
my license suspended twice for insubordination and covertly terminated once while I was on medical leave of absence; after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as lecturer in
its education department; (where I ranked first among 250 education
faculty in the "Student-Faculty Ratings" each year I was there); after
planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school
fundraiser in New York City history; after helping a single eighthgrade class perform thirty thousand hours of volunteer community
service; after organizing and financing a student-run food cooperative, securing more than a thousand apprenticeships, and directing
the collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of
private student libraries; after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals and launching
an armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students into a larger human reality - I quit. I was New York State Teacher of the Year when it happened. An accumulation of disgust and frustration that grew too heavy is what finally did me in. To test my resolve, I sent a short essay to the Wall Street Journal tided, "I Quit, I Think" In it, I explained my reasons for deciding to throw in the towel, despite having no savings and not the slightest idea what else I might do in my mid-fifties to pay the rent. The essay, in its entirety, read:
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found it's "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some iron law of biology. It's a religious notion, and school is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs project, contract giver, and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed:' It has political allies to guard its marches; that's why reforms come and go without altering much. Even reformers can't imagine school being much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are thirteen, you can't tell which one learned first - the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school, I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I teach David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.
In thirty years of teaching kids, rich and poor, I almost never met a learning-disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and-talented one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values that we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
That's the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen - certification probably guarantees it won't.
How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don't need more money or a longer year; they need real free market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don't need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can't teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall, I'll be looking for work.
My little essay went off in March, and I forgot it. Somewhere along the way, I must have gotten a note saying it would be published at the editor's discretion, but if so, it was quickly forgotten in the press of turbulent feelings that accompanied my own internal struggle. Finally, on July 5, 1991, I swallowed hard and quit. Twenty days later, the Journal published the piece.
Looking back on a thirty-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent so much of my time on earth institutionalized. I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrinating and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.
School is a religion. Without understanding this holy-mission aspect, you're certain to misperceive what takes place there as a result of human stupidity or venality or class warfare. All are present in the equation; it's just that none of them matters very much - even without them, school would move in the same direction.
Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart; but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance. Now it's been transformed into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity, such as "gifted and talented;' "mainstream;' and "special ed" - categories in which learning is rationed for the good of the system and the social order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are dangerous imbeciles whose minds must be conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation for tranquilizing purposes.
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper middle-class kids already made shallow by the pressures to conform imposed by the world on their often lightly rooted parents. When these kids come of age, they feel certain they must know something, because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain convinced of this until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing, or panic attacks brought on by meaninglessness manage to upset the precarious balance of their incomplete adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said evil is a state of incompetence. If he's right, then our school adventure filled the twentieth century with evil.
Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine" It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is think for themselves or ever be at rest very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal their dependence in many ways and are easily exploited by their knowledgeable elders.
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe the dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model), or is nature's way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model), or society's way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic-elitist model), or that it's evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is necessary to address the problem of the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the many careers devoted to tending them may seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Hector, the Horse-Tamer
See thirteen-year-old Hector Rodriguez as I first saw him one cold November day: slightly built, olive-skinned, short, with huge black eyes, his body twisted acrobatically in an attempt to slip past the gate of the skating rink at the northern end of Central Park. I had known Hector for several months as his teacher, but up to that time I had never really seen him, nor would I have seen him then but for the startling puzzle he presented: he was gate-crashing with a fully paid admission ticket in his pocket. Was he nuts?
Finding Hector wedged between the bars of the revolving security gate, I yelled, "Hector, you idiot, why are you sneaking in? You have a ticket"
He gave me a look that said,"Why shout? I know what I'm doing:' He actually appeared offended by my lack of understanding.
Hector was conducting an experiment to answer a simple question: Could the interlocking bars of the automatic turnstile be defeated? What safer way to find out than with a paid ticket in hand in case he got caught?
Later, as I searched school records for clues to understanding this boy, I discovered that, in his short time on earth, he had built up a long record as an outlaw. Although none of his crimes would have earned him more than a good spanking a hundred years earlier, now they helped support a social-service empire.
At the time of this incident, Hector attended one of the lowest rated public schools in New York State, part of a select group threatened with takeover by state overseers. Of the thirteen classes in Hector's grade, a full nine were of higher rank than the one he was in. Hector was an exhausted salmon swimming upstream in a raging current that threatened to sweep away his dignity. We had deliberately unleashed the flood by assigning about eleven hundred kids to five strict categories: "gifted and talented honors;" "gifted and talented;" "special progress;" "mainstream;" and "special ed:' (These last kids had a cash value to the school three times higher than that of the others, providing a genuine incentive to find fatal defects where none existed.)
Hector belonged to the doomed category called "mainstream;' itself further divided into subcategories labeled A, B, C and O. Worst of the worst, above special ed, was mainstream O. This was where Hector reported. Since special ed was a life sentence of ostracism and humiliation at the hands of one's peers, we might even call Hector lucky to be in mainstream, though as mainstream 0, he was suspended in that thin layer of mercy just above the truly doomed. Hector's standardized-test scores placed him about three years behind the middle of the pack. He wasn't just behind the eight ball he was six feet under it.
Shortly after I found Hector breaking and entering, he was arrested in a nearby elementary school with a gun. It was a fake gun, but it looked pretty real to the school's secretaries and principal. Hector had been dismissed for the Christmas holiday that morning, at which time he had high-tailed it to his old elementary school (which was still in session), intending to turn the younger children loose, to free the slaves like a pint-sized Spartacus. I found this out at the faculty Christmas party when the principal came over to where I was camped by the potato salad and cried, "Gatto, what have you done to me?
Travel forward now one year in time: Hector is a freshman in high school On his second report card, he has failed every subject and has been absent enough to be cited for truancy.
Can you see the Hector portrayed by these implacable school records Poor, small for his age, a member of a minority, not paid much attention by people who matter, dumb in a super dumb class, a bizarre gate-crasher, a gunslinger, a total failure in high school Can you see Hector? Certainly you think you can. How could you not? The system makes it so easy to classify him and predict his future.
What is society to do with its Hectors? This is the boy, multiplied by millions, whom school people agonized about in every decade of the twentieth century. This is the boy who destroyed the academic mission of American public schooling, turning it into a warehouse operation, a clinic for behavioral training and attitude adjustment. When the Christian Science Monitor made a documentary about my class and Hector's, the principal said to the filmmakers,"Sure, the system stinks, but John has nothing to replace it. And as bad as the system is, it's better than chaos"
But is the only alternative to a stifling system really chaos? The country has been sold the idea Hector is the problem of modern schooling. That misperception is the demon we face, under its many guises and behind its shape-shifting rhetoric. Forced schooling itself was conceived to be the front line in a war against chaos, the beginning of the effort to keep Hector and his kind in protective custody. Important people believe, with the fervor of religious zealots, that civilization can survive only if the irrational, unpredictable impulses of human nature are continually beaten back and confined until their demonic vitality is sapped.
next
The Camino de Santiago
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