243. Nuts
And Bolts: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
Nuts
And Bolts
Let me end this book, my testament, with a
warning: only the fresh air from millions
upon millions of freely made choices will create the educational climate
we need to realize a better destiny. No
team of experts can possibly possess the wisdom to impose a successful solution to the problem inherent in
a philosophy of centralized social
management; solutions that endure are always local, always personal.
Universal prescriptions are the problem
of modern
schooling, academic research which pursues the will-o-the-wisp of average children and average stages of development makes for destructive social policy, it is a sea anchor dragging against advancement, creating the problems it begs for money to solve. But here is a warning: should we ever agree to honor the singularity of children which forced schooling contravenes, if we ever agree to set the minds of children free, we should understand they would make a world that would create and re-create itself exponentially, a world complex beyond the power of any group of managers to manage. Such free beings would have to be self-managing. And the future would never again be easily predictable.
schooling, academic research which pursues the will-o-the-wisp of average children and average stages of development makes for destructive social policy, it is a sea anchor dragging against advancement, creating the problems it begs for money to solve. But here is a warning: should we ever agree to honor the singularity of children which forced schooling contravenes, if we ever agree to set the minds of children free, we should understand they would make a world that would create and re-create itself exponentially, a world complex beyond the power of any group of managers to manage. Such free beings would have to be self-managing. And the future would never again be easily predictable.
Here might be a first step toward such a
great leap forward for human beings. Not a
comprehensive formula, remember, but a first step:
If we closed all government schools, made
free libraries universal, encouraged public
discussion groups everywhere, sponsored apprenticeships for every young
person who wanted one, let any person or
group who asked to open a school do so — without government oversight — paid parents (if we
have to pay anyone) to school their kids at
home using the money we currently spend to confine them in school
factories, and launched a national crash
program in family revival and local economies, Amish and Mondragon style, the American school
nightmare would recede.
That isn't going to happen, I know.
The next best thing, then, is to
deconstruct forced schooling, minimizing its school aspect, indoctrination, and maximizing its
potential to educate through access to tools,
models, and mentors. To go down this path requires the courage to
challenge deeply rooted assumptions. We
need to kill the poison plant we created. School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must
be challenged. Do this as an individual if
your group won't go along.
Here is a preliminary list of strategies
to change the schools we have. I intend to develop the theme of change further in a future book,
The Guerrilla Curriculum: How To Get An
Education In Spite Of School, but I'm out of time and breath, so the
brief agenda which follows will have to
suffice for the moment. As you read my ideas maintain a lively awareness of the implicit irony that to
impose them as a counter system would require as dictatorial a central management like the
current dismal reality. The trick, then, is not to impose them. My own belief based on long
experience is that people given a degree of
choice arrive without coercion at arrangements somewhat like these, and
even improve upon them with ideas beyond
my own imagination to conceive. Such is the genius of liberty.
Dismiss the army of reading and arithmetic
specialists and the commercial empire they
represent. Allow all contracts with colleges, publishers, consultants,
and materials suppliers in these areas
to lapse. Reading and arithmetic are easy things to learn, although nearly impossible to "teach." By
the use of common sense, and proven methods that don't cost much, we can solve a problem which is artificially
induced and wholly imaginary. Take the
profit out of these things and the disease will cure itself.
Let no school exceed a few hundred in
size. Even that's far too big. And make them local. End all unnecessary transportation of
students at once; transportation is what the British used to do with hardened criminals. We don't
need it, we need neighborhood schools.
Time to shut the school factories, profitable to the building and
maintenance industries and to bus
companies, but disaster for children. Neighborhoods need their own
children and vice versa; it's a
reciprocating good, providing surprising service to both. The factory school doesn't work anywhere — not in Harlem
and not in Hollywood Hills, either.
Education is always individualized, and individualization requires
absolute trust and split-second
flexibility. This should save taxpayers a bundle, too.
Make everybody teach. Don't let anybody
get paid for schooling kids without actually
spending time with them. The industrial model, with pyramidal management
and plenty of hori-zontal featherbedding
niches, is based on ignorance of how things get done, or indifference to results. The administrative
racket that gave New York City more
administrators than all the nations of Europe combined in 1991, has got
to die. It wastes billions, demoralizes
teachers, parents, and students, and corrupts the common enterprise.
Measure performance with individualized
instruments. Standardized tests, like schools
themselves, have lost their moral legitimacy. They correlate with
nothing of human value and their very
existence perverts curriculum into a preparation for these extravagant rituals. Indeed, all paper and pencil tests
are a waste of time, useless as predictors of
anything important unless the competition is rigged. As a casual guide
they are probably harmless, but as a
sorting tool they are corrupt and deceitful. A test of whether you can drive is driving. Performance testing is
where genuine evaluation will always be found.
There surely can't be a normal parent on earth who doesn't judge his or
her child's progress by
performance.
Shut down district school boards. Families
need control over the professionals in their
lives. Decentralize schooling down to the neighborhood school building
level, each school with its own citizen
managing board. School corruption, like the national school milk price-rigging scandal of the 1990s, will
cease when the temptations of bulk
purchasing, job giveaways, and remote decision-making are ended.
Install permanent parent facilities in
every school with appropriate equipment to allow parent partnerships with their own kids and
others. Frequently take kids out of school to
work with their own parents. School policies must deliberately aim to
strengthen families.
Restore the primary experience base we
stole from childhood by a slavish adherence to a Utopian school diet of steady abstraction, or
an equally slavish adherence to play as the
exclusive obligation of children. Define primary experience as the
essential core of early education,
secondary data processing a supplement of substantial importance. But be
sure the concepts of work, duty,
obligation, loyalty, and service are strong components of the mix. Let them stand shoulder to shoulder with
"fun." Let children engage in real tasks as Amish children do, not synthetic games and
simulations that set them up for commercial
variants of more-of-the-same for the rest of their lives.
Recognize that total schooling is
psychologically and procedurally unsound. Wasteful and horrendously expensive. Give children
some private time and space, some choice of
subjects, methods, and associations, and freedom from constant
surveillance. A strong element of volition,
of choice, of anti-compulsion, is essential to education. That doesn 't mean granting a license to do anything.
Anyway, whatever is chosen as "curriculum," the vital assistance that old can grant young is
to demand that personal second or third best
will not do — the favor you can bestow on your children is to show by
your own example that hard, painstaking
work is the toll an independent spirit charges itself for self-respect. Our colleges work somewhat better than our
other schools because they understand this
better.
Admit there is no one right way to grow up
successfully. One-system schooling has had a
century and a half to prove itself. It is a ghastly failure. Children
need the widest possible range of roads
in order to find the right one to accommodate themselves. The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based
is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every
style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody. Tax
credits, vouchers, and other more
sophisticated means are necessary to encourage a diverse mix of different school logics of growing up. Only sharp
competition can reform the present mess; this
needs to be an overriding goal of public policy. Neither national nor
state government oversight is necessary
to make a voucher/tax credit plan work: a modicum of local control, a disclosure law with teeth, and a
policy of client satisfaction or else is all the citizen protection needed. It works for
supermarkets and doctors. It will work for schools, too, without national testing.
Teach children to think dialectically so
they can challenge the hidden assumptions of the world about them, including school
assumptions, so they can eventually generate much of their own personal curriculum and oversight.
But teach them, too, that dialectical
thinking is unsuited to many important things like love and family.
Dialectical analysis is radically
inappropriate outside its purview.
Arrange much of schooling around complex
themes instead of subjects. "Subjects" have a real value, too, but subject study as an
exclusive diet was a Prussian secret weapon to produce social stratification. Substantial
amounts of interdisciplinary work are needed as
a corrective.
Force the school structure to provide
flex-time, flex-space, flex-sequencing, and flex- content so that every study can be
personalized to fit the whole range of individual styles and performance.
Break the teacher certification monopoly so
anyone with something valuable to teach can
teach it. Nothing is more important than this.
Our form of schooling has turned us into
dependent, emotionally needy, excessively
childish people who wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Our
national dilemma is that too many of us
are now homeless and mindless in the deepest sense — at the mercy of strangers.
The beginning of answers will come only
when people force government to return
educational choice to everyone. But choice is meaningless without an
absolute right to have progress
monitored locally, too, not by an agency of the central government. Solzhenitsyn was right. The American founding
documents didn't mention school because
the authors foresaw the path school would inevitably set us upon, and rejected it.
The best way to start offering some choice
immediately is to give each public school the
independence that private schools have. De-systematize them, grant each
private, parochial, and homeschool equal
access to public funds through vouchers administered as a loan program, along with tax credits. In
time the need for even this would diminish, but
my warning stands — if these keys to choice are tied to intrusive
government oversight, as some would
argue they must be, they will only hasten the end of the American
libertarian experiment. Vouchers are
only a transition to what is really called for: an economy of independent livelihoods, a resurrection of
principles over pragmatism, and restoration of
the private obligation, self-imposed, to provide a living wage to all
who work for you.
School can never deal with really
important things. Only education can teach us that quests don't always work, that even worthy
lives most often end in tragedy, that money
can't prevent this; that failure is a regular part of the human
condition; that you will never
understand evil; that serious pursuits are almost always lonely; that
you can't negotiate love; that money
can't buy much that really matters; that happiness is free. A twenty-five-year-old school dropout walked
the length of the planet without help, a
seventeen-year-old school dropout worked a twenty-six-foot sailboat all
by herself around the girdle of the
globe. What else does it take to realize the horrifying limitations we have inflicted on our children? School is
a liar's world. Let us be done with it.
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