240 Almost The End: The Underground History of
Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Almost
The End
And
so we arrive at the end of our journey together. You have seen the trap
conceived, the trap built, the trap
sprung, and its quarry turning in panic within until the bright light of living spirit goes dull behind its eyes
and it grows indifferent to its banal fate in a
comprehensively planned society and economy without any hope of escape.
You have watched the
trap grow like Arch Oboler's demonic chicken heart, 4 maintained by an
army of behaviorally adjusted
functionaries reproducing its own mechanistic encoding in the lives of schoolchildren. You have watched the listless creatures caught in the trap pressing a bar to get their food while they await instructions to their final meaningless destiny. How the trap was conceived hardly makes much difference at this point, except to warn us we are not dealing with any ordinary mistake; this trap was intended to be as it is. It is a work of great human genius.
functionaries reproducing its own mechanistic encoding in the lives of schoolchildren. You have watched the listless creatures caught in the trap pressing a bar to get their food while they await instructions to their final meaningless destiny. How the trap was conceived hardly makes much difference at this point, except to warn us we are not dealing with any ordinary mistake; this trap was intended to be as it is. It is a work of great human genius.
Mass schooling cannot be altered or
reformed because any palliative from its killing religion will only be short-lived as long as
the massification machinery it represents
remains in place. That's why all the well-publicized
"this-time-we-have-it-right"
alternatives to factory schooling fizzle out a decade after launch. Most
sooner.
Nothing in human history gives us any
reason to be optimistic that powerful social
machinery, through its very existence, doesn't lead to gross forms of
oppression. If engines of mass control
exist, the wrong hands will find the switches sooner or later. That's why standing armies, like the enormous
one we now maintain, are an invitation to
serfdom. They will always, sooner or later, go domestic. The more
rationally engineered the machinery, the
more certain its eventual corruption; that's a bitter pill rationalists
still haven't learned to swallow.
We are, I think, at one of those great
points of choice in the human record where society gets to select from among widely divergent
futures. It's customary to say there will be no
turning back from our choice, but that is wrong. It would be more
accurate to say that we will not be able
to turn back from our next choice without a great and dreadful grief. It
is best to heed the Amish counsel not to
jump until you know where you're going to land.
Not jumping at this moment in time means
rejecting further centralization of children in
government schooling. It means rejecting every attempt to nationalize
the religious enterprise of
institutional schooling. If centralizers prevail, the connection between schooling and work will become total; if
decentralizers prevail it will be diffuse,
irregular, and for many kinds of work, as utterly insignificant as it
should be. Experts have consistently
misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling. The problem is not that children don't learn to read, write,
and do arithmetic well — the problem is that
kids hardly learn at all from the way schools insist on teaching.
Schools desperately need a vision of
their own purpose. It was never factually true that all young people learn
to read or do arithmetic by being
"taught" these things — though for many decades that has been the masquerade.
When children are stripped of a primary
experience base as confinement schooling must
do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is
destroyed, a sequence which puts
experience first. Only much later, after a long bath in experience, does the
thin gruel of abstraction mean very
much. We haven't "forgotten" this; there is just no profit in remembering it for the businesses and people
who make their bread and butter from
monopoly schooling.
The relentless rationalization of the
school world has left the modern student a prisoner of low-grade vocational activities. He lives in
a disenchanted world without meaning. Our
cultural dilemma here in the United States has little to do with
children who don't read, but lies
instead in finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life.
Any system of values that accepts the
transformation of the world into machinery and the construction of pens for the young called
schools, necessarily rejects this search for
meaning.
Schools at present are the occupation of
children; children have become employees,
pensioners of the government at an early age. But government jobs are
frequently not really jobs at all — that
certainly is the case in the matter of being a schoolchild. There is nothing or very little to do in school, but
one thing is demanded — that children must
attend, condemned to hours of desperation, pretending to do a job that
doesn't exist. At the end of the day,
tired, fed up, full of aggression, their families feel the accumulated tedium of their pinched lives. Government
jobs for children have broken the spirit of our
people. They don't know their own history, nor would they care to.
In a short time such a system becomes
addictive. Even when efforts are made to find real work for children to do, they often drift
back to meaningless busywork. Anyone who has
ever tried to lead students into generating lines of meaning in their
own lives will have felt the resistance,
the hostility even, with which broken children fight to be left alone. They prefer the illness they have become
accustomed to. As the school day and year
enlarge, students may be seen as people forbidden to leave their
offices, as people hemmed in by an
invisible fence, complaining but timid. Schools thus consume most of the people they incarcerate.
School curricula are like unwholesome
economies. They don't deal in basic industries of mind, but instead try to be
"popular," dealing in the light stuff in an effort to hold down rebellion. That's why we can't read Paine's
Common Sense anymore, often can't read at
all. Only one person in every sixteen, I'm told, reads more than one
book a year after graduation from high
school. Kids and teachers live day by day. That's all you can do when you have a runaway inflation of
expectations fueled by false promissory notes on the future issued by teachers and television
and other mythmakers in our culture. In the
inflationary economy of mass schooling — with its "A's" and
gold stars and handshakes and trophies
tied to nothing real — you cease to plan. You're just happy to make it to
the weekend.
Once the inflation of dishonesty is
perceived, the curriculum can only be imposed by intimidation, by a dizzapie of bells and
horns, by confusion. With inflation of the school variety, a gun is held to your head by the
State, demanding you acknowledge that school
time is valuable; otherwise everyone would leave except the teachers who
are being paid.
4 My reference is to the greatest of the old
"Lights Out" radio shows I heard long ago in Monongahela, in which
university scientists messing around
with a chicken heart find a way to make it grow indefinitely, sort of like what
schools are doing. It bursts from the laboratory and extends across the entire planet, suffocating
every other living thing. The show is purportedly broadcast from an airplane
flying over the global chicken heart
until it runs out of fuel, crashes into the throbbing organ and is devoured
with a giant sucking sound.
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