Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?
by John Taylor Gatto
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 up--and 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 explorations--gets
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:
- Obedient soldiers to the army;
- Obedient workers to the mines;
- Well subordinated civil servants to government;
- Well subordinated clerks to industry
- 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 purpose--which was to create a form of state
socialism--gradually 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 Wester 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.
Diablo Valley School admits students of any race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin to all rights and privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students and staff at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan program, and athletic and other school administered programs.
Our school has enrolled students from: Antioch, Berkeley, Clayton, Concord, Danville, El Cerrito, Lafayette, Livermore, Martinez, Oakland, Oakley, Pittsburg, Pleasant Hill, San Francisco, San Leandro, Vallejo, Walnut Creek and other communities in the Bay Area.
