192. What Really Goes On: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
What
Really Goes On
School wreaks havoc on human foundations
in at least eight substantive ways so deeply buried few notice them, and fewer still can imagine any
other way for children to grow
up:
1) The first lesson
schools teach is forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they taught themselves important things like
walking and talking.
This is done so pleasantly and painlessly that the one area of schooling most of us
would agree has few problems is
elementary school — even though it is there that the massive damage to
language-making occurs. Jerry
Farber captured the truth over thirty years ago in his lapidary metaphor "Student as Nigger" and
developed it in the beautiful essay of the same name. If we forced children to learn to walk with
the same methods we use to force them to read, a few would learn to walk well in spite of us, most would walk
indifferently, without pleasure,
and a portion of the remainder would not become ambulatory at all. The push
to extend "day care"
further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence,
ensuring utmost tractability among first graders.
2) The second lesson
schools teach is bewilderment and confusion. Virtually nothing selected by schools as basic is basic,
all curriculum is subordinate to standards imposed by behavioral psychology, and to a lesser extent Freudian
precepts compounded into a hash
with "third force" psychology (centering on the writings of Carl
Rogers and Abraham Maslow).
None of these systems
accurately describes human reality, but their lodgement in university/business seven-step mythologies makes
them dangerously invulnerable to
common-sense criticism. None
of the allegedly scientific school sequences is empirically defensible. All
lack evidence of being much more
than superstition cleverly hybridized with a body of borrowed fact. Pestalozzi's basic "simple to
complex" formulation, for instance, is a prescription for disaster in the classroom since no two
minds have the same "simple"
starting point, and in the more advanced schedules, children are
frequently more knowledgeable than
their overseers — witness the wretched record of public school computer instruction when compared to
self-discovery programs undertaken informally. Similarly, endless sequences of so-called
"subjects" delivered by men and women who, however well-meaning, have only superficial knowledge of the
things whereof they speak, is the
introduction most kids get to the liar's world of institutional life.
Ignorant mentors cannot manage
larger meanings, only facts. In this way schools teach the disconnection of everything.
3) The third lesson
schools teach is that children are assigned by experts to a social class and must stay in the class to which
they have been assigned. This is an Egyptian outlook, but its Oriental message only begins to suggest the bad fit
it produces in America. The
natural genius of the United States as explored and set down in
covenants over the first
two-thirds of our history has now been radically degraded and
overthrown. The class system is
reawakened through schooling. So rigid have American classifications
become that our society has taken
on the aspect of caste, which teaches unwarranted self-esteem and its converse — envy, self-hatred,
and surrender. In class systems, the state assigns your place in a class, and if you know what's good for you,
you come to know it, too.
4) The fourth lesson
schools teach is indifference. By bells and other concentration- destroying technology, schools teach
that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and
aperiodically. If nothing is worth
finishing, nothing is worth starting. Don't you see how one follows the
other? Love of learning can't
survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors
and ceremonial grades which
correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense
rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals.
Schools alienate the winners as
well as the losers.
5) The fifth lesson schools teach is
emotional dependency. By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition
children to lifelong emotional
dependency. It's like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known
to animal trainers from antiquity,
is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth- century Leipzig and incorporated
thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth
century in America. Haifa century later, by 1968, it had infected every school system in the United
States, so all-pervasive at century's end that few people can imagine a different way to go about management.
And indeed, there isn't a better
one if the goal of managed lives in a managed economy and a managed social order is what you're after.
Each day, schools reinforce how absolute
and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water,
privacy, and movement. In this
way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition,
are transformed into privileges
not to be taken for granted.
6) The sixth lesson schools teach is
intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Good people do it the way
the teacher wants it done. Good
teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or textbook to tell
them what to do. Principals are
evaluated according to an ability to make these groups conform to expectations; superintendents upon
their ability to make principals conform; state education departments on their ability to efficiently direct
and control the thinking of
superintendents according to instructions which originate with
foundations, universities, and
politicians sensitive to the quietly expressed wishes of powerful corporations,
and other interests.
For all its clumsy
execution, school is a textbook illustration of how the bureaucratic chain of command is supposed to work.
Once the thing is running, virtually nobody can alter its direction who doesn't understand the complex code
for making it work, a code that
never stops trying to complicate itself further in order to make human
control impossible. The sixth
lesson of schooling teaches that experts make all important choices, but it is useless to remonstrate with
the expert nearest you because he is as helpless as you are to change the system.
7) The seventh lesson schools teach is
provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in children must be made contingent on the certification of experts
through rituals of number magic.
It must not be self-generated as it was for Benjamin Franklin, the
Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, or
Henry Ford. The role of grades, report cards, standardized tests, prizes, scholarships, and other awards
in effecting this process is too obvious to belabor, but it's the daily encounter with hundreds of verbal and
nonverbal cues sent by teachers
that shapes the quality of self-doubt most effectively.
8) The last lesson school teaches I'll
call the glass house effect: It teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always
watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you
should be watched even more
closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it
that there is no private time, no
private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical
policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols.
The most sensitive children I had each
year knew on some level what was really going on. But we choked the treacherous breath out of them until
they acknowledged they
depended on us for their futures. Hard-core cases were remanded to adjustment
agencies where they converted
themselves into manageable cynics.
Pathology As A Natural Byproduct
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