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Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing
better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me
as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn‘t what
I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to
schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in
more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong."
I don‘t know who decides that my kids belong there but that‘s not my
business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be
returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children
are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human
being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a
big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to
accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that‘s not my business. My job is to make the kids
like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure
it. If things go well, the kids can‘t imagine themselves anywhere else;
they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber
classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That‘s
the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know
your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge
children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer
from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will
come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even
though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to
such things. I never lie outright, but I‘ve come to see that truth and
[school]teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class
except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light
switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping
up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with
each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop
the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing
important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too
deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their
argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every
interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain
and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each
undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a
predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by
authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal
decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a
disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My
judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly
to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems
of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private
moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me
out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need
water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children
angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such
things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be
withdrawn, exist.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum
you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay
me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good
kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show
of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what
few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important
place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make
decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow
that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to
break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait
for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson
of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves,
to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our
entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what
would fall apart if kids weren‘t trained in the dependency lesson:
The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the
fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts,
along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their
own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would
shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending
on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and
engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a
guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year.
We‘ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told
because they don‘t know any other way. For God‘s sake, let‘s not rock
that boat!
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an
observer‘s measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and
judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into
students‘ homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single
percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should
be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection
goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective-
seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child
to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on
the casual judgment of strangers.
Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that
ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The
lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not
trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of
certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep
each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are
no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts
300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students
are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents.
Of course I encourage parents to file their own child‘s waywardness, too.
I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household,
where students might otherwise use the time to learn something
unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some
wiser person in the neighborhood.
The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that
privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among
certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by
Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte,
by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing:
Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under
central control.
It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best
of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only
a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only
a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States:
originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from
regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class
boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was
marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things
independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by
ourselves, as individuals.
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math
skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry
for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt
the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I‘ve
just taught you.
We‘ve had a society increasingly under central control in the United
States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we
wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast
to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are
the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the
hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization
of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that
central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a
complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look
around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.
"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering
that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows
to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such
a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a
fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and
through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And
yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our
backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt:
compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling
was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he
laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum
is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I‘ve told you
about and a few more I‘ve spared you. This curriculum produces moral and
intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to
reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great
irrelevancy.
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to
change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is
no right way. There is no "international competition" that compels our
existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a
constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important
material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a
non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located
-- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple
ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service
to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would be truly
self-sufficient.
How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we
know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919,
when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor,
and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line
families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration --
and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third
contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same
families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society
after the Civil War.
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent
underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center
of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its
original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of
the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of
a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have
enlarged schooling‘s original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of
the middle class.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took
money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable
direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting
the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs,
indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about
your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error.
It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing,
and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical
procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder
we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to
the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except
the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot
concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time
past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of
divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic,
dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted
to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque
extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective
personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness,
selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive
at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of
training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly
will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the
use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a
year without being torn to pieces.
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children‘s development.
Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the
instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational.
No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs,
the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than
we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost,
the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency.
We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.
At the pass we‘ve come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching,
I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most
families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de-
institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system
for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the
near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor,
and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell
that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of
schooling is the only real content it has. Don‘t be fooled into thinking
that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical
determinants of your son and daughter‘s schooltime. All the pathologies
we‘ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school
prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and
their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance,
self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in
service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left
after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only
thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that
all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will
demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life
economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools
as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence
in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach
school and win awards doing it. I should know.
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