Anyone who likes this essay would probably enjoy Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education. It's about the historical forces that shaped the evolution of compulsory schooling it America and in other industrialized countries. The book makes some pretty bold claims. For example, "Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned."
An annoying quirk of Gatto is that he usually doesn't cite his sources formally because he thinks making the reader peruse the entire primary text to fact check him encourages intellectual curiosity and independent thinking. That being said, many of the excerpts he uses are now in public domain and take about 30 seconds to Google. (For example Gatto is using the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey to make the above claims, which you can download as a PDF from the National Center of Education Statistics.)
Another good one is John Holt's How Children Learn, in which he says something along the lines of "It's just as well that we don't try to teach children to walk and talk" or else they would struggle to learn that as well.
My wife and I are homeschooling our children for sure...
My 6 year old neighbor keeps getting in trouble for asking questions in school. His dad asked the teacher, "aren't you supposed to ask questions?" The teacher's response: "I don't like being questioned."
It occurred to me some time ago that many things are confusing because they are improperly named. For example, the label "Education System" is confusing because it implies that the system in question is primarily about education. Having accepted the premise, you now have many paradoxes to explain.
But if you change the label to, say, "Child Processing Factories", most of the paradoxes disappear.
Edit: I originally wrote "child processing system". But I prefer the stronger formulation.
There is a book called The Addictive Organization that touches on this. Below are a couple thoughts and excerpts cut-and-pasted from my notes:
"What makes the organization addictive is the promise it makes to every employee about the future, which takes them out of the here and now." These promises involve power, money, influence, and social acceptance, the same as the promises of pop culture made-for-TV society.
Having a self-important and grandiose mission statement can make an organization addictive, even if it has little or nothing to do with the actual work being done. "The very fact of having goals can be enough to con employees into believing that everything is all right in the organization."
"One of the ways employees react to this addictive process is by changing their perceptions and thinking, therefore deluding themselves. They try to make themselves believe that the stated mission of the organization is really what is happening, even if what they are seeing and feeling as they work is quite different. When organizations function as the addictive substance, it is in their interest to keep promoting the vision of the mission, because as long as the employees are hooked by it, they are unlikely to turn their awareness to the present discrepancies. They choose to stay numb in order to stay in the organization. The mission is a powerful source of identification for workers. It is a type of philosophical orientation that appeals to their values. Through the mission they find a link between themselves and the organization."
BTW, the sociologists refer to these hidden agendas as the "latent functions" of the organization, in case you ever want to search through the academic papers about this.
It seems we have similar interests. I've run across The Addictive Organization too, in addition to Gatto, though in his case I read Dumbing Us Down, not the book you cited. Gatto seems courageous to me; a real freethinker.
Was it Durkheim who said that the first purpose of any large organization is to perpetuate itself, and only secondarily to accomplish whatever mandate it may have?
>Was it Durkheim who said that the first purpose of any large organization is to perpetuate itself, and only secondarily to accomplish whatever mandate it may have?
I'm not sure about Durkheim, but I am a big fan of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
Not sure about that specific quote, but I know that one of Durkheim's main interests was how organizations, institutions, and culture reproduce themselves, so it would make sense.
I haven't read Dumbing Us Down yet, although I think Underground History was meant to supersede it. I'm sure I'll check it out eventually though.
It starts off with a rather poor summary of the book, but then he eventually makes a few important novel points. He comes up with a list of patterns that separate the nation's elite boarding schools from our public schools. Pretty important stuff, albeit you need to sit through the rest of the video to get at it.
Just popped into my mind: do you know the book "Systemantics" (also known as "The Systems Bible") by John Gall? It's not on education but is very much in the space we're discussing. It's a brilliant (and hilarious) underground classic. I think you would like it. A lot of people here would. It's irreverent and subversive and incredibly smart and not rigid.
One of its more famous aphorisms (relevant to the software startup crowd) is "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked".
The really frustrating bit is sorting out how much of society relies on these fundamentally anti-intellectual structures. That's hard to answer. I really believe that over a certain size, widespread free-thinking is almost an impossibility.
A really interesting exploration of those sorts of ideas is reading Huxley's Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and Island as a trilogy. I've read Gato's book that this essay is taken from, and he does a good job of stating the problem, but doesn't step far enough into it to look at how you restructure society to live in a freer way. Brave New World sets up a completely systemized dystopia, Island a communal utopia and BNW Revisited (collection of essays) puts down in more explicit terms much of what he thinks is the core of modern societies.
I think schools need to be more economically focused. Teach kids about the realistic options in their future and what they can do to give themselves more choices (avoid premature optimization).
also: I hate when people whine about how hard "the poor" have it. I'm technically living below the poverty line and I live the way an emperor might have lived in ages past.
I have my own personal transportation to take me wherever I want whenever I want. I eat delicious food shipped to me from all around the world. I have fantastic opportunities to make riches beyond what 99.9% of the human population has ever been able to.
I'm sorry what's the problem? Oh, right...school is kinda boring. boo hoo. self starters have always taught themselves what they wanted to know anyway, regardless of the institutions of the time. Our forefathers achieved more with less. I don't think blaming poor schooling excuses us from anything.
Not personally a huge fan of the Public School system. Whether they are intentionally meant to turn students into sheep is one question I don't have the answer to, but I don't think that a centralized system can ever work to create an independent and informed citizenry.
Personally, I've always taken issue with the approach that the government should be directly responsible for the formation of its citizens rather than the reverse.
>Whether they are intentionally meant to turn students into sheep is one question I don't have the answer to
Gatto's book makes a pretty good argument that this is the case, although mostly accidently as opposed to the result of any secret conspiracy. Gatto does dig up some pretty telling quotes though. For example,
"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."-- Woodrow Wilson, from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909
I actually went to the New York public library a couple of years ago and found a copy of the speech in the collection of Woodrow Wilson's papers. Here is the full quote in context:
"I do not wonder at it. I think it is hardly just to blame those who have brought this situation about, because this change in modern life has come upon us suddenly. It has confused us. We are in an age so changeful, so transitional, I do not wonder that this confusion has come into our education, and I do not blame anybody. I do not see how it could have been avoided, how we could have avoided trying our hands at a score of things hitherto unattempted to determine at least if they were possible or not. Therefore this is not a subject for cynical comment, this is not a subject for criticism. It is a subject for self-recognition. The present need is that we should examine ourselves and see whether this be true or not; and, if it is true, ask ourselves whether the air has cleared enough, and whether our experiment has gone far enough, to make a definite program, to make a radical change, in the things we have attempted. This is the moment for counsel. The thing that is imperative upon our conscience is that we should ask ourselves whether it be possible to do it differently and better." [...]
"Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. You cannot train them for both in the time that you have at your disposal. They must make a selection, and you must make a selection. I do not mean to say that in the manual training there must not be an element of liberal training; neither am I hostile to the idea that in the liberal education there should be an element of the manual training. But what I am intent upon is that we should not confuse ourselves with regard to what we are trying to make of the pupils under our instruction. We are either trying to make liberally-educated persons out of them, or we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines, or else we do not know what we are trying to do."
It's unpleasant how many of his points just ring true in my mind instantly. I connected it with PG's essay, too, where he asks why students should have to ask to go to the bathroom.
But my theory is that a school system cannot be designed in a one-size-fits-all sort of way. There are students who will take advantage of lenient teachers, instead of learning. It is because of them that the rest of the students cannot progress as they could have.
I've wondered about it often. I have no idea what to do. None.
I've wondered about it often. I have no idea what to do. None.
I sympathize. It seems to me that part of the block comes from defining the problem monolithically: how can we take the standard system we have and make a better standard system out of it? Nobody seems to have a good answer to that. Maybe we should stop asking it and instead go through a period of decentralization and even destandardization. Let all sorts of experiments be tried. There's a study I read about that showed that when great schools or great teachers achieve amazing things, attempts to reproduce what they do almost always fail. The problem seems to be in the systematizing impulse itself. Can there even be a bureaucracy that sustains life, joy, creativity?
Here's an example of what I mean (I may have even got this from Gatto). In the traditional one-room farm schoolhouse, there weren't enough children to segregate by age, so by necessity they would work side by side on different things. This has interesting effects. You no longer have the problem that not all kids are at the same level; each is working at his/her level anyway. So, no reason why a bright 9-year-old can't study math with the 15-year-olds (but play with kids their own age at recess). Another example is that because one teacher simply can't address all the different subjects at once, older kids end up teaching and mentoring younger ones. Think of the organizational contortions required to set up things like this in most schools. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone should go to a one-room farm school. My point is that we need a great deal more diversity and that maybe policy should support this instead of trying to fix everything the same way (or even at all).
People will cry out about the risks of destandardization but really, if you stop to think about it, kids want to learn. Passionately. They're hard-wired to do it. What we should be asking is not how we can get them to learn but how we ever manage to program the desire out of them. Personal anecdote: when my daughter was in the third grade (and had a teacher she loved), she would get up in the morning and literally jump for joy that she was going to school. I don't mean little bunny hops... I mean she would jump up and down bigtime and sing "I'm going to schooooool!" Just a short time later (after the teacher she loved was fired and not even allowed to say goodbye to the class... different story) a pallor that I can only call depression came over her about everything associated with school. It took years for signs of intellectual excitement to return.
Whoa. Your story is pretty... well, unpleasant, I suppose. Especially at such a young age. It's all too often that people give up on education just because the school system sucks.
At my school, I'm branded as a "nerd", often because I don't think I've joined that group of people who have given up on intellectual curiosity just because the school system is inadequate. What bothers me, though, is that such an attitude is pervasive through a very large portion of my school, even though it is an advanced program school.
Ah well. I hope it will become better. Maybe I'll be able to do something about it someday. I'd certainly love to.
how can we take the standard system we have and make a better standard system out of it? Nobody seems to have a good answer to that.
Montessori is a good answer. The U.S. could convert its standard system to Montessori. The project could be funded by taking money out of the invade-small-oil-rich-countries budget. It only doesn't happen because the U.S. does not make education a priority.
I don't think I've read the essay about why children need to ask to go to the bathroom, but it seems to me that the answer should be pretty obvious to anyone who's ever had to take care of thirty ten-year-old kids. It's hard enough even when they're all within your line of sight -- if they go wandering off to the "bathroom" at random intervals then surely disaster looms.
I had a fifth grade teacher who insisted that you didn't need to ask to go the bathroom. She said we were all responsible enough to just do it and there was no need to interrupt the class. Nothing bad ever happened.
Ten year olds - yes. A few years older - I'm not so sure. Take the extreme case: should someone able to vote have to? (There are 18-year olds in school, that's what I mean.)
"But my theory is that a school system cannot be designed in a one-size-fits-all sort of way."
It can be, and was for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the practice of the assembly line was forced on education that the breakdown began. The justification, though obfuscated, was something like this: "We can't have thinkers in a world in which we need lever pullers. Well educated people (in a classical sense) won't ever be content working on an assembly line (or other modern equivalents), so we must make them functionally literate, and not actually literate. Then they can be happy pulling levers and pushing buttons, and society can flourish." It's no wonder that the school day is 'assembled', so similar to the factory that we even have bells moving people in shifts governed by a bell.
Alex3917 - Thank you sir. I really don't have any words to describe what I felt after I read this article. And thank you for the book references. I will be sure to follow up on those.
Mr. Gatto - I certainly hope we can see some of the ideas you suggested in our lifetimes. I am sure it will make for a much better world.
In childhood, in early years of school, I perceived teachers as evil and good. In the last years of school we used to label them as "normal" and "crazy" (or "idiots", if one preferred).
My grades were exceptionally high with "good" teachers and low with "evil" throughout all the school. Only recently I liberted myself to start seeing that as a good sign.
I guess, "good" or "normal" teachers in our perception were those who procrastinated from teaching these lessons.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm
An annoying quirk of Gatto is that he usually doesn't cite his sources formally because he thinks making the reader peruse the entire primary text to fact check him encourages intellectual curiosity and independent thinking. That being said, many of the excerpts he uses are now in public domain and take about 30 seconds to Google. (For example Gatto is using the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey to make the above claims, which you can download as a PDF from the National Center of Education Statistics.)
Anyway the whole book can be found here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm