240. Almost The End: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Almost The End 



And so we arrive at the end of our journey together. You have seen the trap conceived, 
the trap built, the trap sprung, and its quarry turning in panic within until the bright light 
of living spirit goes dull behind its eyes and it grows indifferent to its banal fate in a 
comprehensively planned society and economy without any hope of escape. You have 
watched the trap grow like Arch Oboler's demonic chicken heart, 4 maintained by an army 
of behaviorally adjusted functionaries reproducing its own mechanistic encoding in the 
lives of schoolchildren. You have watched the listless creatures caught in the trap 
pressing a bar to get their food while they await instructions to their final meaningless 
destiny. How the trap was conceived hardly makes much difference at this point, except 
to warn us we are not dealing with any ordinary mistake; this trap was intended to be as it 
is. It is a work of great human genius. 

Mass schooling cannot be altered or reformed because any palliative from its killing 
religion will only be short-lived as long as the massification machinery it represents 
remains in place. That's why all the well-publicized "this-time-we-have-it-right" 
alternatives to factory schooling fizzle out a decade after launch. Most sooner. 

Nothing in human history gives us any reason to be optimistic that powerful social 
machinery, through its very existence, doesn't lead to gross forms of oppression. If 
engines of mass control exist, the wrong hands will find the switches sooner or later. 
That's why standing armies, like the enormous one we now maintain, are an invitation to 
serfdom. They will always, sooner or later, go domestic. The more rationally engineered 
the machinery, the more certain its eventual corruption; that's a bitter pill rationalists still 
haven't learned to swallow. 

We are, I think, at one of those great points of choice in the human record where society 
gets to select from among widely divergent futures. It's customary to say there will be no 
turning back from our choice, but that is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that we 
will not be able to turn back from our next choice without a great and dreadful grief. It is 
best to heed the Amish counsel not to jump until you know where you're going to land. 

Not jumping at this moment in time means rejecting further centralization of children in 
government schooling. It means rejecting every attempt to nationalize the religious 
enterprise of institutional schooling. If centralizers prevail, the connection between 
schooling and work will become total; if decentralizers prevail it will be diffuse, 
irregular, and for many kinds of work, as utterly insignificant as it should be. Experts 
have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling. The problem is 
not that children don't learn to read, write, and do arithmetic well — the problem is that 
kids hardly learn at all from the way schools insist on teaching. Schools desperately need 
a vision of their own purpose. It was never factually true that all young people learn to 
read or do arithmetic by being "taught" these things — though for many decades that has 
been the masquerade. 

When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must 
do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which 
puts experience first. Only much later, after a long bath in experience, does the thin gruel 



of abstraction mean very much. We haven't "forgotten" this; there is just no profit in 
remembering it for the businesses and people who make their bread and butter from 
monopoly schooling. 

The relentless rationalization of the school world has left the modern student a prisoner of 
low-grade vocational activities. He lives in a disenchanted world without meaning. Our 
cultural dilemma here in the United States has little to do with children who don't read, 
but lies instead in finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life. Any 
system of values that accepts the transformation of the world into machinery and the 
construction of pens for the young called schools, necessarily rejects this search for 
meaning. 

Schools at present are the occupation of children; children have become employees, 
pensioners of the government at an early age. But government jobs are frequently not 
really jobs at all — that certainly is the case in the matter of being a schoolchild. There is 
nothing or very little to do in school, but one thing is demanded — that children must 
attend, condemned to hours of desperation, pretending to do a job that doesn't exist. At 
the end of the day, tired, fed up, full of aggression, their families feel the accumulated 
tedium of their pinched lives. Government jobs for children have broken the spirit of our 
people. They don't know their own history, nor would they care to. 

In a short time such a system becomes addictive. Even when efforts are made to find real 
work for children to do, they often drift back to meaningless busywork. Anyone who has 
ever tried to lead students into generating lines of meaning in their own lives will have 
felt the resistance, the hostility even, with which broken children fight to be left alone. 
They prefer the illness they have become accustomed to. As the school day and year 
enlarge, students may be seen as people forbidden to leave their offices, as people 
hemmed in by an invisible fence, complaining but timid. Schools thus consume most of 
the people they incarcerate. 

School curricula are like unwholesome economies. They don't deal in basic industries of 
mind, but instead try to be "popular," dealing in the light stuff in an effort to hold down 
rebellion. That's why we can't read Paine's Common Sense anymore, often can't read at 
all. Only one person in every sixteen, I'm told, reads more than one book a year after 
graduation from high school. Kids and teachers live day by day. That's all you can do 
when you have a runaway inflation of expectations fueled by false promissory notes on 
the future issued by teachers and television and other mythmakers in our culture. In the 
inflationary economy of mass schooling — with its "A's" and gold stars and handshakes 
and trophies tied to nothing real — you cease to plan. You're just happy to make it to the 
weekend. 

Once the inflation of dishonesty is perceived, the curriculum can only be imposed by 
intimidation, by a dizzapie of bells and horns, by confusion. With inflation of the school 
variety, a gun is held to your head by the State, demanding you acknowledge that school 
time is valuable; otherwise everyone would leave except the teachers who are being paid. 



4 My reference is to the greatest of the old "Lights Out" radio shows I heard long ago in Monongahela, in which university scientists messing 
around with a chicken heart find a way to make it grow indefinitely, sort of like what schools are doing. It bursts from the laboratory and 
extends across the entire planet, suffocating every other living thing. The show is purportedly broadcast from an airplane flying over the global 
chicken heart until it runs out of fuel, crashes into the throbbing organ and is devoured with a giant sucking sound. 

I Would Prefer Not To