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