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How public education cripples our kids, and why
I
taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and
in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in
boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the
kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave
the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no
sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing
something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't
seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested
in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every
bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common
condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a
teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the
dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they
feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect.
Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested
only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves
products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so
thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are
trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the
children. Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My
grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I
complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He
told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that
if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to
amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't
know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly
not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here
and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some
remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to
challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the
natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom,
and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
The empire struck back,
of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with
disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all
evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely
destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer
possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented
effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary
testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family
suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired
in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with
their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students
and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly
could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had
revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too,
yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could
easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help
kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We
could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity,
adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by
being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids
to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he
or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And
the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the
"problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the
point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they
are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common
sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because
they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something
right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth
when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our
schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows
up?
Do
we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling:
six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve
years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?
Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale,
because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal
justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of
well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our
kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George
Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln?
Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a
school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a
secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally
didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like
Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie
and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even
scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people
who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at
all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good,
multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily
married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant
was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that
is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous
with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that
isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty
of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves
without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all
too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education
with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public
schools?
Mass schooling of a
compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between
1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for
throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this
enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly
speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still
trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in
one form or another as a decent definition of public education's
mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we
are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national
literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of
compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great
H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924
that the aim of public education is not
Because of Mencken's
reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage
as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace
the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished,
though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although
he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war
with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was
being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is
Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a
Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you
know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the
turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's
1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing
the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace
Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of
Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the
Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian
culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early
association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's
aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German- speaking people
had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a
German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that
we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of
Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to
produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny
students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and
incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace
"manageable."
It
was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years,
WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project,
high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and
truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century -
that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling.
Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree
of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed
with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at
a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly
after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length
essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a
little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools
we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905
and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct
the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book,
Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this
revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a
lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear
that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just
what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the
burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants
and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern,
industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical
incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide
children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests,
and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the
ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever
reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the
purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic
functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those
innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive
or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of
reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment
completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or
interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for
reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn,
and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating
function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because
its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who
conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to
harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and
directive function. School is meant to determine each student's
proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically
and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record."
Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating
function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to
be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the
social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making
kids their personal best.
5) The selective
function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's
theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored
races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously
attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the
unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments -
clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and
effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what
all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to
do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic
function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an
elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids
will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to
watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and
declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and
corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is
the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest
you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take
on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly
alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the
ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American
school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody,
who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South,
surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not
only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a
virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of
industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by
cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among
them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
There
you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a
grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of
complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to
demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them
if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when
Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the
following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909:
"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want
another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in
every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit
themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the
motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends
need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or
from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount
virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they
can stem from simple greed.
There were vast fortunes
to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and
organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small
business or the family farm. But mass production required mass
consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans
considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't
actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School
didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should
consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged
them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another
great invention of the modem era - marketing.
Now, you needn't have
studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can
always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and
children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children
into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our
children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from
Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be
cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and
independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of
greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly
grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public
Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and
praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had
extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at
that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of
Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin,
and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the
following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School
Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw
products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the
business of the school to build its pupils according to the
specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious
from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by
now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce
laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has
removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has
removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have
removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of
children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political
exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual
adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the
television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the
computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when
they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and
believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even
when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye
when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we
remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the
land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as
intended, has seen to it.
Now
for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern
schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School
trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be
leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively;
teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled
kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an
inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the
serious material, the grown-up material, in history,
literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the
stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids
with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own
company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are
conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship
through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow
friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children
should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must
wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of
experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and
attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves
children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into
servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even
for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British
warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at
the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a
printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study
that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your
own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public
school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We
suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to
manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think,
is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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** 09/2003
Harper's Magazine.
*
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York
City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The
Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in
the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill," which appeared in the
September 2001 issue. You can find his web site
here.
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