39. The School Edition: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

CHAPTER THREE 

Eyeless in Gaza 

he deeds were monstrous, but the doer [Adolf Eichmann] ....was quite ordinary, 
commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm 
ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one 
could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial... was 
something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.... Might not the 
problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our 
faculty for thought 
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind 

The School Edition 

I always knew schoolbooks and real books were different. Most kids do. But I remained 
vague on any particular grounds for my prejudice until one day, tired of the simple- 
minded junior high school English curriculum, I decided to teach Moby Dick to eighth- 
grade classes. A friendly assistant principal smuggled a school edition into the book 
purchases and we were able to weigh anchor the next fall. 

What a book! Ishmael, the young seaman who relates Melville's tale, is a half-orphan by 
decree of Fate, sentenced never to know a natural home again. But Ahab is no accidental 
victim. He has consciously willed his own exile from a young wife and child, from the 
fruits of his wealth, and from Earth itself in order to pursue his vocation of getting even. 
Revenge on the natural order is what drives him. 

War against God and family. To me, it defines the essence of Americanness. It's no 
accident that America's three classic novels — Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and 
Huckleberry Finn — each deal with ambiguous families or that each emerges from a time 
not far from either side of the Civil War. America had been an inferno for families, as 
Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain all knew. Midway through our first full century as a 
nation, the nearly universal American experience of homelessness found its voice. 
Ishmael is a half-orphan, Ahab an absentee father and husband, the harpooners expatriate 
men of color; Pearl a bastard, Hester an adulteress, the Reverend Dimmesdale a sexual 
predator and runaway father; Huck Finn, de facto, an adoptee, Jim a twice-uprooted 
African slave. When we think what our schools became we need to recall what a great 
pile of us are homeless. We long for homes we can never have as long as we have 
institutions like school, television, corporation, and government in loco parentis. 

Patricia Lines of the U.S. Department of Education, in trying honorably to discuss what 
the rank and file of homeschoolers actually do, finally declared it seems to be wrapped up 
closely with a feeling of "intense interest in the life of the community." Above anything 
else, she found loyalty in the warp and woof of family: 

Homeschoolers are tremendously loyal as family members, they are suspicious of 
television and other less intimate influences. They eat as a family, they socialize as a 



family, they attend church as a family, they become members of an 
extended. . .homeschooling community. 

American great fiction is about individuals broken from family. The closest they come to 
satisfying the universal yearning is a struggle for surrogates — like the strange connection 
between Pearl, Hester, and the dark forest. America's most fascinating storytellers focus 
on the hollowness of American public life. We have no place to go when work is done. 
Our inner life long extinguished, our public work in remaking the world can never be 
done because personal homework isn't available to us. There's no institutional solace for 
this malady. In outrage at our lonely fate, we lay siege to the family sanctuary wherever it 
survives, as Ahab lay siege to the seas for his accursed Whale. 

For this and other reasons long lost, I decided to teach Moby Dick to my eighth-grade 
classes. Including the dumb ones. I discovered right away the white whale was just too 
big for forty-five-minute bell breaks; I couldn't divide it comfortably to fit the schedule. 
Melville's book is too vast to say just what the right way to teach it really is. It speaks to 
every reader privately. To grapple with it demanded elastic time, not the fixed bell breaks 
of junior high. Indeed, it offered so many choices of purpose — some aesthetic, some 
historical, some social, some philosophical, some theological, some dramatic, some 
economic — that compelling the attention of a room full of young people to any one 
aspect seemed willful and arbitrary. 

Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick I realized the school edition wasn't a real book 
but a kind of disguised indoctrination providing all the questions, a scientific addition to 
the original text designed to make the book teacher-proof and student-proof. If you even 
read those questions (let alone answered them) there would be no chance ever again for a 
private exchange between you and Melville; the invisible editor would have preempted it. 

The editors of the school edition provided a package of prefabricated questions and more 
than a hundred chapter-by-chapter abstracts and interpretations of their own. Many 
teachers consider this a gift — it does the thinking for them. If I didn't assign these 
questions, kids wanted to know why not. Their parents wanted to know why not. Unless 
everyone duly parroted the party line set down by the book editor, children used to 
getting high marks became scared and angry. 

The school text of Moby Dick had been subtly denatured; worse than useless, it was 
actually dangerous. So I pitched it out and bought a set of undoctored books with my own 
money. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it 
away. Real books don't do that. Real books demand people actively participate by asking 
their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren't just stupid, they 
hurt the mind under the guise of helping it — exactly the way standardized tests do. Real 
books, unlike schoolbooks, can't be standardized. They are eccentric; no book fits 
everyone. 

If you think about it, schooled people, like schoolbooks, are much alike. Some folks find 
that desirable for economic reasons. The discipline organizing our economy and our 



politics derives from mathematical and interpretive exercises, the accuracy of which 
depends upon customers being much alike and very predictable. People who read too 
many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. 
Market research depends on people behaving as //they were alike. It doesn't really 
matter whether they are or not. 

One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to 
examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, 
from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually 
comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read 
instead of just pretending to read. 

For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate 
readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The 
librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to 
follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose 
of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return. 

Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask 
my own questions and helps me when I want help, not when she decides I need it. If I 
feel like reading all day long, that's okay with the librarian, who doesn't compel me to 
stop at intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its nose out of my home. It 
doesn't send letters to my family, nor does it issue orders on how I should use my reading 
time at home. 

The library doesn't play favorites; it's a democratic place as seems proper in a 
democracy. If the books I want are available, I get them, even if that decision deprives 
someone more gifted and talented than I am. The library never humiliates me by posting 
ranked lists of good readers. It presumes good reading is its own reward and doesn't need 
to be held up as an object lesson to bad readers. One of the strangest differences between 
a library and a school is that you almost never see a kid behaving badly in a library. 

The library never makes predictions about my future based on my past reading habits. It 
tolerates eccentric reading because it realizes free men and women are often very 
eccentric. Finally, the library has real books, not schoolbooks. I know the Moby Dick. I 
find in the library won't have questions at the end of the chapter or be scientifically 
bowdlerized. Library books are not written by collective pens. At least not yet. 

Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible 
curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport us to an inner realm of 
solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer programs 
can't. If they were not devoid of such capacity, they would jeopardize school routines 
devised to control behavior. Real books conform to the private curriculum of particular 
authors, not to the demands of bureaucracy. 

Intellectual Espionage