May 30, 2005
In March of 1991, a middle-aged school teacher penned a letter to the Wall Street Journal, entitled “I Quit, I Think” which the newspaper duly published in July, shortly after he quit. In his letter to the editor, John Taylor Gatto, a 30-year veteran of the New York City School system, recently named New York Teacher of the Year, declared the entire forced schooling project in America to be an institution designed to “kill the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.” Further, he stated that schools are predicated on the bell curve “along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of Biology,” and which amounted to a religion to which teachers offered rituals to keep heresy at bay.
Invitations to speak flooded in from all over the nation in response, propelling Gatto to national prominence in the debate over schools. His first book, Dumbing Us Down, written shortly after he left the teaching profession, was his next shot over the bow of compulsory schooling. The recently-published Underground History of American Education: a schoolteacher’s intimate investigation into the prison of modern schooling, grows out of his research and thought since that time.
Several months ago, this writer discovered Gatto’s web site on the way to something else and read the entire Underground History chapter by chapter as Gatto posted a new chapter each week.
To say that reading the book changed my point of view grossly understates the effect it made upon me; it brought into sharp focus vague and unarticulated ideas and suspicions that I had harbored for many years. It explained much that was previously inexplicable. It made sense of what appeared nonsensical. Most of all, it stripped the cover off a carefully-constructed academic con game that has persisted for more than 100 years without significant opposition from the people most affected: the American public.
It is difficult to briefly describe the book. It has the cadence of a Mahler symphony, vast in scope, replete with digressions and detours, illustrated with moving personal anecdotes. There is hardly a question concerning the human condition that Gatto does not touch upon somewhere within its 392 oversize pages: Who are we? What is important? How should we live? What kind of government and society should we have? How should our children be educated? Who should decide what our children should learn? He confronts Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Frederick Taylor, John Dewey, and a host of lesser-known but highly influential educational thinkers who took Sparta, with its strictly regimented society, rather than the freedom-loving polis of Athens, to be the ideal model of social organization. He points out that the modern compulsory system of education has become a totalitarian system, like that of Sparta; every aspect of it has been engineered by academic and financial elites to suit their own interests and no child may escape. It is the modern version of making a peasant, traditionally said to require 500 years of servitude and oppression. In Orwell's dystopia, 1984, the system turned the common people into proles, in Huxley's Brave New World, into deltas.
In the United States, citizens have been transformed into consumers.
The mechanism for the transformation of education is familiar to anyone who has lived through several cycles. Every generation since the 1840s has witnessed an "educational crisis," a crisis that is said to threaten the very fabric of our nation and society. After such a solemn pronouncement, there inevitably follows a flurry of activity. Guest editorial writers undertake to warn of the impending disaster, white papers proliferate, educational experts make speeches to important governmental commissions, and textbook publishers offer revolutionary teaching materials created to meet the official crisis. There is always an accepted "fix." In the 1950s it was the building of mega-schools. In the ‘60s it was the new math. In the ‘80s it was special education for slow learners. In the ‘90s it was psychiatric medications like Ritalin, administered on a large scale to non-conforming children. It appears that the first decade of the 21st Century will be devoted to high-stakes testing of schoolchildren from a very early age. See the article You'll Never Be Good Enough by Dave Stratman for a commentary on high-stakes testing in Massachusetts. One can only guess at the effect this testing will have upon the children, their parents and teachers, and upon what is taught in the schools.
The ordinary citizen usually finds it difficult to determine the source of these crises; they appear unbidden out of nowhere, and are quickly followed by new teaching methods, new curricula, and “innovative” theories of learning that become adopted overnight. There is one thing, however, which does not change: in spite of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of financial and human resources sunk into the public schools of America, they have not improved. In fact, by almost any measure the quality of high school graduates has declined significantly since World War II. There is no reason to believe that high-stakes testing, such as “No Child Left Behind,” will improve the schools any more than weighing sheep will make them put on weight.
Until I read Gatto’s book, I believed that our public schools had the goals of making our young literate, knowledgeable and intelligent, and attributed their shortcomings to misguided politicians, vacuous academicians, and the usual frailties of human nature. Like Robert Hutchins I believed that we sent children to school “first, to teach the tools of learning; second, to open new worlds to the young in order to get them out of the rut of the place and time in which they were born; and, finally, to get the young to understand their cultural heritage.” (The Great Ideas Today, University of Chicago, 1972, p. 211). Hutchins admitted that the schools were not fulfilling any of those purposes, but argued that all the alternatives were worse.
Gatto disagrees, reminding us that such historical luminaries as Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Lincoln spent little time in a schoolhouse. For the most part, they were self-taught, acquiring knowledge and skills when they needed them. Published letters of soldiers in the Civil War reveal a beauty and power that would put today's college graduates to shame. Hardly any of those soldiers had more than a year or two of schooling.
Compulsory schooling, he argues, was deliberately designed to condition the vast majority of children to accept subordinate roles in modern industrial society. It purposefully extends childhood, retards maturity, and results in a society of incomplete and immature adults, bereft of creativity, self-reliance and independence. Modeled on the early Nineteenth Century Prussian school system, it fosters the class system prevalent in Britain and Prussia in the 19th Century. It disregards the aspirations of both parents and children. Perhaps worst of all, it deadens the ability to think critically, the sine qua non of citizenship. In short, the system dumbs down under the guise of educating.
Gatto has made a serious accusation, but having fought in the trenches for 30 years as a public school teacher, he has earned the right to be taken seriously. His message is pertinent and urgent, for we are now reaping the bitter harvest of a sociological experiment conceived and financed by a small group of very wealthy and powerful men more than 100 years ago, and executed by academics who founded schools of education at major universities and through them inculcated in American teachers the attitudes and skills to dumb down American students. Since parents could not be expected to acquiesce in the dumbing down of their children, they foisted this project upon the American public by stealth. The Progressive Era, admirable in so many ways, had already prepared Americans to accept as authoritative the pronouncements of experts on a variety of subjects the average person was not supposed to understand. Parents, not considered experts on early education, were not consulted as to whether they wanted their children to participate. Compulsory schooling was not the subject of public debate, but nevertheless became the policy of this nation shortly after the First World War.
Gatto tells us that contemporary compulsory schooling is a scam. The schools, contrary to what we are told, are not failing; on the contrary, they are doing precisely what they were intended to do. From the view of a small group of highly influential and powerful tycoons and their academic henchmen who created the system from the 1890s through the 1920s, the modern public school is an unblemished success.
He brings an impressive array of documentary evidence, from the ponderous Report of the Senate Committee on Education (1888) (“We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes”), to James Bryant Conant’s The American High School Today (1959), that promoted the creation of huge secondary schools with thousands of students.
The tycoons of which he writes were four of the most powerful industrial and financial giants of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan the Elder and John D. Rockefeller. Through their patronage of academic institutions, either directly or through charitable foundations, they provided the intellectual and political impetus that resulted in a nationwide system of compulsory schools, designed to turn out docile adults who accept without question their subordinate positions in life and whose idea of personal fulfillment is to acquire an ever-increasing quantity of the products of an industrial system that requires ever-increasing personal consumption of its products in order to survive. There were already plenty of lawyers, doctors, scientists and ministers, went the reasoning; the system needed reliable and predictable workers and consumers. The American ideal of the citizen—responsible, self-educated, individualistic, and frugal, insisting on the right to be heard on all public matters, great and small—was archaic, outmoded, and unsuitable to the modern industrial civilization being established in America.
Educators from the time of Horace Mann found the Prussian school system amenable. The Prussian university system, emphasizing research and scholarship over teaching, had already begun to dominate major American universities by the 1880s. Prussian schooling from the first grade on was designed to form the overwhelming majority of its wards into workers to supply labor to the factories, the mines and the enlisted ranks of the military. A much smaller proportion were trained to be managers and professionals. The remaining two percent, destined to command, received an education suitable for rulers. Intentionally created to mold the vast majority of Prussian citizens into obedient, uncritical servants of the power elite, Prussian education embodied a vision of politics and society that was the very antithesis of the society Americans created and enjoyed in the first 70 years of the nation's existence.
What was this American society like? Although hardly anyone finished twelve years of school, and many only managed to do a year or two, literacy in the northern states has been estimated at ninety percent or greater, given the number of newspapers and books sold during the era. Infant mortality was significantly lower and expected lifespan was significantly higher than in Europe. Poverty was virtually unknown and abundance was taken for granted. Entry into the trades was through apprenticeships, often beginning at eleven or twelve. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, left school at 10 to help his father and was subsequently apprenticed to his older brother, a printer, at age 12. At 15, he was writing an anonymous column for his brother’s newspaper that was highly admired throughout Boston. By the time he was 24, he owned and edited the Pennsylvania Gazette, the most successful newspaper in the colonies.
Education was not considered a problem in the early republic. In fact, Americans looked down on schoolmasters, who were often the butt of jokes, like Washington Irving's memorable pedant, Ichabod Crane. There was a vast continent waiting to be explored and settled. For once, land was not scarce. It was not owned by an upper class or nobility who could extract the productive surplus from farmers and leave them with a subsistence share. A family could homestead in the American wilderness and prosper in a way their European forbears had been unable to do for several thousand years. A child might attend school for a while to learn to read and write, but, like Franklin, he was expected to learn what he needed to know when the need arose. Higher education was reserved principally for future ministers.
The citizen that emerged from the American republic could not be relied upon to acquiesce to the necessities of a highly regimented industrial system; there are too many things more important to such a person—family, community, and the love of freedom—that trump the demands of the assembly line. The American character also had a deeply ingrained disrespect for authority of all kinds, an attitude that was unappreciated by an elite that was becoming fabulously wealthy in the “golden age” of the 1890s. Public schooling was the ideal tool to change that attitude and prepare the masses to take instructions from their betters and in return receive the possibility of a secure job and material prosperity.
Gatto meticulously and painstakingly traces the history of the dumbing down process: new textbooks, new methods of teaching reading, the displacement of the basic curriculum with more and more extracurricular activities, the extension of the school year and the push for twelve years of required schooling before entering the work force. He demonstrates that children do not read well because that is exactly what is intended. Through the lens of his own upbringing and his thirty years of experience in the classroom, he relates how he watched bright, playful, curious and happy children gradually lose their soul:
The biggest mystery lurked in the difference between the lusty goodwill of first, second, and to some extent third graders—even in Harlem—the bright, quick intelligence and goodwill always so abundant in those grades, and the wild change fourth grade brought in terms of sullenness, dishonesty, and downright mean spirit.
I knew something in the school experience was affecting these kinds, but what? It had to be hidden in those first-, second-, and third-grade years which appear so idyllic even in Harlem. What surfaced by fourth grade was the effect of a lingering disease running rampant in the very utopian interlude when they were laughing, singing playing, and running round in the earlier grades. And kids who had been to kindergarten seemed worse than the others.
And it gets worse from there. He relates the anatomy of a system that literally kills the soul of our children, through boredom, regimentation and intellectual and social impoverishment.
But Gatto also tells of his successes, of students he encouraged, usually surreptitiously, to break out of their school-fostered immaturity and to think like adults. Often he was punished by principals and superintendents for helping the kids succeed in spite of the system. Once, he was fired on trumped-up charges and won reinstatement only because a secretary testified that his principal had destroyed evidence of his innocence. In order to do his job and fulfill what he felt was his responsibility to the children, he had to continually work against and around a system that did everything in its power to squeeze the last vestiges of independence from both himself and his pupils.
The founders of the modern public school system undoubtedly had the best intentions. They knew that the frontier was closed and that the future lay in the modern industrial, urban culture, powered first by coal and then oil, and devoted to the manufacture of the goods that would lift Americans to unimaginable heights of comfort and achievement. A different world required a different type of person. The assembly line, in which workers must spend their days repeating a simple task, did not require highly educated or individualistic workers. It needed people to execute mind-numbing work during the day and then purchase goods with the wages they had earned. If workers could be isolated from each other and their families, so much the better:
The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control. ... In it Ed Ross wrote these words for his prominent following: “Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media .... the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School .... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.”
So if this project to dumb down Americans has succeeded, and ordinary experience says that it has succeeded more than we would like to admit, where does that leave us now, with a docile workforce bred to work at an assembly line during the day and sit before a television set each evening to watch equally mindless programming? It leaves us in a very, very bad spot because over the past thirty years industrial America has been virtually eradicated. The industrial belt is now the rust belt. Decent-paying jobs for high school graduates have disappeared as the giant corporations outsourced their manufacturing to Mexico and East Asia, where unions are non-existent and wages but a fraction of union scale at home. Minimum-wage jobs proliferate but they are inadequate to support a decent life. Yet the educational system, while giving lip service to the new realities, still turns out a 21st Century version of assembly line workers and shows little signs of changing.
Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller and Morgan sincerely believed that the system of schooling they were promoting and establishing would be a blessing to the entire nation. They also believed that the future lay in heavy industry, the one thing we now know will not be in the American future, especially when the cheap energy that enabled the industrial age becomes prohibitively expensive, as it must.
We have produced workers particularly suited to an industrial environment. In biology it is common wisdom that species often develop attributes that enable it to thrive in one environment, but become extinct when the environment changes. To dumb down people into industrial workers and consumers is to make them overspecialized, because they have been deliberately deprived of the skills and knowledge that would allow them to adapt.
What to do with the schools? Gatto wants us to tear down the entire structure; he believes that there is no hope in reformation. It is hard to argue with him. Were he alive today, even Robert Hutchins might give up on the compulsory schooling project. But public schools are a fact of life; there are few persons left alive who attended the one-room schoolhouse. It is difficult for us to conceive of a world in which people learn what they need to know only when the need arises, but Gatto has shown us that such learning is the only kind of learning worth its salt, and it is precisely that kind of learning that had to be discouraged and ultimately done away with because it made people too independent, intelligent and knowledgeable.
Gatto may or may not be right that compulsory schooling should be abolished, but it is hard to imagine how it can be reformed, given the interests of the educational establishment and the military-industrial complex in keeping the masses tame and compliant. He has, however, clearly defined the issue and it will be impossible to ignore it forever.
|Copyright 2005 by Thomas Lowe. All rights reserved. Republication permitted for non-commercial uses provided this notice is included. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com