July 06, 2005

It's an education carnival

or more accurately...it's the 22nd Carnival of Education. My series on An Underground History of American Education is linked.

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July 03, 2005

Gatto - A final word

I hope ya'll enjoyed the process as much as I did. The pressure of having "readers" definately motivated me to slog through the final few chapters. He does get a bit repetitive at the end. I had so much fun with this that I want to pick another book and do it again.

Does anybody have a suggestion? The Teenage Liberation Handbook comes to mind, as my oldest is rapidly approaching teenagerhood. Also, we aren't unschoolers, so I think the unschooling perspective would be good for me.

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July 02, 2005

Gatto Chapter 18 - Breaking out of the trap (Part II)

If you've stuck with me this far, you know the origins of the public school system and you understand just how well it has achieved its initial goals. I might go as far to say it's the most successful conspiracy applied to a mass audience in the history of mankind.

At the heart of any school reforms that aren’t simply tuning the mudsill mechanism lie two beliefs: 1) That talent, intelligence, grace, and high accomplishment are within the reach of every kid, and 2) That we are better off working for ourselves than for a boss. But how on earth can you believe these things in the face of a century of institution-shaping/economy-shaping monopoly schooling which claims something different?

What makes us different? Why do such a small percentage of us see this and act on it?

Here is the crux of the dilemma: modern schooling has no lasting value to exchange for the spectacular chunk of living time it wastes or the possibilities it destroys. The kids know it, their parents know it, you know it, I know it, and the folks who administer the medicine know it. School is a fool’s bargain, we are fools for accepting its dry beans in exchange for our children.

And yet so few are willing to do something about it. Did they really do that good of a job of killing off self reliance? Are people just lazy?

If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they’ll be okay.

I both agree and disagree with Gatto here. Certainly, schools kills the basic instinct for self education in the first and second grade. There is simply no other explanation for how kids teach themselves to walk and talk before age 4, yet become almost feeble minded by 2nd or 3rd grade, completely unable to do anything without explicit direction from an authority figure.

However, the Lord of Flies world that is junior high is at least as destructive. I'm not sure that even the most exceptional of kids will have the internal fortitude to avoid the corrosive effects of the American Junior High School. I say you have to keep them out the system until about age 14. I think most home educated kids will be able to survive high school if necessary. Although I suspect most of them by that time would rather be dipped in honey and dropped on a fire ant hill, over being subjected to school after 14 years of thriving without it.

And now Gatto provides his ultimate solution.

If we closed all government schools, made free libraries universal, encouraged public discussion groups everywhere, sponsored apprenticeships for every young person who wanted one, let any person or group who asked to open a school do so—without government oversight—paid parents (if we have to pay anyone) to school their kids at home using the money we currently spend to confine them in school factories, and launched a national crash program in family revival and local economies, Amish and Mondragon style, the American school nightmare would recede.

The only thing I would add is that we absolutely cannot pay anybody with public funds. Return the tax money to the parents and let them use it as they see fit.

Gatto acknowledges that the above will never happen , and provides the basic summary of his next book, how to go to school and still get an education. Interestingly, his prescription has a lot in common with the "community as one big community college" model of education I have discussed on occasion. He essentially recommends de-professionalizing education by getting out of the schools and into the real world. No standards, no oversight, no mandatory anything. Unleash millions of bright inquisitive minds on their particular worlds, and let a million seeds bloom.

He also recommends:

The final word, appropriately, goes to Gatto.

One-system schooling has had a century and a half to prove itself. It is a ghastly failure. Children need the widest possible range of roads in order to find the right one to accommodate themselves. The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody. Tax credits, vouchers, and other more sophisticated means are necessary to encourage a diverse mix of different school logics of growing up. Only sharp competition can reform the present mess; this needs to be an overriding goal of public policy. Neither national nor state government oversight is necessary to make a voucher/tax credit plan work: a modicum of local control, a disclosure law with teeth, and a policy of client satisfaction or else is all the citizen protection needed. It works for supermarkets and doctors. It will work for schools, too, without national testing.
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Gatto Chapter 18 - Breaking out of the trap

After the torture of trying to read about the politics of schools in chapter 17, I was quite happy to dive in the 18th and final chapter of the book. In chapter 18, Gatto ties it all together for us. An overview of what we've learned, interlaced with examples of real life kids that succeeded outside of the system, followed by Gatto's ideal solution, and then some real world suggestions.

It's a lot of material, so I'm going to break it up into two posts. This post covers the problem, hopefully neatly summarized into a few paragraphs, and then I'll do another post to cover Gatto's solutions.

During the industrial revolution, American business leaders became acutely aware of the need for a steady supply of factory workers to man the rapidly growing industrial infrastructure of the US. Unfortunately for them, the typical man in the US at the time was a farmer or sole proprietor that had no interest in giving up self sufficiently for a regular paycheck. In fact, back then, a job was something you did maybe for a few months during the winter when the farm was dormant, or it was something you did when young to learn a trade that would enable self sufficiency. If you worked for somebody else long term you were generally considered a failure.

The intent was not malicious. Like all classical liberals, these folks truly believed that they were smarter than the common man and were in a position to help us by providing secure jobs in their great factories. If only they could get us off the farm...

School was how they did it. By breaking the early family bond where the values of self sufficiency and family were naturally passed on, the business community, with the support of the government, was able to wipe out the tenant of self sufficiency in about one generation.

If you can detach yourself from the horror of it all for just a moment, it's really a remarkable achievement in mass behavioral change.

Gatto summarizes all this in nine major assumptions that must be acknowledged as false if you hope to rise above the mediocrity of forced schooling and achieve true education.

1) Universal government schooling is the essential force for social cohesion. There is no other way. A heavily bureaucratized public order is our defense against chaos and anarchy. Right, and if you don’t wipe your bum properly, the toilet monster will rise out of the bowl and get you.
2) The socialization of children in age-graded groups monitored by State agents is essential to learn to get along with others in a pluralistic society. The actual truth is that the rigid compartmentalizations of schooling teach a crippling form of social relation: wait passively until you are told what to do, never judge your own work or confer with associates, have contempt for those younger than yourself and fear of those older. Behave according to the meaning assigned to your class label. These are the rules of a nuthouse. No wonder kids cry and become fretful after first grade.
3) Children from different backgrounds and from families with different beliefs must be mixed together. The unexamined inference here is that in this fashion they enlarge their understanding, but the actual management of classrooms everywhere makes only the most superficial obeisance to human difference—from the first, a radical turn toward some unitarian golden mean is taken, along the way of which different backgrounds and different beliefs are subtly but steadily discredited.
4) The certified expertise of official schoolteachers is superior in its knowledge of children to the accomplishments of lay people, including parents. Protecting children from the uncertified is a compelling public concern. Actually, the enforced long-term segregation of children from the working world does them great damage, and the general body of men and women certified by the State as fit to teach is nearly the least fit occupational body in the entire economy if college performance is the standard.
5) Coercion in the name of education is a valid use of State power: compelling assemblies of children into specified groupings for prescribed intervals and sequences with appointed overseers does not interfere with academic learning. Were you born yesterday? Plato said, "Nothing of value to the individual happens by coercion."
6) Children will inevitably grow apart from their parents in belief, and this process must be encouraged by diluting parental influence and disabusing children of the idea their parents are sovereign in mind or morality. That prescription alone has been enough to cripple the American family. The effects of forced disloyalty on family are hideously destructive, removing the only certain support the growing spirit has to refer to. In place of family the school offers phantoms like "ambition," "advancement," and "fun," nightmare harbingers of the hollow life ahead.
7) An overriding concern of schooling is to protect children from bad parents. No wonder G. Stanley Hall, the father of school administration, invited Sigmund Freud to the United States in 1909—it was urgent business to establish a "scientific" basis upon which to justify the anti-family stance of State schooling, and the programmatic State in general.
8) It is not appropriate for any family to unduly concern itself with the education of its own children, although it is appropriate to sacrifice for the general education of everyone in the hands of State experts. This is the standard formula for all forms of socialism and the universal foundation of utopian promises.
9) The State is the proper parent and has predominant responsibility for training, morals, and beliefs. This is the parens patriae doctrine of Louis XIV, king of France, a tale unsuited to a republic.

Gatto sees hope for the future though. He sees hope in unabashed capitalism that defines Silicon Valley. As somebody who has rode the Internet wave since it was a ripple in 1996, I can assure you that the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley only goes so far. Dangle a $2 million government contract in front of a SV entrepreneur he'll latch on to the government teat so fast it'll make your head spin.

It can only be a matter of time before America rides on the back of the computer age into a new form of educational schooling once called for by Adam Smith, that and a general reincorporation of children back into the greater social body from which they were excised a century and more ago will cure the problem of modern schooling

We'll see, but I wouldn't bet on it.

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July 01, 2005

Gatto Chapter 17 - The Politics of Schooling

I just can't do it. I tried, I really tried. I read the first few pages, then I skimmed the rest. I can't read it in depth. It's too depressing. It's also the longest chapter in the book. That alone says enough.

This was the paragraph that pushed me over the edge and killed my will to continue.

By the end of 1999, 75.5 million people out of a total population of 275 million were involved directly in providing and receiving what has come to be called education. And an unknown number of millions indirectly. About 67 million were enrolled in schools and colleges (38 million in K-8, 14 million in secondary schools, 15 million in colleges,) 4 million employed as teachers or college faculty (2 million elementary; 2 million secondary and college combined), and 4.5 million in some other school capacity. In other words, the primary organizing discipline of about 29 percent of the entire U.S. population consists of obedience to the routines and requests of an abstract social machine called School.

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June 30, 2005

Gatto Chapter 16 - A conspiracy against ourselves

The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.

We were warned a long time ago...any man that trades freedom for security deserves neither. Government provided education that promises a good job and secure future, government managed retirement that promises a secure future, government managed health care that promises a secure future. It all ties together nicely, eh?

Unfortunately for us, none of those promises can be kept.

None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren’t aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.

We also didn't realize that the regular corporate paycheck wasn't going to be regular.

Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.

Interestingly, Daniel Pink writes in his new book that now is the time that the creative class will rise. His theory is that all the mundane production and technical work can and will be outsourced. All that will be left is creative work.

Although plenty went wrong with the national experiment in forced schooling, nothing was as damaging as this.

Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his "infinite delight" with Spenser’s Faerie Queen—an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its "Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses." Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. "Frank had a dog. His name was Spot." That happened.

I'm constantly amazed at what my kids teach themselves from books. It should go without saying that they didn't learn to read the "school way".

Gatto also touches on the future a bit. The underclasses have been sold a bill of goods. A college degree isn't really worth that much either. The working class is starting to realize that 16 years of school was just a way to keep us busy and keep us under control.

What happens if we decide to revolt?

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June 12, 2005

Gatto Chapter 15 - The Psychopathy of Everyday Schooling

In this chapter, Gatto talks in the present for the first time. This is not a history lesson anymore, this is what the schools are doing to your kids today. If you've been keeping up, none of this will be a surprise.

To understand how this happens, you have to grok the nature of bureaucracies. It's not personal.

The sensationalistic charge that all large corporations, including school corporations, are psychopathic becomes less inflammatory if you admit the obvious first, that all such entities are nonhuman.
All large bureaucracies, public or private, are psychopathic to the degree they are well-managed. It’s a genuine paradox, but time to face the truth of it. Corporate policies like downsizing and environmental degradation, which reduce the quality of life for enormous numbers of people, make perfectly rational sense as devices to reach profitability.

The hierarchical nature of large bureaucracies is what allows these institutions, comprised of people, to ultimately make completely inhumane decisions.

Michel wrote in Political Parties that the primary mission of all institutional managers (including school managers) is to cause their institution to grow in power, in number of employees, in autonomy from public oversight, and in rewards for key personnel. The primary mission is never, of course, the publicly announced one. Whether we are talking about bureaucracies assigned to wage war, deliver mail, or educate children, there is no difference.
In 1911, a prominent German sociologist, Robert Michel, warned in his book Political Parties that the size and prosperity of modern bureaucracies had given them unprecedented ability to buy friends. In this way they shield themselves against internal reform and make themselves impervious to outside reform.

Ever notice how every government reform project, whether it be the schools, the postal system, the Pentagon, or the Dept. of Fisheries, leaves the reformed organization bigger and less efficient than before? It has to be by design. Random luck dictates that once in a while, government should be able to do something right.

Name that something. Name just one government program that works well and at least cost.

A massive effort is underway to link centrally organized control of jobs with centrally organized administration of schooling. This would be an American equivalent of the Chinese "Dangan"—linking a personal file begun in kindergarten (recording academic performance, attitudes, behavioral characteristics, medical records, and other personal data) with all work opportunities.

This is one case where government inefficiency is our friend. All this data already exists on all of us. It's scattered in hundreds of databases. Government will never effectively connect all the dots. The real problem is that government will act as though it has connected all those dots and will make decisions with incomplete data.

This American Dangan will begin with longer school days and years, with more public resources devoted to institutional schooling, with more job opportunities in the school field, more emphasis on standardized testing, more national examinations, plus hitherto unheard of developments like national teaching licenses, national curricula, national goals, national standards, and with the great dream of corporate America since 1900, School-to-Work legislation organizing the youth of America into precocious work battalions

Sound familiar? The only reason that last bit hasn't happened yet is that we have maintained historically low unemployment rates since early in the Clinton Administration. I have no doubt that next time unemployment creeps towards double digits, some sort of national jobs program, with government deciding which job you get, will be proposed.

Gatto then provides us a list of the 8 things schools are really teaching your kids.

The first lesson schools teach is forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they taught themselves important things like walking and talking.

This was one of the great insights I had as we stared the homeschool journey. Kids teach themselves to walk and talk before age 4, yet they need government approved teachers for the relatively easy stuff after that?

The second lesson schools teach is bewilderment and confusion.

School curriculum only makes sense to school curriculum developers. The kids are totally confused. Nothing is connected from one year to the next, or even one class to the next. Everything exists in silos, devoid of any real meaning.

The third lesson schools teach is that children are assigned by experts to a social class and must stay in the class to which they have been assigned.

Increasingly, there is only one class as the schools strive to treat and teach every kid exactly the same, ignoring all those individual differences that separate us from the robots.

The fourth lesson schools teach is indifference. By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically.

This is one I had never thought about before now. How often do you fail to start something because there isn't time. Is that a learned behavior from school? If we weren't "schooled" would it be more natural to start without regard to finish times? I definitely see that tendency in my kids.

The fifth lesson schools teach is emotional dependency. By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It’s like training a dog.

Positive reinforcement with kids is a good thing, but too much of a good thing leads to the self esteem nonsense we see today.

The sixth lesson schools teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Good people do it the way the teacher wants it done. Good teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or textbook to tell them what to do.

I was never real good at that waiting to be told what to do part.I remember frequently having the days work done 10 minutes into class. The instructional pattern was easy to figure out, so I usually knew we were going to be expected to do all the odd problems at the end of the chapter, or whatever. So instead of listening to the teacher drone on, I usually did the work on my own and was done before anybody else started. Back then, I never understood why that wasn't a good thing.

The seventh lesson schools teach is provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in children must be made contingent on the certification of experts through rituals of number magic. It must not be self-generated as it was for Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford.

The kids that figure this out on theory own make lousy students. I know realize that lousy student should be a compliment!

It teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to.

And now we have a generation of kids, our future leaders, who think random backpack searches and metal detectors at the doors are normal and acceptable.

By allowing the existence of large bureaucratic systems under centralized control, whether corporate, governmental, or institutional, we unwittingly enter into a hideous conspiracy against ourselves, one in which we resolutely work to limit the growth of our minds and spirits. The only conceivable answer is to break the power of these things, through grit, courage, indomitability and resolution if possible, through acts of personal sabotage and disloyalty if not.

Is home education personal sabotage and disloyalty? I sort of like the sound of that actually.

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May 30, 2005

Gatto Chapter 14 - Absolute Absolution

Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. That is really all I can say after reading this chapter. In chapter 14 Gatto connects the history of Western spirituality and forced schooling in a way that I would not have believed possible 30 minutes ago.

I can't possibly do this chapter justice here. It's way too deep and the message is way too powerful. But since y'all are paying me try...

You are paying me, right?

Gatto makes this key point.

Starting with Everson vs. Board of Education in 1947, powerful business interests were at work in a concerted effort to drive spirituality out of the public schools.

Why? Consider these passages from the book.

The net effect of holding children in confinement for twelve years without honor paid to the spirit is a compelling demonstration that the State considers the Western spiritual tradition dangerous, subversive. And of course it is. School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.
Once the mechanism is identified, its dynamics aren’t hard to understand. Spiritually contented people are dangerous for a variety of reasons. They don’t make reliable servants because they won’t jump at every command. They test what is requested against a code of moral principle. Those who are spiritually secure can’t easily be driven to sacrifice family relations. Corporate and financial capitalism are hardly possible on any massive scale once a population finds its spiritual center.
For a society like ours to work, we need to feel that something is fundamentally wrong when we can’t continually "do better"—expand our farms and businesses, win a raise, take exotic vacations. This is the way our loan/repayment cycle—the credit economy—is sustained. The human tendency to simply enjoy work and camaraderie among workers is turned into a race to outdo colleagues, to climb employment ladders. Ambition is a trigger of corporate life and at the same time an acid that dissolves communities. By spreading contentment on the cheap, spirituality was a danger to the new economy’s natural growth principle. So in a sense it was rational self-interest, not conspiracy, that drove enlightened men to agree in their sporting places, drawing rooms, and clubs that religious activity would have to be dampened down.

Simply put, spiritual, well adjusted people would never submit to their Utopian vision of the future.

Gatto also has a lot to say about the Western brand of spirituality as practiced in the US, and how it provides a model for the education of our children.

In Western spirituality, everyone counts. It offers a basic, matter-of-fact set of practical guidelines, street lamps for the village of your life. Nobody has to wander aimlessly in the universe of Western spirituality. What constitutes a meaningful life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility, acceptance of aging and loss, preparation for death. In this neglected genius of the West, no teacher or guru does the work for you. You do it for yourself. It’s time to teach these things to our children once again.

Gatto delves further into the discipleship of Jesus Christ and how that provides a model for education, one that powerful interests have worked hard to erase. The discipleship model is based on four characteristics; A calling to follow, commitment, self-awareness and independence, and a master to follow.

It's easy to see that forced schooling is nothing like that, and in fact is purposely completely unlike that.

it's heady stuff, and there is more I want to say so I'm going to break this up and tackle the more spiritual side of the conversation next time.

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Gatto Chapter 13 - The Empty Child

In chapter 13, Gatto explores the influence on BF Skinner and Behavioralism in the school system. To refresh your memory, behavioralism is the theory that we are all born as blank slates, and what we become is merely the sum total of our experiences. The connection to the schools should be obvious. If we are all blank slates, it should be easy to manage how we turn out. It's that pursuit of utopia that has come up in several chapters.

Skinner, by the way, was a real winner.

...B.F. Skinner, that most famous of all behaviorists from Harvard. Skinner was then rearing his own infant daughter in a closed container with a window, much like keeping a baby in an aquarium, a device somewhat mis-described in the famous article "Baby in a Box," (Ladies Home Journal, September 28, 1945).

Skinner's influence went way beyond the schools. This concept that humans were blank slates to be programmed was the defining psychological mantra of the 20th century.

I suspect not many parents look at their offspring as empty vessels because contradictory evidence accumulates from birth, but the whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty, or so plastic it’s the same thing.

Looking back at my college days - I'm starting to understand what I really studied in Organizational Leadership and Supervision. It was nothing more than applied behavioralism. My degree program may have been in the School of Technology, but when you really strip back the covers, I was a Psych major.

As behavioralism took over, it became obvious that we were all screwed up. Blank slates could not be allowed to develop in the wild. We needed trained professionals to make sure we turned out OK. The late 40's / early 50's was when schools started becoming more about mental health services and less about reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Reading the text "Proceedings of the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth," we learn that school has "responsibility to detect mental disabilities which have escaped parental or pre-school observation." Another huge duty it had was the need to "initiate all necessary health services through various agencies." Still another, to provide "counseling services for all individuals at all age levels.
In 1962, an NIMH-sponsored report, "The Role of Schools in Mental Health," stated unambiguously, "Education does not mean teaching people to know." (emphasis added) What then? "It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave," a clear echo of the Rockefeller Foundation’s "dream" from an earlier part of the century (See page 45). Schools were behavioral engineering plants; what remained was to convince kids and parents there was no place to hide.

Looking back on my time in school, it's easy to see this boulder rolling downhill. The end result is predictable and exactly what you would expect. Having let the psychologists take over the schools, the schools have become much concerned about kids feelings and self-esteem and for the most part, nobody cares if Johnny can read. What's important is that Johnny is ok with the fact that he can't read, and understands that it's not his fault.

It can never be his fault.

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May 26, 2005

Gatto Chapter 12 - Daughters of the Baron of Runnymeade

I found this chapter fascinating on several levels. I'm really just now starting to comprehend the corporate influences that led to forced schooling. It really wasn't a nefarious government plot. It was a nefarious, racist, elitist plot funded by corporate money and pushed through a sympathetic government that was too busy cashing the checks to actually care about what they were doing. Some things never change...

Gatto tells us that several factors cumulated in the popularization of forced schooling in the early 20th Century.

The root idea in all of this was to provide two primary classes. The liberal elites would continue to rule and the rest of us would "Americanized" in government school where we would learn that we were not worthy of anything beyond working for the man.

Reading through the papers of the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board—an endowment rivaled in school policy influence in the first half of the twentieth century only by Andrew Carnegie’s various philanthropies—seven curious elements force themselves on the careful reader:
1) There appears a clear intention to mold people through schooling. 2) There is a clear intention to eliminate tradition and scholarship. 3) The net effect of various projects is to create a strong class system verging on caste. 4) There is a clear intention to reduce mass critical intelligence while supporting infinite specialization. 5) There is clear intention to weaken parental influence. 6) There is clear intention to overthrow accepted custom. 7) There is striking congruency between the cumulative purposes of GEB projects and the utopian precepts of the oddball religious sect, once known as Perfectionism, a secular religion aimed at making the perfection of human nature, not salvation or happiness, the purpose of existence. The agenda of philanthropy, which had so much to do with the schools we got, turns out to contain an intensely political component.

The chapter also addresses a peculiarity of American society that I had noticed on my own.

Elite private boarding schools were an important cornerstone in the foundation of a permanent American upper class whose children were to be socialized for power. They were great schools for the Great Race, intended to forge a collective identity among children of privilege, training them to be bankers, financiers, partners in law firms, corporate directors, negotiators of international treaties and contracts, patrons of the arts, philanthropists, directors of welfare organizations, members of advisory panels, government elites, and business elites.
Michael Useem’s post-WWII study showed that just thirteen elite boarding schools educated 10 percent of all the directors of large American business corporations, and 15 percent of all the directors who held three or more directorships. These schools collectively graduated fewer than one thousand students a year. More spectacular pedagogy than that is hard to imagine.

I have often wondered why so many politicians and leaders come from Harvard, Yale and the like. Having met more than a few graduates of the elite universities, I am 110% certain that ability is not the answer. According to Gatto, that answer is breeding.

The liberal intelligesta of its day set up a system, financed by Carnegie, JP Morgan, and Rockefeller, to protect the business and political interests of America's upper class from the hordes of immigrants hitting the shores.

That system was forced schooling.

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May 17, 2005

Gatto Chapter 11 - The Crunch

In chapter 11, Gatto examines the role of racism is the early days of forced schooling.

In the thirty years between 1890 and 1920, the original idea of America as a cosmopolitan association of peoples, each with its own integrity, gave way to urgent calls for national unity. Even before WWI added its own shrill hysterics to the national project of regimentation, new social agencies were in full cry on every front, aggressively taking the battle of Americanization to millions of bewildered immigrants and their children.

That's right, I said racism. The intellectuals of pre WWI America were obsessed with the idea that the mass influx on Latinos and Southern Europeans might deplete the high quality breeding stock of white Anglo Saxons in the US. On one hand, I feel like I need a tin foil hat on to read this. On the other hand, it all rings true.

The eugenics movement begun by Galton in England was energetically spread to the United States by his followers. Besides destroying lesser breeds (as they were routinely called) by abortion, sterilization, adoption, celibacy, two-job family separations, low-wage rates to dull the zest for life, and, above all, schooling to dull the mind and debase the character, other methods were clinically discussed in journals, including a childlessness which could be induced through easy access to pornography.2 At the same time those deemed inferior were to be turned into eunuchs, Galtonians advocated the notion of breeding a super race.

It is important to note that the Fords and Carnegies that were funding all this really did believe it was for the best. They saw forced schooling as a way to scrub out the ethnic diversity of the immigrants and make them more like the white Northern European folks that ran the country.

Three great private fortunes were to dominate early twentieth-century public schooling—Carnegie’s, Rockefeller’s, and Ford’s—each with a stupendous megalomaniac in charge of the checkbook, each dedicating the power of great wealth not to conspicuous consumption but to radical experiments in the transformation of human nature. The hardest lesson to grasp is that they weren’t doing this for profit or fame—but from a sense of conviction reserved only for true believers.

On of the key strategies was the break of of the strong family unit. The proponents of forced schooling saw (correctly I might add) that forced schooling would fail if countered by a strong family unit. What better way to break up the family than put the kids in government care all day? This is also about the time that abortion came into vogue.

The planned parenthood movement, in our day swollen to billion dollar corporate status, was one side of a coin whose obverse was the prospering abortion, birth control, and adoption industries. In those crucial years, a sudden host of licensing acts closed down employment in a wide range of lucrative work—rationing the right to practice trades much as kings and queens of England had done. Work was distributed to favored groups and individuals who were willing to satisfy screening commissions that they met qualifications often unrelated to the actual work.

It's really a devious plan. Discourage breeding in the name of national unity, indoctrinate the kids, make jobs scare, and make it easy to end pregnancies or to place the kids into adoption where a nice Anglo Saxon family could give the kid a proper upbringing.

Did it work?

It prepares us to understand the future—that time in which we now live, our own age where "home cooking" means commercially homogenized food product microwaved, where an entire nation sits down each evening to commercial entertainment, hears the same processed news, wears the same clothing, takes direction from the same green road signs, thinks the same media-inculcated thoughts, and relegates its children and elders to the same scientific care of strangers in schools and "nursing homes."

What do you think?

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May 15, 2005

Gatto Chapter 10 - The Character of a Village

Chapter 10 is all about Gatto's childhood and how it impacted his teaching methodology and ultimately his repudiation of the teaching profession. I found it a nice little story, but it didn't really connect with me, probably because I grew up a military brat and can not relate at all to spending my first 18 years in one small town.

That said, he does return to a couple of broad themes that he has touched on earlier in the book. He discusses the importance of kids being part of the adult world, and not being shunted off in a room with kids their own age.

No kid in Mon City reached for the "Events and Activities" page of the papers because there wasn’t one, nor were there any special kid places that people of all ages didn’t frequent. When the men weren’t playing bocce at the Italian Club, kids were allowed, passing first through a barroom reeking of unpasteurized stale beer. No special life was arranged for kids. Yet there was always a full menu.
Why a child would want to associate exclusively with children in a narrow age or social class range defies understanding, that adults would impose such a fate on kids strikes me as an act of madness.

This is one thing I think my parents generation did better than we do. We didn't have playdates when I was kid. I got dragged along to whatever social events my parents were attending and it was just expected that I would find a way to entertain myself without getting into trouble. We probably have catered a little too much to our kids. When I say we, I speak of Michelle and I personally, as well as our entire generation.

Shouldn’t you ask why your boy or girl needs to know anything about Iraq or about computer language before they can tell you the name of every tree, plant, and bird outside your window? What will happen to them with their high standardized test scores when they discover they can’t fry an egg, sew a button, join things, build a house, sail a boat, ride a horse, gut a fish, pound a nail, or bring forth life and nurture it? Do you believe having those things done for you is the same? You fool, then. Why do you cooperate in the game of compulsion schooling when it makes children useless to themselves as adults, hardly able to tie their own shoes?

I can't do most of that list. My kids probably can, combined they certainly can do more of that list than I. They are home educated, I wasn't. Coincidence? Probably not ;) This speaks directly to the value of kids being out in the world, and not locked in a windowless room viewing filmstrips of the real world.

This is sort of a throw away line at the beginning of the chapter, but to me it is the foundation of everything I believe about home education.

The immense edifice of teacher instruction and schooling in general rests on the shaky hypothesis that expert intervention in childhood produces better people than might otherwise occur. I’ve come to doubt that.

It's also probably one of the few things ever on this site that all homeschoolers will agree with :)

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May 10, 2005

Gatto Chapter 9:The Cult of Scientific Management

I'm not sure if I've really got my brain wrapped around this chapter yet. I may have to read again to really get it. Gatto squarely lays the blame for public education, and the state of our current society in general, at the feet of two people most of us know fairly well.

Frederick Taylor and Charles Darwin.

Taylor was, of course, the father of scientific management. Coincidently, I have a B.S. in Organizational Leadership and Supervision. This is a management degree from Purdue University that was (is?) heavily influenced and directed by Ford, Chrysler, and GM. It is one of the primary training grounds for entry level management who will start their career supervising 3rd shift in a transmission factory somewhere in Southern Ohio. (I never did any of it).

We spent a lot of time on Taylor. We did time studies, lots of them. I don't remember anything negative about Taylor in the program. Scientific Management was an unquestioned good thing.

In case you are wondering how this is connected to public education.

Taylorism, had four characteristics designed to make the worker "an interchangeable part of an interchangeable machine making interchangeable parts."
Since each quickly found its analogue in scientific schooling, let me show them to you:3 1) A mechanically controlled work pace; 2) The repetition of simple motions; 3) Tools and technique selected for the worker; 4) Only superficial attention is asked from the worker, just enough to keep up with the moving line. The connection of all to school procedure is apparent.

The Darwin connection is both simple, and complex. Prior to the Civil War, Americans by and far were individualists. Everybody was on their own, capable of whatever they could manage. Darwin, by advancing the idea that evolutionary nature had favored certain groups, gave cover to liberal elitists to advance forced schooling. They had scientific proof in Darwin that the bottom 90% of society were there because they were supposed to be there, and they had no chance of advancing. They needed to be taught to be happy with their station in life, and be grateful for the factory jobs the top 10% would graciously provide to them in a few years.

This is a gross simplification, but I hope the idea is getting through.

To realize the tremendous task Fabians originally assigned themselves (a significant part of which was given to schooling to perform), we need to reflect again on Darwin’s shattering books, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), each arguing in its own way that far from being blank slates, children are written upon indelibly by their race of origin, some "favored" in Darwin’s language, some not.
Both books taken together issued a license for liberal upper classes to justify forced schooling. From an evolutionary perspective, schools are the indoctrination phase of a gigantic breeding experiment. Working-class fantasies of "self-improvement" were dismissed from the start as sentimentality that evolutionary theory had no place for.

Since it was inevitable that the lower class were staying put, it made perfect sense to the elitists to speed the process. After all, it was all in pursuit of some capitalist utopia, right?

Society evolves slowly toward "social efficiency" all by itself; society under stress, however, evolves much faster! Thus the deliberate creation of crisis is an important tool of evolutionary socialists. Does that help you understand the government school drama a little better, or the well-publicized doomsday scenarios of environmentalists?

There is a lot more in the chapter, a lot more. Reading Chapter 9 is without a doubt one of the most disturbing 30 minutes I have ever invested in a book. I'm going to be up all night as my mind wrestles with this.

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May 07, 2005

Gatto Chapter 8 - A Coal-Fired Dream World

In this chapter, Gatto explores the specific reasons and events behind forced schooling, or the mass production of people. The great industrialists on the late 19th and early 20th century correctly foresaw that coal, and later oil, could bring about great changes to American society. Coal put the potential for great power in the hands of just about everybody. All those everybodys were potential competitors, and the industrialists feared that competition would lead to over production and lower prices.

The very ingenuity and self-reliance that built a strong and unique America came to be seen as its enemy. Competition was recognized as a corrosive agent no mass production economy could long tolerate without bringing ruinous financial panics in its wake, engendering bankruptcy and deflation.

In the place of the traditional American family farm, where self-reliance and industrious were the roots of all success, Carnegie and his ilk saw great factories and production lines worked by people of little social consequence and even less ambition. The typical farmer was not going to go quietly into the coal mines.

Schools build national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality, and family life.
We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.

The traditional American education had to go, and school would be the replacement, financed in the early years primarily by men who got rich in the first wave of the coal powered economy.

Here is the crux of the difference between education and schooling— the former turns on independence, knowledge, ability, comprehension, and integrity; the latter upon obedience

Gatto also returns to the Civil War theme again.

After decades of surreptitious Northern provocation, the South fired on Fort Sumter. Hegel himself could not have planned history better. America was soon to find itself shoehorned into a monoculture. The Civil War demonstrated to industrialists and financiers how a standardized population trained to follow orders could be made to function as a reliable money tree; even more, how the common population could be stripped of its power to cause political trouble.

Although this all looks like a conspiracy, it really wasn't. In many ways, the direction of our economy sort of forced the issue. Mass production of obedient factory workers was required if the socialistic ideals of utopia were ever to be realized. Forced schooling was simply the most efficient way to produce those workers.

Gatto also answers the basic question, why wasn't this great change noticed at the time?

There are three indisputable triumphs of mass society we need to acknowledge to understand its strength: first, mass production offers relative physical comfort to almost all—even the poor have food, shelter, television as a story-teller to raise the illusion of community; second, as a byproduct of intense personal surveillance in mass society (to provide a steady stream of data to the producing and regulating classes) a large measure of personal security is available; third, mass society offers a predictable world, one with few surprises—anxieties of uncertainty are replaced in mass society with a rise in ennui and indifference.

In summary, the American working class was sedated by a constantly rising standard of living.

This brings up another question in my mind.

Is the current interest in school reform, and the growth in home education, in any way a manifestation of the realization, maybe even only at an unconscious level, that forced schooling can not properly prepare our youth for the world of tomorrow. Those factory jobs no longer exist in this country.

It's an interesting paradox. Now that we are finally being replaced by machines in many ways we are realizing that we have been training our young to be machines all along.

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April 30, 2005

Gatto Chapter 7 - The Prussian Connection

The Prussian connection to American forced schooling has been hinted at previously. In this chapter, Gatto lays it out in detail. The connection can not be denied. It all starts at Jena in 1806, when Napoleon defeated a superior Prussian Army. Prussia, basically being a mercenary state, decided that centralized government education of the kids was the key to raising disciplined future soldiers. In America, that famous German engineering, applied to people, would be the path to a greater tomorrow. 100 years later, Hitler would would follow that process to it's awful conclusion.

The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.

To get here though, the family unit had to be busted.

People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as 1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.

I poked around Google trying to confirm that Switzerland statistic. I didn't find an exact number, but most kids in Switzerland go through more of an apprenticeship program where they learn a trade while attending school 1 or 2 days a week. 23% appears to be the percentage that goes to full time school in pursuit of higher order careers such as engineering and the priesthood.

Interestingly, Gatto also implies that a Southern victory in The War of Northern Aggression would have derailed the forced schooling effort before it ever got going. It's not a central or important point in the chapter, he just sort of throws it out there. I'm doing the same :)

Also interesting is Gatto's charge that Horace Mann's Report to the Boston School Committee, (the blueprint for American forced education) outlining all the wonderful things happening in Prussian schools, is basically full of fabrications. Apparently he was in Prussia while school was out. He never saw a live classroom in action.

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Gatto Chapter 6 Supplemental - No Place To Hide

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.

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Gatto Chapter 6 - The Lure of Utopia

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.
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April 28, 2005

Gatto Chapter 5 - True Believers & The Unspeakable Chautauqua

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.


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Gatto Chapter 4 - I'm Outta Here

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.


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April 27, 2005

Gatto Chapter 3 - Eyeless in Gaza

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.
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April 25, 2005

Gatto Chapter 2 - An Angry Look At Modern Schooling

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 Müller 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?

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April 24, 2005

The Underground History of American Education - Chapter 1

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

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.
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