33. An Enclosure Movement For Children: The Underground
History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
An
Enclosure Movement For Children
The
secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn,
and it isn't supposed to; school was
engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It
wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would
define their own needs. School is the first
impression
children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the
lasting one. Life according to school is
dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where real
meaning is found, that is the classroom's
lesson, however indirectly delivered.
The
decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren't hard to spot. Work in
classrooms isn't significant work; it fails to
satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn't answer real
questions experience raises in the young
mind; it doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all
schoolwork external to individual longings,
experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless.
This phenomenon has been well-understood
at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into
factory work. Growth and mastery come only to
those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing,
reflecting, freely associating, enjoying
privacy — these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up
to prevent, on one pretext or
another.
As I watched it happen, it took about
three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with
nothing real to do. In such environments,
songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games, and other
tension-breakers do the work better than
angry words and punishment. Years ago it struck me as more than a little
odd that the Prussian government was the
patron of Heinrich Pestalozzi, inventor of
multicultural fun-and-games psychological elementary schooling, and of
Friedrich Froebel, inventor of
kindergarten. It struck me as odd that J. P. Morgan's partner, Peabody, was instrumental in bringing
Prussian schooling to the prostrate South after the Civil War. But after a while I began to see
that behind the philanthropy lurked a rational
economic purpose.
The
strongest meshes of the school net are invisible. Constant bidding for a
stranger's attention creates a chemistry
producing the common characteristics of modern
schoolchildren: whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty.
Unceasing competition for official favor
in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little
people with no apparent purpose for being
alive. The full significance of the classroom as a dramatic environment,
as primarily a dramatic environment, has
never been properly acknowledged or examined.
The
most destructive dynamic is identical to that which causes caged rats to
develop eccentric or even violent
mannerisms when they press a bar for sustenance on an aperiodic reinforcement schedule (one where
food is delivered at random, but the rat
doesn't suspect). Much of the weird behavior school kids display is a
function of the aperiodic reinforcement
schedule. And the endless confinement and inactivity to slowly drive children out of their minds. Trapped
children, like trapped rats, need close
management. Any rat psychologist will tell you that.
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