221. Four
Kinds Of Classroom: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Four
Kinds Of Classroom
Jean Anyon, a professor at Rutgers, recently examined four
major types of covert career
preparation going on simultaneously in the school world, all traveling
together under the label
"public education." All use state-certified
schoolteachers, all share
roughly common budgets, all lead
to intensely political outcomes.
In the first type of classroom, students
are prepared for future wage labor that is mechanical and routine. Of course neither students nor
parents are told this, and almost
certainly teachers are not consciously aware of it themselves. The
training regimen is this: all work
is done in sequential fashion starting with simple tasks, working very slowly and progressing gradually to
more difficult ones (but never to very difficult work). There is little decision-making or
choice on the part of students, much rote behavior is practiced. Teachers hardly ever explain why any particular
work is assigned or how one piece of work connects to other
assignments. When explanations are undertaken they are shallow and platitudinous. "You'll
need this later in life." Teachers spend most of their day at school controlling the time and
space of children, and giving commands.
In the second type of classroom,
students are prepared for low-level bureaucratic work, work with little creative element to
it, work which does not reward critical appraisals of management. Directions are followed just as in the first
type of classroom, but those
directions often call for some deductive thinking, offer some selection,
and leave a bit of room for
student decision-making.
The third type of classroom finds
students being trained for work that requires them to be producers of artistic, intellectual,
scientific, and other kinds of productive enterprise. Often children work creatively and independently here.
Through this experience, children learn
how to interpret and evaluate reality, how to become their own best critics
and supporters. They are trained
to be alone with themselves without a need for constant authority intervention and approval.
The teacher controls this class through endless negotiation. Anyon concludes: "In their schooling these
children are acquiring symbolic
capital, they are given opportunity to develop skills of linguistic, artistic,
and scientific expression and
creative elaboration of ideas in concrete form."
The
fourth type of public school classroom trains students for ownership,
leadership, and control. Every hot
social issue is discussed, students are urged to look at a point from all sides. A leader, after all, has to
understand every possible shade of human nature in order to effectively mobilize, organize, or
defeat any possible opponent. In this kind of schoolroom bells are not used to begin and end periods. This
classroom offers something none of
the others do: "knowledge of and practice in manipulating socially
legitimated tools of systems
analysis."
It strikes me as
curious how far Anyon's "elite" public school classroom number four
still falls far short of the goals
of elite private boarding schools, almost as if the very best government schools are willing to offer
is only a weak approximation of the leadership style of St. Paul's or Groton. What fascinates me most is
the cold-blooded quality of this
shortfall because Groton's expectations cost almost nothing to meet on a
different playing field — say a
homeschool setting or even in John Gatto's classroom — while the therapeutic community of psychologized
public schooling is extremely expensive to maintain. Virtually everyone could be educated the Groton
way for less money than the
average public school costs.
No comments:
Post a Comment