192. What Really Goes On: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
What
Really Goes On
School wreaks havoc on human foundations in at
least eight substantive ways so deeply
buried few notice them, and fewer still can imagine any other way for
children to grow up:
1) The first lesson schools teach is
forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they taught themselves important things like
walking and talking. This is done so pleasantly
and painlessly that the one area of schooling most of us would agree has
few problems is elementary school — even
though it is there
that the massive damage to language-making occurs. Jerry Farber captured the truth over thirty years ago in his lapidary metaphor "Student as Nigger" and developed it in the beautiful essay of the same name. If we forced children to learn to walk with the same methods we use to force them to read, a few would learn to walk well in spite of us, most would walk indifferently, without pleasure, and a portion of the remainder would not become ambulatory at all. The push to extend "day care" further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders.
that the massive damage to language-making occurs. Jerry Farber captured the truth over thirty years ago in his lapidary metaphor "Student as Nigger" and developed it in the beautiful essay of the same name. If we forced children to learn to walk with the same methods we use to force them to read, a few would learn to walk well in spite of us, most would walk indifferently, without pleasure, and a portion of the remainder would not become ambulatory at all. The push to extend "day care" further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders.
2) The second lesson schools teach is
bewilderment and confusion. Virtually nothing
selected by schools as basic is basic, all curriculum is subordinate to
standards imposed by behavioral
psychology, and to a lesser extent Freudian precepts compounded into a hash with "third force" psychology
(centering on the writings of Carl Rogers and
Abraham Maslow).
None of these systems accurately describes
human reality, but their lodgement in
university/business seven-step mythologies makes them dangerously invulnerable to common-sense criticism. None of the allegedly scientific school
sequences is empirically defensible. All lack
evidence of being much more than superstition cleverly hybridized with a
body of borrowed fact. Pestalozzi's
basic "simple to complex" formulation, for instance, is a prescription for disaster in the classroom
since no two minds have the same "simple" starting point, and in the more advanced
schedules, children are frequently more
knowledgeable than their overseers — witness the wretched record of
public school computer instruction when
compared to self-discovery programs undertaken informally. Similarly, endless sequences of so-called
"subjects" delivered by men and women who, however well-meaning, have only superficial
knowledge of the things whereof they
speak, is the introduction most kids get to the liar's world of
institutional life. Ignorant mentors
cannot manage larger meanings, only facts. In this way schools teach the disconnection of everything.
3) The third lesson schools teach is that
children are assigned by experts to a social class and must stay in the class to which they have
been assigned. This is an Egyptian outlook,
but its Oriental message only begins to suggest the bad fit it produces
in America. The natural genius of the
United States as explored and set down in covenants over the first two-thirds of our history has now been
radically degraded and overthrown. The class
system is reawakened through schooling. So rigid have American
classifications become that our society
has taken on the aspect of caste, which teaches unwarranted self-esteem and its converse — envy, self-hatred, and
surrender. In class systems, the state assigns
your place in a class, and if you know what's good for you, you come to
know it, too.
4) The fourth lesson schools teach is
indifference. By bells and other concentration-
destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing
because some arbitrary power intervenes
both periodically and aperiodically. If nothing is worth finishing, nothing is worth starting. Don't
you see how one follows the other? Love of
learning can't survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work
for little favors and ceremonial grades
which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense rewards,
schools make them indifferent to the real
power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals. Schools
alienate the winners as well as the
losers.
5)
The fifth lesson schools teach is emotional dependency. By stars, checks,
smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and
disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It's like training a dog. The
reward/punishment cycle, known to animal
trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in
late nineteenth- century Leipzig and
incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth century in America.
Haifa century later, by 1968, it had infected
every school system in the United States, so all-pervasive at century's
end that few people can imagine a
different way to go about management. And indeed, there isn't a better one if the goal of managed lives in a
managed economy and a managed social
order is what you're after.
Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and
arbitrary power really is by granting and
denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and
movement. In this way, basic human
rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for
granted.
6)
The sixth lesson schools teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for
a teacher to tell them what to do. Good
people do it the way the teacher wants it done.
Good teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or
textbook to tell them what to do.
Principals are evaluated according to an ability to make these groups
conform to expectations; superintendents
upon their ability to make principals conform; state education departments on their ability to
efficiently direct and control the thinking of
superintendents according to instructions which originate with
foundations, universities, and politicians
sensitive to the quietly expressed wishes of powerful corporations, and other interests.
For all its clumsy execution, school is a
textbook illustration of how the bureaucratic
chain of command is supposed to work. Once the thing is running,
virtually nobody can alter its direction
who doesn't understand the complex code for making it work, a code that never stops trying to complicate itself
further in order to make human control
impossible. The sixth lesson of schooling teaches that experts make all
important choices, but it is useless to
remonstrate with the expert nearest you because he is as helpless as you are to change the system.
7)
The seventh lesson schools teach is provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in
children must be made contingent on the
certification of experts through rituals of number magic. It must not be self-generated as it was for
Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers,
Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford. The role of grades, report cards,
standardized tests, prizes,
scholarships, and other awards in effecting this process is too obvious to
belabor, but it's the daily encounter
with hundreds of verbal and nonverbal cues sent by teachers that shapes the quality of self-doubt most
effectively.
8)
The last lesson school teaches I'll call the glass house effect: It teaches how
hopeless it is to resist because you are
always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually
a signal you should be watched even more
closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it
that there is no private time, no
private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical policing or
the counseling arm of thought patrols.
The
most sensitive children I had each year knew on some level what was really
going on. But we choked the treacherous
breath out of them until they acknowledged they depended on us for their futures.
Hard-core cases were remanded to adjustment agencies where they converted themselves into
manageable cynics.
Pathology As A Natural Byproduct
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