241 I Would Prefer Not To: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

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.