60.The
Great Transformation: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Great Transformation
I lived through the great transformation which turned
schools from often useful places (if
never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of
state experimentation. When I
began teaching in 1961, the social environment of Manhattan schools was a distant cousin of the
western
Pennsylvania schools I attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant cousin of Malthus.
Discipline was the
daily watchword on school corridors. A network of discipline referrals, graded into an elaborate
catalogue of well-calibrated offenses, was etched into the classroom heart. At bottom, hard as
it is to believe in today's school climate, there was a common dedication to the intellectual part of the
enterprise. I remember screaming
(pompously) at an administrator who marked on my plan book that he would
like to see evidence I was
teaching "the whole child," that I didn't teach children at all, I
taught the discipline of the
English language! Priggish as that sounds, it reflects an attitude not uncommon among teachers who grew up in
the 1940s and before. Even with much
slippage in practice, Monongahela and Manhattan had a family
relationship. About schooling at
least. Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.
Whatever the event is that I'm actually
referring to — and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me — it was a nationwide phenomenon
simultaneously arriving in all big
cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever
it was, it arrived all at once,
the way we see national testing and other remote-control school matters
like School-to-Work legislation
appear in every state today at the same time. A plan was being orchestrated, the nature of which
is unmasked in the upcoming chapters.
Think of this thing
for the moment as a course of discipline dictated by coaches outside the perimeter of the visible school
world. It constituted psychological restructuring of the institution's mission, but traveled
under the guise of a public emergency which (the public was told) dictated increasing the intellectual
content of the business! Except for its
nightmare aspect, it could have been a scene from farce, a swipe
directly from Orwell's 1984 and
its fictional telly announcements that the chocolate ration was being
raised every time it was being
lowered. This reorientation did not arise from any democratic debate, or from any public clamor for
such a peculiar initiative; the public was not consulted or informed. Best of all, those engineering the
makeover denied it was
happening.
I watched fascinated,
as over a period of a hundred days, the entire edifice of public schooling was turned upside down. I
know there was no advance warning to low-level administrators like principals, either, because I watched my
first principal destroy himself
trying to stem the tide. A mysterious new deal was the order of the
day.
Suddenly children
were to be granted "due process" before any sanction, however
mild, could be invoked. A formal
schedule of hearings, referees, advocates, and appeals was set up. What might on paper have seemed
only a liberal extension of full humanity to children was actually the starting gun for a time of mayhem.
To understand this better, reflect
a minute on the full array of ad hoc responses to wildness, cruelty, or
incipient chaos teachers usually
employ to keep the collective classroom a civil place at all. In a building with a hundred teachers, the
instituting of an adversarial system of justice meant that within just weeks the building turned into an insane
asylum. Bedlam, without a modicum
of civility anywhere.
This transformation,
ironically enough, made administrative duty easier, because where once supervisory intercession had
constituted, a regular link in the ladder of referral as it was called, in the
new order, administrators were excused from minute-to-minute discipline and were granted power to
assume that incidents were a teacher's fault, to be duly entered on the Cumulative Record File, the pedagogical
equivalent of the Chinese
Dangan.
There was a humorous
aspect to what transpired over the next few years. I had no particular trouble keeping a lid on
things, but for teachers who counted upon support from administrative staff it was a different story. Now, if
they asked for a hand, often they
were pressured to resign, or formally charged with bad classroom management,
or worst of all, transferred to an
even more hideous school in expectation they would eliminate themselves.
Most, under such tension, took the hint
and quit. A few had to be pushed. I remember a magnificent math teacher, an older black woman with honors
and accomplishments to her name,
much beloved and respected by her classes, singled out for public persecution probably because she acted as an
intractable moral force, a strong model teacher with strong principles. Daily investigative teams from the
district office watched her classes,
busily took notes in the back of her room, challenged her style of presentation
openly while children listened.
This went on for two weeks. Then the administration began to call her students to the school office
to interrogate them, one by one, about the teacher's behavior. They coached some kids to watch her during her classes,
coached them to look for any
telltale signs she was a racist! Parents were called and offered an option
of withdrawing their kids from her
classes. Broken by the ordeal, one day she vanished.
When my wife was
elected to the district school board, one of her first actions was to gain access to the superintendent's
private files without his knowledge. Some of those records concerned details of official cases of harassment.
Dozens of employees had been
similarly purged, and dozens more were "under investigation"
in this gulag on West 95th Street.
Contacting these people in private, it became clear to me that, they were far
from the worst teachers around.
Indeed some were the best. Their relative prowess had emboldened them to speak out on policy matters and so marked
them for elimination.
One principal, whose
school was the most successful reading environment in the district, received similar treatment, ultimately
sentenced to an official Siberia in Harlem, given no duties at all for the two years more he lasted before
quitting. His crime: allegedly striking
a girl although there were no witnesses to this but the girl, a student
who admitted breaking into the
light-control panel room in the auditorium where the offense is supposed to have occurred. His real
crime was his refusal to abandon phonetic reading methodology and replace it with a politically mandated
whole-word substitute.
I escaped the worst effects of the
bloodbath. Mostly I minded my business trying to ignore the daily carnage. In truth I had no affection for
the old system being savaged, and
chaos made it easier for me to try out things that worked. On balance, I
probably did my best work during
those turbulent years as a direct result of the curious smokescreen they provided.
But accounts are not
so simple to balance overall. If I regarded run-of-the-mill school administrators as scared rabbits or
system flunkies, the reformers I saw parading daily through the building corridors looked like storm troopers
and made my skin crawl.
On several occasions,
energetic efforts were made by these people to recruit my assistance as an active ally. All such
appeals I politely refused. True belief they had, but for all of it they seemed like savages to me, inordinately
proud of their power to cause
fear, as willing to trample on the decencies as the people they were
harassing as indecent. However, it
seemed just possible something good might actually emerge from the shakeup underway. About that, I was
dead wrong. As the project advanced, schools became noticeably worse. Bad to begin with, now they mutated
into something horrible.
What shape began to emerge was a
fascinating echo of the same bureaucratic cancer which dogged the steps of the French, Russian, and Chinese
revolutions. Do-nothing
administrators and nonteaching teachers multiplied like locusts. With
them came an entirely new class of
school-teacher, one aggressively ignorant, cynical, and often tied to local political clubs. New categories
of job description sprang up like weeds.
My own school fell
victim to a politically correct black gym teacher imported from New England to be its principal. Two
schoolwide riots followed his installation, mass marches on city hall transpired in which local
politicians instrumental in the man's selection used schoolchildren as unwitting cadres to lobby their favorite
schemes in newsworthy, children's
crusade fashion.
A small band of old-fashioned teachers
fought rearguard actions against this, but time retired them one by one until, with only an occasional
exception, the classrooms of
Community School District 3, in one of the most prosperous neighborhoods
on earth, became lawless
compounds, job projects for the otherwise unemployable.
I need to wrap this up so we can get on
with things. I have to skip the full story of the Hell's Angel math teacher who parked his Harley Hog outside
the door of his classroom, and
when the principal objected, told him in front of startled witnesses that if
the man didn't shut his mouth, the
number-crunching cyclist would come to his home that evening, pour gasoline under his front door, and set his
house on fire. I have to skip the
hair-raising stories of not one but three junior high teachers I knew
quite well who married their
students. Each, spotting a likely thirteen-year-old, wooed the respective
girl in class and married her a
few years later. They took the more honorable course, hardly the outcome of most teacher-student
romances I was privy to. I have to skip the drug habits of staff in each of the buildings I worked in and
other lurid stuff like that. In the
midst of the unending dullness of institutional schooling, human nature
cracks through the peeling paint
as grass through cement. I have to skip all that. Suffice it to say, my
life experience taught me that
school isn't a safe place to leave your children.
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