60.The
Great Transformation: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Great Transformation
I
lived through the great transformation which turned schools from often useful
places (if never the essential ones
school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation. When I began teaching in
1961, the social environment of Manhattan
schools was a distant cousin of the western Pennsylvania schools I
attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant
cousin of
Malthus.
Malthus.
Discipline was the daily watchword on
school corridors. A network of discipline
referrals, graded into an elaborate catalogue of well-calibrated
offenses, was etched into the classroom
heart. At bottom, hard as it is to believe in today's school climate,
there was a common dedication to the
intellectual part of the enterprise. I remember screaming (pompously) at an administrator who marked on
my plan book that he would like to see
evidence I was teaching "the whole child," that I didn't teach
children at all, I taught the discipline
of the English language! Priggish as that sounds, it reflects an attitude
not uncommon among teachers who grew up
in the 1940s and before. Even with much
slippage in practice, Monongahela and Manhattan had a family
relationship. About schooling at least.
Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.
Whatever the event is that I'm actually
referring to — and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me — it was a nationwide
phenomenon simultaneously arriving in all big
cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever
it was, it arrived all at once, the way
we see national testing and other remote-control school matters like School-to-Work legislation appear in every
state today at the same time. A plan was
being orchestrated, the nature of which is unmasked in the upcoming
chapters.
Think of this thing for the moment as a
course of discipline dictated by coaches outside the perimeter of the visible school world. It
constituted psychological restructuring of the
institution's mission, but traveled under the guise of a public
emergency which (the public was told)
dictated increasing the intellectual content of the business! Except for its nightmare aspect, it could have been a scene
from farce, a swipe directly from Orwell's
1984 and its fictional telly announcements that the chocolate ration was
being raised every time it was being
lowered. This reorientation did not arise from any democratic debate, or from any public clamor for such a
peculiar initiative; the public was not
consulted or informed. Best of all, those engineering the makeover
denied it was happening.
I watched fascinated, as over a period of
a hundred days, the entire edifice of public
schooling was turned upside down. I know there was no advance warning to
low-level administrators like
principals, either, because I watched my first principal destroy himself trying to stem the tide. A mysterious new
deal was the order of the day.
Suddenly children were to be granted
"due process" before any sanction, however mild, could be invoked. A formal schedule of
hearings, referees, advocates, and appeals was set up. What might on paper have seemed only a
liberal extension of full humanity to
children was actually the starting gun for a time of mayhem. To
understand this better, reflect a minute
on the full array of ad hoc responses to wildness, cruelty, or incipient chaos teachers usually employ to keep the
collective classroom a civil place at all. In a
building with a hundred teachers, the instituting of an adversarial
system of justice meant that within just
weeks the building turned into an insane asylum. Bedlam, without a modicum of civility anywhere.
This transformation, ironically enough,
made administrative duty easier, because where
once supervisory intercession had constituted, a regular link in the
ladder of referral as it was called,
in the new order, administrators were excused from minute-to-minute discipline and were granted power to assume
that incidents were a teacher's fault, to be
duly entered on the Cumulative Record File, the pedagogical equivalent
of the Chinese Dangan.
There was a humorous aspect to what
transpired over the next few years. I had no
particular trouble keeping a lid on things, but for teachers who counted
upon support from administrative staff
it was a different story. Now, if they asked for a hand, often they were pressured to resign, or formally
charged with bad classroom management, or
worst of all, transferred to an even more hideous school in expectation
they would eliminate themselves.
Most, under such tension, took the hint and
quit. A few had to be pushed. I remember a magnificent math teacher, an older black woman
with honors and accomplishments to her
name, much beloved and respected by her classes, singled out for public
persecution probably because she acted
as an intractable moral force, a strong model teacher with strong principles. Daily investigative teams
from the district office watched her classes,
busily took notes in the back of her room, challenged her style of
presentation openly while children
listened. This went on for two weeks. Then the administration began to call her students to the school office to
interrogate them, one by one, about the teacher's behavior. They coached some kids to watch her
during her classes, coached them to look
for any telltale signs she was a racist! Parents were called and offered
an option of withdrawing their kids from
her classes. Broken by the ordeal, one day she vanished.
When my wife was elected to the district
school board, one of her first actions was to
gain access to the superintendent's private files without his knowledge.
Some of those records concerned details
of official cases of harassment. Dozens of employees had been similarly purged, and dozens more were
"under investigation" in this gulag on West 95th Street. Contacting these people in private,
it became clear to me that, they were far from
the worst teachers around. Indeed some were the best. Their relative
prowess had emboldened them to speak out
on policy matters and so marked them for elimination.
One principal, whose school was the most
successful reading environment in the district,
received similar treatment, ultimately sentenced to an official Siberia
in Harlem, given no duties at all for
the two years more he lasted before quitting. His crime: allegedly
striking a girl although there were no
witnesses to this but the girl, a student who admitted breaking into the light-control panel room in
the auditorium where the offense is
supposed to have occurred. His real crime was his refusal to abandon
phonetic reading methodology and replace
it with a politically mandated whole-word substitute.
I
escaped the worst effects of the bloodbath. Mostly I minded my business trying
to ignore the daily carnage. In truth I
had no affection for the old system being savaged, and chaos made it easier for me to try out things
that worked. On balance, I probably did my
best work during those turbulent years as a direct result of the curious
smokescreen they provided.
But accounts are not so simple to balance
overall. If I regarded run-of-the-mill school
administrators as scared rabbits or system flunkies, the reformers I saw
parading daily through the building
corridors looked like storm troopers and made my skin crawl.
On several occasions, energetic efforts
were made by these people to recruit my
assistance as an active ally. All such appeals I politely refused. True
belief they had, but for all of it they
seemed like savages to me, inordinately proud of their power to cause fear, as willing to trample on the decencies
as the people they were harassing as indecent.
However, it seemed just possible something good might actually emerge
from the shakeup underway. About that, I
was dead wrong. As the project advanced, schools became noticeably worse. Bad to begin with,
now they mutated into something horrible.
What shape began to emerge was a fascinating
echo of the same bureaucratic cancer
which dogged the steps of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.
Do-nothing administrators and nonteaching
teachers multiplied like locusts. With them came an entirely new class of school-teacher, one
aggressively ignorant, cynical, and often tied to local political clubs. New categories of job
description sprang up like weeds.
My own school fell victim to a politically
correct black gym teacher imported from New
England to be its principal. Two schoolwide riots followed his
installation, mass marches on city hall transpired
in which local politicians instrumental in the man's selection used schoolchildren as unwitting cadres to lobby
their favorite schemes in newsworthy,
children's crusade fashion.
A
small band of old-fashioned teachers fought rearguard actions against this, but
time retired them one by one until, with
only an occasional exception, the classrooms of
Community School District 3, in one of the most prosperous neighborhoods
on earth, became lawless compounds, job
projects for the otherwise unemployable.
I
need to wrap this up so we can get on with things. I have to skip the full
story of the Hell's Angel math teacher
who parked his Harley Hog outside the door of his classroom, and when the principal objected, told him in
front of startled witnesses that if the man
didn't shut his mouth, the number-crunching cyclist would come to his
home that evening, pour gasoline under
his front door, and set his house on fire. I have to skip the hair-raising stories of not one but three junior
high teachers I knew quite well who
married their students. Each, spotting a likely thirteen-year-old, wooed
the respective girl in class and married
her a few years later. They took the more honorable course, hardly the outcome of most teacher-student romances
I was privy to. I have to skip the drug
habits of staff in each of the buildings I worked in and other lurid
stuff like that. In the midst of the
unending dullness of institutional schooling, human nature cracks through the peeling paint as grass through cement. I
have to skip all that. Suffice it to say, my life experience taught me that school isn't a safe
place to leave your children.
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