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Principles: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
Principles
Five days a week the town turned its
children out in the morning to march up the hill to
Waverly or down to the end of town
to high school. There was no school bus. Waverly
floor, serve in the lunchroom, clean
the erasers, help our slower classmates in arithmetic
and reading — and the specialized
procedures and curriculum of the slowly dawning
corporate age of schooling. While
this latter style had been sold as more "socially
efficient" ever since 1905, the
realities of town life were such that nothing passed muster
at Waverly which didn't first pass
muster with parents and the elders of the town.
School was something you took like
medicine. You did it because your mother had done
it and your grandmother. It was
supposed to be good for you. Nobody believed it was
decisively so. Looking back, I might
agree this daily exercise with neighbors suddenly
transformed into grammarians,
historians, and mathematicians might well have been, as
Mother said, "good for
me." One thing is certain, these part-time specialists cared a great
deal about Mother's opinion of what
they were doing, just as she cared about theirs in
regard to her parenting.
The schoolteachers I remember are
few but bear noting: Peg Hill who spoke to me
exactly the way she did to the
principal and won my heart for treating me as a peer; Miss
Wible who taught me to sing and
memorize song lyrics so ferociously, that my
vocabulary and dramatic repertoire
increased geometrically (even if we did whisper to
each other that she was reading
"love books" at her desk as we copied the day's words);
old Miss McCullough, who played
"American Patrol" every single day for an entire
school year on a hand-cranked
phonograph: "You must be vigilant, you must be diligent,
American Patrol!" Her
expressionless face and brutally stark manner stifled any
inclination to satire. If we have to
have schoolteachers, let some of them be this kind of
teacher.
At Waverly I learned about principle
when Miss Hill read from Gibbon's Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire. She read
of the courageous death of Blandina the slave, a
teenage convert to Christianity who
was offered her life to repudiate her faith and a cruel
death if she refused. She refused. I
learned that all the management savvy of the most
powerful empire in history couldn't
overwhelm the principles of a teenage slave.
Principles were a daily part of
every study at Waverly. In latter days, schools replaced
principles with an advanced form of
pragmatism called "situational ethics," where
principles were shown to be variable
according to the demands of the moment. During
the 1970s, forcing this study on
children became an important part of the school religion.
People with flexible principles
reserve the right to betray their covenants. It's that simple.
The misery of modern life can be
graphed in the rising incidence of people who exercise
the right to betray each other,
whether business associates, friends, or even family.
Pragmatists like to keep their
options open. When you live by principles, whatever
semantic ambiguity they involve you
in, there are clear boundaries to what you will
allow, even when nobody is watching.
Frances "Bootie" Zimmer
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