Today I read Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto. Formerly an award-winning school teacher, Gatto now spews more vitriol at schooling than anyone else I have ever encountered. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you must visit his site. Years ago, Heidi Fisk turned me on to Gatto; I began reading his The Underground History of American Education on the web and simply couldn’t stop until I got to the last page; it’s on my short list of seminal documents.
A few gems from Weapons of Mass Instruction:
- Quoting H.L. Mencken on the aim of American education: “The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”
Schools intend “to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.”
Quoting Ellwood Cubberly: “Our schools are… factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned… And that is the business of the school, to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”
School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.
I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs project, contract giver, and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.”
School is a religion.
Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within; school disconnects its clientele from other primary sources of learning. It must do that to achieve administrative efficiency; education sets out to provide a set of bountiful connections which are random, willful, promiscuous, even disharmonious with one another — understanding that the learning of resourcefulness, self sufficiency, and invention will inevitably involve surprising blends of things, things impossible to predict or anticipate in advance.
Sad to say, Weapons of Mass Instruction, like the title itself, is stronger on flashy, firebrand rhetoric than inner logic. Gatto refers to important shifts in the direction of Horace Mann without telling the reader who Mann was. Gatto’s stories sometimes ramble off to nowhere. To savor the best of Gatto, read Dumbing Us Down or The Underground History of American Education.
I love intellectual counterpoint, so it was delightful to read John Taylor Gatto on a train to and from a temple devoted to pioneering railroads, the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Railroads fueled the need for the by-products of the schools that Weapons of Mass Instruction rails against.
As this plaque points out,
- “By 1800, the United States had a progressive political systems and an idealistic vision for the future. But the country was small, rural, agrarian, and culturally backward. Transportation was slow and America produced few manufactured goods. The Ancient Romans enjoyed a higher standard of living and comfort than did most Americans.”
Enter trains.
- “A hundred years later the United States was a large and powerful nation. It was highly urban, thoroughly industrialized, culturally sophisticated, and enjoyed some of the higher living standards anywhere. At no time in human history has a country transformed itself so quickly or on such a scale.”
Small wonder we revere the things that got us here.
It takes a lot of conformity to run a railroad. You don’t want workers re-interpreting the rules for the sake of innovation. Assembly-line schooling spit out ideal workers for the time, workers who respect authority and do what they’re told. Those workers kept the railroads and factories humming efficiently.
The perennial problem is that the times have changed but the way we do things have not. We need knowledge workers who can think for themselves but maintain schools that are structured to produce drones for the long-gone railroads and factories.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I just read Clay Christensen’s book Disrupting Class. If you believe Christensen and his co-authors, flexible, individual-focused computerized learning will take care of disrupting the entire system. I share your sentiment about education–and hope he’s right.
This article by John Taylor Gatto uses a different style than most of his writings. It effectively communicates the insidious effects of compulsory schooling. POWERFUL article from 1991 that is as relevant in 2008 as the day he wrote it.
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html?seenIEPage=1
EXCERPTS:
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.
. . . 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.”
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study.
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. 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.
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. The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.
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.
“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. ”
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article from Psychology Today, Apr 2007, also supports much of Mr Gatto’s views on the sociological damage caused by a society that artificially retards maturity. Teens could do so much more but the culture and government schools (that function in many respects like minimum security prisons) is interested in keeping the product in a dependent, reliant, mode as they are easier to manipulate and control when independent action and thought are not part of your formative years.
Then we expect them to pull together an informal learning curriculum in the work place with nobody to tell them what they should learn? Hard to overcome 12 years of top down command and control instruction.
Trashing Teens
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20070302-000002&print=1
Perhaps the saddest part of the problem is that the system creates a small minority of “authorities” (qualified to teach) who, for the most part, don’t believe in the foundations of their purported authority but go on pretending that they do in order to buttress the authority of the system on which they depend. Not believing in their own culture (assuming they have some), they lack the self-confidence to incite others to learn.
Nevertheless I think the analysis could be taken two steps further by looking at:
1) the longer history of educational attitudes, which over the centuries (ever since the Renaissance) has moved further and further away from the “ideal” of the humanities – in which human culture is seen essentially as a form of mutually enriching dialogue – to the “real” of the economy, in which human culture is reduced to the unique question of optimally organizing whole populations for “essential practical activities”: producing and consuming.
2) the fundamental contradiction inherent in a system that now aims exclusively at competitive individual performance (grades, degrees) within a uniquely social setting; the predictable result is that the system neuters the notion of dialogue and replaces is with monologue (as monotone as possible, if you please, so that it sounds like writing!).
Western history has produced the system we – and our children – are slaves of, but it hasn’t always been like that. Dialogue was the basis of Aristotle’s Lyceum, where teaching took place peripatetically, not in an amphitheater (the Greeks used theaters for drama, a highly interactive “entertainment” that actually involved the community in ways that modern entertainment typically avoids). The aim of learning for the Athenians was the aim of the philosophy itself: to attain “the good life”. I recently read that in 16th century England, Latin was taught to young children through what we would now call creative writing techniques and focused on the real environment (it even included contemporary scatology!). It was probably accompanied by spontaneous oral dialogue, similar to the informal and personal Latin repartee of Stephen Dedalus and his school chums in James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. And the famous Enlightenment culture of the 18th century was of course essentially the result of people talking to each other in coffee shops (England) or in salons and boudoirs (France). Dialogue was therefore not always anathema and when it was either encouraged or at least tolerated, it produced high levels of culture.
When in 1959 C.P. Snow wrote about the “Two Cultures” (humanities and the sciences), there were still actually two cultures within the educational establishment. The fact that there was a cold war between them – consistent with the mentality of the times – was an unfortunate but probably predictable occurrence. Like the Cold War itself, all came tumbling down over the next thirty years as “science”, with a strongly industrial – not to say military – flavor to it, relegated the humanities to the same fate as Soviet communism and Francis Fukuyama could pronounce “the end of history”, which translates very simply as the global victory of universal industrial consumerism, supported by its sophisticated financial scaffolding. When the humanities themselves were taken over by influence groups (the major characteristic of “postmodernism”), it really did appear to be “game over”.
Now we should be realizing that the obituary of history was slightly immature given that we can now clearly see that the scaffolding wasn’t up to the task (unlike the flying buttresses of gothic cathedrals, which are still holding up the soaring stone walls). The whole system appears to be crumbling as history reawakens to be written again by future historians after being lived in creative – as well as destructive – confusion by the entire population, i.e. us and the rest of the world. But something significant may be happening. When people are confused they talk to one another and dialogue may be reborn, possibly replacing the official monologue that led to the purported end of history. At least we can hope.
“immature” in the final paragraph should be “premature”.
I found your blog quite by accident while I was searching for material on Weapons of Mass Instruction stuff to put on my blog. I just discovered Gatto, I haven’t read his book, but your blogpost and review mixed with train lore and histroy is quite inventive.
Thanks for the great interconnecting themes. I adore trains. My dad adored trains and so the train people pass on their love of trains to us, jsut like you did here.
I am almost finished reading Gatto’s latest book and while nothing he writes about surprised me, I am so terribly sad that there was and is such contempt among the “elite” for the masses of individuals who are born, work, and finally die trying so hard to live up to the myth that all is possible under the system called democracy in the USA when in reality they have been programmed to reach not for the deepest and most profound parts of themselves, or for the stars; but rather for stuff and dollars that promise only gnawing emptiness that will never be filled.
Years ago when my children were still in grammer school I came to the realization that while religion has lost much of its sway to keep people in fearful obedience under threat of an eternal hell, schools were doing a marvelous job of insuring that many kids would see themselves as academic failures by the end of their kindergarten year because they couldn’t yet read, or compute numbers; and as bad, that by their middle years in grammer school the “smart” ones had fallen for the lie that everything they needed to be success in our world was between the pages of textbooks – if only they worked harder and harder to master material put before them in these books written by self-proclaimed experts. Brave New World is no fantasy, it is our world right now.