A Hard Look at School – part 1

A few weeks ago the homeschool group we are a part of circulated a 1991 letter that John Taylor Gatto had written right after he was named Teacher of the Year called the “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher”. It is a clarifying view of the institution we have called Public Education (which really includes religious or private schools which follow the public model). We all have many different reasons for homeschooling. Mine, as many others, include a component on the type of environment generated – specifically one hostile to a Christian view. This article discusses another reason – the human reason – as in how the system destroys our basic humanity and crushes our will to learn – often crushing our spirit as well.

Due to the length of the article, I will pull some thoughts forward for you, but I encourage you to read the whole article if you have time. It is reprinted here: http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html.

Also Mr. Gatto has gone on to write a number of books. He can be found at http://johntaylorgatto.com/. [PS my favorite title is “Weapons of Mass Instruction”. I have not read it but it is now on my list based on the title alone.] You can read many experts of his books and the whole text of his latest:

http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm.

The reason this caught my attention so much is that we are doing a business process engineering class as part of the IEM program. The primary questions asked by this discipline is – what are you producing? Are your processes actually producing what you want or something different? Do your processes help you be more or less competitive in today’s world? Applied to education – What are we really teaching children to become? Is this what we need in today’s world? Normatively, we are producing doctors, lawyers, programmers, plumbers, schoolteacher, etc. but is that true? Is there a more efficient way with better results? Gatto’s discussion, I think, offers some insight. Please keep in mind this was 1991 – how much more does it apply today?

——————————–

Obviously, with a title of “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher”, the article discusses the six lessons and then makes some observations [with apologies to the author for my editing - most of this text is his words and his credit]

Lesson 1:  “Stay in the class where you belong.” … The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class … the methods to number the children have increased in complexity over the years until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive. … the kids can’t imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place. … I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. … The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

Lesson 2: “to turn on and off like a light switch” [at the whim of the instructor]. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons … competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.  The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?

Lesson 3: “surrender your will to a predestined chain of command” Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Lesson 4: “only I determine what curriculum you will study.” (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity. … This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. … [He goes on to show the number of industries including things like fast food that depend on this lesson] … We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way.

Lesson 5: “your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth”. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students’ homes to spread approval or to mark exactly — down to a single percentage point — how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.  Self-evaluation — the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet — is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

Lesson 6: “they are being watched.” I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness, too. I assign “homework” so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.

…

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for “basic skills” practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I’ve just taught you.

…

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

…

In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located — in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy — then we would be truly self-sufficient.

…

Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling’s original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.

…

With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

…

“Critical thinking” is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces

…

All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love — and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life. Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

…

School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

—————————————————–

Obviously, Mr. Gatto has some discussion to tie his thoughts together. I’ve just included some for thought provoking consideration. He also discusses some of the history of where and why we have the system we have today.

Because of our personal situation, we have employed a sort of hybrid homeschool. In my next blog, I’ll talk about our situation and how, even in a “good school” the points Gatto makes shows true. Lest you leave depressed, Gatto offers a solution which will be in the next post. Stay tuned.