Today I wrote a paper for English.  A paper on how much the educational system sucks and how useless it is.  Here it is, in all of its glory.

oh, and I tread the line for a while, but eventually break the rules about halfway through in honor of the paper itself.


enjoi.

Hollow Congressional Applause:

The Truth About the Education System

            "Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a    conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die."

            Above is a quote from New York State's Teacher of the Year, 1991, Mr. John Taylor Gatto.  After thirty years as a school teacher, Gatto wrote several essays and speeches, one of which was his acceptance of the aforementioned award, which railed against the system he had been working in, and seeing from the inside out.  He knew that today's schools don't educate with knowledge, but rather, they systemize children and mold their impressionable, capable, curious minds into nothing more than order-following robots with one sole purpose: to work.

            Although Gatto sounds like a crazed leftist with a tin foil hat, he is probably one of the best spokesman for his cause.  He has the experience, plenty of time to have thought it out, and he has seen the inner machine of what the world calls education.  Gatto breaks down the system in one of his books, Dumbing Us Down, as he outlines the seven universal lessons taught by public school systems:

1.      Confusion.  Teachers teach too many facts and not enough connections.  They don't show enough of the larger picture or how things work together.  It's like handing car parts but no instruction manual to a kindergartener and telling him it should work.

2.      Class Position.  Children are grouped into classes based on "intelligence" – special needs, average, and gifted – and that's usually where they stay.

3.      Indifference.  Teachers demand that students get highly involved in a lesson for around ninety minutes, and when the bell rings, forget about it and go to the next class.  The poet in the middle of his sonnet packs up and goes to learn about a frog's anatomy.  "Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care about anything too deeply?"

4.      Emotional Dependency.  Teachers and higher authorities decide everyting for students, from what they are allowed to say to who may use the rest room.

5.      Intellectual Dependency.  Teachers decide what will be taught and when and how it will be taught.  "It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for another people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meaning of our lives."

6.      Provisional Self Esteem.  Students are constantly being judged and evaluated.  Their feelings of self-worth depend on how an outsider rates them.

7.      You Can't Hide.  Students have no private time or private space.  They are encouraged to snitch on each other, even their lockers are subject to random search and seizures.  "I teach students that they are always being watched, that each of them is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues."

(as summarized in Psychotropedia)

So, in short, students get the idea that they need to be on time, prepared for the day's work, and silently obedient beat into their heads from the time they turn five until the time they graduate, most often at seventeen or eighteen.  Why would any society willingly do this to their future?  Their children?  The people who will one day take care of the world?  It's very simple.  It all started in Prussia in 1819.

            The structure of 20^th century American schooling began in 1806, when Napoleon's amateur soldiers with little or no combat experience beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena.  Almost immediately after the embarrassing slaughter, a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation," which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect, he told the Prussian people that their way of life was over, and the nation as a whole would have to undergo a new Utopian institution of forced schooling, in which everyone would learn to take orders.  From there, the world was mandated to compulsory schooling at the end of a government bayonet for the first time in human history.  This "modern" forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
            1.Obedient soldiers to the army.  "Keep us free."
            2.Obedient workers to the mines.  "Keep us warm."
            3.Well subordinated civil servants to government.  "Keep us safe."
            4.Well-subordinated clerks to industry.  "Keep us producing goods."
            5.Citizens who thought alike about major issues.  "Keep us informed."

Overall, it sounds like a good idea, for some.  The ruling class, who can think for themselves, has little to worry about.  They'll have workers and politicians to keep the pockets of the rich full and the people happy, respectively.  The masses don't know what's going on, and no one will tell them.  Why spoil the Santa Claus/Easter Bunny-type surprise?

            Since the days of the "education revolution," the original upper class has died and all that's left is the worker class, who taught their children in the same way they were taught.  History repeats itself, and a sick-cycle carousel spins around and around while nothing gets fixed and no one learns who they really are.  Which means that today, millions of students are sitting in classrooms in desks assigned to them, with teachers assigned to them, and classmates in the same rotten predicament.  On time, prepared, seated, asking permission before doing anything and quick to finish the task given.  Attendance in mandatory, and if a student doesn't spend an allotted amount of time in his accursed desk, he'll never learn a thing.  Whether the student was in class but not in the assigned seat, or sleeping at home, an absence is recorded.  An amount of time in the seat is required, whether the student learns the subject in ten minutes or ten hours, and they will all spend at least an hour and a half in each class.  If a student misses class too many times, he is assigned mandatory "seat time make up sessions," during which students sit in a room in complete silence until the minutes they've missed have been taken away and given to a system they don't want to be in anyway.  They aren't even required to do anything while they're there.

            What does that teach the youth?  To either take as much time to do as little as possible, or to do the minimum asked, on time and no more or less.  Often, teachers will assign a paper length of maybe seven to nine pages, but if a student writes a twenty-page paper, the teacher doesn't read the whole thing.  Sometimes, they don't even read the full thing when the assignment was a smaller paper, perhaps as little as five pages.  But that's not the point.  Students will do as little as possible until they can do nothing at all.  Enter, the weekend.

            The designers of school were clever.  They laid the foundations that said five days a week would be mandatory, one day for the Sabbath (don't want to upset those religious types), and one day off.  Luckily, the day off was easy to pick.  Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, whereas Christianity's Sabbath is on Sunday.  Two days, back to back, in a seven-day week.  Both factions feel their religious rights haven't been infringed and they get a day off to relax and get away from the enclosed walls and cameras that pervade schoolhouses across the world.  However, this alleged day off and the evenings that accompany it are little more than clever ruses.

            School seeps into the home life, and takes the reigns of the horse-drawn buggy that is a child's personal life.  Homework was designed to extend the surveillance farther into the lives of the youth, to take time away from discovering themselves or finding something new.  Time spent on homework slashes the hours someone could be learning from an older member of the community, or perhaps the hours spent at a job apprenticing for one of these older and wiser craftsmen, even just an elderly person.  Kids spend hours by themselves reading and filling out worksheets designed to keep them from experiencing their own lives.  Without a fully active role in community life one cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that, and science and arithmetic have accredited him to knowing what he was talking about most of the time.  It's no wonder most students don't do the homework.  Some don't even need it.  They coast along, barely listening in class, and then pass tests.  How does such an oddity occur, when the other 95% can barely pass a test after all the homework and reviews and notes taken ever so tediously?  Ambition and thought.

            Not all students are the same, and that's can be attributed to schooling, but for the sake of argument, it's because everyone perceives differently.  Some students will take detailed notes on lined paper in different colors of pen and highlighter for easy referencing.  Some students will scribble bits and pieces of phrases on a blank sheet of paper entirely in black ink.  Other students take no notes at all.  Oddly enough, tests prove, all that writing makes little difference.  Students who have taken no notes at all and rarely show up to class on time (if at all) can get the same or better scores on tests as those that scribbled furiously for ninety minutes a day, every other day, for eighteen weeks.  Part of this lies in the fact that some students care about a real education so they research on their own or think logically.  Some may lie in the fact that "mandatory attendance" is another way of saying "learn to go to work every day."  But mostly, it shows that if people would learn to teach themselves, school would be unnecessary.

            Many believe that it only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on.  "School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artificial structure which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic, the world had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. People turned their backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly stated in The Republic when he laid down the plans for total state-controlled society of human life.  John Taylor Gatto sent a short essay to The Wall Street Journal titled "I Quit, I Think."  In it, he describes his reasons for retirement from teaching, citing:
                        Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession, something    like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies to guard its marches, and that's why        reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can't imagine           school much different.

            The next section of this paper is the one that will get the author's points deducted.  Why?  He slips into first person, disregards the fascist formatting fallacies, and gets more personal in his subjective opinion on his thirteen years in a social farm covered in weeds and pesticides.  Sheldon Stetz takes the spirited philosophy of his paper and applies it to a real-life situation to prove a point.

            I took Psychology my junior year, second semester.  I probably only went to class maybe eight times the entire semester, but I learned far more than the kids who showed up every day, and in far better detail.  We learned the babinski reflex, but not why or how.  I'm not saying we didn't have a good teacher, but the educational system needs serious revamping if anyone ever wants it to mean anything.

            Here I am now, almost done with my senior year after a minimum thirteen years of public education, and I've desperately wanted out for the last five.  Here's why:

            Pre-Calculus, junior year.  I didn't do any homework.  Any.  Ever.  Then I took the final exam and scored a 98%.  Plainly stated, understanding doesn't always come with practice.  Homework and notes are great ways for some to learn, but what of those of us who don't need either to grasp a concept?  What do we few do?  We fail.  We learn the same material, often better, according to test scores, but as far as the grading scale is concerned, we fail.  As it looks on paper, we didn't learn anything.  Nothing sank in.  Yet somehow our tests are higher-scoring, our conversations richer and more intelligent, and our applications of what we learned perform better, more efficiently.  Is that really fair?  To hand out a free boost to those who need it and a hindrance to those that don't?  Grading these things called notes is the worst idea I've ever heard of, and most of it is purely political, so that if a child fails, the teacher can pull out paper in the student's own hand saying "look, we went over it, it's his fault now."

            As little as my opinion counts (I can't even vote quite yet), I'd say throw out the grading system.  Grade tests.  Homework is completely optional, but if you don't pass the class, you will take it until you do.  Classes such as "study skills" and "power math" shouldn't even exist, and if the school is going to offer a class, it had better make sense.  Pre-Algebra as a freshman or higher?  That's pure, unadulterated laziness and a product of American society today.  I took Pre-Algebra in seventh grade and got an A, but you're telling me a sophomore can't pass it?  Ridiculous.  Throw him out.  If he's not going to learn, why is he there, taking the seat of someone that may want to learn, wasting the time of the teacher paid to instruct?  "But it's a math credit."

            Credits are required to graduate.  Most of the time, one passing semester of a class means one credit for that class.  In most cases, passing is a D.  If I pass Algebra 2, but need one math credit, I can take pre-algebra and get a credit with my eyes closed, and then graduate with people who took AP Calculus.  Is that right?  Apparently it's acceptable.  I know people who have done it.

            One day in English, we sat in a big circle and told ghost stories, most of which turned into jokes and made no difference.  Then we read a ghost story as a class aloud.  What did I do the whole time?  I wrote this paper.  Would I be okay on the test if there was one?  You bet, thanks to another glorious feature of the star-studded "educational system:" the review.

            I can waste as much time as I want, because I know that as soon as the story's over, we'll all talk about it and basically re-tell the story.  Enough to pass the test anyway, because that's all we need to be able to do to get out of it.  Forget deeper thinking, analysis, and finding deeper meaning.  Rape your education time by working the situation so you didn't actually have to do anything.  No thoughts went through your head.  Thousands of kids have figured it out, and thousands of kids have graduated because of passing multiple choice tests.

            That's all they ask, really.  In math I can understand multiple choice.  You work a problem, get an answer, and there it is.  You know you got it right.  If not, you can go back and see what went wrong.  It makes sense.  But English? Government?  History?  Shouldn't students be knowing the answer, instead of recognizing when they see it on paper, or worse, the ISAT?

            The ISAT is a big fat standardized test designed to tell authorities if students are at a level they should be at regarding their age and rank.  If you look closely, you'll find that when kids aren't passing, the overlords lower the standards until enough kids are.  Funding goes around, money is spent, and kids get stupider. No one complains because their little factory workers were still there on time, prepared, and silently obeying.  Thank you, No Child Left Behind, for teaching us all we need to know.  Oh, in the right format as well.

            Writing papers is easy.  It's just like thinking but one writes it down before one moves on to the next thought.  As long as a student can think, the paper turns out well.  The idea of writing a paper is to teach the student something and have that student prove that he knows what he's talking about.  He researches a topic, writes a paper, and turns it in.  But, in order to "teach us responsibility," teachers drag out due dates and invents parts that are "required to write a paper."  Note cards, rough drafts, working bibliographies, special formatting…all just ingenious ways to baby-sit kids who can't be responsible enough to remember that their success hangs in the balance of a single day.

            Formatting was invented by an elite group of button-down, Oxford cloth Ph.Ds  so they'd get paid and teachers would be fooled into thinking it was all necessary.  I can understand margin sizes and font sizes, but even the font has to be exact, the spacing doubled, and the title page perfect.  Some kids try to get out of note cards and rough drafts by writing a single paper and turning it in very early, to prove that the inventions of teachers are unnecessary and a complete waste of time, effort, and supplies.  This paper was written in a single draft.  Even though it's easily possible, the simple idea that a pupil can write a paper without note cards and a rough draft seems impossible because teachers have little faith in their students.  With today's students, it's understandable.  They're not too bright and not too motivated, but why punish those who are obviously different?  They complete the requirements for the paper itself, sometimes more than required, but still receive serious cuts for not having note cards, working bibliography, note cards, and first-person references.

            Is any of that fair?  Hardly, but that's the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints.

            The world doesn't need state-certified teachers to make education happen - that probably guarantees it won't.