This is taken from John Taylor Gatto's book, Dumbing
Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling This speech was given by the author on
31 January 1990 in accepting an award from the THE PSYCHOPATHIC SCHOOL I accept this award on behalf of all the
fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their
transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who were never
complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine what
the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the
best teacher around (those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered), but
she or he is a standard-bearer, representative of these private people who
spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as
well as mine. 1 . We live in a time of great school crisis
linked to an even greater social crisis. Our nation ranks at the bottom of
nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. At the very
bottom. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our consumption of this commodity;
if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and
schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the
highest in the world, and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not
the poor. In This great crisis which we witness in our
schools is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the community. We seem
to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked
away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent; nobody
talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily
life; a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In
fact the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact
with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is
lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a
major actor in the widening gulf among social classes. Using school as a
sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system,
complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who
sleep upon the streets. I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in
my twenty-five years of teaching: that schools and schooling are increasingly
irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore
that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics
classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really
teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me
because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools, as teachers and
aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution
overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do
work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience.
It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close
his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans
and monkeys derive from a common ancestor. 2 . Our form of compulsory schooling is an
invention of the State of Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator
Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago that prior to
compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and
after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in
1990. Here is another curiosity to think about.
The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half
million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last
month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at
home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers
in their ability to think. 3. 1 don't think we'll get rid of schools any
time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly
becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school
institution "schools" very well, though it does not
"educate;" that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the
fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for
education and schooling ever to be the same thing. Schools were designed by Horace Mann
and by Sears and Harper of the To a very great extent schools succeed in
doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national
order in which the only "successful" people are independent,
self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which
protects the dependent and the weak is dead and only networks remain), the
products of schooling are, as I've said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are
irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on
telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as
human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves. The daily misery around us is, I think, in
large measure caused by the fact that, as Paul Goodman put it thirty years
ago, we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal
with its absurdities. It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a
system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same
age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense
diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from
your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same
way television does. It is absurd and anti-life to move from
cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an
institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary
of your home demanding that you do its "homework." "How will they learn to read?"
you ask, and my answer is "Remember the lessons of But keep in mind that in the 4. Two institutions at present control our
children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these
reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a
never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood
and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real
adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you
really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits,
practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community,
learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming
a whole man or woman. But here is the calculus of time the
children I teach must deal with:
It's not enough, is it?
The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the
rich kid's time is just as narrowly prescribed by a somewhat broader
catalogue of commercial entertainments and the inevitable assignment to a
series of private lessons in areas seldom of his or her own choice. But these activities are just a more
cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own
hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to
their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness,
and I think schooling and television and lessons have a lot to do with it. Think of the phenomena which are killing
us as a nation - narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the
pornography of violence, gambling, and alcohol, and the worst pornography of
all: lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy -all of
these are addictions of dependent personalities, and this is what our brand
of schooling must inevitably produce. 5. I want to tell you what the effect on our
children is of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up -
and forcing them to spend it on abstractions.You need to hear this because
any reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be nothing
more than a facade.
I could name a few other
conditions that school reform will have to tackle if our national decline is
to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree
with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television
has, or both. It's a simple matter of arithmetic - between schooling and
television, all the time the children have is eaten up. There simply isn't
enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be other
significant causes. 6. What can be done? First, we need a ferocious national debate
that doesn't quit, day after day, year after year, the kind of continuous
debate that journalism finds boring. We need to scream and argue about this
school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If
we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of home-schooling shows a
different road that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into
schooling back into family education might cure two ailments with one
medicine, repairing families as it repairs children. Genuine reform is possible but it
shouldn't cost anything. More money and more people pumped into this sick
institution will only make it sicker. We need to rethink the fundamental
premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all
children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tiled to
impose objectives downward from a lofty command center made up of
"experts," a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't
worked. It won't work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that
once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create
Plato's republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before our eyes; our own
attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an
instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and
painfully. It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical,
antihuman, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine
education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology:
drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in
the children I teach. 7. It's high time we looked backwards to
regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has
been a favorite of the ruling classes of At the core of this elite system of
education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true
knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find
arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting
with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks,
such as the problem of galloping a horse or malting it jump, but that, of
course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children
before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a
challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes
the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Right now we are taking from our children
all the time that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We
have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back. We need
to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps
arranged in school, but which takes place away from the institutional
setting. We need to invent curricula where each kid has a chance to develop
private uniqueness and self-reliance. A short time ago I took $70 and sent a
twelve-year-old girl from my class, with her non-English-speaking mother, on
a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Seabright to
lunch and apologize for polluting his beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle.
In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for
the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small town police procedures. A
few days later two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone from Harlem
to West Thirty-first street where they began an apprenticeship with a
newspaper editor; later three of my kids found themselves in the middle of
the Jersey swamps at six in the morning, studying the mind of a trucking
company president as he dispatched eighteen-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and
Los Angeles. Are these "special" children in
a "special" program? Well, in one sense yes, but nobody knows about
this program but myself and the kids. They're just nice kids from central Does that worry me? Of course; but I am
confident that as they gain self-knowledge they'll also become self-teachers
- and only self-teaching has any lasting value. We've got to give kids independent time
right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve
them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can
be spent on something other than abstraction. This is an emergency; it
requires drastic action to correct. 8. What else does a restructured school
system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. Of
all the pages in the human ledger, only our tortured country has warehoused
children and asked nothing of them in service of the general good. For a
while I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling.
Besides the experience in acting unselfishly that it will teach, it is the
quickest way to give young children real responsibility in the mainstream of
life. For five years I ran a guerrilla school
program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours
a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years
later, grown up, and told me that the experience of helping someone else had
changed their lives. It had taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals
and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Independent study, community service,
adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand
different apprenticeships, the one-day variety or longer - these are all
powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But
no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children
and our damaged society until we force open the idea of "school to
include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to
break children away from parents - and make no mistake, that has been the
central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of
the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of
Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror
show we have right now. The "Curriculum of Family" is at
the heart of any good life. We've gotten away from that curriculum; it's time
to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take
the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to
promote during schooltime confluences of parent and child that will
strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her
mother down the I have many ideas for formulating a family
curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you have many ideas, too. Our
greatest problem in getting the kind of grassroots thinking going that could
reform schooling is that we have large, vested interests
preempting all the air time and profiting from schooling as it is,
despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new
ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We've all had a bellyful of
authorized voices mediated by television and the press; a decade-long
free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more
"expert" opinions. Experts in education have never been right;
their "solutions" are expensive, self-serving, and always involve
further centralization. We've seen the results. If s time for a return to democracy,
individuality, and family. |
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