Summary: John Taylor Gatto
highlights and explains the singular unproductivity of American
Schools.He observes that the once strikingly powerful American
character, chronicled by de Toqueville -and noted particularly in our
children, has all but disappeared.[Such character has been replaced by
sensuous and relatively mindless creatures with relatively little
character, originality or self-sufficiency. They seem more and more
like the Eloi, right out of HG Wells Time
Machine. It's for you to guess who the Morlocks --those that
prey upon the Eloi-- might be.
This result has been achieved in less than 100
years. Perhaps, if we can find the collective intelligence and will, we can consciously undo the damage in 50??!!
In his own words [extracted from his essay AGAINST SCHOOL
How public education cripples our kids, and why ]:
"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:
- To make good people.
- To make good citizens.
- 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 in order to render
the populace "manageable." [the emboldening is mine,
SPH]
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
modem 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
modem
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
In another essay, The
Six Lesson School Teacher*,
Gatto left out the ideological provenence and just gave us the effect:
the true school curriculum, the one that we teach best of all. In it
there are six understandings for each student to master (All the rest
is just smoke and mirrors):
12:28:24 PM 
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