194. A Critical Appraisal: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
A
Critical Appraisal
In the latter half of the
nineteenth century, as the new school institution slowly took root after the Civil War in big cities and
the defeated South, some of the best minds in the land, people fit by their social rank to
comment publicly,
spoke out as they watched its
first phalanx of graduates take their place in the traditional American
world. All these speakers had been
trained themselves in the older, a-systematic, noninstitutional schools. At the beginning of another new
century, it is eerie to hear what these great-grandfathers of ours had to say about the mass
schooling phenomenon as they approached their own fateful new century.
In 1867, world-famous
American physician and academic Vincent Youmans lectured the London College of Preceptors about the
school institution just coming into being:
School produces mental perversion and
absolute stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It produces these things by measures which operate to the
prejudice of the growing brain. It
is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are
frequently aggravated by the
lessons of school.
Thirteen years later,
Francis Parkman (of Oregon Trail fame) delivered a similar judgment. The year was 1880, at the
very moment Wundt was founding his laboratory of scientific psychology in Germany:
Many had hoped that
by giving a partial teaching to great numbers of persons, a thirst for knowledge might be awakened. Thus far,
the results have not equaled expectations. Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have cause to
congratulate ourselves, (emphasis
added)
In 1885, the president of Columbia
University said:
The results actually attained under our
present system of instruction are neither very flattering nor very encouraging.
In 1895, the
president of Harvard said:
Ordinary schooling produces dullness. A
young man whose intellectual powers are worth cultivating cannot be willing to cultivate them by pursuing
phantoms as the schools now insist
upon.
When he said this,
compulsion schooling in its first manifestation was approaching its forty- fifth year of operations in
Massachusetts, and running at high efficiency in the city of Cambridge, home to Harvard.
Then, in the early
years of the twentieth century, pedagogy underwent another metamorphosis that resulted in an even
more efficient scientific form of schooling. Four years before WWI broke out, a well-known European thinker
and schoolman, Paul Geheeb, whom
Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer all were to claim as a friend, made this commentary on English
and German types of forced schooling:
The dissatisfaction with public schools
is widely felt. Countless attempts to reform them have failed. People complain about the
"overburdening" of schools; educators argue about which parts of curriculum should be cut; but school
cannot be reformed with a pair of
scissors. The solution is not to be found in educational institutions,
(emphasis added)
In 1930, the yearly Inglis Lecturer at
Harvard made the same case:
We have absolutely nothing
to show for our colossal investment in common schooling after 80 years of trying.
Thirty years passed before John
Gardner's "Annual Report to the Carnegie Corporation," in 1960, added this:
Too many young people gain nothing [from
school] except the conviction they are
misfits.
The record after 1960
is no different. It is hardly unfair to say that the stupidity of 1867, the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness
of 1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960 have
continued into the schools of
today. We pay four times more in real dollars than we did in 1930 and
thus we buy even more of what mass
schooling dollars always bought.
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