AGAINST SCHOOL How public education cripples our kids, and why By John Taylor Gatto taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time Tbecame 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? Ifeven that. Of course, teachers are themselves preducts ofthe same twelve-year com- pulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, andl as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those im- posed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame? ‘Well are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was sev- en 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 | 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 i posible, Certainly 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 wo challenge the oficial 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. John Tayler Gatto isa former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper’s Magazine forum “School on a Hil which appeared in the September 2001 issue ESSAY BDo WE REALLY NEED SCHOOL: SIX CLASSES A DAY, FIVE DAYS A WEEK, NINE MONTHS A YEAR, FOR ‘TWELVE YEARS? IS THIS DEADLY ROUTINE REALLY NECESSARY? 1M HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2003 The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate op- position with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that allevidence of my having been granted the lave had been purpesely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort | was able to re- trieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot un- fold. 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-stye, 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 tome what many other teachers must earn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easly and inexpen- sively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids te an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youth- fulness—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 [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 uth 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? fo 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 cured 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 un- schooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; cap- tains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholar, 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 happi- ly 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 "suc- cess” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but his- torically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plen- ty 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 gor 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. Thereason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural tradi- tions 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 ac cept them in one form or another asa decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. Butwe are dead ‘wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature hold ‘numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s ti 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 you with knowled; of the spe 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 stan Jardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the Jnied Staces. and that i ts aim everywhere else. Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dis. miss 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 IN 1843, HORACE MANN WROTE A PAEAN TO THE LAND OF FREDERICK THE GREAT AND CALLED FOR ITS SCHOOLING TO BE BROUGHT HERE although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at wor 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 oxd 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 tum of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prus- sianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 ises- sentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its school- ing to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hard ly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian, served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many Ger- man-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocksMobeaN, INDUSTRIALIZED, COMPULSORY SCHOOLING WAS TO MAKE A SURGICAL INCISION INTO THE PROSPECTIVE UNITY OF THE UNDERCLASSES 36 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2003 is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Pr ian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students ap- preciable leadership ills, and to ensure docile and incomplet citizens—all in order to render the populace “manageable. 1 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 cen- tury—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 | 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 intrigue 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 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 per fectly 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 bur geoning 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 prospec tive unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more sub- te means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in child: hood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole. Inglis breaks down the pur- pose—the actual purpose—of modern schooling into six ba sic functions, any one of which is enough to curl che hair of those innocent enough to be- lieve the three traditional goals listed earlier: 1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to estab- lish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, pre cludes critical judgment com. pletely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting mate- rial should be taught, because you can‘ test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids leam, and do, foolish and boring things. 2) The invegraing function. This might well be called “the conformity func- tion,” 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 hamess 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 mathe matically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diag- nosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so faras their des tination 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 Dar- win’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 toimprove 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 repro- ductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to da: wash the dir: down the drain. 6) The propaedewtic 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 de- clawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corpo- rations 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 harm- less 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 Camegie and John D. Rockefeller. hhere you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx’s con- ception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest cof complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to de- ‘moralize 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 atall. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that “efficiency” isthe paramount virtue, rather than love, lib- erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed. ‘There were vast fortunes to be made, afterall, 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 tun 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 some- thing 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 cof 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 chil- dren into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children. into children. Again, this isno accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau ScHoo1 DIDN'T HAVE TO TRAIN KIDS TO THINK THEY SHOULD CONSUME NONSTOP; IT SIMPLY TAUGHT THEM NOT TO THINK AT ALL ESSAY 0MawnbaTory SCHOOLING'S PURPOSE IS TO TURN KIDS INTO SERVANTS, DON'T LET YOUR OWN HAVE THEIR CHILDHOODS EXTENDED, NOT EVEN FOR A DAY 38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2005, ‘to our own Dr. Inglis knew that ifchildren could be cloistered with other chil- dren, 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 Stats, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extend ed 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 Ed- ucation, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant’ friend and cor- respondent at Harvard—had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our schools are... factories in which the raw proxlucts (children) are to be shaped and fashioned... And ieis the busi- ‘nes: of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” Te’ 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 insur- ance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst ofall, 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 Jow 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, econom- ics, theology—all che 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: nborato- ties of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and at- titucles that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally its real purpose i 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 preteen, 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 ditt. ‘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. .Copyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing