The Case Against Public Education -Locking a Nation Into Permanent Childhood

[RockPusher]

Locking a Nation Into Permanent Childhood

by Vin Suprynowicz
January 23, 2008
Locking a Nation Into Permanent*Childhood by Vin Suprynowicz

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A letter-writer recently objected that I used great libertarian Rose Wilder Lane as a "sole source" for the fact that American schooling was taken over, in the late 19th century, by statists enamored of the Prussian compulsion model, aiming to create a docile peasant class by crippling the American intellect – making reading seem real hard, for starters, by replacing the old system in which delighted kids learned to combine the sounds of the Roman letters, with a perverted "whole word" method better suited to decoding hieroglyphics.
In July 1991, John Taylor Gatto, New York's Teacher of the Year, quit, saying he was tired of working for an institution that crippled the ability of children to learn. He explained why in an essay published that month in the Wall Street Journal.
Let's look at that essay, and see if we can find our "second source":
"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history," Mr. Gatto begins. "It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. 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.' It has political allies to guard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. ...
"David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first – the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel 'learning disabled' and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, 'special education' fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.
"In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths. ..."
These are not the words of some sour-grapes loser who "couldn't make it" as a teacher. Testimonials from Gatto's former students fill a whole book.
Citing the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey, Gatto in his book Underground History of American Education, reports only 3.5 percent of Americans are literate enough today "to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today."
This month, that majority is choosing our presidential candidates based on who looks better on TV.
"During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years," Gatto's research shows. "Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race." This "infantalization" continues, as "Child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. ..."
Gatto recounts how a woman once showed him a poem written by a high school senior in Alton, Ill., two weeks before he committed suicide:

"'He drew... the things inside that needed saying.
Beautiful pictures he kept under his pillow.
When he started school he brought them...
To have along like a friend.
It was funny about school, he sat at a square brown desk
Like all the other square brown desks ... and his room
Was a square brown room like all the other rooms, tight
And close and stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, his arms stiff
His feet flat on the floor, stiff, the teacher watching
And watching. She told him to wear a tie like
All the other boys, he said he didn't like them.
She said it didn't matter what he liked. After that the class drew.
He drew all yellow. It was the way he felt about Morning.
The Teacher came and smiled, "What's this?
Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing?"
After that his mother bought him a tie, and he always
Drew airplanes and rocketships like everyone else.
He was square inside and brown and his hands were stiff.
The things inside that needed saying didn't need it
Anymore, they had stopped pushing... crushed, stiff
Like everything else.' "

Perhaps you'll say we're better off without losers who can't get with the program, anyway.
"After I spoke in Nashville, a mother named Debbie pressed a handwritten note on me which I read on the airplane to Binghamton, New York," Gatto continues:
'We started to see Brandon flounder in the first grade, hives, depression, he cried every night after he asked his father, "Is tomorrow school, too?" In second grade the physical stress became apparent. The teacher pronounced his problem Attention Deficit Syndrome. My happy, bouncy child was now looked at as a medical problem, by us as well as the school.
'A doctor, a psychiatrist, and a school authority all determined he did have this affliction. Medication was stressed along with behavior modification. If it was suspected that Brandon had not been medicated he was sent home. My square peg needed a bit of whittling to fit their round hole. ...
'I cried as I watched my parenting choices stripped away. My ignorance of options allowed Brandon to be medicated through second grade. The tears and hives continued another full year until I couldn't stand it. I began to homeschool Brandon. It was his salvation. No more pills, tears, or hives. He is thriving. He never cries now and does his work eagerly.' "
You can read John Taylor Gatto's entire Underground History of American Education, detailing just how Mann and Dewey and their gang imposed on us a Prussian system of coercive schooling, so ill-suited to a free people, at Read The Book - John Taylor Gatto.
What I wonder is: If you "care about the children," why don't you want to?

[RockPusher]

Locking Our Children Away From the Real World

by Vin Suprynowicz
http://www.lewrockwell.com/suprynowicz/suprynowicz74.html

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Last week, we again delved into John Taylor Gatto's invaluable text The Underground History of American Education, citing his summary of the career of George Washington.
The point of Mr. Gatto – a former New York city and state (government) Teacher of the Year – when he summarizes the careers of men like Washington, Franklin, David Farragut, Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, is twofold. First, the careers of these men – by no means all child geniuses, by no means all the offspring of wealthy aristocrats – demonstrate that literacy, fame and high character have often been achieved in America without the benefit of more than a few years' formal schooling. That is to say, the insistence of today's educrats that anyone deprived of a full 12 years locked up in their compulsory propaganda camps is doomed to a lifetime as an illiterate loser is self-promoting nonsense from those anxious to perpetuate the largest make-work "jobs" program in history.
But Mr. Gatto then goes much further. He argues careers such as those of Washington and Edison and Carnegie would not have been possible – those great Americans would never have gained the life skills necessary – had they been locked away in a government school for a dozen years.
In response, we heard last week from one of our local government schoolmarms. "First, let it be said I too feel George Washington was the greatest president the country ever had," the schoolmarm asserts, apparently seeking commonality. "Most notable were his leadership and negotiating skills."

In fact, I never said Washington was our greatest president – an honor for which others including Jefferson and Van Buren remain in contention. (If the suggestion of Van Buren brings a chuckle of ridicule, you may have attended a government school. Today's government propagandists define "greatness" as the willingness to trample the Constitution in a grab for dictatorial powers – i.e. Lincoln and Frank Roosevelt. Leaving aside his lamentable complicity in the "Indian removals," Van Buren is considered negligible today precisely because he limited himself to competently executing his constitutional duties, during which time the country prospered with minimal federal "stimulus.")
Rather, I said Washington "remains the greatest man of our age," the strategist who won the Revolution by avoiding the one pitched battle we probably would have lost, the man who resigned when he could have been king.
Meantime, what's this about Washington's most notable attribute being his "negotiating skill"?
I've read many scholarly biographies; I can't recall any biographer listing this as the greatest of Washington's attributes. Yes, he showed forbearance with a Congress that played disastrous games with the vital supply system. But the most important "negotiating" was conducted by Franklin, who cemented the vital French alliance.
Next to whose statue should we place Washington in the Great Negotiator's Hall of Fame – that of Neville Chamberlain?
Did Washington "negotiate" the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781? Sure he did. The way he "negotiated" it was to line up his cannon on the ridge and start blowing the houses occupied by the British officers and troops to smithereens.
How did he "negotiate" an end to the Whiskey Rebellion? By calling out the militia and marching on western Pennsylvania with an army of 12,000 men.
(Since this led to the stronger central government preferred by the Hamiltonians, I will reserve my praise. At least Washington let the tax protesters off with a stern warning, when others called for mass hangings.)
Showing up with 12,000 armed men may be my kind of "negotiation," but I somehow doubt it's the kind our friend the schoolmarm fantasizes about to her young charges.
I believe we are seeing revisionism in progress here, right before our eyes. Heaven forfend the children should be told Washington's greatest skill was in gathering together a large group of men who believed the best way to "negotiate" our freedom was to take up unregistered firearms and use them to kill people, most especially the duly delegated officers of the established government.
One of the points Mr. Gatto makes about the skills George Washington managed to acquire without benefit of much formal schooling (he somehow fails to list "negotiator") is that, "Years later he became his own architect for the magnificent estate of Mount Vernon."
The schoolmarm replies – you knew this was coming, right? – "Let us not forget that George Washington did not do the work at Mount Vernon by himself. He had at least 100 employees also known as slaves."
Mr. Gatto was speaking of Washington's abilities as an amateur architect. (He rebuilt Mount Vernon twice beginning in 1757.) Do we dismiss the skills and talents of Frank Lloyd Wright or I.M. Pei because others do the actual excavation and carpentry? One of Mr. Pei's most famous hotels was built in Red China in 1982. While the laborers on the project were not "slaves," I have no idea what would have happened to them if they'd refused to work. Does this devalue Mr. Pei's work?
Mr. Gatto was citing Washington's skills not as a day laborer, but as an architect.
Did any of the slaves at Mount Vernon actually help design the new building? We await the schoolmarm's documentation.
Failing that, what we have here is a classic argument from non sequitur – bringing in the old familiar argument that no example of American accomplishment from before 1863 can be relevant to a modern debate, "since they all owned slaves," when it has nothing to do with the topic under discussion.
The great irony here, of course, is that the tried and true "slavery" red herring (Washington did at least include a provision in his will to free his slaves upon the death of his wife) is used here to try and distract us from Mr. Gatto's point about our modern schooling practice, dragged across the trail in an effort to distract the hounds from a fresh analysis of a current institution which our descendents will regard with almost as much puzzlement, dismay and condemnation as those earlier versions of involuntary servitude, chattel slavery and "the press" – that being our current practice of locking our children away from the real world during their most vital and formative years, on penalty of law, ignoring the fact that no one can ever be forced to learn anything other than subservience and toadyism, in the prison-like boredom of our increasingly violent and dysfunctional mandatory government youth propaganda camps.

[7960]

only 3.5 percent of Americans are literate enough today "to do traditional college study,....."

I'm not buying the book, but I'm also not buying this little tidbit either.

[bheld]

Not much of a case, I'd say.

[7960]

I do agree that school prolongs childhood, though. But that pretty much stops when the "child" leaves school and enters the adult world.

[RockPusher]

Originally Posted by bheld

Not much of a case, I'd say.

Call me surprised you missed it.... Let me deliver it in a style befitting modern public education; redacted for impacted attention spans and with bold and coloured lettering to highlight the important parts.


"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. 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.' It has political allies to guard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. ...


"David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first – the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel 'learning disabled' and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, 'special education' fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.


But Mr. Gatto then goes much further. He argues careers such as those of Washington and Edison and Carnegie would not have been possible – those great Americans would never have gained the life skills necessary – had they been locked away in a government school for a dozen years.


a fresh analysis of a current institution... of involuntary servitude, chattel slavery and "the press" – that being our current practice of locking our children away from the real world during their most vital and formative years, on penalty of law, ignoring the fact that no one can ever be forced to learn anything other than subservience and toadyism, in the prison-like boredom of our increasingly violent and dysfunctional mandatory government youth propaganda camps.

[RMNIXON]

Originally Posted by 7960

I do agree that school prolongs childhood, though. But that pretty much stops when the "child" leaves school and enters the adult world.

Not for everybody, not by a long shot!

As a child, no matter how curious, you are always protected and guided by parents or other adult authorities in institutions of school and church. This should be just a part of your life. For many adults real learning was abandoned a long long time ago, and no matter how rotten the institutions become they are a wet blanket of comfort to the mediocre and dim witted people of the world.

Those with imagination and courage to take on the world are the real adults!

[RockPusher]

Originally Posted by 7960

I'm not buying the book, but I'm also not buying this little tidbit either.

You don't have to buy it. Gatto has placed it in the public domain online.

That tidbit is explained FAR better in the book Gatto uses US military test results over the years to compare adults, and for the 3% figure, he is actually using data and methodology of a USDE funded study.



If you choose to not read it, you will not be hurting anybody. Reading it would give you the benefit of the perspective of a highly regarded educator... whether you agree with his conclusions or not. It would be a win/win situation.

I have read Compte, St. Simone, Marx, Lenin, and Mao...... though I have never subscribed to their schools of thought. Although I am opposed to their viewpoints, I can more acutely address the flaws of their philosophy by reading them.

Conversely, if you disagree with Gatto's conclusions, you can analyze his theory and conjecture to effectively argue against it.

If you had done so, being an intelligent person, you could have poked some holes and generate a dialectic that could cause me to understand your thinking, or a new synthesis of thought could have occurred.

It is a minor shame... but no feelings are hurt.

[RMNIXON]

Originally Posted by RockPusher

"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. 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.' It has political allies to guard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. ...

That is where we have fouled up. We went from the ideal of an educated public to the mindless defense of education as a protected institution. Like a priesthood we have an education system that hides and protects the incompetant. We are set up to believe anything but the institution itself is the problem.

[RockPusher]

Originally Posted by RMNIXON

Not for everybody, not by a long shot!

As a child, no matter how curious, you are always protected and guided by parents or other adult authorities in institutions of school and church. This should be just a part of your life. For many adults real learning was abandoned a long long time ago, and no matter how rotten the institutions become they are a wet blanket of comfort to the mediocre and dim witted people of the world.

Those with imagination and courage to take on the world are the real adults!

I concede that the lowest common denominator may not have their childhood prolonged by modern pedagogy, but in doing so, BY NECESSITY, the more advanced students are held back. As such I take issue with your last sentence. Only those with imagination and courage to take on the world are held back from becoming adults.

[RockPusher]

Originally Posted by RMNIXON

That is where we have fouled up. We went from the ideal of an educated public to the mindless defense of education as a protected institution. Like a priesthood we have an education system that hides and protects the incompetant. We are set up to believe anything but the institution itself is the problem.

Here here...

I love your 'priesthood' statement because that is what the architect of modern society and schooling, Henri St Simon, saw as the teachers role, to be a priest of the new industrial Christianity.

[bheld]

Originally Posted by RockPusher

Call me surprised you missed it.... Let me deliver it in a style befitting modern public education; redacted for impacted attention spans and with bold and coloured lettering to highlight the important parts.


"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. 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.' It has political allies to guard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. ...


"David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first – the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel 'learning disabled' and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, 'special education' fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.


But Mr. Gatto then goes much further. He argues careers such as those of Washington and Edison and Carnegie would not have been possible – those great Americans would never have gained the life skills necessary – had they been locked away in a government school for a dozen years.


a fresh analysis of a current institution... of involuntary servitude, chattel slavery and "the press" – that being our current practice of locking our children away from the real world during their most vital and formative years, on penalty of law, ignoring the fact that no one can ever be forced to learn anything other than subservience and toadyism, in the prison-like boredom of our increasingly violent and dysfunctional mandatory government youth propaganda camps.

Where's the case? This is just a bunch of demagoguery.

[RockPusher]

Originally Posted by bheld

Where's the case? This is just a bunch of demagoguery.

Hardly.. they are examples of dynamics that are destructive to the individuals subjected to public schooling.... i.e. You cannot be a publisher, naval officer, politician or scientist if you are stuck in a metered education system set to the lowest common denominator.

Forcing kids into public school under threat of prosecution is involuntary servitude.

You cannot force someone to learn.... you can only force submission.

I think you are diverting a little bit. The article is certainly written in persuasive language and contains copious opinion and summary, but it is not a dissertation. It is a thought provoking article designed to stimulate critical though and discussion. The sourcing is there as the entire text of the subject is available online, so feel free to read the full text of the sections mentioned and I guarantee you a thoughtful discussion that can branch into the primary sources such as the studies and missions published by key figures and organizations.

[RMNIXON]

Originally Posted by RockPusher

I concede that the lowest common denominator may not have their childhood prolonged by modern pedagogy, but in doing so, BY NECESSITY, the more advanced students are held back. As such I take issue with your last sentence. Only those with imagination and courage to take on the world are held back from becoming adults.

I was refering to the adults as those who can break free of institutional protections. A metaphor.

But your point is well taken. I would not even use the phrase "advanced students." Let us have honesty. Some students are simply smarter and more ambitious than others. They are indeed held back by modern educational ideals and fads. The confusion of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome and self-esteem are treated as a Bible.

The "system" of education has no choice other than to dumb down students because the opposite result is impossible. And it is unfair to the better student. I don't know what advice to give other than they should educate themselves outside the "system" because the system sucks! By the time they are in their early teens any number of kids can tell they are smarter and better informed than their own teachers. The education departments on many Universities are well known as a haven for the "C" students or under. It is no wonder some kids get bored and stop performing for these people.

[bheld]

Originally Posted by RockPusher

Hardly.. they are examples of dynamics that are destructive to the individuals subjected to public schooling.... i.e. You cannot be a publisher, naval officer, politician or scientist if you are stuck in a metered education system set to the lowest common denominator.

Forcing kids into public school under threat of prosecution is involuntary servitude.

You cannot force someone to learn.... you can only force submission.

I think you are diverting a little bit. The article is certainly written in persuasive language and contains copious opinion and summary, but it is not a dissertation. It is a thought provoking article designed to stimulate critical though and discussion. The sourcing is there as the entire text of the subject is available online, so feel free to read the full text of the sections mentioned and I guarantee you a thoughtful discussion that can branch into the primary sources such as the studies and missions published by key figures and organizations.

What's the point when he builds upon the false premise that thousands of school administrators out there are screaming at little children and calling them animals?