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# 2022-07-17 - Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
I found this book interesting and relevant. I was most inspired by
the story told in chapter 3, The Green Monongahela, where the author
came to the aid of a student being unjustly and intentionally "ground
down" by the institution. She was an excellent reader far ahead of
her grade, but she was being held back in a class for poor readers as
punishment for "putting on airs." The author intervened in an
effective and fair way. This girl grew up to become an award winning
teacher. How's that for right livelihood, meaning, and satisfaction
in doing one's duty!
I know from personal experience that this type of institutional abuse
is real. I saw it happen to family members. It happens in both
rural and urban areas. It is not a matter of employee qualification.
The author makes some of the same points made by Booker T.
Washington. Most importantly, that book learning is meaningless
compared to real life learning that is useful to others. He
advocates a less abstract and more real-world style of learning where
a student's accomplishments actually mean something.
See also:
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
# Foreword
Learning can't take place in pieces of time cut out for the
convenience of an institution or in lessons set apart from the world
in which students live. We don't learn when life is divided up into
sections that have little connection with each other.
In my language, I'd like to see us educate the soul, and not just the
mind. The result would be a person who could be in this world
creatively, make good friendships, live in a place he loved, do work
that is rewarding, and make a contribution to the community.
Thomas Moore is the author of Care of the Soul
Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore
# Introduction
"Self-reliance," he [John Gatto] concludes, "is the antidote to
institutional stupidity."
Gatto provided, and continues to provide the key to comprehending
this conundrum. Central to this understanding is the fact that
schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly
successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what
they have been intended to do since their inception. The system,
perfected at places like the University of Chicago, Columbia Teachers
College, Carnegie-Mellon, and Harvard, and funded by the captains of
industry, was explicitly set up to ensure a docile, malleable
workforce to meet the growing, changing demands of corporate
capitalism... [ensuring a workforce] that will be physically,
intellectually, and emotionally dependent upon corporate institutions
for their incomes, self-esteem, and stimulation, and that will learn
to find social meaning in their lives solely in the production and
consumption of material goods.
...the obvious question that follows from this is this: If
educational institutions are so demonstrably successful, why are we
always hearing about their failures? ...to sell a product or
service, one must create the perception of need and the palpable
feeling that this need can only be filled exclusively through the
purchase of the product or service being sold. The simplistic notion
that "our schools are failing" easily translates into a limitless
demand for more resources for the institution and its supports...
...the truth is that no matter how much is expended in the
educational marketplace, 50% of the schools will remain "below
average", with those branded as poor performers changing from year to
year and those above the mid-point fearing, above all, that they will
fall into the abyss. And the copywriter has done his [or her] job
for, it is universally believed, the only response to a fall into
sub-mediocrity is to buy one's way out.
The reforms are therefore never completed. To do so would require
admitting failure, or worse, admitting that the failure is not
failure at all, only a continuing round in the socialized enforcement
of intellectual and emotional dependency... In the meantime, what
we're doing is like requiring our children to live in buildings that
are never finished, and never will be, and forcing them to breathe in
the noxious fumes and dirt and dust from the never-ending
construction.
Let's put it plainly: in Gatto's view, the Combine [the powers that
be] needs dumb adults, and so it ensures the supply by making the
kids dumb.
Gatto implies through his writing, his life, and his witness that he
does not believe individual solutions are likely to be the answer to
larger societal problems... But he has also demonstrated... that we
can only stand to gain by protecting and enlarging those meager zones
of freedom we inhabit
David Albert
# Publishers Note from the First Edition
The social philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote that, "The aim of
totalitarian education has never been to instill conviction but to
destroy the capacity to form any."
If one were to poll our nation's leading educators about what the
goal of our educational systems should be, I suspect one would come
up with as many goals as educators. But I also imagine that the
capacity to form one's own convictions independent of what was being
taught in the classroom, the ability to think critically based upon
one's own experience, would not rank high on many lists.
# About the Author
I'm here to talk to you about ideas, but I think a purpose might be
served in telling a little bit about myself so I become a person like
you rather than just another talking head...
I've worked as a New York City schoolteacher for the past thirty
years, teaching for some of that time elite children from Manhattan's
Upper West Side between Lincoln Center, where the opera is, and
Columbia University, where the defense contracts are; and teaching,
in most recent years, children from Harlem and Spanish Harlem whose
lives are shaped by the dangerous undercurrents of the industrial
city in decay.
My own perspective on things, however, was shaped a long way from New
York City, in the river town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania, forty
miles southeast of Pittsburgh. In those days, Monongahela was a
place of steel mills and coal mines, of paddle-wheel river steamers
churning the emerald green water chemical orange, of respect for hard
work and family life.
During that time, I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly
common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at
random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence-insight,
wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality-that I became
confused. They didn't do this often enough to make my teaching easy,
but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly,
whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was
dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge
children's power, but to diminish it? ...slowly I began to realize
that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the
age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and
all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed
exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning
how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent
behavior.
Bit by bit I began to devise guerrilla exercises to allow as many of
the kids I taught as possible the raw material people have always
used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from
surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human
associations as my limited power and resources could manage. In
simpler terms, I tried to maneuver them into positions where they
would have a chance to be their own teachers and to make themselves
the major text of their own education.
In other words, I dropped the idea that I was an expert whose job it
was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore
how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius
of children from gathering itself.
...the economy school-children currently expect to live under and
serve would not survive a generation of young people trained, for
example, to think critically.
I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are
structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central
myths are exposed and abandoned.
# Chapter 1, The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher
It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass
schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among
even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can
imagine a different way to do things.
Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of
3,000,000, of whom twenty percent were slaves and fifty percent
indentured servants.
Were the Colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing,
and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long
as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait
until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions
of people teach themselves these things-it really isn't very hard.
Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll
see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be
considered college level. The continuing cry for "basic skills"
practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of
children for twelve years and teach them the seven lessons I've just
described to you.
Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful
work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical
care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social
and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are
based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated
from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that
most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little
wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very
different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people
are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to
almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or
poor, school children who face the twenty-first century cannot
concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time
past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the
children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from
significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel,
materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the
unexpected, addicted to distraction.
No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical
thinking tools-like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices
that free minds should employ-would last very long before being torn
to pieces. In our secular society, school has become the replacement
for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be
taken on faith.
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method
of mass schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are
the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All
the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because
the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important
appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons
in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity,
and love-and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the
key lessons of home and community life.
Thirty years ago these lessons could still be learned in the time
left after school. But [screen time] has eaten up most of that time,
and a combination of [screen time] and the stresses peculiar to
two-income or single-parent families has swallowed up most of what
used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow
up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture that will insist that all
of us learn the wisdom of nonmaterial experience; a future that will
demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life
that is economical in material cost.
# Chapter 2, The Psychopathic School
We live in a time of great school crisis linked to an even greater
social crisis. Our nation ranks at the bottom of nineteen industrial
nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. At the very bottom!
Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world, and suicidal
kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor.
This great crisis that we witness in our schools is interlinked with
a greater social crisis in the community. We seem to have lost our
identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from
the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks
to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily
life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous
present.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching:
schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great
enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists
are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or
poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really
teach anything except how to obey orders. Although teachers do care
and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has
no conscience.
Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the
University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College
and by some other men to be instruments for the scientific management
of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the
application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be
predicted and controlled.
[Chapter 9 of There Is A Way contains interesting background
information about Herman Mann and the connection to German history
and Sparta.
Notes on There Is A Way
]
But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads,
writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of
talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most and so
our children talk constantly, following the public models of
television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the
"basics" anymore because they really aren't basic to the society
we've made.
Two institutions at present control our children's lives: [screen
time] and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real
world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a
never-ending, nonstop abstraction.
I want to tell you what the effect on our children is of us taking
all their time from them-time they need to grow up-and forcing them
to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this because any
reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be nothing
more than a facade.
* The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This
defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what
big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of
youth, but nobody wants children to grow up these days, least of
all the children themselves...
* The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little
they do have is transitory. They cannot concentrate for very long,
even on things they choose to do.
* The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how
tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they
live in a continuous present: the exact moment they are in is the
boundary of their consciousness.
* The children I teach are ahistorical: they have no sense of how
the past has predestinated their own present, limits their choices,
shapes their values and lives.
* The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack
compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness; they have
contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
* The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They
cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of
preserving a secret inner self...
* The children I teach are materialistic...
* The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the
presence of new challenges. This timidity is frequently masked by
surface bravado or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a
vacuum without fortitude.
It's a simple matter of arithmetic: between schooling and [screen
time], all the time the children have is eaten up. There simply
isn't enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be
other significant causes.
[This seems like an oversimplification to me because it disregards
the momentum of history. The society around us is an influence
including our family and schoolmates.]
It's high time we looked backwards to regain an educational
philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a
favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. ...
I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.
At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that
self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in
this system, at every age, you will find arrangements that work to
place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve.
Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as
Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs
house.
Right now we are taking from our children all the time that they need
to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent
school experiences that give a lot of that time back.
We've got to give kids independent time right away because that is
the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real
world as fast as possible so that their independent time can be spent
on something other than abstraction. This is an emergency-it
requires drastic action to correct.
Independent study, community service, adventures and experience,
large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different
apprenticeships-the one-day variety or longer-these are all powerful,
cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But
no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged
children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of
"school" to include family as the main engine of education. If we
use schooling to break children away from parents-and make no
mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John
Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650
and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools
in 1850-we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right
now.
Experts in education have never been right; their "solutions" are
expensive and self-serving and always involve further centralization.
We've seen the results.
It's time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family.
# Chapter 3, The Green Monongahela
In 1964, I was making a lot of money. That's what I walked away from
to become a teacher. I was a copy-writer on the fast track in
advertising, a young fellow with a knack for writing thirty-second
television commercials. My work required about one full day a month
to complete, the rest of the time being spent in power breakfasts,
after-work martinis at Michael's Pub, keeping up with the shifting
fortunes of about twenty agencies in order to gauge the right time to
jump ship for more money, and endless parties that always seemed to
culminate in colossal headaches.
It bothered me that all the urgencies of the job were generated
externally, but it bothered me more that the work I was doing seemed
to have very little importance-even to the people who were paying for
it. Worst of all, the problems this work posed were cut from such a
narrow spectrum that it was clear that past, present, and future were
to be of a piece: a twenty-nine-year-old man's work was no different
from a thirty-nine-year-old man's work or a forty-nine-year-old man's
work (though there didn't seem to be any forty-nine-year-old
copywriters-I had no idea why not).
[Then he became a substitute teacher.]
Occasionally I'd get a call from an elementary school. This
particular day it was a third grade assignment at a school on 107th
Street, which in those days was nearly one hundred percent
non-Hispanic in its teaching staff and 99% Hispanic in its student
body.
Like many desperate teachers, I lolled most of the day listening to
the kids read, one after another, and expending most of my energy
trying to shut the audience up. This class had a very low ranking,
and no one was able to put more than three or four words together
without stumbling. All of a sudden, though, a little girl named
Milagros sailed through a selection without a mistake. After class I
called her over to my desk and asked why she was in this class of bad
readers. She replied that "they" (the administration) wouldn't let
her out because, as they explained to her mother, she was really a
bad reader who had fantasies of being a better reader than she was.
"But look, Mr. Gatto, my brother is in the sixth grade, and I can
read every word in his English book better than he can!"
I was a little intrigued, but truthfully not much. Surely the
authorities knew what they were doing. Still, the little girl seemed
so frustrated I invited her to calm down and read to me from the
sixth grade book. I explained that if she did well, I would take her
case to the principal. I expected nothing.
Milagros, on the other hand, expected justice. Diving into "The
Devil and Daniel Webster," she polished off the first two pages
without a gulp. My God, I thought, this is a real reader. What is
she doing here? Well, maybe it was a simple accident, easily
corrected. I sent her home, promising to argue her case. Little did
I suspect what a hornet's nest my request to have Milagros moved to a
better class would stir up.
"You have some nerve, Mr. Gatto. I can't remember when a substitute
ever told me how to run my school before. Have you taken specialized
courses in reading?"
"No."
"Well then, suppose you leave these matters to the experts!"
"But the kid can read!"
"What do you suggest?"
"I suggest you test her, and if she isn't a dummy, get her out of the
class she's in!"
"I don't like your tone. None of our children are dummies, Mr.
Gatto. And you will find that girls like Milagros have many ways to
fool amateurs like yourself. This is a matter of a child having
memorized one story. You can see if I had to waste my time arguing
with people like you, I'd have no time left to run a school."
But, strangely, I felt self-appointed as the girl's champion, even
though I'd probably never see her again.
I insisted, and the principal finally agreed to test Milagros herself
the following Wednesday after school. I made it a point to tell the
little girl the next day ... My responsibility was over, I told
myself.
The following Wednesday after school I waited in the room for
Milagros' ordeal to be over. At 3:30 she shyly opened the door of
the room.
"How'd it go?" I asked.
"I don't know," she answered, "but I didn't make any mistakes. Mrs.
Hefferman was very angry, I could tell."
I saw Mrs. Hefferman, the principal, early the next morning before
school opened. "It seems we've made a mistake with Milagros," she
said curtly. "She will be moved, Mr. Gatto. Her mother has been
informed."
Several weeks later, when I got back to the school to sub, Milagros
dropped by, telling me she was in the fast class now and doing very
well. She also gave me a sealed card. When I got home that night, I
found it, unopened, in my suitcoat pocket. I opened it and saw a
gaudy birthday card with blue flowers on it. Opening the card, I
read, "A teacher like you cannot be found. Signed. Your student,
Milagros."
That simple sentence made me a teacher for life. It was the first
praise I'd ever heard in my working existence that had any meaning.
I never forgot it, though I never saw Milagros again and only heard
of her again in 1988, twenty-four years later. Then one day I picked
up a newspaper and read:
## Occupational Teacher Award
> Milagros M., United Federation of Teachers, has won the
> Distinguished Occupational Teacher Award of the State Education
> Department for "demonstrated achievement and exemplary
> professionalism." A secretarial studies teacher at Norman Thomas
> High School, New York City, from which she graduated, Miss M. was
> selected as a Manhattan Teacher of the Year in 1985 and was
> nominated the following year for the Woman of Conscience Award
> given by the National Council of Women.
# Chapter 4, We Need Less School, Not More
A surprising number of otherwise sensible people find it hard to see
why the scope and reach of our formal schooling networks should not
be increased (by extending the school day or year, for instance) in
order to provide an economical solution to the problems posed by the
decay of the American family. One reason for their preference, I
think, is that they have trouble understanding the real difference
between communities and networks, or even the difference between
families and networks.
Because of this confusion they conclude that replacing a bad network
with a good one is the right way to go. Since I disagree so strongly
with the fundamental premise that networks are workable substitutes
for families, and because from anybody's point of view a lot more
school is going to cost a lot more money, I thought I'd tell you why,
from a school teacher's perspective, we shouldn't be thinking of more
school, but of less.
What is gained from consulting a specialist and surrendering all
judgment is often more than outweighed by a permanent loss of one's
own volition. This discovery accounts for the curious texture of
real communication, where people argue with their doctors, lawyers,
and ministers, tell craftsmen what they want instead of accepting
what they get, frequently make their own food from scratch instead of
buying it in a restaurant or defrosting it, and perform many similar
acts of participation. A real community is, of course, a collection
of real families who themselves function in this participatory way.
Networks, however, don't require the whole person, but only a narrow
piece. If, on the other hand, you function in a network, it asks you
to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest
part-a highly unnatural act although one you can get used to. In
exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the pursuit of some
limited aim. This is, in fact, a devil's bargain, since on the
promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one's
present humanity. If you enter into too many of these bargains, you
will split yourself into many specialized pieces, none of them
completely human. And no time is available to reintegrate them.
The fragmentation caused by excessive networking creates diminished
humanity, a sense that our lives are out of control-because they are.
In spite of ritual moments like the Christmas party or the office
softball game-when individual human components in the network "go
home," they go home alone. And in spite of humanitarian support from
fellow workers that eases emergencies-when people in networks suffer,
they suffer alone, unless they have a family or community to suffer
with them.
It is a puzzling development, as yet poorly understood, that the
"caring" in networks is in some important way feigned. Not
maliciously, but in spite of any genuine emotional attractions that
might be there, human behavior in network situations often resembles
a dramatic act-matching a script produced to meet the demands of a
story. And, as such, the intimate moments in networks lack the
sustaining value of their counterparts in community.
If the loss of true community entailed by masquerading in networks is
not noticed in time, a condition arises in the victim's spirit very
much like the "trout starvation" that used to strike wilderness
explorers whose diet was made up exclusively of stream fish. While
trout quell the pangs of hunger-and even taste good-the eater
gradually suffers for want of sufficient nutrients.
By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by
locking young people up with other young people exactly their own
age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to
think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by
grading people the way we grade vegetables-and in a dozen other vile
and stupid ways-network schools steal the vitality of communities and
replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with
their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators,
and not parents.
A community is a place in which people face each other over time in
all their human variety: good parts, bad parts, and all the rest.
Such places promote the highest quality of life possible-lives of
engagement and participation.
Networks of urban reformers will convene to consider the problems of
homeless vagrants, but a community will think of its vagrants as real
people, not abstractions. Ron, Dave or Marty-a community will call
its bums by their names. It makes a difference.
Who can deny that networks can get some jobs done? They do. But
they lack any ability to nourish their members emotionally.
Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each
other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a
task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being
alive. Networks make people lonely.
Whatever "caring" really means, it means something more than simple
companionship or even the comradeship of shared interests.
By isolating young and old from the working life of places and by
isolating the working population from the lives of young and old,
institutions and networks have brought about a fundamental
disconnection of the generations. The griefs that arise from this
have no synthetic remedy; no vibrant, satisfying communities can come
into being where young and old are locked away.
The deepest purposes of these gigantic networks are to regulate and
to make uniform. Since the logic of family and community is to give
scope to variety around a central theme, whenever institutions
intervene significantly in personal affairs they cause much damage.
...think of the New York City public school system in which I work,
one of the largest business organizations on planet Earth. While the
education administered by this abstract parent is ill-regarded by
everybody, the institution's right to compel its clientele to accept
such dubious service is still guaranteed by the police. And forces
are gathering to expand its reach still further-in the face of every
evidence that it has been a disaster throughout its history.
One thing I do know, though: most of us who've had a taste of loving
families, even a little taste, want our kids to be part of one. One
other thing I know is that eventually you have to come to be part of
a place-part of its hills and streets and waters and people-or you
will live a very, very sorry life as an exile forever. Discovering
meaning for yourself as well as discovering satisfying purpose for
yourself, is a big part of what education is.
The quality-competition of businesses (when it actually happens) is
generally a good thing for customers; it keeps businesses on their
toes, doing their best. The competition inside an institution like a
school isn't the same thing at all. ... The culture of schools only
coheres in response to a web of material rewards and punishments:
A's, F's, bathroom passes, gold stars, "good" classes, access to a
photocopy machine. Everything we know about why people drive
themselves to know things and do their best is contradicted inside
these places.
When the integration of life that comes from being part of a family
in a community is unattainable, the only alternative, apart from
accepting a life in isolation, is to search for an artificial
integration into one of the many expressions of network currently
available. But it's a bad trade!
Yet it appears to me as a schoolteacher that schools are already a
major cause of weak families and weak communities. They separate
parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from
true curiosity about each other's lives. Schools stifle family
originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound
idea of family to develop-then they blame the family for its failure
to be a family. It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph
from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the
photographer incompetent.
Private time is absolutely essential if a private identity is going
to develop, and private time is equally essential to the development
of a code of private values, without which we aren't really
individuals at all. Children and families need some relief from
government surveillance and intimidation if original expressions
belonging to them are to develop. Without these freedom has no
meaning.
Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its
daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and
intimidation. The schools we've allowed to develop can't work to
teach nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone's
life, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held
together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and
sticks.
Sixty-five years ago Bertrand Russell, one of the great
mathematicians of this century, its greatest philosopher, and a close
relation of the King of England to boot, saw that mass schooling in
the United States had a profoundly anti-democratic intent, that it
was a scheme to artificially deliver national unity by eliminating
human variation and by eliminating the forge that produces variation:
the family. According to Lord Russell, mass schooling produced a
recognizably American student: anti-intellectual, superstitious,
lacking self-confidence, and having less of what Russell called
"inner freedom" than his or her counterpart in any other nation he
knew of, past or present.
# Chapter 5, The Congregational Principle
These are surrealistic times. The scientific school establishment
continues to float plans for further centralization in the form of
national standards, a national curriculum, and improved national
standardized testing. Magical promises are everywhere: machines are
the answer; massive interventions are the answer; new forms of
pre-schooling are the answer; baseball bats, bullhorns, and padlocks
are the answer. In the face of a century and a half of searching for
it unsuccessfully, nobody seems to doubt for a minute that there is
an answer. One answer. The one right answer.
Most people think of Colonial New England as embodying the greatest
period of conformity this country has ever seen. But the nature of
Congregationalism hides a very great irony: structurally, this way of
life demands individuality, not regimentation. The service is almost
free of liturgy, emphasizing local preaching about local issues.
This virtually guarantees dissonance inside the congregation. The
constant struggle for clarity by every church member acting as his or
her own priest, his or her own expert, invariably leads to progress
toward truth. ... The Congregational procedure was dialectical down
to its roots, in a way acutely hostile to hierarchical thinking.
Central planners of any period despise the dialectic because it gets
in the way of efficiently broadcasting "one right way" to do things.
Half a century ago Bertrand Russell remarked that the United States
was the only major country on earth that deliberately avoided
teaching its children to think dialectically.
Now I want us to examine something that seems embarrassing in New
England civil life; and yet, paradoxically, I think it hides a secret
of great power, which the social engineers who built and maintain our
government monopoly schools are forced to overlook: Each town was
able to exclude people it didn't like! People were able to choose
whom they wanted to work with, to sort themselves into a living
curriculum that worked for them. The words of the first Dedham
charter catch this feeling perfectly; the original settlers wanted to
(and did) shut out "people whose dispositions do not suit us, whose
society will be hurtful to us." So in a funny way these early towns
functioned like selective clubs or colleges, like MIT and Harvard do
today, narrowing human differences down to a range that could be
managed by them humanely. If you consider the tremendous stresses
the dialectical process sets up anyway-where all people are their own
priests, their own final masters-it's hard to see how a
congregational society can do otherwise. If you have to accept
everyone, no matter how hostile they may be to your own personality,
philosophy, or mission, then an operation would quickly become
paralyzed by fatal disagreements.
It's a subtle distinction: living dialectically as the New Englanders
did produces spectacular accomplishments and brings out strong
qualities of character and mind in individuals, but it isn't possible
to manage where the whole catalogue of human beings is thrown
together haphazardly or forced together, as it is in government
monopoly school life.
These New Englanders invented a system where people who wanted to
live and work together could do so. Yet the whole region seemed to
prosper in wonderful ways: materially, intellectually, and socially.
It was almost as if by taking care of your own business you succeeded
in some magical fashion in taking care of pubic business too. The
habits of self-reliance, self-respect, fearlessness, democracy, and
local loyalty produced good citizens.
...the negative side of local choice is very easy to see and even
very easy to predict. We see it illustrated in the example of
Colonial Dedham. But the whole matter is a good deal more
complicated than assigning a bad grade to religious discrimination or
to any other type of social choice that prescribes and limits a
particular kind of human association. For instance, where could we
begin to look for an explanation of how these people grew gradually
more tolerant and came to accept all forms of religion? They even
changed their conservative ways to the point where Massachusetts
gained a national reputation as the most liberal state in the Union.
That's quite a flip-flop to account for in the absence of compulsion,
intimidation, or potent enabling legislation, isn't it. How did
Dedham and the rest of those towns teach themselves to reform without
experts making them do it and without central intervention? ... And
nobody forced them to do it! Something mysterious inside the
structure of Congregationalism worked to have them abandon some of
the exclusivity that adherence to Biblical elite dogma had taught
them.
I am certain that "something" was nearly unconditional local choice.
And it was self-correcting!
Yes, the negative aspects of local choice are easy to spot, and the
overwhelming argument in its favor-that without it the genius of
democracy cannot exist-is hard to see. Because there is plenty of
local tyranny as well, the temptation is to cede power to a central
authority in the name of fairness, to manage some best way for all
from central headquarters. That's what a national curriculum is
supposed to be for schools, a rational, fair way to legislate bad
schooling out of existence. A national curriculum would never have
allowed Dedham or Sudbury or Framingham or Wellfleet to develop as
they did; that would have been dangerous, unpredictable, divisive...
And here comes the dialectic. The experience of our centrally
planned century has not been very good for most people. According to
some, the planet itself is in jeopardy. And things legislated out of
existence, like alcohol and drug abuse or racism, don't seem to go
away...
The Congregationalists understood profoundly that good things happen
to the human spirit when it is left alone.
The best immediate evidence I have to offer, that leaving people
alone to work out their own local destinies is a splendid idea, is
the curious sociology of my presence as a speaker in Dedham last
year. There, in a community that had whipped half-naked Quaker
women, stood I-a Roman Catholic with a Scots Presbyterian wife,
accompanied by my good friend Roland, half pagan, half Jewish-in a
Unitarian Universalist church that had once been Congregational. No
act of the Massachusetts legislature made that possible, no
pronouncement of the Supreme Court. People learned to be neighbors
in Dedham because for three hundred years they were allowed real
choice, including the choice to make their own mistakes. Everyone
learned a better way to deal with difference than exclusion because
they had time to think about it and to work it through-time measured
in generations.
By allowing the imposition of direction from centers far beyond our
control, we have time and again missed the lesson of the
Congregational principle: people are less than whole unless they
gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony.
Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family, and community
dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them
whole; only slaves are gathered by others.
many of us, the greatest attraction of social engineering and
antisocial demonologies is that both, at bottom, promise a quick
fix. That has always been the dark side of the American dream, the
search for an easy way out, a belief in magic. The endless parade
of promises that constitutes the heart of American advertising, one
of the largest of our national enterprises, testifies to the deep
well of superstition in our national foundation, which has been
institutionalized in the advertising business. Easy money, easy
health, easy beauty, easy education-if only the right incantation
can be found. Lurking behind the magic is an image of people as
machinery that can be built and repaired.
The old Congregationalists would have been able to put their finger
at once on the reason pyramidal societies, such as the one our
monopoly form of schooling sustains, must always end in apathy and
disorganization. At the root they are based on the lie that there is
"one right way" in human affairs and that experts can be awarded the
permanent direction of the enterprise of education. It is a lie
because the changing dynamics of time and situation and locality
render expertise irrelevant and obsolete shortly after it is anointed.
Monopoly schooling is the major cause of our loss of national and
individual identity. ... Its strength arises from many quarters,
the antichild, antifamily stream of history being one-but it draws it
greatest power from being a natural adjunct to the kind of commercial
economy we have that requires permanently dissatisfied consumers.
What is there to do? Turn your back on national solutions and toward
communities of families as successful laboratories. Let us turn
inward until we master the first directive of any philosophy worthy
of the name: "Know Thyself." Understand that successful communities
know the truth of the maxim "Good fences make good neighbors," while
at the same time being able to recognize, respect, understand,
appreciate, and learn from each other's differences.
Teaching must, I think, be decertified as quickly as possible. That
certified teaching experts like me are deemed necessary to make
learning happen is a fraud and a scam. Look around you: the results
of teacher-college licensing are in the schools you see. ... Trust
in families and neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the
important question, "What is education for?" It is illegitimate to
have an expert answer that question for you.
# Afterword (2002)
How did I come to write Dumbing Us Down? When I won the first of my
Teacher of the Year awards in 1990, I intended to do nothing at the
ceremony except to thank the presenter and to wave at my daughter in
the audience or, if I were bold enough, to ask her to the podium for
a public hug (I was; I did). But on the evening before the ceremony,
a student from many years past called to offer congratulations. He
casually asked what I intended by way of remarks.
Remarks? I set him straight, or so I thought. "Nobody," I told him,
"wants to hear a public school teacher make a speech." There would
be no remarks.
"But you have to make speech," he demanded. "You have to speak for
me, for Wendy, for Amy, for Bruce, for Tamir, for Janet, Jane, Jill,
Andy; for all your classes over the years you have to sum up what
it's all meant."
"No one will listen," I said.
"I'll listen," he said.
And so that's how "The Psychopathic School" came to be written, in
one blaze of all-night coffee-drenched passion.
"The Psychopathic School," the key essay in this book, deals with a
number of pathological patterns I had noticed in schoolchildren over
the years, in rich kids as well as in poor.
Giving these speeches (and there were others, each a chapter in this
book) led directly to another phenomenon, which challenged some of my
most dearly-held assumptions: there was an outpouring of invitations
to speak to groups so diverse that, had they been assembled together
in one room, they surely would have killed one another!
Although I altered the rhetorical clothing to fit the various
audiences and situations, my core message was (and remains) that
forced institutional schooling is absolutely unreformable because it
is already an unqualified success! It does brilliantly precisely
what it was originally designed to do, that is, to be the
"educational" component of a centralized mass production economy
directed from a handful of command centers. Such an economy has
desperate needs: in order to work, it requires a particular kind of
"human resource," specifically one driven to define itself by
purchasing things, by owning "stuff," by evaluating everything from
the perspective of comfort, physical security, and status.
Schools are a great mechanism to condition the onrushing generations
to accept total management, to impose a kind of lifelong childishness
on most of us in the interests of scientific management. Efficient
management requires incomplete people to manage because whole people,
or those who aspire to wholeness, reject extended tutelage. It's
impossible to grow up under total management, whether that's total
quality management or any other version.
# Postscript (2005)
On April 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article
about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School.
Headlined "Rendered Speechless," the report was subtitled "Advocate
for education reform brings controversy to Highland.
The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when
the second half of John Gatto's presentation was canceled by the
School Superintendent, "following complaints from the Highland
Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial."
What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school
authorities called the police to intervene and 'restore the peace'
which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the
student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A
scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents
Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities
in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free
assembly...
There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance
of John Taylor Gatto's work, and of this small book, than this sorry
tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto's ideas, their urgency,
and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still
trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication,
afraid even to debate them.
author: Gatto, John Taylor
LOC: LA2317.G33 A3
tags: ebook,non-fiction
title: Dumbing Us Down
# Tags
ebook
non-fiction
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