194. A Critical Appraisal: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
A
Critical Appraisal
In the latter half of the nineteenth
century, as the new school institution slowly took root after the Civil War in big cities and the
defeated South, some of the best minds in the
land, people fit by their social rank to comment publicly, spoke out as
they watched its first phalanx of graduates
take their place in the traditional American world. All these speakers had been trained themselves in the
older, a-systematic, noninstitutional schools.
At the beginning of another new century, it is eerie to hear what these
great-grandfathers of ours had to say
about the mass schooling phenomenon as they
approached their own fateful new century.
approached their own fateful new century.
In 1867, world-famous American physician
and academic Vincent Youmans lectured the
London College of Preceptors about the school institution just coming
into being:
School produces mental perversion and absolute
stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It
produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of the
growing brain. It is not to be doubted
that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are frequently aggravated by the lessons of school.
Thirteen years later, Francis Parkman (of
Oregon Trail fame) delivered a similar
judgment. The year was 1880, at the very moment Wundt was founding his
laboratory of scientific psychology in
Germany:
Many had hoped that by giving a partial
teaching to great numbers of persons, a thirst for knowledge might be awakened. Thus far, the
results have not equaled expectations.
Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have cause to congratulate
ourselves, (emphasis added)
In
1885, the president of Columbia University said:
The
results actually attained under our present system of instruction are neither
very flattering nor very
encouraging.
In 1895, the president of Harvard
said:
Ordinary schooling produces dullness. A young
man whose intellectual powers are worth
cultivating cannot be willing to cultivate them by pursuing phantoms as
the schools now insist upon.
When he said this, compulsion schooling in
its first manifestation was approaching its
forty- fifth year of operations in Massachusetts, and running at high
efficiency in the city of Cambridge,
home to Harvard.
Then, in the early years of the twentieth
century, pedagogy underwent another
metamorphosis that resulted in an even more efficient scientific form of
schooling. Four years before WWI broke
out, a well-known European thinker and schoolman, Paul Geheeb, whom Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and Albert
Schweitzer all were to claim as a
friend, made this commentary on English and German types of forced
schooling:
The
dissatisfaction with public schools is widely felt. Countless attempts to
reform them have failed. People complain
about the "overburdening" of schools; educators argue about which parts of curriculum should be
cut; but school cannot be reformed with a pair
of scissors. The solution is not to be found in educational
institutions, (emphasis added)
In
1930, the yearly Inglis Lecturer at Harvard made the same case:
We have absolutely nothing to show for our
colossal investment in common schooling
after 80 years of trying.
Thirty years passed before John Gardner's
"Annual Report to the Carnegie Corporation," in 1960, added this:
Too
many young people gain nothing [from school] except the conviction they
are misfits.
The record after 1960 is no different. It
is hardly unfair to say that the stupidity of 1867, the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness of
1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the
absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960 have continued into
the schools of today. We pay four times
more in real dollars than we did in 1930 and thus we buy even more of what mass schooling dollars always
bought.
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