Weapons of Mass Instruction....A Teachers Journey through the Dark world of Compulsory Schooling,
By John Taylor Gatto
5
By John Taylor Gatto
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 eighth grade 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 Thin~:' 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
ticked"
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 ballj 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.
6
The Camino de Santiago
Feedback
Let me confess from the start I'm on the board of advisors of an organization called TV-Free America. As a schoolteacher I found that the
kids who drove me crazy were always big TV watchers. Their behavioral profile wasn't pretty. TV addicted kids were irresponsible, childish, dishonest, malicious to one another; above all else they seemed
to lack any sustaining purpose of their own, as if by consuming too
many made-up stories, modeling themselves after too many men
and women who were pretending to be somebody else, listening to
too many talking hamburgers and too many explanations of the way
things are (sponsored by oil companies and dairy councils) they had
lost the power to behave with integrity, to grow up.
It was almost as if by stealing time children needed to write their
own stories, television, like school itself, had dwarfed their spirits. When computers came along, I saw they often made the problem
worse. Potentially, they were a better deal, because of the capacity to
offer interactivity, but a majority of users I saw wallowed in porno,
games spent playing against programs, not other people, and many
spectator pursuits which required only consumption, not actively committed behavior.
Even with the Internet I saw how easy it was to cross the line into
a passive state unless good discipline was exercised, and I knew from
experience how hard that was to come by.
Casting about for a working hypothesis with which to fashion antidotes to the damage, I quickly abandoned preaching as a solution.
Whatever could be said against TV; games, the Internet, and all the
rest, had been said to these kids so many times their minds refused
to hear the words anymore. Relief would have to come from a different quarter; if these things were truly bad as I believed, if they diminished the intellect and corrupted the character as I felt, a solution
would have to be found in the natural proclivity of the young to move
around physically, not sit, before we suppress that urge with confinement to seats in school and with commercial blandishments to watch
performers rather than to perform oneself.
The master mechanism at work to cause harm was a suppression
of natural feedback circuits which allow us to learn from our mistakes. Somebody trying to learn to sail alone in a small boat will inevitably tack too far lefr and too far right when sailing into a wind,
when the destination is straight ahead, but practice will correct that
beginner's error because feedback will instruct the sailor's reaction
and judgement. In the area of mastering speech, with all its complex rhythms of syntax, and myriad notes and tones of diction, the
most crucial variable is time spent in practice. And in both instances
the more challenging the situation, the quicker that competence is
reached.
The principal reason bureaucracies are so stupid is that they cannot respond efficiently to feedback. Think of school management,
compelled by law to follow rules made long ago and far away, as
if human situations are so formulaic they can be codified. Management resents feedback from parents, teachers, students, or outside
criticism because its internal cohesion depends upon rules, not give
and take.
The absolute necessity for feedback from everywhere in taking an
education, (even from one's enemies), forced me to look closely at how rigidly students were ordered about - in a way which made little use
of their innate abilities to grow through feedback. My guess was that
by restoring this natural biological circuitry, the hideous displays of
media-sickened behavior among my students would decline. And the
guess proved right.
Now you have the information you need to understand what
made my Guerrilla Curriculum different from garden-variety "alternative" approaches - its target was inactivity (and even activity
which didn't significantly call feedback into play). Sufficient activity,
all by itself and aimed in any direction, would cause the kids to voluntarily cut back on time spend staring at lighted boxes. My strong
hunch was that the childish expressions of children had little to do
with the content of media programming, and everything to do with a
fatal calculus in which real experience is subtracted from young lives,
and simulated experience added in its place.
I set out to shock my students into discovering that face to face
engagement with reality was more interesting and rewarding than
watching the pre-packaged world of media screens, my target was
helping them jettison the lives of spectators which had been assigned
to them, so they could become players. I couldn't tell anyone in the
school universe what I was doing, but I made strenuous efforts to enlist parents as active participants. Just as Shen Wentong broke many
laws to bring the Phoenix steel plant to Shanghai three times faster
than German engineers thought it could be done, I broke many to
put this Guerrilla Curriculum into effect. From the first it delivered
heartening results.
Plunging kids into the nerve-wracking, but exhilarating waters
of real life - sending them on expeditions across the state, opening the court systems to their lawsuits, and the economy to their
businesses, filling public forums with their speeches and political
action - made them realize, without lectures, how much of their
time was customarily wasted sitting in the dark. And as that realization took hold, their dependence on the electronic doll houses
diminished.
The Camino de Santiago
An important inspiration for this transformational curriculum came
from a medieval pilgrimage road across northern Spain called the
Camino de Santiago. Every year thousands of well educated, often
accomplished people from allover the world, walk hundreds of miles
along the way to the burial place of the Apostle James in Santiago
de Compostela, a city in northwestern Spain. The custom began long
ago, but in the modern era it has increasingly been adopted by people
not religious in the usual sense, modern people estranged by the pressures of contemporary life. They make the pilgrimage to build a new
relationship with themselves, to feel self-reliant, to be close to nature,
to enjoy history and culture and give them time to reflect on things.
My assumption was that if TV and computers had estranged my
kids from themselves, their families, and nature, perhaps a similar pilgrimage could help them find a way to come back. Acting in conspiracy with parents who were as desperate as I was, I sent my 13-year-old
students to journey alone on foot through the five boroughs of New
York City. Some walked the circumference of Manhattan, a distance
of about 30 miles; others walked through different neighborhoods,
comparing them, constructing profiles of the people and businesses
in each from the clues ·of dress, speech, architecture, window displays, integrating these first-hand observations with interviews and library research (much of which can be Googled today).
Some kids mapped Central Park in its different aspects, some
mapped great university campuses, business districts, churches, museums - some invaded such government departments as the board
of education or police headquarters, but not on school trips. Individually. They described and analyzed what they saw there, wrote up
guide pamphlets for others, attempted to master the character and
utility of these places.
Nobody was forced into doing an expedition alone although that
produced the maximum value, but all school year long a standing offer was available that anybody could get a day or two (or ten, although
that required more cunning to get past the bureaucracy) away from school to explore something - as long as he or she was willing to
walk alone and undertake some useful field of study.
A Visitor's Key to Iceland
Because my son-in-law was an Icelander, I was motivated to learn as
much about that remote culture as I could. And in the act of doing
private research I came upon another rich source of inspiration for
the curriculum I was making up as I went along. Iceland has a weird
and wonderful guidebook which someone lent me a copy of, A Visitor's Key to Iceland. This unique book follows every road in that country, step by step, bringing the land itself and all its built environment
fully alive: two chests of silver are believed hidden in this hill. Here a
collapsing bridge allowed a murderer to escape, and proved his innocence! In this hot spring a famous outlaw boiled his meat. Over
there is a farm whose occupants refused a pregnant woman shelter, they were buried alive by a landslide that same night.
Here is history at its best, animating everything, bringing the abstract lines on a map or the words in a history book to vivid life. With
that model as my example, my kids produced visitor's keys to the safest spots in Manhattan to hide out while playing hooky, to the great
pizza parlors of Manhattan (and the rotten ones, too), to the architecture of brownstone apartment buildings in a ten block radius of
the school, to the neighborhood swimming pools of the five boroughs
(few and far between, but enough for a wonderful comparative guide,
complete with sociological analyses of their cultural contexts and clientele). Many experiments involved extracting the hidden knowledge
and points of view of old men and women, those confined to homes,
and those who spent their time sitting on the benches in Riverside or
Central Park.
Once this production-oriented transformation was underway, the
glow of radiant screens lost some of its allure; it isn't nearly as rewarding to watch actors as to be in action yourself. Reality, when tied to
compelling intellectual work, causes feedback circuits in a majority of
the young to produce substantial growth, so much so that I came to expect that the moral and behavioral cripples who walked through my
classroom door in September would be well on their way to becoming interesting and productive young people by the following April. I
don't want to take credit for what must have been discovered when we
lived in caves - accepting hard challenges head on is a sine qua non of
self-mastery and competence. It isn't rocket science.
The biggest surprise for me was how easy this was to accomplish,
it took neither talent nor money; anyone could duplicate my results.
I won't deny its hard work to try to pull off the trick with 130 kids a
year, but a lot of effort is wasted in finding ways to circumvent the
dead hand of school administration. In a system more congenial to
learning (and less to social control) the thrill of doing the labor would
more than outweigh the effort required. And, of course, if everyone in
the society were on the same page about the necessity of developing
intellect and character in the young (not weighting them down with
chains), the work would be ... child's play.
Over the years my students launched so many useful projects and
earned so many plaudits and prizes that I found myself showered with
awards from the school establishment which had no idea how I got
such results. When I tried to explain to the awards committees how
little I had to do with the achievements, I suspect it was discounted
as obligatory modesty, but these days when I have nothing more to
prove to myself about who I am, I sincerely hope you'll believe me.
Take your boot off the downtrodden necks of your children, study
their needs not your own, don't be intimidated by experts, re-connect
your kids to primary experience, give off the game of winners and losers for a while, and you'll get the same results I did. Maybe better.
Some inner clock is ticking in every life, warning us we have appointments to keep with reality: real work to do, real skills to learn,
real battles to fight, real risks to take, real ideas to wrestle with. And
a desperate need to keep death present in your imagination, to never
forget how short and inevitable is the arc of your life.
For many years a variety of outside influences, television, computers and government schooling chief among them, have conspired to wean children away from their urgent need to be out and
about. The end result has been a nation of angry, frightened, uncompassionate and incomplete boys and girls in place of men and women.
People sentenced to be incomplete, incompetent, and fearful will find
ways to take vengeance on their neighbors while they continue to die
by inches in front of an electronic screen. Restore what has been stolen and the problems of child-development warned about by experts
will recede, as childhood itself vanishes into the sick Teutonic minds
which spawned it.
Since the advent of schoolrooms and electronic screens, many of
us never grow up. Too much of our precious trial and error period is
wasted sitting in the dark. Being a mature being means living with
a purpose, your own purpose: it's about welcoming responsibility as
the nourishment a big life needs; it's about behaving as a good citizen - finding ways to add value to the community in which you live;
it's about wrestling with your weaknesses and developing heart, mind,
and spirit - none of them properties of the spectator crowd.
Hitching the body and mind to screens reduces the attention span
to quick takes arranged by strangers; it creates a craving for constant
stimulation which reality can't satisfy. Violence of one sort or another
is the easiest way to still the gnawing hunger for stimulation that the
undead feel. And that violence includes the violence of bizarre sex, the most important psychological product vended on the Internet.
Russian emigre Pitirim Sorokin, founder of Harvard's sociology department, identified cultures of violence, such as our own, with its insatiable craving for war, as late stages of civilizations in terminal decline.
In all failing societies, respect for obligation and family declines
along with compassion for one's fellows - to be replaced by a preoccupation with amusement, diversion, and predation. Despite a carefully calculated propaganda barrage about steadily declining crime
rates in recent years, we have four times the rate of violent crime in 1999 than we did in 1959. Four times the number of citizens in jail.
These remarkable increases in crime immediately followed the penetration of television into our culture.
As deeply as we seemed mired in these anti-life addictions - being wedded to machinery - ending them is, physically at least, as
simple as pulling the plug. Show a TV-addicted young person that
life is more interesting than its television substitute and nature will
do the rest in time - but the operant term is to "show'; not to "tell':
Many of my reservations about television apply to computer screens
as well. How to avoid becoming an incompletely human extension of
this technology while still enjoying its transcendental power to connect us in many new ways, independent of institutional intervention,
is the greatest challenge of the 21st century.
If we threw away two of the four high school years and used the
money to send everyone walking their own Camino de Santiago, it
would help enormously to meet that challenge. It doesn't have to be as
spectacular a walk as George Meeghan, the third grade dropout, took
when he walked alone from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow, Alaska
in the 1970's, it needn't be as spectacular a sail as high school dropout
Tania Aebi took in the 1980's when she sailed around the world in a 26
foot boat, but there's absolutely no reason every boy and girl in America shouldn't have a significant personal Camino as part of schooling.
If the government won't do that for you, you must do it for
yourself.
7
Weapons of Mass Instruction
Only 31 percent of college-educated Americans can fully
comprehend a newspaper story, down from 40 percent a decade ago.
National Commission
on the Future
of
Higher Education,
August, 2006
35 percent of the young regret their university experience
and don't consider the time and money invested worth itj
more than half said they learned nothing of use.
- Wilson Quarterly,
Autumn 2006
A Moral Odor
At the age of sixteen, a blind French teenager named Jacques Lusseyran became head of an underground resistance group of 600 during
WWII. Lusseyran arranged dynamiting, assassinations, and other violent forms of sabotage to free his country from the Germans, a story
told in his autobiography, And Then There Was Light. In chapter four,
he talked about his early schooling, calling the classroom experience
a moral disaster:
... there is such a thing as moral odor and that was the case
at school. A group of human beings that stay in one room by compulsion begins to smell. That is literally the case, and
with children it happens even faster. Just think how much
suppressed anger, humiliated independence, frustrated vagrancy and impotent curiosity can be accumulated by boys
between the ages of ten and fourteen ...
Lusseyran was able to murder large numbers of men just a few months after he left school "where the world of reality with all its real moral questions was entirely lacking." We become what we behold. It's something to remember, Columbine.
School As A Weapon
Most historical accounts of schooling are so negative you have to wonder how this exercise of pedagogy ever passed the test of time with its original parts nearly unchanged. It must yield some benefits, but what those are and for whom isn't so clear.
It seems obvious that school weakens family and indeed all relationships, but perhaps some valuable trade-off occurs which, on balance, rewards people so radically disconnected from one another and from themselves. School elevates winning so far above its ostensible goal of learning that periodically public scandals occur when investigation reveals that even elite students know very little. A century of lending our children to perfect strangers from an early age - to be instructed in what we aren't quite sure - has made an important statement about modern culture which deserves to be mused upon.
One famous ode of Horace contemplates the torments of schooling. Mosaics at Pompeii illustrate painful episodes of school discipline. Washington Irving's story of the headless horseman celebrates turning the tables big-time on an insufferable schoolmaster. The immortal WWI era song, "Schooldays, schooldays, dear old golden rule days;' describes with affection a relationship between school learning and the "tune of the hickory stick:' A recent Hollywood film, Teaching Miss Tingle, is about a schoolteacher kidnapped by her students who torture her physically and psychologically. Numerous web sites exist which specialize in ways to disrupt school routines. On the other side, we rarely hear anyone attributing their success to school time.
The notion of school as a dangerous place is well established then, even if the troubling metaphor of weaponry deliberately brought to bear to cause student harm isn't yet widespread. That school can and does inflict damage is no longer surprising although precisely how that happens is only impressionistically understood. And "why" not at all.
This chapter will seek to nail down some specific aspects of the punitive machinery. It won't be comprehensive - you will have weapons of your own to add - nor will I try to rank the ones I give you in any formal order of importance, much of that will depend upon the nature of your own kids, but I feel compelled to plant this flag firmly while I have time left - school is not a good place for your kids. If they are swarmed by friends and win every award the place can offer it changes nothing. From the first month of my teaching career of 30 years, I realized that intellectual power, creative insight, and good character was being diminished in my classroom and that indeed I had been hired for precisely that purpose. I was a clerk in a vast penitentiary; the rules and procedures were the guards.
A Personal Formula
In a short time I became determined to sabotage the system as Lusseyran had sabotaged the Nazi system, peacefully in most instances, but as time passed and my contempt deepened, by small acts of violence as well. In the course of continuous trial and error experimentation (behind the facade of being an "English" teacher), I stumbled upon a formula to change the destiny of students, one at a time, the way beached starfish have to be rescued. It required assembling a fairly accurate biography of every individual student from birth onward, all the key people, relationships, experiences, places, opinions, accomplishments and failures. School records and memories weren't good enough, though sometimes there was no alternative. The best data came from parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends and enemies, anyone who could provide intimate information to the emerging personal narrative.
With a rich profile in hand a personal course could be custom tailored for each kid, put together in partnership with the student, flexible enough to allow constant feedback to change the design, something schools could not do (nor would they if they could). When you believe in determinism, biological, psychological, sociological, or theological (and schools believe in all of those in various times and places), the very idea of feedback leading to growth must be held at arm's length. For all its legends of social mobility and intellectual growth, school operates out of a belief in social order, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Once a profile was created, the second step was to add a personalized Wishes and Weaknesses component. I asked each student to list three things each wanted to be knowledgeable about by the end of the year, that was the wishes part, and three weaknesses he or she wished to overcome, deficiencies which led to humiliation (I get beat up all the time) or failures of opportunity (I want to do modeling work but only the rich kids know how to present themselves to get that), that was the weaknesses part. I exercised virtually no censorship and whatever the individual kid's priorities were became mine. I didn't consult with a single school administrator to put this program in place, nor with any other teacher, only with parents from whom I extracted promises of silence.
I know this sounds like a hideous amount of effort, and politically impossible in a large urban school, but it was neither: it required only will, imagination, resourcefulness, and a determination to scrap any rules which stood in the way - just as Shen Wenrong had done in moving Phoenix. Acting in my favor was the fact that with this new curriculum each kid was motivated, worked much harder than I legally could have asked him or her to do, and recruited outside assistance with resources no classroom teacher could match. And now for the first time each had a personal reason to work hard, one that was self-grading.
As for myself I became determined to figure out where this bizarre institution had actually come from, why it had taken the shape it did all around the world in the same century, why it was able to turn away intense criticism and grow larger, more expensive, and more intrusive into personal lives. If you allow imagination to work on the institution, it is much more a piece of utopian science fiction, oblivious to human needs, than it is a response to popular demand. Right from the early days of my teaching life, I began a project of research which involved reading and arguing with thousands of books, many dreadfully written and some quite obscure, travelling (by now) three million miles around the country and the world to observe, argue, and discuss schools and which resulted a few years ago in a monster book, still in print, called The Underground History of American Education. A major publisher paid me an enormous amount of money to write it (enormous for a schoolteacher) and then refused to publish it after holding it off the market for over a year. "It would embarrass friends of the house;' I was told. If you wonder what that might mean, consider this was one of the top three textbook publishing houses too, apart from their trade division.
In this way my school teaching practices were directed by intense research on the one hand, and equally intensive and daring field exercises around the city of New York, at times up to sixty different studies in sixty different locations! Simultaneously! Either singly, in small teams, or en masse, "Gatto's Guerrillas" as we called ourselves, infiltrated without notice (or permission either), into public meetings, exhibitions, scheduled hearings, auctions, courthouses, workplaces, anywhere opportunity presented itself. We took public opinion polls on every subject under the sun, often competing with professional news organizations. Travelling dramatic troupes (always more than one) gave shows in elementary schools, in acting studios, and everyplace verbal engagement was possible.
The general targets were many: independence, self-reliance, strategic planning, a good command of the active literacies of speaking and writing, courage, curiosity, an ability to write a script for one's own life.
A major goal was examining barriers schooling creates which restrict intellectual and behavioral superiority to a relative handful of its clientele. Producing a clear inventory of school practices which act to interdict normal development - like involuntary confinement, involuntary associations, bells, bathrooms passes, continuous competitions complete with petty prizes, testing, and all the rest, and discussing the genesis of each, proved useful in changing the way kids approached the school experience. They grew willing to assume full responsibility for educating themselves, in spite of school - rather than trusting an army of strangers to do the job for them. It was a revolution in outlook.
Bad Intentions
I had been hired as an English teacher, but since absolutely nothing was rationally proscribed under a mandate to increase facility with the English language, and since nobody paid close attention to what was happening, if my classes weren't unduly disruptive and parents didn't complain, I put an examination of the public assumptions of schooling at the heart of what I taught. Without ever actually asserting that school was a place of bad intentions I set out to demonstrate to students and their families that the poor results of schooling - with language proficiency, for instance - weren't inevitable, but the results of procedures enshrined in regulation and law.
The system was principally at fault, a conclusion many had reached before me, but not so commonly available was the insight that systems incorporate ways to defend internal integrity. No system will allow deviant behavior. All elements obey central directives or the logic of systematization vanishes. Course correction by unmediated feedback is powerfully discouraged in any system, even made illegal. By destroying possibilities of internal dialectic, and by concealing the operations of management from public scrutiny, schools render themselves virtually immune to change.
It's not my intention to conjure up dark conspiracies; men and women who staff institutional schooling are very like those in other complex institutions, if they exercise significant free will they become outlaws who must be sanctioned and things which improve performance are hardly more welcome than things which impair it. Deviations from a steady state jeopardize the system mission. Medieval craft guilds in precious metals, stained glass, candle making, etc. were very much like this: innovation was powerfully resisted, independent practitioners were sanctioned, ostracized if they persisted.
Robert Michel, the French social thinker, investigated bureaucracies more than a century ago and concluded that, without exception, their nominal missions, defending the country, delivering the mail, collecting garbage, etc, were always secondary to the primary mission: preserving the bureaucracy.
In this regard school is only one of many institutions in American society patterned after a scheme to confuse the public, one first put in place in ancient Sparta - management by cleverly contrived illusions.
Our economy has become rooted in financial trickery. It moves from bubble to bubble in ways which gladden the hearts of speculators privy to the formula, boom and bust the public calls it. When creating bubbles is temporarily ill-advised, wars are invented to fill the temporary bubble-vacuum, although wholesale destruction of property and life occasioned by warfare may be seen as a bubble itself, like our world-famous dream industries; motion picture, television and pop music, just another entertainment to fill up the emptiness of modern life and give it savor. In a nation whose economy depends on bubble illusions, why should the school institution assigned to train the young be any different?
Deliberate Deprivations
In his immortal book, Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith - the Scottish philosopher we regard as the father of capital "e" capitalism - made the distinction between education and schooling very clear. At no time did Smith claim education had anything at all to do with national prosperity, only free trade (competition unfettered by excessive rules) and a division of labor contributed to that.
The role of education, said Smith, was needed to compensate for mutilations inflicted as by-products of those same processes which produce wealth. We need to understand that artificial environments produced by free trade and constant competition cause psychological damage in four ways: 1) they make workers cowardly 2) stupid 3) sluggish 4) and indifferent to everything but animal needs. Only education (he called it "educational schooling") will heal the wounds to community and individuality caused by capitalism.
According to the father of capitalism, the only differences between children of philosophers and those of street sweepers lies in the training they receive. All children, he asserts, have the talents we associate with elite families, all, that is, until the majority of young are deliberately deprived of "subject(s) for thought and speculation" Those so deprived become "deformed" unable to bear hard thinking. They lose "power of judgment, even as regards ordinary matters" He could have been describing public school kids in 2009.
The new curriculum I devised toward the end of the 1960's was intended as a counterattack on cowardice, stupidity, sluggishness, and indifference. It had nothing to do with test scores. The best work I did as a teacher always consisted of the same priorities: entering a personal partnership with anybody who showed a determination to become educated, then working inside that partnership to help meet specific targets the student set. Those too broken to want an education, I schooled. Over time a fraction of those were inspired by the example of more enterprising classmates and wanted out of the school routines, too; others were unable to recover. Those I consoled by schooling them as elite children are schooled, by drill long and strong.
Adam Smith was right. Between children identified as bright by schools and those identified as stupid, hardly a difference exists but those created by deliberate deprivation.
The House of Mirrors
In one of the strange ironies of history, Adam Smith's own publisher, William Playfair, chided Smith for his innocence. The social order to which he and Smith belonged was held together by deliberately depriving most people of information they needed to maximize opportunities. If secrets were promiscuously distributed, the ladders of privilege would collapse, their own children would be plunged back into the common stew. It was unthinkable. The familiar expression, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" was Playfair's invention."Proper" schooling teaches "negatively" it never allows the working classes or the poor "to read sufficiently well to understand what they do read".
Set down clearly over 200 years ago here is the recipe for the schools we commonly experience. Playfair argued that public instruction would ruin national prosperity, not enhance it. And who is to say he is wrong as long as prosperity is reckoned in dollars and cents."The education of the middling and lower ranks" has to be put aside, to be replaced with psychological conditioning in habits and attitudes of deference, envy, appetite, and mistrust of self, if the system of capitalism is to survive with all the benefits it provides.
"A smattering of learning is a very dangerous thing" he said, not because ordinary people are too dumb to learn; just the opposite, they are too smart to be allowed to learn. People become dangerous when too many see through the illusions which hold society together. Long ago in China, Playfair's philosophy had been given a name by the emperors in prehistory. It was called "The Policy of Keeping People Dumb:" The only change the passage of millennia brought in this leadership perspective was in the form of a change in style, in the modern era leaders no longer spoke openly about this great secret of management.
The Lincoln Elective Program
Lincoln Academy, New York City, 1985. A public junior high school, despite its fancy name, located next door to a housing project for the poor, far from the center of Manhattan's dynamic Upper West Side. The West Side of Manhattan is world-famous, a zone of substantial accomplishment, wealth, and power. Home to Columbia University, Fordham; Julliard; Barnard; the Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia Teachers College; Riverside Church; The Lincoln Center: The Metropolitan Opera; The Symphony; The Museum of Natural History; and the Historical Society. Bounded on the east by Central Park, on the west by Riverside Park, one of the great intellectual centers of the earth, housing twenty-odd public schools.
If government schooling were intended to succeed anywhere, it would have to be here, inside this micro-environment of wealth, talent, taste, enlightenment, and European liberal tradition. Yet inside Intermediate School 44 on West 77th Street where I taught for 16 years, bands of marauders roamed the corridors (like my own shown in the photograph on the back cover); three rapes took place inside a single week; and bandit gangs from a nearby high school beat and robbed other students at will.
No dangerous event was ever reported to police, no general caution to parents that safety could not be guaranteed was ever issued, the moral odor of institutional bureaucracy reeked like a dead fish in School District Three, a place many believed the moral center of progressivism in the United States. District Three was a bedroom community for television, theatre and the arts, yet giant firecrackers went off randomly inside the quietly surreal school building on West 77th Street, while opposite the school, not a hundred feet from it, rents climbed beyond a thousand dollars a room per month and kept climbing to double (and nearly triple) that for a one-room studio.
By the 1980s, when I transferred to Lincoln Academy, central management in District Three was employing aggressive reform rhetoric. New programs were regularly announced: partnerships with Columbia, Fordham, the Ford Foundation, the mayor's office, and various federal agencies, and an elective program, intended we were told to bring students into the management loop by giving them a part in decision making was launched. Like 700 other teachers in the district I was ordered to prepare curriculum for an elective of my own design. It was to be a study of epic poetry from Homer through Milton to Tennyson.
On the first day I met my elective, faces were visibly unhappy; on the second revolt reared its head - my offering clearly wasn't congenial to anyone except myself Why had they chosen to be there? I asked for written explanations:
Tonya, I had no choice. They chose it for me.
Gloria, They said to come in here. I didn't even know what it meant. That's why I'm here.
Eddie, I wanted soccer. The only reason I have this is because Dean picked it for me.
Francisco , I am here because Dean said I had to be.
Jane, Dean said this was the only elective I could pick.
Tanisha, I picked this because Dean picked it for me.
Tamura, I am here because Dean ordered me.
Jose, Dean put me here.
George, I didn't pick it. Dean picked it for me.
Bonnie , The principal picked it.
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentum mortalia tangent
Contempt
In March of 2005, Indiana University released a study of school-based anti-smoking programs - which cost taxpayers huge sums of money every year. California alone has invested over a half-billion dollars on this effort. Is the money well-spent?
According to the abstract of the report printed in the International Herald Tribune for March 24, 2005, the principal author, Dr. Sarah Wiehe, said that all such programs have one common characteristic - they all fail. "It may be" said Dr. Wiehe, "that any program conducted in schools induces contempt in students" You'll want to digest that conclusion slowly, ruminating on its invisible consequences. As long as school is the delivery vehicle, any undertaking is held in contempt. But for most of us school exists as the principal forge of intellectual development. Is study itself then brought into contempt?
As that university study was being reported in the European press,Janet and I were in a unique French village near Limoges called Oradour sur Glane, a town without a single inhabitant, all its buildings intact except the ruined church which had been burned to the ground on June 10, 1944, by retreating German military forces in WWII On that day every single citizen was murdered save one, an eight year old boy, Roger Godfrin, who disobeyed his schoolteachers when they obeyed German orders to bring their classes to the town square and church. "Hurry! Hurry!" Roger remembers them saying, "Don't keep them waiting!" Without his contempt for school, which led him to run away and hide instead, Roger would have burned to ashes with the rest.
Irrelevance
Why has schooling acquired such a bad odor? Part of the answer lies in the political nature of mass schooling, a characteristic inherent in any bureaucracy. It's not so much kids think in these abstract terms, it's the widespread understanding among the young that school isn't about them (and their interests, curiosities and futures), but exclusively about the wishes of other people. School is built around the self-interest of others. What's the point of taking this test or that one? Is there any point at all that any young person with real priorities, real anxieties, and real questions which need to be answered would be likely to accept? How would you personally deal with the assertion, "I don't need to know anything about the Leaning Tower of Pisa!" What would you say? Is it possible the complaint is well founded?
What of the political nature of schooling which allows any group in political control and all its important political rivals to edit out any teaching which might call its own privileges, practices, or beliefs into question? School has no choice but to limit free thought and speech to such a profound degree a gulf is opened between the sanctimonious homilies of pedagogy ('searching for truth; 'leveling the playing field; etc.) and the ugly reality of its practices. Will you require me to prove that? I hope so. I shall do it with a stark example from Australia in the expectation you will have no trouble transferring the principle learned to America.
The Australian Example
Australia has an ecosystem so delicately balanced that its health or sickness is quickly transferred to every student in every school. Because of that inescapable, ever-present reality, you might imagine government policy toward the environment would provide compelling analytical matter for curriculum in every academic specialty, but if you thought so you would be dead wrong. One instance will show you why. For years the government there supported a project to eliminate deeply rooted grasses, replacing them with shallowly rooted British grasses which provide food for sheep in a land unsuited to sheep, but where a sheep industry is politically powerful. Sheep chew grass far down; that causes salt to rise from subsoil and concentrate in topsoil- a significant problem for farmers. But something just as bad or worse happens, too: huge quantities of soil blow away and contaminate rivers. Soil-laden water kills fish populations and pollutes the tidal margins where land meets ocean. All over the world this tidal margin is the great producer of fish, but in Australia, with the longest coastline on earth, the tidal zone is the least productive anywhere, in part a result of sheep farming in an environment ill-matched to sheep.
There's more. Tourism, not sheep, is the nation's big money-maker. Among its unique sights is the Great Barrier Reef, a vast mountain of coral harboring a rich collection of sea life. As soil in rivers which flow to the reef has increased, large sections of coral have died, losing their characteristic brilliant red hues which in death change to ugly grey.
Tourism which benefits every corner of the country has been placed in jeopardy to please the sheep lobby. Jared Diamond's Collapse, about historical patterns of social collapse, has a long chapter on Australia, including a discussion of the impact of sheep.
But what, you say, does this ongoing tragedy have to do with school affairs? Well, if the degradation of the economy the young must work in isn't considered a suitable subject for study, it's hard to see why the Leaning Tower of Pisa is. The simple truth is that Australian schools will never be allowed to study and debate vital matters, even though they are sentenced to inherit the mess. Now prepare a list of things your own local schools would only take seriously at their own peril. Go ahead, it isn't difficult. Is fast food a major taxpayer in your area? Check and see if Fast Food Nation is in the school library, or Super Size Me in the film collection. In the history department, what coverage exists of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants or Christians and Muslims? Does any of it deal with the specifics of doctrinal differences without which essential aspects of human nature are flushed down the toilet even though they bear heavily on America's situation in the world today.
Anyone who reflects on personal experience will acknowledge that ease and sophistication with spoken language is substantially more important in life than reading. What percentage of class time in your school's language classes is set aside for that? Don't bother to answer any of these questions, I know the situation in your school already.
Alfred North Whitehead, one of the best known mathematicians of the twentieth century, contended in his book, The Aims of Education, that the most essential form of advanced math apart from arithmetic in modern society is statistical prediction. It's in use on an everyday basis in thousands of practical applications, from political predictions to advising clothing manufacturers what colors will be preferred in the months ahead. The math required to hold this power in one's hands is hardly taxing for people of junior high school age. For ordinary lives, nothing in the world of number beyond arithmetic is remotely as useful; if statistics were the mathematical idea taught, past long division, most students would become more effective for the simple ability to predict with numbers. Check what percentage of your school's math curriculum is devoted to statistics.
Enough said about irrelevance, almost every kid understands that political considerations dictate school time be filled with irrelevance; they just don't understand why, because schools wouldn't dare stress the realities of social class and social engineering.
Social Engineering
Thanks to a 24-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg who created Facebook, and others like him who founded YouTube, MySpace and other social networks still unmonitored by political authorities or academics, thanks to the World-Wide Web and the Internet as platforms for individually generated connections, the power of school as a great disconnector has been weakened.
These vehicles enable people without any particular status, to hook up with one another; they even allow mixtures of nobodies and somebodies to exchange ideas and plans; they provide a fountain of information which replenishes itself constantly; they encourage creativity among masses consigned by schooling to become reliable consumers. Even though this new force is still ih early childhood, already it has caused governments to surrender a great deal of power over their own currencies. It has emboldened accumulations of capital to move at the speed of light from one country to another, destabilizing conventional markets, making national loyalties conditional and patriotism questionable. Thanks to the vast new ball of connections, official truth in every conceivable area is subject to verification by a promiscuous collection of uncertified critics armed with the tools to back up their contrarian critiques.
Thanks to the Internet, the concept of mass schooling by experts is nearly exhausted.
Lying by Omission
Bruno is a college student in Portugal who wrote to me on May I7, 2008 asking for my take on several matters for which his school holds official positions and monitors compliance with its stances through testing. It's a common situation everywhere. These unstated biases presented as gospel truth makes official schooling dangerously anti educational, yet this phenomenon in action is difficult to detect, and among the young, virtually impossible.
Sometimes these pernicious biases are managed simply by omitting some key piece of information. Such was the case that bothered Bruno, in a graduate school program purporting to explain the mechanism through which evolution is presumed to work. The letter which follows represents my attempt to introduce Bruno to one of the best concealed weapons of mass instruction: lying by omission:
Dear Bruno,
You ask my opinion on Darwin's supposition vs. Wallace's, Darwin contending that biological advance occurs through deadly competitions which over time eliminate the weak from success in reproduction, and Wallace arguing that adaptation and cooperation are the important elements.
I would have no opinion on the relative merits of either, but my guess is that what really interests you is how Darwin became the figure historically remembered and Wallace the one forgotten. On that issue I know a great deal.
The politics of science is a matter which hardly ever takes center stage in academic presentations intended for ordinary students, but since Darwin's ascendency was almost exclusively a matter of who he was and who he knew, while Wallace's decline could have been predicted long before it occurred by knowing his background, let me engage your question through that particular aspect of big science, since it is always present and almost always a matter of the greatest importance. Two excellent critical takes on this which you might want to read are Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Robert Scott Root-Bernsteins's Discovering.
Back to the Darwin victory. I'm certain you were never told in school that Darwin was supremely wealthy and hung around with the circle around the powerful and influential in many countries. And I'm equally certain you don't know that he was trained as a Church of England priest, not as a scientist. In a short while I'll get to the significance of this data, but for the moment you should reflect on the possible reason your teachers would have in keeping this information from you.
Your school and colleges will also have kept from you that Wallace was from a lowly background; all his best sympathies were with people who worked hard for subsistence wages. Those sympathies might have been dismissed as an eccentricity in a fine scientist except that he carried his convictions into the political arena, enraging the very social classes in which Darwin enjoyed membership.
For example, he was prominent in the land reform movement which asked that ownership be turned over to the tiller. He disdained the British scientific establishment as more a private club for rich dilettantes like Darwin than a workshop for science. Is it far-fetched to think some of this biographical record, in both cases, might have made a difference in their respective receptions?
Push this a bit further. Free trade was a passionate issue in the 19th century among so-called champions of the liberal persuasion. But Wallace wrote passionately against free trade, claiming it inflicted hideous hardships on working people. He advocated female suffrage when that idea was anathema to the elites. He was the Ralph Nader of his day - and yet he was totally dependent on the classes he criticized for a fair hearing among his judges.
All this is vital to a clear consideration of your original question, yet an invisible committee charged with helping you gain education saw fit to move these interesting narratives out of your reach. Some flesh and blood individuals had to make this decision on several levels of your schooling. What I haven't gotten to yet is how seditious Wallace's theory really was to the controlling interests of the British Empire, versus Darwin's which fit squarely on top of the government's plans and justified them.
The sad truth is Wallace was worse than hated by Britain's managerial classes. His talk of "peaceful adaptation" as the way to species improvement ran directly counter to the violent means necessary to create and maintain the British Empire. Darwin's explanation, on the other hand, that continuous competition of a life and death variety was nature's way, put the voice of Science squarely in the camp of imperialism, globalism, racism, colonialism, free trade economics, and much else of moment to the powerful in 19th century Britain. But if life were found to be inherently better where cooperation rules, as Wallace said, the privileged world would turn upside down.
By Darwin's day, among the powerful, Christianity had become merely ceremonial, a dangerous relic of the past to be kept under State control as it was in the Anglican order. But Wallace, although not arguing his case from any theological perspective, still marshaled his theory in a way which led to the age-old Christian conclusion: we are our brother's keeper; patience, not violent action, is the wisest course in the face of the inevitable.
The revolutionary ability of the Christian message to stir up the masses and put them maddeningly out of reach of carrot-stick control machinery was regarded with horror by the British upper classes. When people build the meaning of their days out of relationships, love, piety, loyalty, and frugal self-sufficiency, the notion of happiness through an accumulation of stuff suffers. But what were the ramifications of that for a commercial civilization? On the other hand, when competition is seen as essential to a good life, when winning against one's neighbors is put at the heart of society, business thrives. To win, others have to lose: the more losers, the better winning feels.
My dear Bruno, you could build a bridge to the moon and back on the corpses which accrued from Darwin's contentious work and the work of his first cousin, Francis Galton, in initiating out the politics of his biological suppositions. He provided policymakers already disposed to regard the mass population as "human resources;' with justification for disregarding the silly idea of human rights. Most people were evolutionary dead-ends, Darwin had spoken, just as had Fichte, Spinoza, Calvin, and Plato before him when they said much the same thing. Or the Anglican theory of a Divine Order, for that matter. Apologists today will protest that the damage has been caused by "Social Darwinists" who hammered his ideas into practical directives for the management of society, but don't let them fool you. You need only read Descent of Man to see that Darwin himself was the master Social Darwinist, even if it was his cousin who invented the new science of "eugenics" to provide the same options with human beings for social leaders as they already had in plant and animal breeding.
I hope this sheds some light on Wallace's eclipse. His public attacks on military spending alone would have been enough to doom him to obscurity. I'm surprised he gets the footnote in scientific history he does, but I expect that will vanish, too, at some not too distant moment in the future. Take this single example as a specimen of the illusions which control the public imagination.
Building Bombs
Ninety eight years ago as I write, anybody who had access to the Encyclopedia Britannica (lIth edition) could have learned how to produce powerful explosives cheaply and with ordinary materials - from combustible dust explosives whose power is derived from finely ground corn in gaseous form, or table sugar, to even more powerful fertilizer bombs, based on ammonium nitrate and diesel oil. The truck bomb which destroyed the government building in Oklahoma City is in the encyclopedia, and others as well.
But no small farmer would have needed to read it there because for everyone who wanted to know about such things, the information was widely available.
Even today, such information isn't hard to come by if you want it. The formula for the TATP bomb which closed the London Underground in 2005 was soon afterwards publicly available (unwittingly, I suppose) in the influential Financial Times - on its editorial page! The only significant information missing from the FT account was supplied a little while later on the New York Times editorial page, in the form of a display advertisement from an Israeli company selling bomb-detection machines. You could hardly deprive the public of bomb-making materials, even if you wanted to:
Note:The material originally appearing here has been blocked on the advice of legal counsel, to protect the publisher and the author from legal consequences: EndNote
Why would anyone with decent motives want such information? Only a population broken to its own insignificance would ask such a slavish question. For anyone who understands what the miracle of America once was (and is no more), that it was a forge to convert slaves, serfs, peasants, and proletarians into free men and women, explosives were an important part of self-reliance and liberty. They were important tools in clearing land, digging foundations, constructing ponds, building roads, moving stones, digging gold mines - perhaps in the gravest extreme even defending your family's liberty from agents of the political state. Isn't that how we got a United States in the first place? Because the common population was armed? Has the possibility of a tyranny here miraculously vanished? But violent conflict aside, and melodrama with it, the tool aspect alone ought to be the common right of free citizens. And whether you agree or not isn't as important as realizing that less than a hundred years ago, perfectly ordinary people were trusted to handle power like this with responsibility.
What has changed in the intervening century? Have ordinary people become more dangerous, or have governments demanded exclusive ownership of things which might unseat them? Carroll Quigley, professor of international relations at Georgetown and former personal tutor of president Clinton's when Clinton attended that school, wrote in Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time that the rights of ordinary people thrive at those times when common citizens are well armed against the incursions of their own government, and that liberty declines precipitously when arms are denied the commonality. Adolf Hitler's first act in office was to ban possession of firearms among citizens.
Once again you'll want to know what information like this has to do with schooling and at the risk of insulting you I'll reply that only a man or woman whose imagination has been ruined, only someone who traded self-respect for security long ago, would need an explanation. These are among the hundreds, perhaps thousands of ideas without which education is impossible, you needn't accept one side of the argument or the other to become educated, but you do have to accept that argument about these things is at the core of the matter. You can't win liberty by memorizing what you're told to memorize. "Nullius in verba" is the motto of the Royal Scientific Society, founded in 1620, which I translate as "Don't take anybody's word for the truth; think for yourself!" The watchword of school is "Let others think for you"
The Decisive Ratio
The new revolution made possible by factory schooling returned citizenship in libertarian America to a deadly ratio which once existed in classical Greece, Tudor England, and Prussia of the Fredericks, a large number of puppets, a small group of puppet masters. Kids don't understand why it's happening, but they sense themselves being put to death in school. That's why they hate it so much.
Physical Ugliness
You never hear among the common complaints against schooling that it acts as a workshop to create physical and psychological ugliness, but that's exactly what I'm going to say, the habits it inculcates lead to ugliness in a culture where beauty and grace is much more important than school allows you to know.
One great secret which you always suspected I'll confirm for you right now: the physical appearance of human bodies is an important sorting device at elite universities, if you're ugly, ungainly, unathletic, ungraceful, your chances of admission at Yale or Stanford drop almost to zero. Your physical appearance tells a sophisticated observer a great deal about you and whether you might be worthy to carry the institution's flag. Here is one of those hundreds of thousands of ideas which school might spend its time examining, but as with much else, it avoids treating entirely. In this case merely omitting discussion of the ideas involved doesn't do the major damage, much more direct methods are employed to tag you with the stigmata of failure which ugliness signifies.
If you wanted general health and vigor in an oncoming generation, would you enforce immobility on it for twelve to twenty years? Would you tie that immobility to constant stresses created by bells and various threats? Would you add to these handicaps the fat and sugar-rich diet of school lunches or allow snack wagons and soda pop vendors inside the school orbit? Don't these provide a direct road to overweight and obesity, ill health, weakness, gracelessness, vulgarity and timidity?
It has long been acknowledged that the most powerful prejudice in America is our national hatred of fat people. This, even though more citizens (and students) are fat here than anywhere else on earth. The epidemic nature of this phenomenon robs a significant chunk of graduates of our 12-year training programs in ugliness of dignity, friends, opportunity, romance - it is among the most vicious weapons of mass instruction. Your associates through life will forgive you for being ignorant of quadratic questions, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but they will not overlook the sin of your low vitality, or your fatness.
Being fat and ugly lowers your chances for admission to any elite university like Stanford. Evaluation protocols at top colleges preference good looks, a slender body, and an outgoing personality because they know that those characteristics - together with membership on sports teams - enlarges chances of success in whatever field a graduate chooses to enter. Including the sciences. But if Stanford knows this, why shouldn't you? I don't mean that to be a rhetorical question.
Every year, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elites turn away thousands of applicants with perfect SAT scores and thousands with perfect 4.0 GPAs. Harvard turns down four out of every five valedictorians who apply. But shapely, well-dressed, physically vital candidates are given a substantial head start, as if elite college was some sort of eugenics project. Why did your high school never talk about this? Is college in part eugenically driven, part of the great Bionomics project begun in turn of the century America which led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of 'biological defectives;' and earned our academic fraternity medals from the Nazi government? What? You never heard of that? Didn't your school teach American history?
The most interesting part of this for me is that ugliness is hardly ever predestined by biology, you have to work to be ugly; it emerges as a byproduct of the "negative" education demanded by Adam Smith's publisher several hundred years ago.
Are you aware that the epidemic of diabetes in America, which now claims children down to the age of five, is caused directly by excessive immobility and a diet heavy in fats and sugars; are you aware that diabetes is our leading cause of amputations and blindness? In light of those facts, why would the largest middle class occupation in America make its living imposing such unwholesome behaviors? If you hide from this question you might as well throwaway this book.
Why are school people immune from lawsuits for physically damaging the incarcerated population? The answer has much to do with the supposed independence of the courts in the pragmatic era, inspired by Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Justice" was too crucial an element in 20th century management to take its demands seriously.
Irrelevance Revisited
To what degree are the curricula of schools and colleges beside the point, mere padding to fill long hours of confinement until the trapped lives, exhausted of their vitality, broken to the traces, can safely be released?
An MIT professor, Langdon Winner, provides an answer in his book, Autonomous Technology, which carries the ominous sub-title: Technics Out-of-Control, intimating what Lewis Lapham said openly in the Summer 2008 number of Lapham's Quarterly:"The arithmetic suggests we have no way of avoiding calamity ... "
In the following citation from Autonomous Technology, Winner inventories deficiencies of the best schooled generations in American history. Be careful as you read not to fall into the trap schooling will have conditioned in your mind - that people are dumb by nature and we cant expect school to turn pigs into swans:
Society is composed of persons who cannot design, build, repair, or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend ... people are confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally unintelligible to them. They are unable to give an adequate explanation of man made phenomena in their immediate experience. They are unable to form a coherent, rational picture of the whole ... all persons do, and indeed must, accept a great number of things on faith ... their way of understanding is basically religious, rather than scientific ... The plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child ... but Citizens of the modern age in this respect are less fortunate than children. They never escape fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world their senses report ...
In a complex society, flexible people survive best, but school , think of the word itself, rewards rigid, miserable rule followers. To be effective and remain independent we need to know how to find things out, how to manage our own learning, but the day prison model school discourages learning for its own sake. Actual learning leads directly to low test scores. Whatever education happens in school happens despite school, not because of it. Learning isn't the point of school, winning is; attention is never placed on quality of thought or performance, but on something entirely different; reaching the winner's circle.
Listen to a couple of random observations made long ago by two products of the best schooling, the first a famous writer, the second a successful stockbroker who ran away to the South Seas to become an influential painter:
How infuriating not to know! All those years at Eton ... Why didn't they teach me anything sensible?
By the second day I had exhausted my provisions. What to do? I had imagined that with money I would be able to find all that was necessary. I was deceived. Once beyond the threshold of the city ... one must know how to climb the tall trees, how to go into the mountains in order to return weighed down with heavy booty. One must know how to catch fish, and how to dive to tear loose the shellfish ... One must know how, one must be able to do things.
Lusseyran was able to murder large numbers of men just a few months after he left school "where the world of reality with all its real moral questions was entirely lacking." We become what we behold. It's something to remember, Columbine.
School As A Weapon
Most historical accounts of schooling are so negative you have to wonder how this exercise of pedagogy ever passed the test of time with its original parts nearly unchanged. It must yield some benefits, but what those are and for whom isn't so clear.
It seems obvious that school weakens family and indeed all relationships, but perhaps some valuable trade-off occurs which, on balance, rewards people so radically disconnected from one another and from themselves. School elevates winning so far above its ostensible goal of learning that periodically public scandals occur when investigation reveals that even elite students know very little. A century of lending our children to perfect strangers from an early age - to be instructed in what we aren't quite sure - has made an important statement about modern culture which deserves to be mused upon.
One famous ode of Horace contemplates the torments of schooling. Mosaics at Pompeii illustrate painful episodes of school discipline. Washington Irving's story of the headless horseman celebrates turning the tables big-time on an insufferable schoolmaster. The immortal WWI era song, "Schooldays, schooldays, dear old golden rule days;' describes with affection a relationship between school learning and the "tune of the hickory stick:' A recent Hollywood film, Teaching Miss Tingle, is about a schoolteacher kidnapped by her students who torture her physically and psychologically. Numerous web sites exist which specialize in ways to disrupt school routines. On the other side, we rarely hear anyone attributing their success to school time.
The notion of school as a dangerous place is well established then, even if the troubling metaphor of weaponry deliberately brought to bear to cause student harm isn't yet widespread. That school can and does inflict damage is no longer surprising although precisely how that happens is only impressionistically understood. And "why" not at all.
This chapter will seek to nail down some specific aspects of the punitive machinery. It won't be comprehensive - you will have weapons of your own to add - nor will I try to rank the ones I give you in any formal order of importance, much of that will depend upon the nature of your own kids, but I feel compelled to plant this flag firmly while I have time left - school is not a good place for your kids. If they are swarmed by friends and win every award the place can offer it changes nothing. From the first month of my teaching career of 30 years, I realized that intellectual power, creative insight, and good character was being diminished in my classroom and that indeed I had been hired for precisely that purpose. I was a clerk in a vast penitentiary; the rules and procedures were the guards.
A Personal Formula
In a short time I became determined to sabotage the system as Lusseyran had sabotaged the Nazi system, peacefully in most instances, but as time passed and my contempt deepened, by small acts of violence as well. In the course of continuous trial and error experimentation (behind the facade of being an "English" teacher), I stumbled upon a formula to change the destiny of students, one at a time, the way beached starfish have to be rescued. It required assembling a fairly accurate biography of every individual student from birth onward, all the key people, relationships, experiences, places, opinions, accomplishments and failures. School records and memories weren't good enough, though sometimes there was no alternative. The best data came from parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends and enemies, anyone who could provide intimate information to the emerging personal narrative.
With a rich profile in hand a personal course could be custom tailored for each kid, put together in partnership with the student, flexible enough to allow constant feedback to change the design, something schools could not do (nor would they if they could). When you believe in determinism, biological, psychological, sociological, or theological (and schools believe in all of those in various times and places), the very idea of feedback leading to growth must be held at arm's length. For all its legends of social mobility and intellectual growth, school operates out of a belief in social order, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Once a profile was created, the second step was to add a personalized Wishes and Weaknesses component. I asked each student to list three things each wanted to be knowledgeable about by the end of the year, that was the wishes part, and three weaknesses he or she wished to overcome, deficiencies which led to humiliation (I get beat up all the time) or failures of opportunity (I want to do modeling work but only the rich kids know how to present themselves to get that), that was the weaknesses part. I exercised virtually no censorship and whatever the individual kid's priorities were became mine. I didn't consult with a single school administrator to put this program in place, nor with any other teacher, only with parents from whom I extracted promises of silence.
I know this sounds like a hideous amount of effort, and politically impossible in a large urban school, but it was neither: it required only will, imagination, resourcefulness, and a determination to scrap any rules which stood in the way - just as Shen Wenrong had done in moving Phoenix. Acting in my favor was the fact that with this new curriculum each kid was motivated, worked much harder than I legally could have asked him or her to do, and recruited outside assistance with resources no classroom teacher could match. And now for the first time each had a personal reason to work hard, one that was self-grading.
As for myself I became determined to figure out where this bizarre institution had actually come from, why it had taken the shape it did all around the world in the same century, why it was able to turn away intense criticism and grow larger, more expensive, and more intrusive into personal lives. If you allow imagination to work on the institution, it is much more a piece of utopian science fiction, oblivious to human needs, than it is a response to popular demand. Right from the early days of my teaching life, I began a project of research which involved reading and arguing with thousands of books, many dreadfully written and some quite obscure, travelling (by now) three million miles around the country and the world to observe, argue, and discuss schools and which resulted a few years ago in a monster book, still in print, called The Underground History of American Education. A major publisher paid me an enormous amount of money to write it (enormous for a schoolteacher) and then refused to publish it after holding it off the market for over a year. "It would embarrass friends of the house;' I was told. If you wonder what that might mean, consider this was one of the top three textbook publishing houses too, apart from their trade division.
In this way my school teaching practices were directed by intense research on the one hand, and equally intensive and daring field exercises around the city of New York, at times up to sixty different studies in sixty different locations! Simultaneously! Either singly, in small teams, or en masse, "Gatto's Guerrillas" as we called ourselves, infiltrated without notice (or permission either), into public meetings, exhibitions, scheduled hearings, auctions, courthouses, workplaces, anywhere opportunity presented itself. We took public opinion polls on every subject under the sun, often competing with professional news organizations. Travelling dramatic troupes (always more than one) gave shows in elementary schools, in acting studios, and everyplace verbal engagement was possible.
The general targets were many: independence, self-reliance, strategic planning, a good command of the active literacies of speaking and writing, courage, curiosity, an ability to write a script for one's own life.
A major goal was examining barriers schooling creates which restrict intellectual and behavioral superiority to a relative handful of its clientele. Producing a clear inventory of school practices which act to interdict normal development - like involuntary confinement, involuntary associations, bells, bathrooms passes, continuous competitions complete with petty prizes, testing, and all the rest, and discussing the genesis of each, proved useful in changing the way kids approached the school experience. They grew willing to assume full responsibility for educating themselves, in spite of school - rather than trusting an army of strangers to do the job for them. It was a revolution in outlook.
Bad Intentions
I had been hired as an English teacher, but since absolutely nothing was rationally proscribed under a mandate to increase facility with the English language, and since nobody paid close attention to what was happening, if my classes weren't unduly disruptive and parents didn't complain, I put an examination of the public assumptions of schooling at the heart of what I taught. Without ever actually asserting that school was a place of bad intentions I set out to demonstrate to students and their families that the poor results of schooling - with language proficiency, for instance - weren't inevitable, but the results of procedures enshrined in regulation and law.
The system was principally at fault, a conclusion many had reached before me, but not so commonly available was the insight that systems incorporate ways to defend internal integrity. No system will allow deviant behavior. All elements obey central directives or the logic of systematization vanishes. Course correction by unmediated feedback is powerfully discouraged in any system, even made illegal. By destroying possibilities of internal dialectic, and by concealing the operations of management from public scrutiny, schools render themselves virtually immune to change.
It's not my intention to conjure up dark conspiracies; men and women who staff institutional schooling are very like those in other complex institutions, if they exercise significant free will they become outlaws who must be sanctioned and things which improve performance are hardly more welcome than things which impair it. Deviations from a steady state jeopardize the system mission. Medieval craft guilds in precious metals, stained glass, candle making, etc. were very much like this: innovation was powerfully resisted, independent practitioners were sanctioned, ostracized if they persisted.
Robert Michel, the French social thinker, investigated bureaucracies more than a century ago and concluded that, without exception, their nominal missions, defending the country, delivering the mail, collecting garbage, etc, were always secondary to the primary mission: preserving the bureaucracy.
In this regard school is only one of many institutions in American society patterned after a scheme to confuse the public, one first put in place in ancient Sparta - management by cleverly contrived illusions.
Our economy has become rooted in financial trickery. It moves from bubble to bubble in ways which gladden the hearts of speculators privy to the formula, boom and bust the public calls it. When creating bubbles is temporarily ill-advised, wars are invented to fill the temporary bubble-vacuum, although wholesale destruction of property and life occasioned by warfare may be seen as a bubble itself, like our world-famous dream industries; motion picture, television and pop music, just another entertainment to fill up the emptiness of modern life and give it savor. In a nation whose economy depends on bubble illusions, why should the school institution assigned to train the young be any different?
Deliberate Deprivations
In his immortal book, Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith - the Scottish philosopher we regard as the father of capital "e" capitalism - made the distinction between education and schooling very clear. At no time did Smith claim education had anything at all to do with national prosperity, only free trade (competition unfettered by excessive rules) and a division of labor contributed to that.
The role of education, said Smith, was needed to compensate for mutilations inflicted as by-products of those same processes which produce wealth. We need to understand that artificial environments produced by free trade and constant competition cause psychological damage in four ways: 1) they make workers cowardly 2) stupid 3) sluggish 4) and indifferent to everything but animal needs. Only education (he called it "educational schooling") will heal the wounds to community and individuality caused by capitalism.
According to the father of capitalism, the only differences between children of philosophers and those of street sweepers lies in the training they receive. All children, he asserts, have the talents we associate with elite families, all, that is, until the majority of young are deliberately deprived of "subject(s) for thought and speculation" Those so deprived become "deformed" unable to bear hard thinking. They lose "power of judgment, even as regards ordinary matters" He could have been describing public school kids in 2009.
The new curriculum I devised toward the end of the 1960's was intended as a counterattack on cowardice, stupidity, sluggishness, and indifference. It had nothing to do with test scores. The best work I did as a teacher always consisted of the same priorities: entering a personal partnership with anybody who showed a determination to become educated, then working inside that partnership to help meet specific targets the student set. Those too broken to want an education, I schooled. Over time a fraction of those were inspired by the example of more enterprising classmates and wanted out of the school routines, too; others were unable to recover. Those I consoled by schooling them as elite children are schooled, by drill long and strong.
Adam Smith was right. Between children identified as bright by schools and those identified as stupid, hardly a difference exists but those created by deliberate deprivation.
The House of Mirrors
In one of the strange ironies of history, Adam Smith's own publisher, William Playfair, chided Smith for his innocence. The social order to which he and Smith belonged was held together by deliberately depriving most people of information they needed to maximize opportunities. If secrets were promiscuously distributed, the ladders of privilege would collapse, their own children would be plunged back into the common stew. It was unthinkable. The familiar expression, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" was Playfair's invention."Proper" schooling teaches "negatively" it never allows the working classes or the poor "to read sufficiently well to understand what they do read".
Set down clearly over 200 years ago here is the recipe for the schools we commonly experience. Playfair argued that public instruction would ruin national prosperity, not enhance it. And who is to say he is wrong as long as prosperity is reckoned in dollars and cents."The education of the middling and lower ranks" has to be put aside, to be replaced with psychological conditioning in habits and attitudes of deference, envy, appetite, and mistrust of self, if the system of capitalism is to survive with all the benefits it provides.
"A smattering of learning is a very dangerous thing" he said, not because ordinary people are too dumb to learn; just the opposite, they are too smart to be allowed to learn. People become dangerous when too many see through the illusions which hold society together. Long ago in China, Playfair's philosophy had been given a name by the emperors in prehistory. It was called "The Policy of Keeping People Dumb:" The only change the passage of millennia brought in this leadership perspective was in the form of a change in style, in the modern era leaders no longer spoke openly about this great secret of management.
The Lincoln Elective Program
Lincoln Academy, New York City, 1985. A public junior high school, despite its fancy name, located next door to a housing project for the poor, far from the center of Manhattan's dynamic Upper West Side. The West Side of Manhattan is world-famous, a zone of substantial accomplishment, wealth, and power. Home to Columbia University, Fordham; Julliard; Barnard; the Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia Teachers College; Riverside Church; The Lincoln Center: The Metropolitan Opera; The Symphony; The Museum of Natural History; and the Historical Society. Bounded on the east by Central Park, on the west by Riverside Park, one of the great intellectual centers of the earth, housing twenty-odd public schools.
If government schooling were intended to succeed anywhere, it would have to be here, inside this micro-environment of wealth, talent, taste, enlightenment, and European liberal tradition. Yet inside Intermediate School 44 on West 77th Street where I taught for 16 years, bands of marauders roamed the corridors (like my own shown in the photograph on the back cover); three rapes took place inside a single week; and bandit gangs from a nearby high school beat and robbed other students at will.
No dangerous event was ever reported to police, no general caution to parents that safety could not be guaranteed was ever issued, the moral odor of institutional bureaucracy reeked like a dead fish in School District Three, a place many believed the moral center of progressivism in the United States. District Three was a bedroom community for television, theatre and the arts, yet giant firecrackers went off randomly inside the quietly surreal school building on West 77th Street, while opposite the school, not a hundred feet from it, rents climbed beyond a thousand dollars a room per month and kept climbing to double (and nearly triple) that for a one-room studio.
By the 1980s, when I transferred to Lincoln Academy, central management in District Three was employing aggressive reform rhetoric. New programs were regularly announced: partnerships with Columbia, Fordham, the Ford Foundation, the mayor's office, and various federal agencies, and an elective program, intended we were told to bring students into the management loop by giving them a part in decision making was launched. Like 700 other teachers in the district I was ordered to prepare curriculum for an elective of my own design. It was to be a study of epic poetry from Homer through Milton to Tennyson.
On the first day I met my elective, faces were visibly unhappy; on the second revolt reared its head - my offering clearly wasn't congenial to anyone except myself Why had they chosen to be there? I asked for written explanations:
Tonya, I had no choice. They chose it for me.
Gloria, They said to come in here. I didn't even know what it meant. That's why I'm here.
Eddie, I wanted soccer. The only reason I have this is because Dean picked it for me.
Francisco , I am here because Dean said I had to be.
Jane, Dean said this was the only elective I could pick.
Tanisha, I picked this because Dean picked it for me.
Tamura, I am here because Dean ordered me.
Jose, Dean put me here.
George, I didn't pick it. Dean picked it for me.
Bonnie , The principal picked it.
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentum mortalia tangent
Contempt
In March of 2005, Indiana University released a study of school-based anti-smoking programs - which cost taxpayers huge sums of money every year. California alone has invested over a half-billion dollars on this effort. Is the money well-spent?
According to the abstract of the report printed in the International Herald Tribune for March 24, 2005, the principal author, Dr. Sarah Wiehe, said that all such programs have one common characteristic - they all fail. "It may be" said Dr. Wiehe, "that any program conducted in schools induces contempt in students" You'll want to digest that conclusion slowly, ruminating on its invisible consequences. As long as school is the delivery vehicle, any undertaking is held in contempt. But for most of us school exists as the principal forge of intellectual development. Is study itself then brought into contempt?
As that university study was being reported in the European press,Janet and I were in a unique French village near Limoges called Oradour sur Glane, a town without a single inhabitant, all its buildings intact except the ruined church which had been burned to the ground on June 10, 1944, by retreating German military forces in WWII On that day every single citizen was murdered save one, an eight year old boy, Roger Godfrin, who disobeyed his schoolteachers when they obeyed German orders to bring their classes to the town square and church. "Hurry! Hurry!" Roger remembers them saying, "Don't keep them waiting!" Without his contempt for school, which led him to run away and hide instead, Roger would have burned to ashes with the rest.
Irrelevance
Why has schooling acquired such a bad odor? Part of the answer lies in the political nature of mass schooling, a characteristic inherent in any bureaucracy. It's not so much kids think in these abstract terms, it's the widespread understanding among the young that school isn't about them (and their interests, curiosities and futures), but exclusively about the wishes of other people. School is built around the self-interest of others. What's the point of taking this test or that one? Is there any point at all that any young person with real priorities, real anxieties, and real questions which need to be answered would be likely to accept? How would you personally deal with the assertion, "I don't need to know anything about the Leaning Tower of Pisa!" What would you say? Is it possible the complaint is well founded?
What of the political nature of schooling which allows any group in political control and all its important political rivals to edit out any teaching which might call its own privileges, practices, or beliefs into question? School has no choice but to limit free thought and speech to such a profound degree a gulf is opened between the sanctimonious homilies of pedagogy ('searching for truth; 'leveling the playing field; etc.) and the ugly reality of its practices. Will you require me to prove that? I hope so. I shall do it with a stark example from Australia in the expectation you will have no trouble transferring the principle learned to America.
The Australian Example
Australia has an ecosystem so delicately balanced that its health or sickness is quickly transferred to every student in every school. Because of that inescapable, ever-present reality, you might imagine government policy toward the environment would provide compelling analytical matter for curriculum in every academic specialty, but if you thought so you would be dead wrong. One instance will show you why. For years the government there supported a project to eliminate deeply rooted grasses, replacing them with shallowly rooted British grasses which provide food for sheep in a land unsuited to sheep, but where a sheep industry is politically powerful. Sheep chew grass far down; that causes salt to rise from subsoil and concentrate in topsoil- a significant problem for farmers. But something just as bad or worse happens, too: huge quantities of soil blow away and contaminate rivers. Soil-laden water kills fish populations and pollutes the tidal margins where land meets ocean. All over the world this tidal margin is the great producer of fish, but in Australia, with the longest coastline on earth, the tidal zone is the least productive anywhere, in part a result of sheep farming in an environment ill-matched to sheep.
There's more. Tourism, not sheep, is the nation's big money-maker. Among its unique sights is the Great Barrier Reef, a vast mountain of coral harboring a rich collection of sea life. As soil in rivers which flow to the reef has increased, large sections of coral have died, losing their characteristic brilliant red hues which in death change to ugly grey.
Tourism which benefits every corner of the country has been placed in jeopardy to please the sheep lobby. Jared Diamond's Collapse, about historical patterns of social collapse, has a long chapter on Australia, including a discussion of the impact of sheep.
But what, you say, does this ongoing tragedy have to do with school affairs? Well, if the degradation of the economy the young must work in isn't considered a suitable subject for study, it's hard to see why the Leaning Tower of Pisa is. The simple truth is that Australian schools will never be allowed to study and debate vital matters, even though they are sentenced to inherit the mess. Now prepare a list of things your own local schools would only take seriously at their own peril. Go ahead, it isn't difficult. Is fast food a major taxpayer in your area? Check and see if Fast Food Nation is in the school library, or Super Size Me in the film collection. In the history department, what coverage exists of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants or Christians and Muslims? Does any of it deal with the specifics of doctrinal differences without which essential aspects of human nature are flushed down the toilet even though they bear heavily on America's situation in the world today.
Anyone who reflects on personal experience will acknowledge that ease and sophistication with spoken language is substantially more important in life than reading. What percentage of class time in your school's language classes is set aside for that? Don't bother to answer any of these questions, I know the situation in your school already.
Alfred North Whitehead, one of the best known mathematicians of the twentieth century, contended in his book, The Aims of Education, that the most essential form of advanced math apart from arithmetic in modern society is statistical prediction. It's in use on an everyday basis in thousands of practical applications, from political predictions to advising clothing manufacturers what colors will be preferred in the months ahead. The math required to hold this power in one's hands is hardly taxing for people of junior high school age. For ordinary lives, nothing in the world of number beyond arithmetic is remotely as useful; if statistics were the mathematical idea taught, past long division, most students would become more effective for the simple ability to predict with numbers. Check what percentage of your school's math curriculum is devoted to statistics.
Enough said about irrelevance, almost every kid understands that political considerations dictate school time be filled with irrelevance; they just don't understand why, because schools wouldn't dare stress the realities of social class and social engineering.
Social Engineering
Thanks to a 24-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg who created Facebook, and others like him who founded YouTube, MySpace and other social networks still unmonitored by political authorities or academics, thanks to the World-Wide Web and the Internet as platforms for individually generated connections, the power of school as a great disconnector has been weakened.
These vehicles enable people without any particular status, to hook up with one another; they even allow mixtures of nobodies and somebodies to exchange ideas and plans; they provide a fountain of information which replenishes itself constantly; they encourage creativity among masses consigned by schooling to become reliable consumers. Even though this new force is still ih early childhood, already it has caused governments to surrender a great deal of power over their own currencies. It has emboldened accumulations of capital to move at the speed of light from one country to another, destabilizing conventional markets, making national loyalties conditional and patriotism questionable. Thanks to the vast new ball of connections, official truth in every conceivable area is subject to verification by a promiscuous collection of uncertified critics armed with the tools to back up their contrarian critiques.
Thanks to the Internet, the concept of mass schooling by experts is nearly exhausted.
Lying by Omission
Bruno is a college student in Portugal who wrote to me on May I7, 2008 asking for my take on several matters for which his school holds official positions and monitors compliance with its stances through testing. It's a common situation everywhere. These unstated biases presented as gospel truth makes official schooling dangerously anti educational, yet this phenomenon in action is difficult to detect, and among the young, virtually impossible.
Sometimes these pernicious biases are managed simply by omitting some key piece of information. Such was the case that bothered Bruno, in a graduate school program purporting to explain the mechanism through which evolution is presumed to work. The letter which follows represents my attempt to introduce Bruno to one of the best concealed weapons of mass instruction: lying by omission:
Dear Bruno,
You ask my opinion on Darwin's supposition vs. Wallace's, Darwin contending that biological advance occurs through deadly competitions which over time eliminate the weak from success in reproduction, and Wallace arguing that adaptation and cooperation are the important elements.
I would have no opinion on the relative merits of either, but my guess is that what really interests you is how Darwin became the figure historically remembered and Wallace the one forgotten. On that issue I know a great deal.
The politics of science is a matter which hardly ever takes center stage in academic presentations intended for ordinary students, but since Darwin's ascendency was almost exclusively a matter of who he was and who he knew, while Wallace's decline could have been predicted long before it occurred by knowing his background, let me engage your question through that particular aspect of big science, since it is always present and almost always a matter of the greatest importance. Two excellent critical takes on this which you might want to read are Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Robert Scott Root-Bernsteins's Discovering.
Back to the Darwin victory. I'm certain you were never told in school that Darwin was supremely wealthy and hung around with the circle around the powerful and influential in many countries. And I'm equally certain you don't know that he was trained as a Church of England priest, not as a scientist. In a short while I'll get to the significance of this data, but for the moment you should reflect on the possible reason your teachers would have in keeping this information from you.
Your school and colleges will also have kept from you that Wallace was from a lowly background; all his best sympathies were with people who worked hard for subsistence wages. Those sympathies might have been dismissed as an eccentricity in a fine scientist except that he carried his convictions into the political arena, enraging the very social classes in which Darwin enjoyed membership.
For example, he was prominent in the land reform movement which asked that ownership be turned over to the tiller. He disdained the British scientific establishment as more a private club for rich dilettantes like Darwin than a workshop for science. Is it far-fetched to think some of this biographical record, in both cases, might have made a difference in their respective receptions?
Push this a bit further. Free trade was a passionate issue in the 19th century among so-called champions of the liberal persuasion. But Wallace wrote passionately against free trade, claiming it inflicted hideous hardships on working people. He advocated female suffrage when that idea was anathema to the elites. He was the Ralph Nader of his day - and yet he was totally dependent on the classes he criticized for a fair hearing among his judges.
All this is vital to a clear consideration of your original question, yet an invisible committee charged with helping you gain education saw fit to move these interesting narratives out of your reach. Some flesh and blood individuals had to make this decision on several levels of your schooling. What I haven't gotten to yet is how seditious Wallace's theory really was to the controlling interests of the British Empire, versus Darwin's which fit squarely on top of the government's plans and justified them.
The sad truth is Wallace was worse than hated by Britain's managerial classes. His talk of "peaceful adaptation" as the way to species improvement ran directly counter to the violent means necessary to create and maintain the British Empire. Darwin's explanation, on the other hand, that continuous competition of a life and death variety was nature's way, put the voice of Science squarely in the camp of imperialism, globalism, racism, colonialism, free trade economics, and much else of moment to the powerful in 19th century Britain. But if life were found to be inherently better where cooperation rules, as Wallace said, the privileged world would turn upside down.
By Darwin's day, among the powerful, Christianity had become merely ceremonial, a dangerous relic of the past to be kept under State control as it was in the Anglican order. But Wallace, although not arguing his case from any theological perspective, still marshaled his theory in a way which led to the age-old Christian conclusion: we are our brother's keeper; patience, not violent action, is the wisest course in the face of the inevitable.
The revolutionary ability of the Christian message to stir up the masses and put them maddeningly out of reach of carrot-stick control machinery was regarded with horror by the British upper classes. When people build the meaning of their days out of relationships, love, piety, loyalty, and frugal self-sufficiency, the notion of happiness through an accumulation of stuff suffers. But what were the ramifications of that for a commercial civilization? On the other hand, when competition is seen as essential to a good life, when winning against one's neighbors is put at the heart of society, business thrives. To win, others have to lose: the more losers, the better winning feels.
My dear Bruno, you could build a bridge to the moon and back on the corpses which accrued from Darwin's contentious work and the work of his first cousin, Francis Galton, in initiating out the politics of his biological suppositions. He provided policymakers already disposed to regard the mass population as "human resources;' with justification for disregarding the silly idea of human rights. Most people were evolutionary dead-ends, Darwin had spoken, just as had Fichte, Spinoza, Calvin, and Plato before him when they said much the same thing. Or the Anglican theory of a Divine Order, for that matter. Apologists today will protest that the damage has been caused by "Social Darwinists" who hammered his ideas into practical directives for the management of society, but don't let them fool you. You need only read Descent of Man to see that Darwin himself was the master Social Darwinist, even if it was his cousin who invented the new science of "eugenics" to provide the same options with human beings for social leaders as they already had in plant and animal breeding.
I hope this sheds some light on Wallace's eclipse. His public attacks on military spending alone would have been enough to doom him to obscurity. I'm surprised he gets the footnote in scientific history he does, but I expect that will vanish, too, at some not too distant moment in the future. Take this single example as a specimen of the illusions which control the public imagination.
Building Bombs
Ninety eight years ago as I write, anybody who had access to the Encyclopedia Britannica (lIth edition) could have learned how to produce powerful explosives cheaply and with ordinary materials - from combustible dust explosives whose power is derived from finely ground corn in gaseous form, or table sugar, to even more powerful fertilizer bombs, based on ammonium nitrate and diesel oil. The truck bomb which destroyed the government building in Oklahoma City is in the encyclopedia, and others as well.
But no small farmer would have needed to read it there because for everyone who wanted to know about such things, the information was widely available.
Even today, such information isn't hard to come by if you want it. The formula for the TATP bomb which closed the London Underground in 2005 was soon afterwards publicly available (unwittingly, I suppose) in the influential Financial Times - on its editorial page! The only significant information missing from the FT account was supplied a little while later on the New York Times editorial page, in the form of a display advertisement from an Israeli company selling bomb-detection machines. You could hardly deprive the public of bomb-making materials, even if you wanted to:
Note:The material originally appearing here has been blocked on the advice of legal counsel, to protect the publisher and the author from legal consequences: EndNote
Why would anyone with decent motives want such information? Only a population broken to its own insignificance would ask such a slavish question. For anyone who understands what the miracle of America once was (and is no more), that it was a forge to convert slaves, serfs, peasants, and proletarians into free men and women, explosives were an important part of self-reliance and liberty. They were important tools in clearing land, digging foundations, constructing ponds, building roads, moving stones, digging gold mines - perhaps in the gravest extreme even defending your family's liberty from agents of the political state. Isn't that how we got a United States in the first place? Because the common population was armed? Has the possibility of a tyranny here miraculously vanished? But violent conflict aside, and melodrama with it, the tool aspect alone ought to be the common right of free citizens. And whether you agree or not isn't as important as realizing that less than a hundred years ago, perfectly ordinary people were trusted to handle power like this with responsibility.
What has changed in the intervening century? Have ordinary people become more dangerous, or have governments demanded exclusive ownership of things which might unseat them? Carroll Quigley, professor of international relations at Georgetown and former personal tutor of president Clinton's when Clinton attended that school, wrote in Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time that the rights of ordinary people thrive at those times when common citizens are well armed against the incursions of their own government, and that liberty declines precipitously when arms are denied the commonality. Adolf Hitler's first act in office was to ban possession of firearms among citizens.
Once again you'll want to know what information like this has to do with schooling and at the risk of insulting you I'll reply that only a man or woman whose imagination has been ruined, only someone who traded self-respect for security long ago, would need an explanation. These are among the hundreds, perhaps thousands of ideas without which education is impossible, you needn't accept one side of the argument or the other to become educated, but you do have to accept that argument about these things is at the core of the matter. You can't win liberty by memorizing what you're told to memorize. "Nullius in verba" is the motto of the Royal Scientific Society, founded in 1620, which I translate as "Don't take anybody's word for the truth; think for yourself!" The watchword of school is "Let others think for you"
The Decisive Ratio
The new revolution made possible by factory schooling returned citizenship in libertarian America to a deadly ratio which once existed in classical Greece, Tudor England, and Prussia of the Fredericks, a large number of puppets, a small group of puppet masters. Kids don't understand why it's happening, but they sense themselves being put to death in school. That's why they hate it so much.
Physical Ugliness
You never hear among the common complaints against schooling that it acts as a workshop to create physical and psychological ugliness, but that's exactly what I'm going to say, the habits it inculcates lead to ugliness in a culture where beauty and grace is much more important than school allows you to know.
One great secret which you always suspected I'll confirm for you right now: the physical appearance of human bodies is an important sorting device at elite universities, if you're ugly, ungainly, unathletic, ungraceful, your chances of admission at Yale or Stanford drop almost to zero. Your physical appearance tells a sophisticated observer a great deal about you and whether you might be worthy to carry the institution's flag. Here is one of those hundreds of thousands of ideas which school might spend its time examining, but as with much else, it avoids treating entirely. In this case merely omitting discussion of the ideas involved doesn't do the major damage, much more direct methods are employed to tag you with the stigmata of failure which ugliness signifies.
If you wanted general health and vigor in an oncoming generation, would you enforce immobility on it for twelve to twenty years? Would you tie that immobility to constant stresses created by bells and various threats? Would you add to these handicaps the fat and sugar-rich diet of school lunches or allow snack wagons and soda pop vendors inside the school orbit? Don't these provide a direct road to overweight and obesity, ill health, weakness, gracelessness, vulgarity and timidity?
It has long been acknowledged that the most powerful prejudice in America is our national hatred of fat people. This, even though more citizens (and students) are fat here than anywhere else on earth. The epidemic nature of this phenomenon robs a significant chunk of graduates of our 12-year training programs in ugliness of dignity, friends, opportunity, romance - it is among the most vicious weapons of mass instruction. Your associates through life will forgive you for being ignorant of quadratic questions, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but they will not overlook the sin of your low vitality, or your fatness.
Being fat and ugly lowers your chances for admission to any elite university like Stanford. Evaluation protocols at top colleges preference good looks, a slender body, and an outgoing personality because they know that those characteristics - together with membership on sports teams - enlarges chances of success in whatever field a graduate chooses to enter. Including the sciences. But if Stanford knows this, why shouldn't you? I don't mean that to be a rhetorical question.
Every year, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elites turn away thousands of applicants with perfect SAT scores and thousands with perfect 4.0 GPAs. Harvard turns down four out of every five valedictorians who apply. But shapely, well-dressed, physically vital candidates are given a substantial head start, as if elite college was some sort of eugenics project. Why did your high school never talk about this? Is college in part eugenically driven, part of the great Bionomics project begun in turn of the century America which led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of 'biological defectives;' and earned our academic fraternity medals from the Nazi government? What? You never heard of that? Didn't your school teach American history?
The most interesting part of this for me is that ugliness is hardly ever predestined by biology, you have to work to be ugly; it emerges as a byproduct of the "negative" education demanded by Adam Smith's publisher several hundred years ago.
Are you aware that the epidemic of diabetes in America, which now claims children down to the age of five, is caused directly by excessive immobility and a diet heavy in fats and sugars; are you aware that diabetes is our leading cause of amputations and blindness? In light of those facts, why would the largest middle class occupation in America make its living imposing such unwholesome behaviors? If you hide from this question you might as well throwaway this book.
Why are school people immune from lawsuits for physically damaging the incarcerated population? The answer has much to do with the supposed independence of the courts in the pragmatic era, inspired by Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Justice" was too crucial an element in 20th century management to take its demands seriously.
Irrelevance Revisited
To what degree are the curricula of schools and colleges beside the point, mere padding to fill long hours of confinement until the trapped lives, exhausted of their vitality, broken to the traces, can safely be released?
An MIT professor, Langdon Winner, provides an answer in his book, Autonomous Technology, which carries the ominous sub-title: Technics Out-of-Control, intimating what Lewis Lapham said openly in the Summer 2008 number of Lapham's Quarterly:"The arithmetic suggests we have no way of avoiding calamity ... "
In the following citation from Autonomous Technology, Winner inventories deficiencies of the best schooled generations in American history. Be careful as you read not to fall into the trap schooling will have conditioned in your mind - that people are dumb by nature and we cant expect school to turn pigs into swans:
Society is composed of persons who cannot design, build, repair, or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend ... people are confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally unintelligible to them. They are unable to give an adequate explanation of man made phenomena in their immediate experience. They are unable to form a coherent, rational picture of the whole ... all persons do, and indeed must, accept a great number of things on faith ... their way of understanding is basically religious, rather than scientific ... The plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child ... but Citizens of the modern age in this respect are less fortunate than children. They never escape fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world their senses report ...
In a complex society, flexible people survive best, but school , think of the word itself, rewards rigid, miserable rule followers. To be effective and remain independent we need to know how to find things out, how to manage our own learning, but the day prison model school discourages learning for its own sake. Actual learning leads directly to low test scores. Whatever education happens in school happens despite school, not because of it. Learning isn't the point of school, winning is; attention is never placed on quality of thought or performance, but on something entirely different; reaching the winner's circle.
Listen to a couple of random observations made long ago by two products of the best schooling, the first a famous writer, the second a successful stockbroker who ran away to the South Seas to become an influential painter:
How infuriating not to know! All those years at Eton ... Why didn't they teach me anything sensible?
- Aldous Huxley
By the second day I had exhausted my provisions. What to do? I had imagined that with money I would be able to find all that was necessary. I was deceived. Once beyond the threshold of the city ... one must know how to climb the tall trees, how to go into the mountains in order to return weighed down with heavy booty. One must know how to catch fish, and how to dive to tear loose the shellfish ... One must know how, one must be able to do things.
- Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa
Neither Huxley nor Gauguin were taught anything useful by their
school time; both found themselves frustrated in later life, imperfectly anchored in reality because of all the time wasted in school in
low-grade abstractions memorized, which lacked any utility; administered in a climate of intimidation.
Seymour Papert (of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)
said in his book Mindstorms that all learning can be learned "as the child
learns to talk, painlessly, successfully, and without organized instruction [emphasis added) ... schools as we know them today will have no
place in the future" Papert offered two possible destinies for institutional schooling - transformation "into something new" or "wither
away and be replaced:' In the decades since that was written, nearly
three million homeschoolers have emerged and well over a million
people drop out of school as of 2009. In urban schools it's an open secret that after lunch, classroom attendance is difficult to maintain and
attention virtually impossible.
The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
The minute you are willing to acknowledge how radically irrelevant
school offerings actually are, the question of intent rears its disturbing head. Is this irrelevance an accident of incompetence? Is it possible the managers of institutional schooling don't know themselves
what to do, but having inherited command of a dangerously unstable
vessel, must sail it somehow to a destination unknown? For an army
of local superintendents and principals this is surely true, the job
is too good to abandon, its perks too rich to give up; they might like
to change and adapt but the command/control structure won't allow
any strong deviations from system logic.
Yet even having granted professional frontline confusion, the spectre of some darker intent at the level of policy won't go away. Schooling in the short and intermediate run is so unmistakably beneficial to
some of the orders of society who possess power to plan for the whole
that the possibility of these surrendering to the temptation to use institutional schooling for social engineering can't be dismissed. And
once that filter is activated in your critical consciousness, evidence
presents itself constantly that indeed this is so. Consider this excerpt
from a speech delivered in 1940 to the Association for the Advancement of Science by the legendary political philosopher and journalist,
Walter Lippmann:
... during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible
for education have progressively removed from the curriculum the Western culture which produced the modern democratic
state ... the schools and colleges have therefore been sending
out into the world men who no longer understand the creative
principle of the society in which they must live ... deprived of
their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no
longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds
and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the
method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization ... the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western
civilization and is in fact destroying it. I realize quite well that
this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and there is a
prima facie case for entering this indictment.
The details, events, and dramatis personae of the project to set
aside Western culture, and their motives, have been exhaustively
explored by a major scholar from Georgetown University, Dr. Carroll
Quigley, in a phenomenal work of syntheses published in 1966, entitled Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time.
Tragedy and Hope was so profoundly eye-opening a treatise that
its New York publisher destroyed the plates after the first printing
and when that small edition (2000 copies) was gone, declined to reprint it, although thousands of backorders were at hand. Dr. Quigley
was deceived with the story his book had met with public indifference. Since that moment, tens of thousands of bootleg copies have
issued from wildcat presses, so a Google search will put a copy in
your hands. One caution: some of the most recent printings may have
been altered to omit certain key passages. It would be such a shame to
come right to the gates of life-changing revelation and then fall into
the clutches of the disinformation crowd yet again, that I strongly recommend you buy one of the older versions available on Amazon -
or better yet, consult one of the first editions if you can find one in the
rare book room of your public library, or the closed stacks of the local
university library.
Quigley, incidentally, was President Clinton's personal tutor at
Georgetown, and is mentioned with respect at the end of Clinton's
acceptance speech for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
You needn't fear falling into the hands of some reckless conspiracy
nut whose eyes glow in the dark. Do the work, I promise you'll never
see our schools or our world the same way again.
Scientific Management? (No! No! No!)
The first goal of Scientific Management - the high level cult created by
efficiency engineer Frederick Taylor and formalized in his book Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which became the driving force in
American business, government, schooling, religion, social work, and
much else - is perfect subordination. The concept of hierarchy is especially important in bureaucracies where the notion of productivity is
always amorphous, there everything is secondary to subordination.
Better the ship should be blown to pieces than allow a common sailor
to give the orders because he knows more than the captain.
Subordination is a religious principle, like transubstantiation; it
involves a ladder system of functional boxes into which employees are
confined; as long as they remain as placed, surrendering volition, they
become predictable: interdependent human resources to be utilized
as needed by management.
Educated people, or people with principles, represent rogue elements in a scheme of scientific management; the former suspect
because they have been trained to argue effectively and to think for
themselves, the latter too inflexible in any area touching their morality to remain reliably dependent. At any 'moment they may announce, "This is wrong. I won't do it". Overly creative people have similar deficiencies from a systems point of view.
Scientific management is always on guard against people who don't
fit securely into boxes, whether because of too much competency, too
much creativity, too much popularity, or what have you. Although often
hired, it is with the understanding they must be kept on a short leash
and regarded warily. The ideal hireling is reflexively obedient, cheerfully enthusiastic about following orders, ever eager to please. Training
for this position begins in the first grade with the word,"don't:'
In primary school, when all the endless possibilities of self-development and the varieties of good life should be explored, the principal element taken up is limitation, signaled by the word, "don't"
Don't run; don't talk; don't climb trees; don't play rough; don't talk
unless you raise your hand; don't fidget; don't get out of your seat; don't
stare out the window; don't take your shoes off; don't eat or drink in
class; don't laugh; don't take too long; don't read ahead; don't go off the
path; don't say 'I'm bored'; don't mix with older kids; don't complain;
don't bring toys, etc. together with the implied don'ts: don't have your
own ideas; don't show initiative; don't be independent; don't make
your own choices; don't take responsibility for your own learning.
There are more don'ts than days in the calendar, a tattoo without end. This non-stop negativity, so reminiscent of William Playfair's prescription for schooling in Scotland, breaks many a spirit. The
most enduring legacy of the DON'T drill is indifference to everything except narcotic anodynes like violence, rudeness, cruelty, alcohol, and actual drugs with which the negativity can be escaped.
How do I know? I spent 30 years in classrooms with nearly 4000
teenagers, many of whom I spoke with personally; another 20 in
classrooms as a student myself, and 20 more studying the school business and talking about it allover the world.
A school trip permission form sent in September, 2005, to parents of eighth grade pupils at the Queen Elizabeth Junior and Senior High School in Calgary, Canada will give you a good idea how
schools discourage direct experience among parents as well as kids, as
an important component of the negativity program:
POTENTIAL HAZARDS MAY INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT
LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:
Bus travel to and from site: Motion sickness, injury from
other person's motion sickness, injury from being thrown
during sudden massive negative or positive acceleration,tripping hazard when entering or exiting vehicle or moving
down the aisle, overheating during transit, objects coming
through open windows, injury from student putting head or
limbs out of window, injury caused by own or other student's
inappropriate behavior.
Entire trip: slipping or tripping getting on or off the bus,
slipping while climbing stairs or pathway on the trail, exposure to pollens, food, dust, or other materials that might
induce allergic reaction, dehydration, exposure to environmental conditions including cold, damp, warm, dry, hot, and
sunny, tripping on sidewalk or paved pathways, attack or
injury from wild animals, food-borne organisms in own or
other students' lunches, snacks, or drinks, electrical storms
including lightning strikes, landslides on hills.
Viewing indoor exhibits at site: tripping hazard on stairs,
bumping hazard from other viewers, pinching, hazard form
doors, slipping hazard on wet floor or pavements, injury
from collapsing exhibits.
Unless you sign off on this catalogue and hold the school harmless
for its part in exposing your hothouse flower of a kid to these pitfalls
which exist every minute of every day in normal ordinary lives, your
kid can't go to the museum but must stay behind in school where these
perils also exist, but from which the courts have lightened school culpability significantly.
And what psychological effect does this grisly enumeration carry,
repeated as it is on every excursion outside school walls? Is it designed
to add value to the adventurous risk-taking without which the mass
of the young are doomed to become and remain clerks lifelong? Forgive my sarcasm.
Connections and Disconnections Revisited
Following the Prussian prescription of our first national school czar,
William Torrey Harris, to alienate individual children from themselves in order to have their identities merge into a group identity
- contemporary school planners treat children as categories: black,
white, Hispanic, other; gifted and talented, special progress, mainstream, special education; rich, middle-class, poor, and with multiple
subdivisions of each imaginable category, rather than as specific individuals with specific intellectual, social, psychological and physical
needs.
The rhetoric of collectivization leads quickly to treating groups
and sub-groups as averages. This makes managerial labor much easier, but guarantees bad results no matter how many resources are
devoted to improving the lot of the group. As with the well-funded
Head Start program out of Washington, whatever small gains show
statistically dissipate with time. The logic of collectivization seeks to
disconnect each child from his or her own unique constellation, particular circumstances, traditions, aspirations, past experiences, families, and to treat each as the representative of a type. By a process as
inexorable as that with which the collapsing walls of a prison room
force the prisoner toward a pit and death in Poe's story, The Pit and
the Pendulum, a collectively viewed classroom must aim for the lowest
common denominator - a fatal decision from the start.
When the mayor of New York City, an excellent manager in every
other regard, was given control of the city schools in 2002 (heretofore
in control of system bureaucrats and state-level politicians), instead
of raising academic standards for all, he took bad advice and sought to
deal with system-wide failure - particularly among students of color
- by lowering the bar for everyone. Between 2002 and 2008 he increased dollar spending on schools 79 percent, he added 5000 teachers to the payroll (even though the attendance rolls had lost 60,000
students over this time) and the result as such things are measured
was zero.
All the while the current approach, embedding each student in a
personalized curriculum whose aim would be to multiply the number
of connections - to ideas, to experiences, to other people - was ignored. It would be shocking if it was even considered.
The educated mind is the connected mind, connected to all manner of different human styles (not the sterile equivalencies of a classroom), connected to all sorts of complex experiences, some of them
fraught with psychological and physical peril (not the barren experiences of school bells in a prison of measured time); connected to a
dizzying profusion of intellectual ideas which interconnect with one
another, and in time, set the pulses racing with the sheer transcendence possible in the human prospect. a feeling like no other and
sufficient to be its own reward without the candy prison' of praise,
gold stars, or the promise of future reward.
Most of all, the educated mind is connected to itself There is not
a major philosopher of Western history since Socrates who didn't
discover that knowing yourself is the foundation for everything else.
To do that you must examine every influence which became a part of
you, as Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius begins to do in the opening
of his Meditations. Without self-knowledge you can hardly think of
yourself as human at all. And yet we have the first National Commissioner of Education, right at the start of things, declaring that self alienation is the goal of schooling.
School disconnects, as it was charged to do. It is Caesar's "divide
and conquer" strategy brought to peak efficiency. Children are divided
from their families, their traditions, their communities, their religions,
their natural allies, other children, their interests and on ad infinitum. They are, as Walter Lippman deplored, disconnected from the
entire Western intellectual tradition which gave societies the greatest
gift of personal liberties they had ever seen,disconnected from the experiences of risk-taking and adventure in which the grand discoveries
of history have been fashioned; young men and women emerge from
school unable to do much of anything, as Langdon Winner testified.
The Talking Choo-Choo Syndrome
On the 19th of February, 2007, I testified for a bill before the Montana
legislature, Rick Jore's HR 404-to abolish compulsory school attendance. Just that simple act of trust in ordinary people would, by itself, I think, act over time to topple the house of cards erected in
the 20th century to prevent education from spreading. Whatever the truth of that proposition, on the airplane back to New York I took up
the task of critiquing a bit of curriculum created for a chain of private
schools on the West Coast.
I had visited one of these schools near Los Angeles in the company
of the curriculum director and in the brief time there was impressed
by the good manners and easy-going civility of teacher-student relations, and by the spirit of good will which visibly attended student efforts to participate in their own education. But two things bothered
me a little. The first was this: in a meeting of school officials and myself, to chat about school matters, several older students were asked
to sit in and though the discussion bore exclusively on their own
school lives, they had nothing to say and weren't encouraged to participate. When I was invited to ask some questions, I directed the first
to the students in the room, "If you could change some things, say
one thing about this school, what would it be?" I sensed a certain unease, even mild shock, among everyone there, including the students.
What could kids possibly know, or care, about the management of
their studies?!
Nobody actually said that, it was simply a feeling I had that, except ceremonially, kids were in one compartment, professional staff in
another, administration and curriculum experts in a third. Thus the
powerful energy which would have been released by connecting all
these parts to exchange information and insights was lost.
The second thing that bothered me was that upon leaving, when
I paused to examine a shelf of eighth grade textbooks, my eye hit on
Homer's Odyssey, a book which along with Homer's Iliad had once
provided the beating heart of classical Greek education. Committed
to memory by many thousands, recited from memory, these tales of
the Trojan War and its aftermath were no simple stories with which to
kill time, but a series of particular moral dilemmas which in one form
or another would afflict everyone in the course of a lifetime. Debating
the proper course of action in these provided a rich mental diet.
I was delighted to find The Odyssey as a part of the eighth grade
curriculum until I opened the cover to find it was a bowdlerized version - rewritten and simplified for 13 and 14-year-old California
students from prosperous families. As if the "meaning" could be abstracted from the language and presented in a livelier fashion than
Homer.One thing is certain: if Homer had written the version I was .
holding, nobody except an "A" student anxious for a good grade would
have ever read the book to its end, and the only way it would have survived to bore a second generation of reader would have been as a textbook in a compulsory school scheme.
But I was on my way out the door and these people not only had a
school infinitely superior to the Los Angeles standard, but they were
intelligent, caring folks nobody would have been reluctant to entrust
their children to, so I made a casual comment that kids had been
reading the original for a couple thousand years without protest, and
left to catch my plane. The curriculum director asked if I'd look over
a new workbook they were putting together for the elementary division, as we drove to LAX, and I said I would.
At 35,000 feet I opened the book and found myself face to face
with a talking choo-choo as my guide through the workbook. Although it's a bare 18 months later as I'm writing, the only detail of
the text I can remember is the talking choo-choo. Everything else has
faded; indeed, it faded as I read. Back home I wrote to the curriculum
director at once:
26 February, 2007
Dear Dave,
All that follows bears on the talking choo-choo your book
is built around. I'm going to be candid because I like you so
much, and enjoyed our talks in the brief time we've known
one another. The talking choo-choo of child development
theory is only one form of a German disease which insinuated itself into school development around the turn of the
20th century. The first invasion of this disease was in the kindergarten movement of the 19th century, but that never
took sufficiently to satisfy its managers, so inserting cartoons
into children's heads instead of real world ideas became the
vogue as part of a great project to artificially extend childhood and childishness. The project started in earnest at the
beginning of the century and was acknowledged and even
boasted about - by the dean of Teacher Education at Stanford University, who played a hand in its inception.
As a weapon of mass instruction it's superior in its destructive effect to all the others, the master weapon as it were.
It's a principal cause of the intense and growing childishness
of Americans in every social class, an indictment I hear from
every corner of the world as I travel, and increasingly from
domestic commentators, too.
I know this is a heavy trip to lay at the doorstep of your
choo-choo, but since this is just me talking to you I wanted
to bypass the public relations aspect of things and strike
at what troubles me about every sequential curriculum , simple to complex, I've ever seen. It's a strategy which has
traveled under many names throughout history as leadership groups have worked to make their ordinary populations
manageable. The project was brought to its scientific pinnacle in the early decades of the 19th century in Prussia and exported all around the world in the last half of that century.
That's why I call it the German disease - the artificial
extension of childhood. Make no mistake, it works. Once
sufficiently infected with the virus the disease is progressive.
Its victims become inadequate to the challenges of their existence without help, and that relative helplessness makes
them manageable.
Remember, I'm using your talking choo-choo metaphorically, there are many ways to interdict the growth of competence, of clear thinking, of forceful purpose, and each is a
talking choo-choo in different guise: think of slasher flicks,think of pornography, think of Big Macs or tabloid/ network
news - each is easy to take, each seemingly an inconsequential time-killer. But ah! The ensemble of them playing their
mindless tunes - the Death of a Thousand Cuts!
The genius lies in setting up a perverse hunger which
defies eradication later on as the victim struggles to grow up.
This implanted need for simplifications in everything makes
self-discipline difficult, and for most of us, only indifferently
possible. We can't grow up after the disease has taken over
- think of the blockbuster Hollywood films not in cartoon
form, think of Peter Pan, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears
shaving her head bald and sucking her thumb, think of the
incessant commercial, "I don't want to grow up, I'm a Toys R-Us kid! I read in the L.A. times that upscale mothers try to
dress and act like their nine-year-old daughters, I read in The
Nation that the level of economic understanding is so minimal, so primitive, that it's difficult to conduct a discussion on
any level beyond fairy tale simplification of things.
The formula for talking choo-choo social control is set down in Calvin's Institutes (1535), refined impressively in Spinoza's Tractate (1670),
and brought to institutional life by Fichte in the second decade of the
19th century. Since then it's been off to the races. The dark side of the
Welfare State midwifed by Beatrice Webb and the Fabian socialists
is not its superficial purpose of being kind, but its intention of killing
with kindness, and thus protecting the interests of the better people,
non-violently. The talking choo-choo is the tip of the tip of the iceberg on which the damned are consigned to be frozen intellectually,
psychologically, and socially.
And now for a different way to see talking choo choos from the
customary perspective (besides my own, that is). Consider Miss Beatrix Potter, subject of a movie about her life in 2007 and a biography
by St. Martin's Press. In 1912 at the pinnacle of her success she excoriated her publisher for being afraid to print her new book unaltered, a
tale of the kidnapping and near death of a sack of baby rabbits.
"I am tired of making goody-goody books" she wrote, "You are
a great deal too much afraid" Potter saw correctly that what set her
apart from the general run of children's tale-tellers was that she employed an "attitude of mind" full of darkness, violence, non sentimentality, and realism, exactly in the qualities which human life displays
and which must be confronted directly if one is ever to become master of oneself. Children understand this, both implicitly and explicitly,
and unlike schooling, Potter speaks to the need to think about these
things. Her work is tart and crisp, dwelling frequently on death.
In The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, an owl picks up a squirrel, "intending to skin him"
The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck traffics in transcendental evil as
the fox asks Jemima to pick out the seasonings in which she is to be
cooked.
Fee Fie Foe Fum
I smell the blood of an Englishman
Be he live or be he dead
I'll grind his bones to make my bread
Nothing is more interesting to young children than evil, cruelty, and
malice; they are cognizant of these things before they can speak with
any fluency. The hypocrisy of sweet animal tales and images in a culture which murders animals wholesale and eats them with lip-smacking gusto is lost on most desensitized adults, but almost never lost on
their children. And this ugly skew from reality is only one of many
such contradictions our talking choo choo culture traffics in wholesale.
The effect of these amoral exercises is severe on children, despite
apologetics practiced by child development experts who justify the
practice.
There are talking animals in Potter, but none are cute. "Thank
goodness my education was neglected" Potter wrote, but what she
meant was talking choo-choo schooling. Potter's learning was of a
high standard: she read Homer in the best translations, spoke fluent German, and wrote frequently that she did not like children. She despised those spirits ruined by theories inflicted upon them in long term forced confinement, especially the ones who produced childish
responses long after they had developed an inner life, because it was
expected of them. The fact that children are still strongly attracted to
Potter is a triumph of truth over the official illusions of institutional
schooling.
Detach the Training Wheels!
According to The New York Times of December 15, 2006, Elena Delle
Donne is the best female basketball player in the country, with "the
potential to alter the game for women in the same way Michael Jordan did for men" She's off to a major college without it costing her a
nickel and she is destined to make millions in endorsements. I'm telling you about her, however, because of something she did at age three
without any thought of basketball.
She picked up a wrench and without any guidance detached the
training wheels from her bike! At three she freed herself from the
curse of childhood, that exquisitely German invention. Freed herself of its damaging assumptions about what is possible and what is
not. Try to imagine the internal organization that requires in a three year old: the close observation of wrenches, structure, processes; the
planning that had to take place inside this thousand day old creature
to even conceive such a plan, let alone execute it. To ensure more EIenas, school would have to abandon the convenience of treating large
groups in the aggregate - as "classes" Insist on classes and most Elenas will be ruined in the egg. Think of Branson, think of Ben Franklin
or George Washington, think of Octavia Walker and David Farragut
described elsewhere in this book.
When, as happens with some frequency, I'm asked by parents for
a single suggestion for changing the relationship between them and
their kids for the better, I don't hesitate to recommend this:
Don't think of them as kids. Childhood exists, but it's over long
before we allow it to be. I'd start to worry if my kid were noticeably childish past the age of seven and if by twelve you aren't dealing with
young men and women anxious to take their turn, disgusted with
training wheels on anything, able to walkabout London, do hundred
mile bike trips, and add enough value to the neighborhood that they
have an independent income; if you don't see this, you're doing something seriously wrong.
Even at seven don't edit the truth out of things. If the family has
an income kids need to know to the penny what it is and how it's
spent. Assume they are human beings with the same basic nature and
aptitudes that you have; what you have superior in terms of experience and mature understanding should be exchanged for their natural
resilience, quick intelligence, imagination, fresh insight, and eagerness
to become self-directing.
Don't buy into the calculated illusion of extended childhood. It's a
great secret key to power, power for your kids if you turn the tables
on their handlers. And adolescence is a total fraud, a pure concoction of social engineers barely a century old. It's a paradox, constantly
threatening to solve itself as the young beat against the school jail in
which we've confined them. Sometimes as I read obituaries , far and
away the most valuable department in a good newspaper, I stumble
across a new piece of evidence that what I've told you is true.
On the 18th of April, 2003, for instance, my newspaper carried the
obit of the world's 101st richest man, John Latsis. If that name sounds
vaguely familiar it's because his grandson Paris Latsis was for a brief
time engaged to Paris Hilton, the celebrity heiress and beloved cut-up
whose fornication video has been a staple of the American male imagination since its release to the world.
John Latsis' yacht had been a familiar sight in the harbors of the
planet for a long time before his death, having been loaned to Prince
Charles, President Bush, Marlon Brando, Colin Powell and many
other awe-inspiring somebodies. But nothing inspires my own awe
more than Mr. Latsis' personal story.
Born to a poor Greek family in a Greek fishing village, childhood
was a luxury his family couldn't afford. He had no schooling to speak of and began work as a laborer at the age of twelve. Latsis was ambitious for something more, however; eventually he hooked on as deckhand on a rusty tramp freighter. After World War II, rusty freighters
were a drag on the international freight market; almost valueless there
were so many, built to haul war supplies and soldiers.
At the age of 28 this poor boy, Latsis, took his savings and all the
money he could borrow and put a down payment on one of the rusty
freighters. Over the next 30 years he parlayed that single ship into
a mighty fleet. Without any prompting from business school mentors (of which he had none) he gradually branched out from shipping
into construction, oil, banking and other enterprises. His growing sophistication was a natural by-product of being fully connected to the
world of affairs.
Seventy-five years ago, schools routinely spoke of alternative roads
to success like Latsis; they don't do that anymore. Eighty percent of
the young today - even more - are prepared (in theory at least) for
"good jobs" as specialized employees of one sort or another. Attention
is never focused on lives like that taken by John Latsis; who made it
without benefit of any formal education at all.
Tania Aebi and George Meeghan
Twenty years ago in 1989 a teenage girl named Tania Aebi sailed into
New York Harbor after two years at sea alone, having circumnavigated the world - the first woman in history known to have performed this remarkable feat. She has no background in seamanship,
no particular calling or aptitude for it, and only a vague knowledge
of navigation when she set out, having failed Celestial Navigation
on the Coast Guard exam. No matter. She taught herself the subject
on board her vessel. And sailed her way into adulthood, the record
books, and history.
Tania had such difficulties at Brooklyn Tech High School that she
gradually stopped attending, as you can discover by reading her book,
Maiden Voyage; her father, disgusted with her rudeness and general
demeanor, wanted her out of the house and offered to buy her a 26 foot boat if she would sail it around the world alone. As a way to spite
him, she accepted the challenge, dropped out, and did it.
Thirty years ago, a poor young man from England conceived the
idea of making the longest walk in human history. George Meeghan
had no college degree, no specialized training, no state of the art equipment, no money, and no schooling beyond the third grade - he was a
lowly deckhand on a nondescript steamer headed for the tip of South
America. Leaving the ship there he made his way to Tierra del Fuego,
faced north, and started to walk. His entire kit was towed behind him
in one of those flimsy shopping carts people take to the market to roll .
their purchases home. The wheels kept coming off. It was like a joke.
It took George Meeghan seven years to cross the Andes, negotiate dangerous mountain nations, cross the trackless Darien Gap, and
enter the United States. Once in Texas he decided to make a side trip
to see Washington, D.C., on foot of course , then turned northwest to Point Barrow, Alaska, to complete the longest walk in human history. The bare outline I've given you doesn't do George's saga
(or Tania's) justice. I urge you to read his book, The Longest Walk,
to discover what unschooled human beings are capable of. Recently,
George's young daughter, Ayumi, walked the entire length of Japan
from south to north.
Two dropouts, two triumphs of the human spirit. No school
on earth would dream of teaching what they learned, to write their
own scripts, to be self-sufficient and purposeful. The longest walk in
human history (check the Guinness Book for George), the longest
solo sail (check the Guinness Book for Tania)-if two young people
without much help or special equipment could do this in the 1970's and 1980's on sheer will power, can you ever believe again the hypothetical academic hypotheses of human migration? If Tania and
George did it with nothing, then anonymous others have done it before, too. "Academic" once referred to Akademos, the garden where
Plato taught; it was a term of great respect for nearly two millennia,
but by the late 19th century, it had come to mean "of slight human
interest"; irrelevant.
Now contrast the lives of Tania and George with the lives of 25,000
intensely schooled young people who work in Washington, D.C. and
let their hair down on weekends in Dewey Beach, Delaware:
Dewey Beach, Delaware,
July 5, 2001 - In Corinthians, Paul
preaches that adults put away childish things. Clearly the
apostle never summered in this mile-long stretch of beachtown. It is Friday afternoon, and 25,000 single professionals ... are pouring into this village of 500 for their weekly
ritual of regression .. .lobbyists, House and Senate aides,
computer network developers and management consultants,
ranging in age from 23-33. There will be a $420 bar tab at
the Starboard tonight - A Saturday afternoon sexual escapade will occur in plain view of neighbors. A punch will be
thrown on the dance floor... [this] ritual of hard-working
singles shedding power suits for beach house escapism each
Friday is in full swing.
-USATODAY
The Trapped Flea Principle
What accounts for the eerie inhuman passivity of school children toward matters the grown-up world has traditionally considered important? And the even weirder seeming indifference poor children
display toward their ominous and onrushing futures? I had theories
about this as a teacher, but never one I actually believed until an 11 year-old Taiwanese immigrant boy named Andrew Hsu explained
how you break the spirit of fleas to they can be trained. His explanation was printed in an autobiographical sketch he wrote for the ceremony in which he and I received the same award, but the material
recognition for me paled in comparison to what I learned from Andrew that day.
In the first place, he was fresh from winning the Washington
State Science and Engineering Fair, for his sequencing of a gene held
in common between man and mouse: COL20IA. At 11, Andrew was a champion swimmer with many trophies. He spoke Chinese, French,
and English, all fluently. He worked in his spare time as an assistant
on professional documentary films. And he was homeschooled.
When asked to describe the most important lesson of his life, the
one which held the most influence over his choices, he said it was a
story told to him by his father about the method used to train fleas
to swing on trapezes, drive little chariots, (or pull them) and all the
other wonderful things fleas learned to do to amuse kings and courts
in world history. The story his father told goes like this:
If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you
put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying
to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their
quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisoned by their own self-policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our
own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low
expectations.
Reading that, my whole life as a schoolteacher flashed before my
eyes. I had been hired to be the lid on the petri dish which the kids
would butt their heads trying to follow their own path until one day,
exhausted, they would quit trying. At that point they would be fit
subjects to be trained.
How to Drive A Horse Slightly Insane
The time we spend trapped in schooling and its humbug renders
most of us passive, incompletely human, unable to function as sovereign spirits. But other tools exist to clip our wings, just to be safe.
Those who break out of the school doors or hang out in bathrooms
and stairwells aren't the biggest problem - after all, where can they
run? The biggest danger to the social order comes from those who retreat into the secret recesses of their inner lives where no snoop can
penetrate.
For this hard core contingent, an insight of horse breeders provides another strategy. By taking known dangers to a horses sanity,
things to be avoided if you want your thoroughbred to be productive,and instead of avoiding them you impose these conditions, it's possible
to drive young people to work against their own best interests, seeking connections, and send them deep into the prison of self to play
"Dungeons and Dragons''; computer games, or endlessly surf the web
instead of taking risks or learning how to be effective.
Some years back I saw with some surprise my school experience
mirrored in the pages of a highly specialized journal, a publication of
the Equine Mental Health Association. The relevant article was paper-clipped and mailed from Frankfurt, Kentucky, by a Mr. and Mrs.
Howard, horse enthusiasts like my wife, Janet. It considers damage
done to quality horseflesh when the scope of their daily experience is
over-simplified:
Tick off the conditions which cause a horse to go slightly crazy
as you read and compare them to the familiar discipline of an average school:
... Keep them predominantly idle, keep them apart from
other horses, and you will create an animal that interacts
with the world in ways clearly un-natural ... timid, crazy, undependable, bolting, bucking, avoidant, shying, etc. Keep a
horse from accessing the wisdom of the herd and the wisdom of its own nature and you get a horse that doesn't know
where it belongs in the world. Under such conditions wellbred horses with tremendous potentials end up living their
lives as ... consumers instead of contributors.
Consumers rather than contributors. Of course that's the point,
which you already understand if you've followed the meandering argument of my book closely - mass market corporate capitalism and
the financial capitalism which has been replacing it for some time,
both need consumers who define the value of their lives by consumption; both understand that only a small fraction of people need to
know how to produce - and anything beyond that small fraction is
a deadly poison to the system because the spectre of overproduction
will frighten capital into hiding.
Overproduction has to be stopped is the policy belief. Schools are
the principal factory in which that is done; consumption on the other
hand has to be enhanced - and no condition stimulates consumption like boredom, especially when the imagination and the inner life
have been paralyzed by endless memory drills, the synthetic crises of
continual testing, and a thorough conditioning in rewards and punishments, the game of winners and losers. Do people actually think
this way, If you ask me that question, I'd have to reply with some sorrow: Yes.
The Cauldron of Broken Time
When time is tightly scheduled, we are compelled to attend more to
the appearances of attention and concern than to the reality of those
qualities; without uninterrupted time you haven't a prayer of synthesizing the fact bits thrown at you. It's possible to memorize the official meaning of those bits, but in the time available no possibility
remains of arriving at your own careful conclusions. After years of
study, we know that uninterrupted sleep time is essential for precision
in thought, but as Claire Wolfe, a west coast writer once taught me,
uninterrupted waking time is similarly essential. When you can't concentrate, it's hard to make sense of things. Rather than persist in trying, it's easier just to quit.
The destruction of uninterrupted time is a major weapon of mass
instruction. Schools are a rat's maze of frantic activity,: bells, loudspeakers, messengers pounding on classroom doors, shrieks from the
playground, official visitors, unofficial visitors, toilet interruptions
coming and going, catcalls, bullyings and £lirtings - you never know
when the next interruption will appear. Try to reckon the psychological effect of being plunged into a cauldron of broken time, in Miss
Wolfe's phrase, again and again for 12 years (in the student's case) and
even longer in th: teacher's.
Personal time is the only time we have in which to build theories, test hypotheses of our own, and speculate how the bits of information our senses gather might be connected. Time allows us to add quality to our undertakings. It took only one knock at the door
to ruin Coleridge's mighty poem Kubla Khan. I wasn't that sensitive
as a classroom teacher, but after three interruptions - and my years
in harness averaged seven per class hour - my brains were so scrambled I faked the rest of the lesson.
The End
I hope this has been enough to continue weapon-hunting on your
own. Writing this has made me so sad and angry. I can't continue.
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