O’DonnellWeb

I pulled this quote out to its own post because it is so germane to the current discussion on several home education sites about cyber charters and the danger they pose to the home education movement.

In a New York Times description of the first “Edison Project” school in Sherman, Texas?a system of proprietary schools supplying a home computer for every child, e-mail, longer school days and years, and “the most high-tech school in America” (as Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale, put it)?the local superintendent gloated over what he must have regarded as the final solution to the student-control issue: ” Can you imagine what this means if you?re home sick? The teacher can just put stuff in the student?s e-mail….There?s no place to hide anymore!”

No school superintendent will ever “put stuff” in my child’s email.

In Chapter 6, Gatto continues his exploration of the people and ideals that led to forced schooling. In short, the ruling class saw that the industrialization of America and the movement of people into the higher density living environment of the cities provided an opportunity. It was an unlikely collaboration of New England Puritans, who believed that the idle time provided by non farm work would lead to debauchery (they were probably right!), and idealist social planners who thought they could manage us to a Utopian ideal.

Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as “The Order of the Quest,” all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality.

Gatto spends several pages discussing the role of children’s literature in the plans of the Utopian planners. I found this section completely fascinating. It was something I had never thought through before.

Until 1875, about 75 percent of all children?s titles dealt with some aspect of the future?usually salvation. Over the next forty years this idea vanished completely. As Comte and Saint-Simon had strongly advised, the child was to be relieved of concerning itself with the future. The future would be arranged for children and for householders by a new expert class, and the need to do God?s will was now considered dangerous superstition by men in charge.

1845 – 1920 were the crucial years that laid the foundation for all that was to come. Massachusetts started implementing forced schooling in 1850, but it took 70 years for the practice to become the norm. Consider this.

When you consider how bizarre and implausible much of the conformist machinery put in place during this critical period really was?and especially how long and successfully all sorts of people resisted this kind of encroachment on fundamental liberty?it becomes clear that to understand things like universal medical policing, income tax, national banking systems, secret police, standing armies and navies which demand constant tribute, universal military training, standardized national examinations, the cult of intelligence tests, compulsory education, the organization of colleges around a scheme called “research” (which makes teaching an unpleasant inconvenience), the secularization of religion, the rise of specialist professional monopolies sanctioned by their state, and all the rest of the “progress” made in these seventy-five years, you have to find reasons to explain them. Why then? Who made it happen? What was the point?

He drops this following thought in at the very end of the chapter. This is a paragraph I’ve read about 6 times in the last 10 minutes. It’s not that I don’t understand the paragraph, I do. However, I’m finding the implication contained in this to be quite frightening as it’s a very serious shock to my capitalistic world view.

Erich Fromm thought Bellamy had missed the strong similarities between corporate socialism and corporate capitalism?that both converge eventually in goals of industrialization, that both are societies run by a managerial class and professional politicians, both thoroughly materialistic in outlook; both organize human masses into a centralized system; into large, hierarchically arranged employment-pods, into mass political parties. In both, alienated corporate man?well-fed, well-clothed, well-entertained?is governed by bureaucrats. Governing has no goals beyond this. At the end of history men are not slaves, but robots. This is the vision of utopia seen complete.

Chapter 5 is a tough chapter. Gatto returns to the idea that forced schooling was a planned and deliberate attempt to separate the few worthy of an education from the masses that would be happier just being told what to do each day. He ties together several seemingly disparate movements and the personalities behind them. It’s a little tough to grok on the first reading.

Here in a brief progression is one window on the problem of modern schooling. It set out to build a new social order at the beginning of the twentieth century (and by 1970 had succeeded beyond all expectations), but in the process it crippled the democratic experiment of America, disenfranchising ordinary people, dividing families, creating wholesale dependencies, grotesquely extending childhoods. It emptied people of full humanity in order to convert them into human resources.

We are introduced to many of the players of the early 20th century. Gatto refers to them as true believers, ideologues who believed humans were malleable, and under their grand direction, a Utopian society could be formed if just everybody could be kept in their place. It was the schools job to sort them out.

One in particular who had maybe more influence on the direction of forced schooling that anybody else is William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906.

Harris believed that children were property and that the state had a compelling interest in disposing of them as it pleased. Some would receive intellectual training, most would not.

Harris was inspired by the notion that correctly managed mass schooling would result in a population so dependent on leaders that schism and revolution would be things of the past. If a world state could be cobbled together by Hegelian tactical manipulation, and such a school plan imposed upon it, history itself would stop. No more wars, no civil disputes, just people waiting around pleasantly like the Eloi in Wells? The Time Machine. Waiting for Teacher to tell them what to do. The psychological tool was alienation. The trick was to alienate children from themselves so they couldn?t turn inside for strength, to alienate them from their families, religions, cultures, etc., so that no countervailing force could intervene.

Notice how they present this as being good for everybody. After all, who could be against no more wars, or civil disputes? It sounds perfectly reasonable.

Chapter 5 is a tough chapter. Gatto returns to the idea that forced schooling was a planned and deliberate attempt to separate the few worthy of an education from the masses that would be happier just being told what to do each day. He ties together several seemingly disparate movements and the personalities behind them. It’s a little tough to grok on the first reading.

Here in a brief progression is one window on the problem of modern schooling. It set out to build a new social order at the beginning of the twentieth century (and by 1970 had succeeded beyond all expectations), but in the process it crippled the democratic experiment of America, disenfranchising ordinary people, dividing families, creating wholesale dependencies, grotesquely extending childhoods. It emptied people of full humanity in order to convert them into human resources.

We are introduced to many of the players of the early 20th century. Gatto refers to them as true believers, ideologues who believed humans were malleable, and under their grand direction, a Utopian society could be formed if just everybody could be kept in their place. It was the schools job to sort them out.

One in particular who had maybe more influence on the direction of forced schooling that anybody else is William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906.

Harris believed that children were property and that the state had a compelling interest in disposing of them as it pleased. Some would receive intellectual training, most would not.

Harris was inspired by the notion that correctly managed mass schooling would result in a population so dependent on leaders that schism and revolution would be things of the past. If a world state could be cobbled together by Hegelian tactical manipulation, and such a school plan imposed upon it, history itself would stop. No more wars, no civil disputes, just people waiting around pleasantly like the Eloi in Wells? The Time Machine. Waiting for Teacher to tell them what to do. The psychological tool was alienation. The trick was to alienate children from themselves so they couldn?t turn inside for strength, to alienate them from their families, religions, cultures, etc., so that no countervailing force could intervene.

Notice how they present this as being good for everybody. After all, who could be against no more wars, or civil disputes? It sounds perfectly reasonable.

In Chapter 4, Gatto briefly recounts his 30 year career as a public school teacher. It’s not the most exciting chapter, mostly a collection of stories to illustrate his central thesis that kids don’t belong in school. A few interesting quotes…

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’ve notice this myself, and have mentioned on this site several times. It’s universal to public school kids.

The highest school priorities are administrative coherence, student predictability, and institutional stability; children doing well or poorly are incidental to the main administrative mission.

Job one of any bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy. Independent minded kids don’t help in that mission.

About one kid in five in my experience is in acute torment from the intimidation of peers, maybe more are driven to despair by the indifference of official machinery. What the hounded souls can?t possibly see is that from a system standpoint, they are the problem with their infernal whining, not their persecutors.

Bullying in the public schools is a persistent problem. Really, it’s a problem anytime kids congregate away from adult supervision. And even with metal detectors at the doors and drug dogs roaming the hallways, kids in school are for the most part unsupervised.

A relative handful of people could change the course of schooling significantly by resisting the suffocating advance of centralization and standardization of children, by being imaginative and determined in their resistance, by exploiting manifold weaknesses in the institution?s internal coherence: the disloyalty its own employees feel toward it. It took 150 years to build this apparatus; it won?t quit breathing overnight. The formula is to take a deep breath, then select five smooth stones and let fly. The homeschoolers have already begun.

Yes, we have.

Process kids like sardines and don?t be surprised when they come out oily and dead. In the words of the Albany Free School, if you aren?t making it up as you go along, you aren?t doing it right

And finally, Mr. Gatto pretty much says it all in one sentence.

My life experience taught me that school isn?t a safe place to leave your children.

Chapter 3 of The Underground History of American Education is a survey of the history of literacy and reading in America. It is also quite possibly the most infuriating material I have ever read. I literally had to stop and refocus several times as the magnitude of what the schools did to literacy became clear to me.

Simply put, forced education turned us from the most literate nation on the planet to a nation of people unable to understand the instructions on a prescription bottle. The military measures literacy as part of the pre-draft induction. At the start of WWII 96% of draftees passed. At the start of the Korean War only a decade later, 81% passed. Vietnam era draftees failed the test 27% of the time. In one generation, the literacy rate in America, as measured by a huge sample of randomly selected draftees, went from 96% to 73%. The military is not asking anybody to read Shakespeare to get in. They are only looking for a 4th grade reading level.

Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:

After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren?t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn?t.

I went to DoD schools for most of my K-12 life. I remember learning to sound words out and being drilled over and over again on the basic phonics that make up all words. DoD apparently stuck with what worked in their schools.

At this point, you are probably wondering did happen in the schools. The answer is simple. Whole Language Reading. Phonics was abandoned in the 30′s. Gatto provides a devastating take down of the Whole Language movement. This probably sums it up as well as anything.

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. Your librarian should be able to locate a copy for you without much trouble. 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.”

The bottom line is that people are not little plastic lumps of human dough, and you can’t teach them to read (or do anything else) as though they were.

Even if your not up for the assault on Whole language Reading, you should at least read page 1 of Chapter 3 for Gatto’s delightful description of the the differences between a school book and a real book as evidenced by the differences between a classroom and a library. I’ll end this with just a taste.

The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don?t do that. Real books demand people actively participate by asking their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren?t just stupid, they hurt the mind under the guise of helping it?exactly the way standardized tests do. Real books, unlike schoolbooks, can?t be standardized. They are eccentric; no book fits everyone.

I don?t mean to be inflammatory, but it?s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.

Yikes! Summarizing this chapter is just a few sentences is tough. Basically, Gatto claims that forced schooling was a conspiracy set in motion by wealthy industrialists like Rockefeller who understood that the American economy of the 20th century would need a large army of factory drones to man the lines of production. So they worked with a very willing government to put in place a system of forced schooling based on the school system in Prussia that would produce a generation of people with no ambition beyond their next paycheck.

Sound preposterous? Yeah, I sort of think so too. The simplest solution is usually right, and a massive conspiracy that was widely successful is difficult to believe. On the surface, I would think public education is more of a happy accident than a well thought out and planned initiative.

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

-President Woodrow Wilson, just prior to WWI.

Just a few months before this report was released, an executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected “to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.”

The report mentioned is The Geneticist’s Manifesto, in which Hermann M?ller reported on his experiments using X-rays to override genetic law in fruit flies. Mueller believed human behavior could be scientifically controlled and exploited. Mueller believed the state must be ready to direct human sexual behavior, and that schools were the place to separate the breeders from those slated for termination. Muller was not just some random quack. He received a Nobel prize and was highly influential with Rockefeller, who at this time was spending more on schools that the entire US Government.

Scary stuff indeed.

Lest you think this is all ancient history,

In 1973, Catherine Barrett, president of the National Education Association, said, “Dramatic changes in the way we raise our children are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling…we will be agents of change.

One more thought from Gatto.

Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about.

He makes a very good case. However, I can’t bring myself to really believe the depth of conspiracy that Gatto is exposing. I think the thought that they could do that is just too frightening to contemplate. Because if a small group of wealthy and powerful men, helped by the government, really can ruin our children like this, what else can they do? What else have they already done?

I’m going to try to read Gatto’s classic online over the next few weeks, one chapter per night, more of less. I started tonight with Chapter 1 (big surprise, eh?), The Way It Used to Be.

Chapter 1 is primarily a survey of school throughout history, with the central points being that

• Most of our great leaders and thinkers spent very little time in formal school
• School, where is existed, was primarily a tool used to keep the lower classes uneducated so they would not threaten the status quo.
• Kids are capable of much more than we give them credit for today.

A few quotes that struck me as particulatly interesting…

Something in the structure of schooling calls forth violence. While latter-day schools don?t allow energetic physical discipline, certainly they are state-of-the-art laboratories in humiliation, as your own experience should remind you.

With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?

I?ve yet to meet a parent in public school who ever stopped to calculate the heavy, sometimes lifelong price their children pay for the privilege of being rude and ill-mannered at school. I haven?t met a public school parent yet who was properly suspicious of the state?s endless forgiveness of bad behavior for which the future will be merciless.

No public school in the United States is set up to allow a George Washington to happen. Washingtons in the bud stage are screened, browbeaten, or bribed to conform to a narrow outlook on social truth. Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.