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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