241 I
Would Prefer Not To: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
I
Would Prefer Not To
What to do?
Take
Melville's insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the
Scrivener and make it your own
watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration
about what really matters. Breaking the
hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid out of any part of the
school sequence at all, keep him or her out of
kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them
at least that far through the zone where
most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they'll be okay.
Don't let a world of funny animals, dancing
alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly
music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at exactly the
moment when big questions about the
world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about
fantasy and social engineering that you
should teach yourself.
Your four- year-old wants to play? Let him
help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet,
clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give
her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch,
let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell
from the joy she displays that becoming
strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a
prison of games. There isn't a single formula
for breaking out of the trap, only a general one you tailor to your own
specifications.
No
two escape routes are exactly alike. Stanley, my absentee pupil, found one.
Two magnificent American teenagers, Tara
Lipinski and Michelle Kwan, who enchanted the
world with a display of physical artistry and mental discipline on ice
skates in the Olympic games in Japan,
found another. Neither went to school and both gained wealth and prominence for their accomplishments. For
me they show again what stories might be
written out of ordinary lives if our time to learn wasn't so lavishly wasted.
Are your children less than these?
At
least nine major assumptions about the importance of government schooling must
be acknowledged as false before you can
get beyond the fog of ideology into the clear air of education. Here they are:
1)
Universal government schooling is the essential force for social cohesion.
There is no other way. A heavily
bureaucratized public order is our defense against chaos and anarchy. Right, and if you don't wipe your
bum properly, the toilet monster will rise out
of the bowl and get you.
2)
The socialization of children in age-graded groups monitored by State agents
is essential to learn to get along with
others in a pluralistic society. The actual truth is that the rigid compartmentalizations of schooling
teach a crippling form of social relation:
wait passively until you are told what to do, never judge your own work
or confer with associates, have contempt
for those younger than yourself and fear of those older. Behave according to the meaning assigned to your
class label. These are the rules of a nuthouse.
No wonder kids cry and become fretful after first grade.
3)
Children from different backgrounds and from families with different beliefs
must be mixed together. The unexamined
inference here is that in this fashion they enlarge their understanding, but the actual management of
classrooms everywhere makes only the
most superficial obeisance to human difference — from the first, a
radical turn toward some unitarian
golden mean is taken, along the way of which different backgrounds and different beliefs are subtly but steadily
discredited.
4)
The certified expertise of official schoolteachers is superior in its knowledge
of children to the accomplishments of
lay people, including parents. Protecting children from the uncertified is a compelling public
concern. Actually, the enforced long-term
segregation of children from the working world does them great damage,
and the general body of men and women
certified by the State as fit to teach is nearly the least fit occupational body in the entire economy if
college performance is the standard.
5) Coercion in the name of education is a
valid use of State power: compelling
assemblies of children into specified groupings for prescribed intervals
and sequences with appointed overseers
does not interfere with academic learning. Were you born yesterday? Plato said, "Nothing of value
to the individual happens by coercion."
6) Children will inevitably grow apart from
their parents in belief, and this process must
be encouraged by diluting parental influence and disabusing children of
the idea their parents are sovereign in mind
or morality. That prescription alone has been enough to cripple the American family. The effects of
forced disloyalty on family are hideously
destructive, removing the only certain support the growing spirit has to
refer to. In place of family the school
offers phantoms like "ambition," "advancement," and
"fun," nightmare harbingers of
the hollow life ahead.
7) An
overriding concern of schooling is to protect children from bad parents. No
wonder G. Stanley Hall, the father of
school administration, invited Sigmund Freud to the United States in 1909 — it was urgent business to
establish a "scientific" basis upon which to justify the anti-family stance of State
schooling, and the programmatic State in general.
8) It
is not appropriate for any family to unduly concern itself with the education
of its own children, although it is
appropriate to sacrifice for the general education of everyone in the hands of State experts. This is the
standard formula for all forms of socialism and
the universal foundation of Utopian promises.
9) The State is the proper parent and has
predominant responsibility for training, morals, and beliefs. This is the parens patriae
doctrine of Louis XIV, king of France, a tale
unsuited to a republic.
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