41. Looking Behind Appearances: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Looking Behind Appearances 

Do you think class size, teacher compensation, and school revenue have much to do with 
education quality? If so, the conclusion is inescapable that we are living in a golden age. 
From 1955 to 1991 the U.S. pupil/teacher ratio dropped 40 percent, the average salary of 
teachers rose 50 percent (in real terms) and the annual expense per pupil, inflation 
adjusted, soared 350 percent. What other hypothesis, then, might fit the strange data I'm 
about to present? 

Forget the 10 percent drop in SAT and Achievement Test scores the press beats to death 
with regularity; how do you explain the 37 percent decline since 1972 in students who 
score above 600 on the SAT? This is an absolute decline, not a relative one. It is not 
affected by an increase in unsuitable minds taking the test or by an increase in the 
numbers. The absolute body count of smart students is down drastically with a test not 
more difficult than yesterday's but considerably less so. 

What should be made of a 50 percent decline among the most rarefied group of test- 
takers, those who score above 750? In 1972, there were 2,817 American students who 
reached this pinnacle; only 1,438 did in 1994 — when kids took a much easier test. Can a 
50 percent decline occur in twenty-two years without signaling that some massive 
leveling in the public school mind is underway? 1 

In a real sense where your own child is concerned you might best forget scores on these 
tests entirely as a reliable measure of what they purport to assess. I wouldn't deny that 
mass movements in these scores in one direction or another indicate something is going 
on, and since the correlation between success in schooling and success on these tests is 
close, then significant score shifts are certainly measuring changes in understanding. This 
is a difficult matter for anyone to sort out, since many desirable occupational categories 
(and desirable university seats even before that) are reserved for those who score well. 
The resultant linkage of adult income with test scores then creates the illusion these tests 
are separating cream from milk, but the results are rigged in advance by foreclosing 
opportunity to those screened out by the test! In a humble illustration, if you only let 
students with high scores on the language component of the SATs cut hair, eventually it 
would appear that verbal facility and grooming of tresses had some vital link with each 



other. Between 1960 and 1998 the nonteaching bureaucracy of public schools grew 500 
percent, but oversight was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The 40,520 school 
districts with elected boards this nation had in 1960 shriveled to 15,000 by 1998. 

On the college rung of the school ladder something queer was occurring, too. Between 
1960 and 1984 the quality of undergraduate education at America's fifty best-known 
colleges and universities altered substantially. According to a 1996 report by the National 
Association of Scholars, these schools stopped providing "broad and rigorous exposure to 
major areas of knowledge" for the average student, even at decidedly un-average 
universities like Yale and Stanford. 

In 1964, more than half of these institutions required a thesis or comprehensive for the 
bachelor's degree; by 1993, 12 percent did; over the same period, the average number of 
classroom days fell 16 percent, and requirements in math, natural science, philosophy, 
literature, composition, and history almost vanished. Rhetoric, most potent of the active 
literacies, completely vanished, and a foreign language, once required at 96 percent of the 
great colleges, fell to 64 percent. 

According to The Journal of the American Medical Association (December 1995), 33 
percent of all patients cannot read and understand instructions on how often to take 
medication, notices about doctor's appointments, consent forms, labels on prescription 
bottles, insurance forms, and other simple parts of self-care. They are rendered helpless 
by inability to read. Concerning those behind the nation's prison walls (a population that 
has tripled since 1980), the National Center for Education Statistics stated in a 1996 
report that 80 percent of all prisoners could not interpret a bus schedule, understand a 
news article or warranty instructions, or read maps, schedules, or payroll forms. Nor 
could they balance a checkbook. Forty percent could not calculate the cost of a purchase. 

Once upon a time we were a new nation that allowed ordinary citizens to learn how to 
read well and encouraged them to read anything they thought would be useful. Close 
reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known 
for learning to think for yourself. This invitation to commoners extended by America was 
the most revolutionary pedagogy of all. 

Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a 
position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education in its 
most fundamental civilized sense. No one can do this very well without learning ways of 
paying attention: from a knowledge of diction and syntax, figures of speech, etymology, 
and so on, to a sharp ability to separate the primary from the subordinate, understand 
allusion, master a range of modes of presentation, test truth, and penetrate beyond the 
obvious to the profound messages of text. Reading, analysis, and discussion are the way 
we develop reliable judgment, the principal way we come to penetrate covert movements 
behind the facade of public appearances. Without the ability to read and argue we're just 
geese to be plucked. 



Just as experience is necessary to understand abstraction, so the reverse is true. 
Experience can only be mastered by extracting general principles out of the mass of 
details. In the absence of a perfect universal mentor, books and other texts are the best 
and cheapest stand-ins, always available to those who know where to look. Watching 
details of an assembly line or a local election unfold isn't very educational unless you 
have been led in careful ways to analyze the experience. Reading is the skeleton key for 
all who lack a personal tutor of quality. 2 

Reading teaches nothing more important than the state of mind in which you find 
yourself absolutely alone with the thoughts of another mind, a matchless form of intimate 
rapport available only to those with the ability to block out distraction and concentrate. 
Hence the urgency of reading well if you read for power. 

Once you trust yourself to go mind-to-mind with great intellects, artists, scientists, 
warriors, and philosophers, you are finally free. In America, before we had forced 
schooling, an astonishing range of unlikely people knew reading was like Samson's 
locks — something that could help make them formidable, that could teach them their 
rights and how to defend those rights, could lead them toward self-determination, free 
from intimidation by experts. These same unlikely people knew that the power bestowed 
through reading could give them insight into the ways of the human heart, so they would 
not be cheated or fooled so easily, and that it could provide an inexhaustible store of 
useful knowledge — advice on how to do just about anything. 

By 1812, Pierre DuPont was claiming that barely four in a thousand Americans were 
unable to read well and that the young had skill in argumentation thanks to daily debates 
at the common breakfast table. By 1820, there was even more evidence of Americans' 
avid reading habits, when 5 million copies of James Fenimore Cooper's complex and 
allusive novels were sold, along with an equal number of Noah Webster's didactic 
Speller — to a population of dirt farmers under 20 million in size. 

In 1835, Richard Cobden announced there was six times as much newspaper reading in 
the United States as in England, and the census figures of 1 840 gave fairly exact evidence 
that a sensational reading revolution had taken place without any exhortation on the part 
of public moralists and social workers, but because common people had the initiative and 
freedom to learn. In North Carolina, the worst situation of any state surveyed, eight out of 
nine could still read and write. 

In 1853, Per Siljestromm, a Swedish visitor, wrote, "In no country in the world is the 
taste for reading so diffuse as among the common people in America." The American 
Almanac observed grandly, "Periodical publications, especially newspapers, disseminate 
knowledge throughout all classes of society and exert an amazing influence in forming 
and giving effect to public opinion." It noted the existence of over a thousand 
newspapers. In this nation of common readers, the spiritual longings of ordinary people 
shaped the public discourse. Ordinary people who could read, though not privileged by 
wealth, power, or position, could see through the fraud of social class or the even grander 
fraud of official expertise. That was the trouble. 



In his book The New Illiterates, author Sam Blumenfeld gives us the best introduction to 
what went wrong with reading in the United States. He also gives us insight into why 
learning to read needn't be frustrating or futile. A typical letter from one of his readers 
boasts of her success in imparting the alphabet code to four children under the age of five 
by the simple method of practice with letter sounds. One day she found her three-year-old 
working his way through a lesson alone at the kitchen table, reading S-am, Sam, m-an, 
man, and so on. Her verdict on the process: "I had just taught him his letter sounds. He 
picked [the rest] up and did it himself. That's how simple it is." 



1 The critics of schooling who concentrate on fluctuations in standardized test scores to ground their case 
against the institution are committing a gross strategic mistake for several reasons, the most obvious of 
which is that in doing so they must first implicitly acknowledge the accuracy of such instruments in ranking 
every member of the youth population against every other member, hence the justice of using such 
measures to allocate privileges and rewards. An even larger folly occurs because the implicit validation of 
these tests by the attention of school critics cedes the entire terrain of scientific pedagogy, armoring it 
against strong counter-measures by recruiting the opposition, in effect, to support teaching to the test. The 
final folly lies in the ease with which these measures can be rigged to produce whatever public effects are 
wanted. 

2 In a fascinating current illustration of the power of books, black female tennis star Venus Williams' father 
acknowledged in a press interview for the Toronto Globe that he had, indeed, set out to create a tennis 
millionaire from his infant daughter even before her birth. Mr. Williams, who had no knowledge 
whatsoever of the game of tennis, and who was reared in a poor home in the South by his single mother, 
had his ambition piqued by witnessing a young woman on television receiving a $48,000 check for playing 
tennis successfully. At that moment he proposed to his wife that they set out to make their unborn children 
tennis millionaires. How did he learn the game? By reading books, he says, and renting videos. That, and 
common sense discipline, was all that Venus and sister Serena needed to become millionaire teenagers. 



The Sudbury Valley School