An
Enclosure Movement For Children
The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the
way children learn, and it isn't
supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and
a deliberately re-stratified
social order. It wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions
would define their own needs. School is the first
impression
children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the
lasting one. Life according to
school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where
real meaning is found, that is the classroom's lesson, however indirectly delivered.
The decisive dynamics which make forced
schooling poisonous to healthy human
development aren't hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn't significant
work; it fails to satisfy real
needs pressing on the individual; it doesn't answer real questions
experience raises in the young
mind; it doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making
all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim
listless. This phenomenon has been
well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land
into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating,
doing, reflecting, freely associating,
enjoying privacy — these are precisely what the structures of schooling
are set up to prevent, on one
pretext or another.
As I watched it happen,
it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness
with nothing real to do. In such environments, songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games, and other
tension-breakers do the work better
than angry words and punishment. Years ago it struck me as more than a little
odd that the Prussian government
was the patron of Heinrich Pestalozzi, inventor of multicultural fun-and-games psychological elementary
schooling, and of Friedrich
Froebel, inventor of kindergarten. It struck me as odd that J. P.
Morgan's partner, Peabody, was
instrumental in bringing Prussian schooling to the prostrate South after
the Civil War. But after a while I
began to see that behind the philanthropy lurked a rational economic purpose.
The strongest meshes of the school net
are invisible. Constant bidding for a stranger's attention creates a chemistry producing the common
characteristics of modern
schoolchildren: whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty.
Unceasing competition for official
favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom,
little people with no apparent purpose for being alive. The full significance of the classroom as a dramatic
environment, as primarily a
dramatic environment, has never been properly acknowledged or
examined.
The most destructive dynamic is
identical to that which causes caged rats to develop eccentric or even violent mannerisms when they press a bar
for sustenance on an aperiodic
reinforcement schedule (one where food is delivered at random, but the rat doesn't suspect). Much of the weird
behavior school kids display is a function of the aperiodic reinforcement schedule. And the endless confinement
and inactivity to slowly drive
children out of their minds. Trapped children, like trapped rats, need
close management. Any rat
psychologist will tell you that.
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