56. Intimidation: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

56. Intimidation: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Intimidation

    New teachers and even beleaguered veterans are hardly in any position to stand back far  enough to see clearly the bad effect the dramatic setting of the building — its rules,  personalities, and hidden dynamics — has on their own outlook and on children's lives.  About one kid in five in my experience is in

acute torment from the intimidation of peers,  maybe more are driven to despair by the indifference of official machinery. What the  hounded souls can't possibly see is that from a system standpoint, they are the problem  with their infernal whining, not their persecutors. 

      And for every one broken by intimidation, another breaks himself just to get through the  days, months, and years ahead. This huge silent mass levels a moral accusation lowly  teachers become conscious of only at their peril because there is neither law nor  institutional custom to stop the transgressions. Young, idealistic teachers burn out in the  first three years because they can't solve administrative and collegial indifference, often  concluding mistakenly that consciously willed policies of actual human beings — a  principal here, a department head or union leader there — are causing the harm, when  indifference is a system imperative; it would collapse from its contradictions if too much  sensitivity entered the operating formula.  

     I would have been odds-on to become one of these martyrs to inadequate understanding  of the teaching situation but for a fortunate accident. By the late 1960s I had exhausted  my imagination inside the conventional classroom when all of a sudden a period of  phenomenal turbulence descended upon urban schoolteaching everywhere. I'll tell you  more about this in a while, but for the moment, suffice it to say that supervisory  personnel were torn loose from their moorings, superintendents, principals and all the rest  flung to the wolves by those who actually direct American schooling. In this dark time,  local management cowered. During one three-year stretch I can remember, we had four  principals and three superintendents. The net effect of this ideological bombardment,  which lasted about five years in its most visible manifestation, was to utterly destroy the  utility of urban schools. From my own perspective all this was a godsend. Surveillance of  teachers and administrative routines lost their bite as school administrators scurried like  rats to escape the wrath of their unseen masters, while I suddenly found myself in  possession of a blank check to run my classes as I pleased as long as I could secure the  support of key parents.