John Taylor Gatto - Modern "Education"

[pai mei]

Confederacy of Dunces
John Taylor Gatto page
An Underground History of American Education

"Now dumb people aren't just ignorant; they're the victims of the non-thought of secondhand ideas. Dumb people are now well-informed about the opinions of Time magazine and CBS, The New York Times and the President; their job is to choose which pre-thought thoughts, which received opinions, they like best. The élite in this new empire of ignorance are those who know the most pre-thought thoughts.

Mass dumbness is vital to modem society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision."

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"The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far. "

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Also search for "Stanford Experiment". You can also see what "educated" people who were good citizens in their own country did at Abu Ghraib. There are thousands of other examples. The Nazis, the Milgram Experiment .

What people who were not given the chance develop themselves and think for themselves do, when they get some freedom from supervision, from law. They can't be what we call "good" people without authority. They never learned it - and this cannot be taught, it has to come from one's own experience. Experience which is denied to them as children. By everyone around them. Parents, teachers - the system. The system itself maintained by the same robots repeating what they have been told.

"Do not look at the finger or you will miss the Moon". A teacher can only point the way. Then let the student develop his own thinking. Modern schools fill people with information and do not create the environment for them to think for themselves. As free humans. Children waste their lives sitting in a room. Never really learning to be responsible for themselves.

Some videos :

YouTube - John Taylor Gatto: Schooling is not Education - Part 1

YouTube - John Taylor Gatto: Schooling is not Education - Part 1

YouTube - John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness

YouTube - John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness

I am not against learning, I am against "formal education".
Children are not "antisocial" or "lazy". Our schools and society make them to be like that.

I remember as a child doing stuff - which now seems to be as a lot of "work". Building stuff, at one time I even liked solving math problems. But hated homework. Outside of school I did lots of things - but if any of these would have been "taught" at school suddenly they would have become very boring. Liked to read - but hated anything the school gave me to read.

Children like to experiment, to find out stuff . There are no "stupid children". That is a modern myth. Just bored to death by this "education".

I remember how excited I was at school when we entered the chemistry lab. But we only did experiments when the teacher allowed us to. And boredom ruled again. At least 8 years of a child's life spent in a room where he is always told what to do and never allowed even to move from his seat.

That is brainwashing. Conditioned to obey. Taught not to think for yourself. Because if you think - you say :"what am I doing here ?". But you can't leave. So you give up thinking. Accept the situation. Forget you are a free human - if you ever had the chance to know you are.

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority

Molding Minds - Ascent of Humanity

These features of schooling were designed into it from the very beginning, as stated very explicitly by such guiding organizations as Rockefeller's General Education Board :

In our dreams. . . people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. . . .

[Iliftrocks]

I often advise my daughter, who is very bored in school, and can't stand the stupidity, to just do the minimum effort required to satisfy all the requirements of the homework she is assigned. If she works too hard the teacher will, at best, not recognize the effort, and at worst ( and this happens quite a bit ) will detract points from her work for not following the instructions to the letter. These very same teachers will write notes on her report card with the most atrocious grammar and spelling that I have ever seen from someone beyond an elementary education. My daughter, now starting the 6th grade, makes fun of their grammar often.

Public education in this country offers very little but obedience training, and they do that as poorly as they do everything else.

[Reese]

There are alternatives to public education.

[vanblah]

Originally Posted by cybermike

There are alternatives to public education.

Such as?

Private school? Boarding school? Home-schooling?

The "affordable" private schools in my area are not much better than public schools--and I can think of one that is worse (in my opinion).

The nicer private schools (around here) all have some religious agenda.

The secular private schools that actually have decent academic programs have tuition that is around $20,000+

Home schooling requires that either me or my wife stay home. I would love to do this for our daughter but it's not really a possibility these days.

My daughter is in public school. It's actually not a bad one as far as public schools go around here. However, my wife and I stay very involved with the school and with our daughter and this makes a huge difference. She has just started second grade and her mother or I (both sometimes) sit with her for the ENTIRE time she is doing homework. We don't just sit her down and say "Do your homework." We are trying to teach her "how to learn." This will change as she gets older.

The other thing about the particular school she is going to is that it has a slightly different curriculum than most of the others. Students don't just sit in their chairs all day ... even in first and second grade they go to different classrooms for certain subjects.

Another point I'd like to make is that we really can't place all the blame on public schools. I do agree that the entire goal of public schools is to produce "happy little workers" but from what I can see the most damage comes from parents. The children around my daughter have no interest in learning; they have no desire to find out more than what is needed to keep the teacher happy--and some don't even care enough to do that. These are first and second graders I'm talking about. They have not been "broken" by the system yet. They arrive already broken by uncaring and neglectful parents.

[roachboy]

socialization.
that's what education, particularly at the more basic levels, is. nothing more, nothing less.
that it can open onto other possibilities is a result of the internal design of education as it's currently understood, so almost an accident if you see it from the viewpoint of it's larger functions.

this is really obvious.

personally, i am not against formal education per se---but i think the ways in which captialist social reproduction organizes information are wholly dysfunctional, and given that the primary role of formal eduction is to imprint that information organization as if it were necessary (this because it's central both to workerbee skillsets and the organization of political consent), the ways in which is reproduction in education are also dysfunctional.

but at the same time, the way you are in a position to articulate that critique is through that same system.
the ways in which you can imagine alternatives presuppose what you already know as a baseline.

personally, i think a new bauhaus or new black mountain school would be an interesting political action in the field of education.
if anyone's got a few million laying around they're not using, i have a plan.

[pai mei]

Making children sit in a chair - under threat is evil. "Discipline" ? What is that ? Tribal children - never beaten, educate, forced to do something, how come they don't all become lazy or "antisocial" ? Because their nature is not "lazy" or "antisocial" and they do not need "discipline". They need freedom to develop, to test the world around by themselves.

Read "The Continuum Concept". The author describes some tribe in Venezuela - a child age 11 was free to decide for himself where to go, to stay with her and the crew or whatever. Even if that meant going some 3 days alone with them, nobody forced his will on him. His destiny was his own. That's how you build self trust - by having the freedom to to things on your own. As a child. That's how I know I gained self trust. Later as an "educated", molded, broken , brainwashed adult is much harder. You need psychotherapy and stuff.



How school should be : you have the teacher (who knows something from everything, only at college level you have separate teachers). Children go to school and sit where they like. Nobody says anything if they go outside and play. (A playground somewhere in nature would be best).

But children are curious. So at first the teacher will tell them stories, even teaching them history and stuff about our world - but in the form of a story. Then he can show them other stuff, to read, to calculate, and let them freely experiment with it. They stay at school as long as they like. And I am sure they would want to stay there They will make friends there, they can play or do interesting stuff. Free. (By free I mean free to come and go as they chose). All their friends will be at "school" playing - learning new stuff, I am sure the social and curious nature of children will make them want to be there.

Then the teacher starts telling them about everything : math, biology, chemistry and so on. Gives them books to read. Let's them chose what they like.
No grades, no tests, no schedule. Children can compete among themselves - only if they want to.

How long does school last ? As long as a child wants to. Then there will be "college" , after a child has chosen (if he has chosen) something he likes, and after he read some books about it, he goes to the university he wants. Here things are much more specialized - but he has the same freedom. Yes - simple freedom to sit anywhere, go anywhere, and come and go as he pleases. In the middle of the class. This is freedom. This forms character, to be able to decide for yourself. Not freedom like "sit here or there, but sit, do not dare to say you leave !". That is molding, and it's evil. To make the child feel he is too stupid to decide such a simple thing on his own. To make him doubt himself and make him ready to accept whatever he is told by "the smarter people above"

In the end this "education" will produce anything but the worker consumer of today. Will probably produce a modern tribe, and a gift economy , no boss - servant relations, but that's something else.

[Nisses]

nobody will be conditioned to accept another telling him what to do.

this sounds to me like a stupid idea that can only work in small tribes that don't need to accomplish bigger projects. Do the average people now think differently than let's say 2000 years ago? Probably.

If you let everybody do as they please and personally feel like, there will barely be any kind of doctors/architects/engineers. Meaning there will not be any real medicine (who wants to spend his whole life indoor, making medicines in a laboratory?) or surgery, there will not be any serious buildings or communication, the ones we have will not even be able to maintain the setup we have today.

In fact, we will run out of teachers very fast for anything that a tribal society has no need for.

[pai mei]

No.
Who would want to do that ? Alexander Fleming would. And others like him.
Do you think Einstein was "working" ? He was playing. That was his play. What he liked to do.
Please read my other threads, don't want to write everything again.

Yes - some repetitive boring machine jobs will be gone. I described a solution about such society in the thread "Why Capitalism will never work" it's in "Tilted Economics".

Don't want to write again, or mix everything up, here it was about education. Hope you agree the current system only creates slaves. The idea that Alexander Fleming is 1 in a million is a myth. This school destroys people's minds. Yes they will not be all geniuses in medicine. But they will be in the field they like. Same as any Native American was a genius in his own stuff - hunting, tracking and what they usually did. And they liked it. It was not what we call "work".

http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter5-5.php

"To most of the roles society offers, I say, "You are made for more than that." We inhabit, in the words of Ivan Illich, "a world into which nobody fits who has not been crushed and molded by sixteen years of formal education." The very idea of having to be at a job "on time" was appalling to early industrial laborers, who also refused the numbing repetitiveness of industrial work until the specter of starvation compelled them. What truly self-respecting person would spend a life marketing soda pop or chewing gum unless they were somehow broken by repeated threats to survival? "

Not only does school prepare us to submit to the trivialized, demeaning, dull, and unfulfilling jobs that dominate our economy to the present time, not only does it prepare us to be modern producers, it equally prepares us to be modern consumers. Consider Gatto's description:

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 worth arguing about.

[Nisses]

pai mei: Alexander Fleming and Albert Einstein can't supply the world, now can they?

The very few that would to this, would get inundated with requests from all over the world. Even if it where physically possible for them to answer them, why would they then push themselves to do this and not have any more free time to do anything else? After all, they don't take requests/orders from anybody.

[pai mei]

Please read my other threads. Do you know how many people work slave jobs after they have been molded by this "education" today ? Everybody would be a genius in his own field. Why ? Remember when you were a child, were you not "good" at what you liked most ?

Yes yes but children like to play most - you say. No. Children in tribes like to imitate what adults do. Free. See above what I mean by free Today's school bores them to death, destroys them so they end up as "stupid people" working at Mc Donald.

Free children never "play". Play is never some "pass time" because they are "bored". "Boredom" is a modern invention. Play is their most important thing - because that is how free children see it and that is how they learn about the world.

My idea of school will present children with all the possibilities, I am sure they will like something and learn it and be good at it. And they will see it as "play". Same as tribal children who first imitate adults - playing.

http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter4-2.php

As children the things we did together mattered to us. To us they were real; we cared about them intensely and they evoked our full being. In contrast, most of the things we do together as adults for the sake of fun and friendship do not matter. We recognize them as frivolous, unnecessary, and relegate them to our "spare time". A child does not relegate play to spare time, unless forced to.

[Nisses]

I've read most of your threads so far.
I know alot of people are not happy in the jobs they have.
I agree that the current system is not the best way (far from it)

Unfortunately, by definition, these jobs that require specific training, would happen at university. But not everybody would actually *want* to teach this. What would you do when positions start dropping left and right because of no interested parties? Where would the people that want to learn this go then?

Would they go to another place, some place different? And what if in that place, the only 2 teachers already have their own share of apprentices? Does the teacher have to take on extra apprentices?
And if so, how is he ever gonna get any work done? Especially with several apprentices, who all require a totally different approach, since they're all free spirits? One you have to lead, the other you have to merely point to things, the other you have to discuss with to make him see the reason, while the 4th one only requires that he has a bit of silence to think things through?

Would you somehow have to work on a general way of instructing them? Perhaps a set path that you adjust a bit for each and every one? And eventually when a printing press is available, for ease (and time-saving) you have the printer make you copies of this path so that your apprentices can spend more time imitating you and less taking notes (because we can't all just memorize everything).


For arts/crafts types of jobs, that a tribes/village culture has need of, your system sounds workable.
For other jobs, that are "newer" it does not.

[pai mei]

So what ? Of course - you like doing what you like but say "I can't live without all this stuff produced by people who hate their lives. No way ! This stuff is needed !".

Let people be happy. If they want more stuff, they will be happy to work for it. If not - no. Give them this choice.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/tilted-...ever-work.html

How is that gonna work ? Teachers and apprentices ? Read the above link. In such an organization - there is no pressure for things to "work". People will call themselves "teachers" if they want to. The day they stop wanting, the day they feel bored, or disappointed - they stop teaching. Same applies - for their "Students".
Imagine - nobody would be bored, or disturb the teacher - because he is there by his own will....

"Imagination is more important than knowledge"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school’s regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. In the spring of 1895, he withdrew to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor’s note.[5] During this time, Einstein wrote his first scientific work, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields"

If he was kept at school - bored to death - scavenging time to live, maybe he would have not written that. That is what children go trough. Even if not all of them have the same interests as Einstein. Some say : "lazy children, they like just to live ! We know 90% will fail to be Einstein, but who cares, don't give them time to live, later they will not be able to integrate and work for us !". And even Einstein - did not agree with the system... So - the system does not even try to produce some Einstein in a million. Just to mold people...

http://paimei01.blogspot.com/2009/11/to-learn.html

Around 1900:
Rockefeller's General Education Board

"In our dreams. . . people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. . . . We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple. . . we will organize children . . . and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

[pai mei]

An Underground History of American Education - page 31

Athens distributed its most responsible public positions by lottery: army generalships, water supply, everything. The implications are awesome— trust in everyone’s competence was assumed; it was their version of universal driving. Professionals existed but did not make key decisions; they were only technicians, never well regarded because prevailing opinion held that technicians had enslaved their own minds. Anyone worthy of citizenship was expected to be able to think clearly and to welcome great responsibility. As you reflect on this, remember our own unvoiced assumption that anyone can guide a ton of metal traveling at high speed with three sticks of dynamite sloshing around in its tanks.

When we ask what kind of schooling was behind this brilliant society which has enchanted the centuries ever since, any honest reply can be carried in one word: None. After writing a book searching for the hidden genius of Greece in its schools, Kenneth Freeman concluded his unique study The Schools of Hellas in 1907 with this summary, "There were no schools in Hellas." No place boys and girls spent their youth attending continuous instruction under command of strangers. Indeed, nobody did homework in the modern sense; none could be located on standardized tests. The tests that mattered came in living, striving to meet ideals that local tradition imposed. The word sköle itself means leisure, leisure in a formal garden to think and reflect. Plato in The Laws is the first to refer to school as learned discussion.

The most famous school in Athens was Plato’s Academy, but in its physical manifestation it had no classes or bells, was a well-mannered hangout for thinkers and seekers, a generator of good conversation and good friendship, things Plato thought lay at the core of education. Today we might call such a phenomenon a salon. Aristotle’s Lyceum was pretty much the same, although Aristotle delivered two lectures a day—a tough one in the morning for intense thinkers, a kinder,gentler version of the same in the afternoon for less ambitious minds. Attendance was optional.And the famous Gymnasium so memorable as a forge for German leadership later on was in reality only an open training ground where men sixteen to fifty were free to participate in high-quality, state-subsidized instruction in boxing, wrestling, and javelin.The idea of schooling free men in anything would have revolted Athenians. Forced training was for slaves. Among free men, learning was self-discipline, not the gift of experts. From such notions Americans derived their own academies, the French their lycees, and the Germans their gymnasium. Think of it: In Athens, instruction was unorganized even though the city-state was surrounded by enemies and its own society engaged in the difficult social experiment of sustaining a participatory democracy, extending privileges without precedent to citizens, and maintaining literary, artistic, and legislative standards which remain to this day benchmarks of human genius.For its five-hundred-year history from Homer to Aristotle, Athenian civilization was a miracle in a rude world; teachers flourished there but none was grounded in fixed buildings with regular curricula under the thumb of an intricately layered bureaucracy.

[percy]

Watched this guys videos and laughed because I have been saying for years what this guy is saying.

Half of those people I spoke with were union driven teachers who believed they were the second coming of Christ, but would strike at the drop of a dime if come contract time they didn't get their 12-14% over 3 years,...they didn't like what I had to say.

The other half were people in general whose eyes would glaze over in the first minute. Not that I cared what they thought,...but most of them had children starting their careers in the education system but they had absolutely 100% trust their kids would get a good education.

Oh well,..we reap what we sow

[Seaver]

Tribal children - never beaten, educate, forced to do something, how come they don't all become lazy or "antisocial" ? Because their nature is not "lazy" or "antisocial" and they do not need "discipline". They need freedom to develop, to test the world around by themselves.

Bullshit. Tribal societies are MUCH harder on their children with discipline than we are, simply for the matter that if all members do not carry their own weight, all risk dying. If a child is dumb and gets lost, he stood a very high risk of dying.

Just because you wish tribal societies to be the perfect society does not make is so. Making stuff up in support of your argument only nullifies it.

[pai mei]

Their children want to be part of the group. The group accepts them with no conditions. But they conform because they are social.

Pawnee:

"They were a well-disciplined people, maintaining public order under many trying circumstances. And yet they had none of the power mechanisms that we consider essential to a well-ordered life. No orders were ever issued...Time after time I tried to find a case of orders given and there were none. Gradually I began to realize that democracy is a very personal thing which like charity, begins at home. Basically it means not being coerced and having no need to coerce anyone else. The Pawnee learned this way of living in the earliest beginning of his life. In the detailed events of every day as a child, he began his development as a disciplined and free man or as a women who felt her dignity and her independence to be inviolate"

Perhaps as essential as the assumption of innate sociality in children and adults is a respect for each individual as his own proprietor. The notion of ownership of other persons is absent among the Yequana. The idea that this is "my child" or "your child" does not exist. Deciding what another person should do, no matter what his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence – let alone coerce –anyone. A child's will is his motive force. There is no slavery – for how else can one describe imposing one's will on another and coercion by threat or punishment? The Yequana do not feel that a child's inferior physical strength and dependence upon them imply that they should treat him or her with less respect than an adult. No orders are given a child that run counter to his own inclinations as to how to play, how much to eat, when to sleep, and so on. But where his help is required, he is expected to comply instantly. Commands like "Bring some water!" "Chop some wood!" "Hand me that!" or "Give the baby a banana!" are given with the same assumption of innate sociality, in the firm knowledge that a child wants to be of service and to join in the work of his people. No one watches to see if the child obeys – there is no doubt of his will to cooperate. As the social animal he is, he does as he is expected without hesitation and to the very best of his ability

When the same Yequana family jokingly adopted me, I was surprised at the pleasure and faint sense of longing it gave me. Although I was not technically an orphan, I had never felt accepted by my mother, and although she and I both lived in New York at the time, I did not live with her. Nor did my sister, who lived alone, also in New York, with her daughter. My father, long since divorced from my mother, lived somewhere in Maine, I knew not precisely where.

I was embarrassed by the Yequana women's bewilderment at these living arrangements. They could not understand why my sister and I did not live with our mother. How could I explain to them that members of my tribe were so alienated that we expected people to want to live separate from their families, and even to feel put upon if, as adults, they had to live with their parents. More than bewilderment, the women had shown signs of fear, as though these solitary creatures, of whom I was one, were a cause for anxiety.

In Yequana society there is no equivocation about what behavior is undesirable, inconvenient or "not done," but neither is there any doubt that the child is what she ought to be: good, right and social, a human child behaving like one. Like all children she may create occasional inconveniences as she learns what is expected, but there is no question that she wants to do what is right. And quite rightly, for we are innately social animals.
Why do we assume that children will be destructive if not made afraid of punishment?

Amazon.com: The Continuum Concept: In Search Of Happiness Lost (Classics in Human Development) (9780201050714): Jean Liedloff: Books

Amazon.com: The Continuum Concept: In Search Of Happiness Lost (Classics in Human Development) (9780201050714): Jean Liedloff: Books

Adopt an Adult Orphan, by Jean Liedloff

"The manner in which Xingu indigenous parents raise their children is somewhat unique in that, generally they do not punish their children. They respect them and treat them as adults giving them much responsibility. In return, Xingu children for their part respond well and do not misbehave. According to a Xingu Indian story, a child once started a fire that burnt down a house. Although the loss was great, no punishment was given to the child. When the father was asked why he did not punish the son, he responded with surprise, “Why? He is only a child. What would punishing him accomplish?” From that point on, the Xingu natives called him Conomét Aratá (Fire Boy).

Kayapo TribeThe above story illustrates just how different Xingu tribes are from western societies. The first thing that I noticed when I first visited the Xingu Indigenous Park Reserve is that everyone was happy. It seems that very little makes them unhappy and that they spend about half the day laughing. The native of the Xingu are always joking and laughing. Not surprisingly, outsiders with their foreign ways are often the subject of their jokes. For example when I first arrived in the Xingu Indigenous Park, the chief put a feathered crown on my head. Little did I know that I would be the source of great amusement and jokes.

"The power of the cacique is very limited as each member of the tribe acts for himself. No one determines what an individual should do. Each Xingu Indian is a free and independent man. It is the force of culture and tribal traditions that maintain the unity of the village and tribe. Xingu Indian men do not recognize the authority of any cacique to impose penalties and punishment. Xinguano men learn early in life as boys what their position within the community is and they begin to act like an adult at an early age. When a Xinguano attains the age of twelve, he is very knowledgeable about what his responsibilities are and about the traditions of his people."

http://www.amazon-indians.org/page16.html

[ARTelevision]

This is a significant discussion. Gatto is one of the very important voices discussing education as it is practiced. Education is often - almost always, socialization, as roachboy indicates. It can be something different, however. There is some good discussion and practice occurring in what is being called "mindfulness education." That's a bit of a catch-all, of course. But it is not too difficult to conceive of far more humanistic approaches to this most human of subjects - even though "humanistic education" as a conventional thing has turned into just another form of socialization. So real progress is by no means simple on this path.