39. The School Edition: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Eyeless in Gaza
The deeds were
monstrous, but the doer [Adolf Eichmann] ....was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor
monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the
only notable characteristic one
could detect in his past behavior as well as in his
behavior during the
trial... was something entirely
negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.... Might not the problem of good and evil, our faculty
for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty for thought
— Hannah Arendt, The
Life of the Mind
I always knew
schoolbooks and real books were different. Most kids do. But I remained vague on any particular grounds for my
prejudice until one day, tired of the simple- minded junior high school English curriculum, I decided to
teach Moby Dick to eighth- grade
classes. A friendly assistant principal smuggled a school edition into the
book purchases and we were able to
weigh anchor the next fall.
What a book! Ishmael,
the young seaman who relates Melville's tale, is a half-orphan by decree of Fate, sentenced never to know
a natural home again. But Ahab is no accidental victim. He has consciously willed his own exile from a young
wife and child, from the fruits of
his wealth, and from Earth itself in order to pursue his vocation of getting
even. Revenge on the natural order
is what drives him.
War against God and
family. To me, it defines the essence of Americanness. It's no accident that America's three classic
novels — Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn — each deal with ambiguous families or that
each emerges from a time not far
from either side of the Civil War. America had been an inferno for families,
as Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain
all knew. Midway through our first full century as a nation, the nearly universal American experience of
homelessness found its voice.
Ishmael is a half-orphan, Ahab an absentee father and husband, the
harpooners expatriate men of
color; Pearl a bastard, Hester an adulteress, the Reverend Dimmesdale a
sexual predator and runaway father;
Huck Finn, de facto, an adoptee, Jim a twice-uprooted African slave. When we think what our schools became we need
to recall what a great pile of us
are homeless. We long for homes we can never have as long as we have institutions like school, television,
corporation, and government in loco parentis.
Patricia Lines of the
U.S. Department of Education, in trying honorably to discuss what the rank and file of homeschoolers
actually do, finally declared it seems to be wrapped up closely with a feeling of "intense
interest in the life of the community." Above anything else, she found loyalty in the warp and
woof of family:
Homeschoolers are
tremendously loyal as family members, they are
suspicious of television and other less intimate
influences. They
eat as a family, they
socialize as a
family, they attend
church as a family,
they become members of an
extended. .
.homeschooling
community.
American great fiction is about
individuals broken from family. The closest they come to satisfying the universal yearning is a
struggle for surrogates — like the strange connection between Pearl, Hester, and the dark forest. America's most
fascinating storytellers focus on
the hollowness of American public life. We have no place to go when work is
done. Our inner life long
extinguished, our public work in remaking the world can never be done because personal homework isn't
available to us. There's no institutional solace for this malady. In outrage at our lonely fate, we lay siege to
the family sanctuary wherever it
survives, as Ahab lay siege to the seas for his accursed Whale.
For this and other
reasons long lost, I decided to teach Moby Dick to my eighth-grade classes. Including the dumb ones. I
discovered right away the white whale was just too big for forty-five-minute bell breaks; I couldn't divide it
comfortably to fit the schedule.
Melville's book is too vast to say just what the right way to teach it
really is. It speaks to every reader
privately. To grapple with it demanded elastic time, not the fixed bell
breaks of junior high. Indeed, it
offered so many choices of purpose — some aesthetic, some historical, some social, some
philosophical, some theological, some dramatic, some economic — that compelling the attention of a room full of
young people to any one aspect
seemed willful and arbitrary.
Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick I
realized the school edition wasn't a real book but a kind of disguised indoctrination providing all the
questions, a scientific addition to
the original text designed to make the book teacher-proof and
student-proof. If you even read
those questions (let alone answered them) there would be no chance ever again
for a private exchange between you
and Melville; the invisible editor would have preempted it.
The editors of the
school edition provided a package of prefabricated questions and more than a hundred chapter-by-chapter
abstracts and interpretations of their own. Many teachers consider this a gift — it does the thinking for
them. If I didn't assign these
questions, kids wanted to know why not. Their parents wanted to know why
not. Unless everyone duly parroted
the party line set down by the book editor, children used to getting high marks became scared and
angry. The school text of
Moby Dick had been subtly denatured; worse than useless, it was actually dangerous. So I pitched it out
and bought a set of undoctored books with my own money.
The school edition of
Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don't do that. Real
books demand people actively participate by asking their own questions. Books that show you the best questions
to ask aren't just stupid, they
hurt the mind under the guise of helping it — exactly the way
standardized tests do. Real books,
unlike schoolbooks, can't be standardized. They are eccentric; no book
fits everyone.
If you think about it, schooled people,
like schoolbooks, are much alike. Some folks find that desirable for economic reasons. The discipline
organizing our economy and our politics derives from mathematical and
interpretive exercises, the accuracy of which depends upon customers being much alike and very
predictable. People who read too
many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would
bankrupt us. Market research
depends on people behaving as //they were alike. It doesn't really matter whether they are or not.
One way to see the
difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which
separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin
with, libraries are usually
comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can
actually read instead of just
pretending to read.
For some reason
libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of
ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read,
doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to
have a worthwhile purpose of my
own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other
significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me
ask my own questions and helps me
when I want help, not when she decides I need it. If I feel like reading all day long, that's
okay with the librarian, who doesn't compel me to stop at intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library
keeps its nose out of my home. It
doesn't send letters to my family, nor does it issue orders on how I
should use my reading time at
home.
The library doesn't
play favorites; it's a democratic place as seems proper in a democracy. If the books I want are
available, I get them, even if that decision deprives someone more gifted and talented than I am. The library
never humiliates me by posting
ranked lists of good readers. It presumes good reading is its own reward
and doesn't need to be held up as
an object lesson to bad readers. One of the strangest differences between a library and a school is that you
almost never see a kid behaving badly in a library.
The library never makes predictions
about my future based on my past reading habits. It tolerates eccentric reading because it realizes free men and
women are often very eccentric.
Finally, the library has real books, not schoolbooks. I know the Moby Dick.
I find in the library won't have
questions at the end of the chapter or be scientifically bowdlerized. Library books are not
written by collective pens. At least not yet.
Real books conform to the private
curriculum of each author, not to the invisible curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport
us to an inner realm of solitude
and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer
programs can't. If they were not
devoid of such capacity, they would jeopardize school routines devised to control behavior. Real books
conform to the private curriculum of particular authors, not to the demands of bureaucracy. Intellectual Espionage
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