41. Looking Behind Appearances: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
41. Looking
Behind Appearances
Do you think class size, teacher
compensation, and school revenue have much to do with education quality? If so, the conclusion is
inescapable that we are living in a golden age.
From 1955 to 1991 the U.S. pupil/teacher ratio dropped
40 percent, the
average salary of teachers rose 50
percent (in real terms) and the annual expense per pupil, inflation adjusted, soared 350 percent. What other
hypothesis, then, might fit the strange data I'm about to present?
Forget the 10 percent drop in SAT and
Achievement Test scores the press beats to death with regularity; how do you explain the 37
percent decline since 1972 in students who
score above 600 on the SAT? This is an absolute decline, not a relative
one. It is not affected by an increase
in unsuitable minds taking the test or by an increase in the numbers. The absolute body count of smart students
is down drastically with a test not more
difficult than yesterday's but considerably less so.
What should be made of a 50 percent decline
among the most rarefied group of test-
takers, those who score above 750? In 1972, there were 2,817 American
students who reached this pinnacle; only
1,438 did in 1994 — when kids took a much easier test. Can a 50 percent decline occur in twenty-two years
without signaling that some massive
leveling in the public school mind is underway? 1 In a real sense where your own child is
concerned you might best forget scores on these
tests entirely as a reliable measure of what they purport to assess. I
wouldn't deny that mass movements in
these scores in one direction or another indicate something is going on, and since the correlation between success
in schooling and success on these tests is
close, then significant score shifts are certainly measuring changes in
understanding. This is a difficult
matter for anyone to sort out, since many desirable occupational
categories (and desirable university
seats even before that) are reserved for those who score well. The resultant linkage of adult income with
test scores then creates the illusion these tests are separating cream from milk, but the
results are rigged in advance by foreclosing
opportunity to those screened out by the test! In a humble illustration,
if you only let students with high
scores on the language component of the SATs cut hair, eventually it would appear that verbal facility and grooming
of tresses had some vital link with each
other. Between 1960 and 1998 the nonteaching bureaucracy of public
schools grew 500 percent, but oversight
was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The 40,520 school districts with elected boards this nation had
in 1960 shriveled to 15,000 by 1998.
On the college rung of the school ladder
something queer was occurring, too. Between
1960 and 1984 the quality of undergraduate education at America's fifty
best-known colleges and universities altered
substantially. According to a 1996 report by the National Association of Scholars, these schools
stopped providing "broad and rigorous exposure to major areas of knowledge" for the
average student, even at decidedly un-average
universities like Yale and Stanford.
In 1964, more than half of these
institutions required a thesis or comprehensive for the bachelor's degree; by 1993, 12 percent did;
over the same period, the average number of
classroom days fell 16 percent, and requirements in math, natural
science, philosophy, literature,
composition, and history almost vanished. Rhetoric, most potent of the
active literacies, completely vanished,
and a foreign language, once required at 96 percent of the great colleges, fell to 64 percent.
According to The Journal of the American
Medical Association (December 1995), 33
percent of all patients cannot read and understand instructions on how
often to take medication, notices about
doctor's appointments, consent forms, labels on prescription bottles, insurance forms, and other simple
parts of self-care. They are rendered helpless
by inability to read. Concerning those behind the nation's prison walls
(a population that has tripled since
1980), the National Center for Education Statistics stated in a 1996 report that 80 percent of all prisoners could
not interpret a bus schedule, understand a
news article or warranty instructions, or read maps, schedules, or
payroll forms. Nor could they balance a
checkbook. Forty percent could not calculate the cost of a purchase.
Once upon a time we were a new nation that
allowed ordinary citizens to learn how to
read well and encouraged them to read anything they thought would be
useful. Close reading of tough-minded
writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself. This
invitation to commoners extended by America was
the most revolutionary pedagogy of all.
Reading, and rigorous discussion of that
reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections,
is an operational definition of education in its most fundamental civilized sense. No one can
do this very well without learning ways of
paying attention: from a knowledge of diction and syntax, figures of
speech, etymology, and so on, to a sharp
ability to separate the primary from the subordinate, understand allusion, master a range of modes of
presentation, test truth, and penetrate beyond the obvious to the profound messages of text.
Reading, analysis, and discussion are the way
we develop reliable judgment, the principal way we come to penetrate
covert movements behind the facade of
public appearances. Without the ability to read and argue we're just geese to be plucked.
Just as experience is necessary to
understand abstraction, so the reverse is true.
Experience can only be mastered by extracting general principles out of
the mass of details. In the absence of a
perfect universal mentor, books and other texts are the best and cheapest stand-ins, always available to
those who know where to look. Watching
details of an assembly line or a local election unfold isn't very
educational unless you have been led in
careful ways to analyze the experience. Reading is the skeleton key for all who lack a personal tutor of quality.
2
Reading teaches nothing more important than
the state of mind in which you find
yourself absolutely alone with the thoughts of another mind, a matchless
form of intimate rapport available only
to those with the ability to block out distraction and concentrate. Hence the urgency of reading well if you read
for power.
Once you trust yourself to go mind-to-mind
with great intellects, artists, scientists,
warriors, and philosophers, you are finally free. In America, before we
had forced schooling, an astonishing
range of unlikely people knew reading was like Samson's locks — something that could help make them
formidable, that could teach them their
rights and how to defend those rights, could lead them toward
self-determination, free from
intimidation by experts. These same unlikely people knew that the power
bestowed through reading could give them
insight into the ways of the human heart, so they would not be cheated or fooled so easily, and that
it could provide an inexhaustible store of
useful knowledge — advice on how to do just about anything.
By
1812, Pierre DuPont was claiming that barely four in a thousand Americans
were unable to read well and that the
young had skill in argumentation thanks to daily debates at the common breakfast table. By 1820, there
was even more evidence of Americans'
avid reading habits, when 5 million copies of James Fenimore Cooper's
complex and allusive novels were sold,
along with an equal number of Noah Webster's didactic Speller — to a population of dirt farmers
under 20 million in size.
In
1835, Richard Cobden announced there was six times as much newspaper reading
in the United States as in England, and
the census figures of 1 840 gave fairly exact evidence that a sensational reading revolution had
taken place without any exhortation on the part
of public moralists and social workers, but because common people had
the initiative and freedom to learn. In
North Carolina, the worst situation of any state surveyed, eight out of nine could still read and write.
In
1853, Per Siljestromm, a Swedish visitor, wrote, "In no country in the
world is the taste for reading so
diffuse as among the common people in America." The American Almanac observed grandly, "Periodical
publications, especially newspapers, disseminate knowledge throughout all classes of society
and exert an amazing influence in forming
and giving effect to public opinion." It noted the existence of
over a thousand newspapers. In this
nation of common readers, the spiritual longings of ordinary people shaped the public discourse. Ordinary people
who could read, though not privileged by
wealth, power, or position, could see through the fraud of social class
or the even grander fraud of official
expertise. That was the trouble.
In
his book The New Illiterates, author Sam Blumenfeld gives us the best
introduction to what went wrong with
reading in the United States. He also gives us insight into why learning to read needn't be frustrating or
futile. A typical letter from one of his readers boasts of her success in imparting the
alphabet code to four children under the age of five by the simple method of practice with letter
sounds. One day she found her three-year-old
working his way through a lesson alone at the kitchen table, reading
S-am, Sam, m-an, man, and so on. Her
verdict on the process: "I had just taught him his letter sounds. He picked [the rest] up and did it himself.
That's how simple it is."
1 The
critics of schooling who concentrate on fluctuations in standardized test
scores to ground their case against the
institution are committing a gross strategic mistake for several reasons, the
most obvious of which is that in doing
so they must first implicitly acknowledge the accuracy of such instruments in
ranking every member of the youth
population against every other member, hence the justice of using such measures to allocate privileges and rewards.
An even larger folly occurs because the implicit validation of these tests by the attention of school
critics cedes the entire terrain of scientific pedagogy, armoring it against strong counter-measures by recruiting
the opposition, in effect, to support teaching to the test. The final folly lies in the ease with which these
measures can be rigged to produce whatever public effects are wanted.
2 In
a fascinating current illustration of the power of books, black female tennis
star Venus Williams' father acknowledged
in a press interview for the Toronto Globe that he had, indeed, set out to
create a tennis millionaire from his
infant daughter even before her birth. Mr. Williams, who had no knowledge whatsoever of the game of tennis, and who was
reared in a poor home in the South by his single mother, had his ambition piqued by witnessing a young
woman on television receiving a $48,000 check for playing tennis successfully. At that moment he proposed
to his wife that they set out to make their unborn children tennis millionaires. How did he learn the
game? By reading books, he says, and renting videos. That, and common sense discipline, was all that Venus
and sister Serena needed to become millionaire teenagers.
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