How public education cripples our kids, and why

How public education cripples our kids, and why

By John Taylor Gatto - September 2003, Harpers Magazine

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year
and the author, most recently, of 'The Underground History of American Education'.


I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan,
and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom.

Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did,
why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers:

They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it.

They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around.

They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects
and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right:

their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.




Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who
has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy,
the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there.

When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids,
as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who
are rude and interested only in grades?

If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year
compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school
personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed
upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?


We all are.



My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained
to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that
I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored
it was my fault and no one else's.

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own,
and people who didn't know that were childish people,
to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted.

That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years
I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student.

For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion
that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom.

Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law,
to help kids break out of this trap.




The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly
conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a
medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been
granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job
had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even
a teaching license.

After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license
when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold.

In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember.

By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think
of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement
of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness.

Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way.

My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn
along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal:
if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid
structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling.

We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure,
resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible
about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults,
and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to
take a risk every now and then.




But we don't do that.

And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of
schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is
no "problem" with our schools?

What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense
and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing
something wrong but because they are doing something right?

Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said
we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed
to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?



Do we really need school?

I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week,
nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary?
And if so, for what?

Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale,
because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal
justification to rest.

Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans
never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through,
and they turned out all right.



George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln?
Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system,
and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school.

Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school,
yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison;
captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain
and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.



In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't
looked upon as children at all.



Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history
of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who
could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person?
Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.






We have been taught (that is, schooled)
in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with,
or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically
that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense.

And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way
to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory
secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons.


Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system?
What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?


Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into
the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived
of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century.


The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life
and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:


1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis,
and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent
definition of public education's mission, however short schools
actually fall in achieving them.


But we are dead wrong.


Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous
and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose.

We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in
The American Mercury for April 1924 that

"the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species
with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ...

Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ...
is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level,
to breed and train a standardized citizenry,
to put down dissent and originality.

That is its aim in the United States...
and that is its aim everywhere else."




Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted
to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm.

His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our
own educational system back to the now vanished, though never
to be forgotten, military state of Prussia.

And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently
been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture,
Mencken was being perfectly serious here.



Our educational system really is Prussian in origin,
and that really is cause for concern.



The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again
once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn
of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book,
The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American
schools back in the 1840s.

Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education
in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its
schooling to be brought here.

That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early
association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during
the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795
that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws.

But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst
aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce
mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable
leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to
render the populace "manageable."





It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years,
WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project,
high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly
one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that

I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling.



Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree
of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed
with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students
at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado.

Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay,
'The Child the Parent and the State', and was more than a little intrigued to see
him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a
"revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930.

A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the
uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education,
in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."



Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named,
makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent
was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s:
a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened
to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.




Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of
surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses.



Divide children by subject, by age-grading,
by constant rankings on tests,
and by many other more subtle means,
and it was unlikely that the ignorant
mass of mankind, separated in childhood,
would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.


Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose -
of modern schooling into six basic functions,
any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those
innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:


1 ) The adjustive or adaptive function.
Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.
This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely.

It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material
should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until
you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2 ) The integrating function.
This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention
is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable,
and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and
manipulate a large labor force.

3 ) The diagnostic and directive function.
School is meant to determine each student's proper social role.
This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally
on cumulative records.

As in "your permanent record."

Yes, you do have one.


4 ) The differentiating function.
Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted
by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits -
and not one step further.


So much for making kids their personal best.



5 ) The selective function.
This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection
as applied to what he called "the favored races."

In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting
to improve the breeding stock.

Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement,
and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them
as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes.

That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward
were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.



6 ) The propaedeutic function.
The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of
caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught
how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population
deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed
unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.




That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country.



And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical
take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone
in championing these ideas.

Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned
tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines.

Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling
throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful
in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also
a virtual herd of mindless consumers.

In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize
the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such
a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.




There you have it.


Now you know.


We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between
the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management,
economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them,
to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform.


Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson,
then president of Princeton University, said the following
to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education,
and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class,
of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education
and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."


But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about
these ends need not be class-based at all.



They can stem purely from fear,
or from the by now familiar belief
that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue,
rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope.

Above all, they can stem from simple greed.



There were vast fortunes to be made, after all,
in an economy based on mass production and organized
to favor the large corporation rather than
the small business or the family farm.



But mass production required mass consumption,
and at the turn of the twentieth century most
Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise
to buy things they didn't actually need.


Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count.
School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense
to think they should consume nonstop,
because it did something even better:



It encouraged them not to think at all.


And that left them sitting ducks for another
great invention of the modern era - marketing.



Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know
that there are two groups of people who can always be
convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children.

School has done a pretty good job of turning our children
into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning
our children into children. Again, this is no accident.

Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew
that if children could be cloistered with other children,
stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged
to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy,
jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.




In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book
'Public Education in the United States', Ellwood P. Cubberley
detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school
enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and
forced schooling was at that point still quite new.

This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education,
a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and
correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition
of his book Public School Administration:



"Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children)
are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school
to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."




It's perfectly obvious from our society
today what those specifications were.

Maturity has by now been banished from nearly
every aspect of our lives.

Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships;
easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control;
easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself;
easy answers have removed the need to ask questions.


We have become a nation of children,
happy to surrender our judgments and our wills
to political exhortations and commercial blandishments
that would insult actual adults.

We buy televisions, and then
we buy the things we see on the television.

We buy computers, and then
we buy the things we see on the computer.

We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not,
and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair.

We drive SUVs and believe the lie
that they constitute a kind of life insurance,
even when we're upside-down in them.



And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye
when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say,"
even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school
that America is the land of the free.


We simply buy that one too.


Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.




Now for the good news.


Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling,
its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid.


School trains children to be employees and consumers;
teach your own to be leaders and adventurers.


School trains children to obey reflexively;
teach your own to think critically and independently.


Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom;
help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored.


Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material,
in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology
- all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid.


Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude
so that they can learn to enjoy their own company,
to conduct inner dialogues.

Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone,
and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer,
the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired
and quickly abandoned.


Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.




First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are:


laboratories of experimentation on young minds,
drill centers for the habits and attitudes
that corporate society demands.

Mandatory education serves children only incidentally;
its real purpose is to turn them into servants.


Don't let your own have their childhoods extended,
not even for a day.


If David Farragut could take command of a
captured British warship as a pre-teen,

If Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet
at the age of twelve,

If Ben Franklin could apprentice
himself to a printer at the same age
(then put himself through a course of study
that would choke a Yale senior today),



There's no telling what your own kids could do.



After a long life, and thirty years
in the public school trenches,
I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt.



We suppress our genius only because
we haven't yet figured out how to manage
a population of educated men and women.



The solution, I think, is simple and glorious.


Let them manage themselves.


- END -