On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 06:46:02 -0700 (PDT), Sir Arthur CB Wholeflaffers
ASA <garymatalucci@gmail.com> wrote:
The United States of War Criminals By Mickey Z.
"I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan,
and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in
boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the
kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the
same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense,
that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something
real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know
much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning
more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored
as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has
spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the
whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why
they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might
expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and
interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are
themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs
that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they
are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon
the children. Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was
seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the
head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence
again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The
obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and
people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if
possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of
boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass
on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however,
I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and
childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often
I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of
this trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate
opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to
discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had
been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I
no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of
tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school
secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my
family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally
retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools
- with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both
students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I
honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience
had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way,
too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we
could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and
help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We
could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity,
adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by
being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids
to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he
or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in
thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the
more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our
schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in
the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn
things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they
are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush
accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child
behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not
one of them ever really grows up?
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced
schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year,
for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so,
for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a
rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that
banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable
number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year
wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham
Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products
of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a
secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally
didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like
Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie
and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even
scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people
who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at
all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good,
multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily
married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant
was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of
"success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling,"
but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a
financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find
a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of
compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why,
then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What
exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the
United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much
earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The
reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural
traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most
of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of
public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in
achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the
fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly
consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have,
for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American
Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their
intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. 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. That is its aim in the United States . . .
and that is its aim everywhere else.
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to
dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article,
however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system
back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state
of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we
had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought
and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational
system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for
concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again
and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it
many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of
Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly
denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s.
Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board
of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick
the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That
Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given
our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as
Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-
speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered
publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what
shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst
aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately
designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life,
to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile
and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace
"manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty
years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb
project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII,
and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century
- that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling.
Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree
of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed
with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at
a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly
after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length
essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little
intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we
attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and
1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the
curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles
of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the
eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it
perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was
intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth
column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give
the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.
Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of
surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses.
Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on
tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that
the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever
reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem
schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl
the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional
goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed
habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical
judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful
or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for
reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn,
and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity
function," because its intention is 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.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine
each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence
mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your
permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been
"diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far
as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step
further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but
to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called
"the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by
consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are
meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and
other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them
as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive
sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first
grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these
rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small
fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this
continuing project, how to watch over and control a population
deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might
proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient
labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in
this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a
rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know
that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself,
building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly
for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like
George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout
the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in
creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but
also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of
industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by
cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among
them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception
of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the
interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people
down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to
discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition,
as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said
the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in
1909: "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 forgo the privileges of a liberal
education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual
tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring
about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely
from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the
paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above
all, they can stem from simple greed.
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on
mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather
than the small business or the family farm. But mass production
required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century
most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things
they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that
count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think
they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it
encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks
for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two
groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they
need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of
turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job
of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident.
Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if
children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of
responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the
trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would
grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once
well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P.
Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive
school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and
forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same
Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook
editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at
Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book
Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in
which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . .
And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to
the specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those
specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly
every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to
work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal
self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to
entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask
questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our
judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial
blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and
then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and
then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers
whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy
another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a
kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And,
worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be
careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere
back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy
that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern
schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. 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. Urge them to take on the
serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature,
philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff
schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with
plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company,
to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to
dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the
TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships
quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a
more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are:
laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the
habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory
education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to
turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods
extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of
a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could
publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could
apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself
through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today),
there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and
thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius
is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only 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."
___
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___