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Gatto
The
Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to
destroy individual thought?
When you want
to teach children to think, you begin by treating
them seriously when they are little, giving them
responsibilities, talking to them candidly,
providing privacy and solitude for them, and
making them readers and thinkers of significant
thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want
to teach them to think.... There is no evidence
that this has been a State purpose since the
start of compulsion schooling.
I want you to consider
the frightening possibility that we are spending far too
much money on schooling, not too little. I want you to
consider that we have too many people employed in
interfering with the way children grow upand that
all this money and all these people, all the time we take
out of children's lives and away from their homes and
families and neighbourhoods and private
explorationsgets in the way of education.
That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern
technological society it is the quantity of schooling and
the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. And
yet last year in St. Louis, I heard a vice-president of
IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the
process of teacher certification that in his opinion this
country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not
through any action of schools. He said 45 million people
were comfortable with computers who had learned through
dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very
formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach
computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now
instead of leading the world in this literacy. Now think
about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and
up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for
quality in everything it produces. It makes sense to
think their schools must have something to do with that.
Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to
school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason
the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be
first and seconds grades here is that they don't want to
pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when
boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers
at home too early.
It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide
jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick,
incomplete kids who can't be put back together again very
easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn't 12
years, either--it's nine. Less schooling, not more. The
direct savings of such a step in the US would be $75-100
billion, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of
time freed up with which to seek an education.
Who was it that decided to force your attention onto
Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year
and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short
school year, short school sequence, and free choice where
your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about
Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbour with a short
school year that outperforms Japan across the board in
math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding
that from you?
One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're
in is that we allowed schooling to become a very
profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the
police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts
increased investment only when it does poorly, and since
there are no penalties at all for such performance, the
temptation not to do well is overwhelming. That's because
school staffs, both line and management, are involved in
a guild system; in that ancient form of association no
single member is allowed to outperform any other member,
is allowed to advertise or is allowed to introduce new
technology or improvise without the advance consent of
the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely
sanctioned--as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large
number of once-brilliant teachers found out.
The guild reality cannot be broken without returning
primary decision-making to parents, letting them buy what
they want to buy in schooling, and encouraging the
entrepreneurial reality that existed until 1852. That is
why I urge any business to think twice before entering a
cooperative relationship with the schools we currently
have. Cooperating with these places will only make them
worse.
The structure of American schooling, 20th century style,
began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the
professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena.
When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle
like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a
German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous
"Address to the German Nation" which became one
of the most influential documents in modern history. In
effect he told the Prussian people that the party was
over, that the nation would have to shape up through a
new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which
everyone would learn to take orders.
So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a
state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern
forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear
vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
1. Obedient
soldiers to the army;
2. Obedient
workers to the mines;
3. Well
subordinated civil servants to government;
4. Well
subordinated clerks to industry;
5. Citizens who
thought alike about major issues.
Schools should create
an artificial national consensus on matters that had been
worked out in advance by leading German families and the
head of institutions. Schools should create unity among
all the German states, eventually unifying them into
Greater Prussia.
Prussian industry
boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare
and her reputation in international affairs was very
high. Twenty-six years after this form of schooling
began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America
to determine the boundary between the United States and
Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention
of the central school institution, as the behest of
Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed
the style of Prussian schooling as our own.
You need to know this because over the first 50 years of
our school institution Prussian purposewhich was to
create a form of state socialismgradually forced
out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was
to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.
In Prussia the purpose of the Volksshule, which educated
92 percent of the children, was not intellectual
development at all, but socialization in obedience and
subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in
which 8 percent of the kids participated. But for the
great mass, intellectual development was regarded with
managerial horror, as something that caused armies to
lose battles.
Prussia concocted a method based on complex
fragmentations to ensure that its school products would
fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved
dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further
divisible, some of it involved short periods punctuated
by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted
by ceaseless interruptions.
There were many more techniques of training, but all were
built around the premise that isolation from first-hand
information, and fragmentation of the abstract
information presented by teachers, would result in
obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful
of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be
unable to interfere with policy makers because, while
they could still complain, they could not manage
sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled
children cannot think critically, cannot argue
effectively.
One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian
schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars
of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic
"All Quiet on the Western Front" tells us that
the First World War was caused by the tricks of
schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was
the inevitable product of good schooling.
It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that
literally, not metaphorically schooling after the
Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think
for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to
tell them what to do and if what they have done is good
or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the moral will as
well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes
well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize
many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are
badly damaged because their own ability to think is left
rudimentary and undeveloped.
We got from the United States to Prussia and back because
a small number of very passionate ideological leaders
visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century,
and fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency
of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a
translation of Prussian vision onto these shores. If
Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany,
our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification
of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national
consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To
do that children would have to be removed from their
parents and from inappropriate cultural influence.
In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that
had been around at least since Plato's
"Republic", a bad idea that New England had
tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally
rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It
was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing"
legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was
the leading edge of a famous secret society which
flourished at that time known as "The Order of the
Star Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple
sentence, "I know nothing"--hence the popular
label attached to the secret society's political arm,
"The American Party." Over the next 50 years
state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice
and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There
was one powerful exception to this--the children who
could afford to be privately educated. It's important to
note that the underlying premise of Prussian schooling is
that the government is the true parent of children--the
State is sovereign over the family. At the most extreme
pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents
are really the enemies of their own children, not to be
trusted.
How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take
hold in American schools? Thousands and thousands of
young men from prominent American families journeyed to
Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th
century and brought home the Ph. D. degree to a nation in
which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted
the top positions in the academic world, in corporate
research, and in government, to the point where
opportunity was almost closed to those who had not
studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples
of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G.
Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins.
Virtually every single one of the founders of American
schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of
these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the
Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous "7th
Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries,
was perhaps the most important of these. By 1889, a
little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for
harvest. It that year the US Commissioner of Education,
William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis
Huntington, that American schools were
"scientifically designed" to prevent
"over-education" from happening. The average
American would be content with his humble role in life,
said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to
think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant
he would not be able to think about any other role.
In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of
Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were
a counter-productive anachronism in the collective
society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey,
people would be defined by their associations--not by
their own individual accomplishments. It such a world
people who read too well or too early are dangerous
because they become privately empowered, they know too
much, and know how to find out what they don't know by
themselves, without consulting experts.
Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was
to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early
schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of
teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole
word method, not because the latter was more efficient
(he admitted that it was less efficient) but because
independent thinkers were produced by hard books,
thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By
socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives
administered by the best social thinkers in government.
This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the
form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically
disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes
and dreams.
Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley
Hall, said this at about the same time, "Reading
should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be
paid to reading." Hall was one of the three men most
responsible for building a gigantic administrative
infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that
structure really became can only be understood by
comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more
school administrators than all of the European Economic
Community nations combined.
Once you think that the control of conduct is what
schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a
very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to
the machine so that young subjects will not twist and
turn so, while their minds and bodies are being
scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their
minds better is beside the point.
Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling
was among the most radical experiments in human history,
that America was deliberately denying its children the
tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach
children to think, you begin by treating them seriously
when they are little, giving them responsibilities,
talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude
for them, and making them readers and thinkers of
significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you
want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that
this has been a State purpose since the start of
compulsion schooling.
When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in
19th century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have
a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor
of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables.
Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the
influence of mothers on their children. I note with
interest the growth of daycare in the US and the repeated
urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds.
The movement toward state socialism is not some
historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the
world around us. It is fighting for its life against
those forces which would, through vouchers or tax
credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has
countered this thrust with a demand for even more control
over children's lives, and even more money to pay for the
extended school day and year that this control requires.
A movement as visibly destructive to individuality,
family and community as government-system schooling has
been might be expected to collapse in the face of its
dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive
shake down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened.
The explanation is largely found in the transformation of
schooling from a simple service to families and towns to
an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.
While this development has had a markedly adverse effect
on people and on our democratic traditions, it has made
schooling the single largest employer in the United
States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the
Defence Department. Both of these low-visibility
phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful
political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful
allies. This is a large part of the explanation why no
amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or
changes them for very long. School people are in a
position to outlast any storm and to keep
short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.
An overview of the short history of this institution
reveals a pattern marked by intervals of public outrage,
followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case.
After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public
schools, some considered good, some bad, I feel certain
that management cannot clean its own house. It
relentlessly marginalizes all significant change. There
are no incentives for the "owners" of the
structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside
competition.
What is needed for several decades is the kind of
wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of
our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that no
body of theory exists to accurately define the way
children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By
pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves
off from the information and innovation that only a real
market can provide. Fortunately our national situation
has been so favourable, so dominant through most of our
history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast.
But the future is not so clear. Violence, narcotic
addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these
are but tangible measures of a poverty in education.
Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the
daytimes of childhood, can be called to account for this.
In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but
only the people.
Trust the people, give them choices, and the school
nightmare will vanish in a generation.
--
I first read
this here on the School Survival website.
John Taylor Gatto website
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