241 I
Would Prefer Not To: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
I
Would Prefer Not To
What to do?
Take Melville's insight "I would prefer not
to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your own watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a
shock of inspiration about what
really matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first
step. If you can keep your kid out
of any part of the
school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and
maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you
can manage that, they'll be okay.
Don't let a world of funny animals,
dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at
exactly the moment when big
questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North
German social engineers; they knew
something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.
Your four- year-old
wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing
"Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in
which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the
best play of all. Pure games are
okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games. There isn't a single
formula for breaking out of the
trap, only a general one you tailor to your own specifications.
No two escape routes are exactly alike.
Stanley, my absentee pupil, found one. Two magnificent American teenagers, Tara Lipinski and Michelle
Kwan, who enchanted the world with
a display of physical artistry and mental discipline on ice skates in the Olympic games in Japan, found another.
Neither went to school and both gained wealth and prominence for their accomplishments. For me they show
again what stories might be
written out of ordinary lives if our time to learn wasn't so lavishly wasted.
Are your children less than these?
At least nine major assumptions about
the importance of government schooling must be acknowledged as false before you can get beyond the fog of
ideology into the clear air of
education. Here they are:
1)
Universal government schooling is the essential force for social cohesion.
There is no other way. A heavily
bureaucratized public order is our defense against chaos and anarchy. Right, and if you don't wipe
your bum properly, the toilet monster will rise out of the bowl and get you.
2)
The socialization of children in age-graded groups monitored by State agents
is essential to learn to get along
with others in a pluralistic society. The actual truth is that the rigid compartmentalizations of
schooling teach a crippling form of social relation: wait passively until you are told what to do, never judge
your own work or confer with
associates, have contempt for those younger than yourself and fear of
those older. Behave according to
the meaning assigned to your class label. These are the rules of a nuthouse. No wonder kids cry and become fretful
after first grade.
3)
Children from different backgrounds and from families with different beliefs
must be mixed together. The
unexamined inference here is that in this fashion they enlarge their understanding, but the actual
management of classrooms everywhere makes only the most superficial obeisance to human difference — from the
first, a radical turn toward some
unitarian golden mean is taken, along the way of which different backgrounds
and different beliefs are subtly
but steadily discredited.
4)
The certified expertise of official schoolteachers is superior in its knowledge
of children to the accomplishments
of lay people, including parents. Protecting children from the uncertified is a compelling public concern.
Actually, the enforced long-term
segregation of children from the working world does them great damage,
and the general body of men and
women certified by the State as fit to teach is nearly the least fit occupational body in the entire economy
if college performance is the standard.
5) Coercion in the name of education is
a valid use of State power: compelling
assemblies of children into specified groupings for prescribed intervals
and sequences with appointed
overseers does not interfere with academic learning. Were you born yesterday? Plato said, "Nothing of
value to the individual happens by coercion."
6) Children will inevitably grow apart
from their parents in belief, and this process must be encouraged by diluting parental influence and disabusing
children of the idea their parents
are sovereign in mind or morality. That prescription alone has been enough
to cripple the American family.
The effects of forced disloyalty on family are hideously destructive, removing the only certain
support the growing spirit has to refer to. In place of family the school offers phantoms like
"ambition," "advancement," and "fun," nightmare harbingers of the hollow life
ahead.
7) An
overriding concern of schooling is to protect children from bad parents. No
wonder G. Stanley Hall, the father
of school administration, invited Sigmund Freud to the United States in 1909 — it was urgent business
to establish a "scientific" basis upon which to justify the anti-family stance of State
schooling, and the programmatic State in general.
8) It
is not appropriate for any family to unduly concern itself with the education
of its own children, although it
is appropriate to sacrifice for the general education of everyone in the hands of State experts. This is
the standard formula for all forms of socialism and the universal foundation of Utopian promises.
9) The State is the proper parent and
has predominant responsibility for training, morals, and beliefs. This is the parens patriae doctrine of Louis
XIV, king of France, a tale
unsuited to a republic.
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