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the_underground_history_of_education_in_america
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impressed
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I Quit, I Think
by John Taylor Gatto
In the first year of the last decade of the twentieth century during my thirtieth year as a school teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools in the district, crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me, after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and terminated covertly once while I was on medical leave of absence, after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a lecturer in the Education Department (and the faculty rating handbook published by the Student Council gave me the highest ratings in the department my last three years), after planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school fund-raiser in New York City history, after placing a single eighth-grade class into 30,000 hours of volunteer community service, after organizing and financing a student-run food cooperative, after securing over a thousand apprenticeships, directing the collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of private student libraries, after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals, and launching an armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students within a larger human reality, I quit.
I was New York State Teacher of the Year when it happened. An accumulation of disgust and frustration which grew too heavy to be borne finally did me in. To test my resolve I sent a short essay to The Wall Street Journal titled "I Quit, I Think." In it I explained my reasons for deciding to wrap it up, even though I had no savings and not the slightest idea what else I might do in my mid-fifties to pay the rent. In its entirety it read like this:
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of Biology. It’s a religious notion, School is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
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. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.
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, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.
How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
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060925
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It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it’s difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism.
Notice how quickly people learn to drive well. Early failure is efficiently corrected, usually self-corrected, because the terrific motivation of staying alive and in one piece steers driving improvement. If the grand theories of Comenius and Herbart about learning by incremental revelation, or those lifelong nanny rules of Owen, Maclure, Pestalozzi, and Beatrice Webb, or those calls for precision in human ranking of Thorndike and Hall, or those nuanced interventions of Yale, Stanford, and Columbia Teachers College were actually as essential as their proponents claimed, this libertarian miracle of motoring would be unfathomable.
Now consider the intellectual component of driving. It isn’t all just hand-eye-foot coordination. First-time drivers make dozens, no, hundreds, of continuous hypotheses, plans, computations, and fine-tuned judgments every day they drive. They do this skillfully, without being graded, because if they don’t, organic provision exists in the motoring universe to punish them. There isn’t any court of appeal from your own stupidity on the road.4
I could go on: think of licensing, maintenance, storage, adapting machine and driver to seasons and daily conditions. Carefully analyzed, driving is as impressive a miracle as walking, talking, or reading, but this only shows the inherent weakness of analysis since we know almost everyone learns to drive well in a few hours. The way we used to be as Americans, learning everything, breaking down social class barriers, is the way we might be again without forced schooling. Driving proves that to me.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
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060925
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For a long time, for instance, classical 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.
There were no schools in Hellas. For the Greeks, study was its own reward.
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060925
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whoa
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No public school in the United States is set up to allow a George Washington to happen. Washingtons in the bud stage are screened, browbeaten, or bribed to conform to a narrow outlook on social truth. Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.
Anyone who reads can compare what the American present does in isolating children from their natural sources of education, modeling them on a niggardly last, to what the American past proved about human capabilities. The effect of the forced schooling institution’s strange accomplishment has been monumental. No wonder history has been outlawed.
- John Taylor Gatto
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060926
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After the Civil War, utopian speculative analysis regarding isolation of children in custodial compounds where they could be subjected to deliberate molding routines, began to be discussed seriously by the Northeastern policy elites of business, government, and university life. These discussions were inspired by a growing realization that the productive potential of machinery driven by coal was limitless. Railroad development made possible by coal and startling new inventions like the telegraph, seemed suddenly to make village life and local dreams irrelevant. A new governing mind was emerging in harmony with the new reality.
The principal motivation for this revolution in family and community life might seem to be greed, but this surface appearance conceals philosophical visions approaching religious exaltation in intensity—that effective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now freed from the obsolete straitjacket of democratic traditions and historic American libertarian attitudes.
Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a "human resource" and managed as a "workforce." No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled.
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060926
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Christ without the cross
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I have found myself unmotivated in school. Maybe this is why. I have been forced for so many years I don't know what i am doing anymore. I feel restricted. I wrote a paper the other day that expressed my ideas and my feelings. I failed because i didn't sight any sources. I didn't feel i needed to. Everyone loved it but my teacher (who speaks openly about open minds) could not accept such phrases as "a belief is a belief, belief in it makes it true." I hate quoting other people's work as if their thoughts are more credible than mine. My thoughts does not require any propping up by stating the opinions of others. My thoughts are a personal thing. it is not relevant who shares them with me. Let me know when you guys organize a real institution of higher learning.
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060926
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unhinged
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190511
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unhinged
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i am tired of teaching with no benefits, no raises, no commitments
fuck education
i am ready to sell out for money
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190512
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daf
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Don;t be a fuck head, do0d.
THAT'S the problem. Weak people who need money more than they believe in themselves.
Don;t make it worse. And yes..you come back to a better life if you do right by your heart..so don't throw that 401k away.
I've got proof. And you may get to see it when I'm on my deathbed if we're still talking. You're no quitter..you're just being battered by quitters and their sorry, habitual, defensive justifications.
Don't become what you despise.
Don't let them kill you.
You're still alive inside..that's why it still hurts.
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190513
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unhinged
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i am also tired of teaching because parents think i don't know what i am doing (even though i have a master's degree in pedagogy) and that i should somehow be SO inspiring in their weekly 30 minute lessons that the parents should have to do nothing to get their kids to practice at home.
on top of the fact that i literally can't keep a roof over my head or food in my stomach from my teaching job. i am tired of working every fucking week asshole. i am tired of juggling three jobs and barely making ends meet. i am tired of my boss giving my students to the other teacher cause she kisses his ass more. i am tired of having no new clients/students coming in and the other teacher getting the new ones because she would rather be playing in orchestras.
i have maybe five students that appreciate me. maybe. and parents these days all think their child deserves special treatment, to never be bored or uncomfortable. i am tired of it. all of it. especially the part where i have to take three buses to get there and then my boss shames me for having to eat at work.
teachers quit teaching all the time because of the exact reasons i am ready to quit. i dont have to be miserable at work. i deserve to have paid time off. i don't want to work til the day i die. teaching is making me miserable. the only paid time off i get at that job is sick pay because the state mandates it. and since i don't make enough money to survive teaching i am definitely not making enough money to save any of it so i can stop working ever.
once again your unsolicited bullshit is just that.
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190513
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dafremen
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Not exactly. You can't feed yourself, because the same pretentious middle class douchebags who claim to love the arts, are raking in the money they donate a fraction of, from renting space to other people so THEY can do the work..including starving music teachers.
It's the parents? What do THEY give af about music? They just want to brag on their kid or keep them from nagging. Go do some auditions before you choose your students. Go figure out how to choose the time you spend wisely. Maybe, start with: Stop wasting you days on money that's dead set on fertilizing barren soil..maybe?
Then again, maybe it's 'ol daf and his unsolicited bullshit instead of you chasing after rent coupons with dead presidents on them and using me as your whipping boy. I work as a handyman..then do music because I'm not that good. YOU? Js..Love you more than you know..you could have your own Julliard if you valued your time more than their money. They'd flock to you if you found their geniuses and assured them of it while nurturing their talents. You are a priestess in the temple of music and ANYONE should be honored to be under your tutelage. So fuck you too. Love daf.
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201201
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unhinged
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stop wasting my time making sure i have enough money to not be homeless and starving? yeah, right, ok.
and covid19 has only made parents more ridiculous and teaching less appealing. it's easy for you to feed me your philosophical bullshit about how i should live on lofty ideals and act like the reality of money and work doesn't exist cause hey, you have risen above it all so i should too. i am tired enough of being unappreciated and underpaid. get off my fucking back. if you think teaching is such a great job go ahead and go do it yourself.
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201201
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dafremen
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Hey dumb, but smart ass.. I love you man. But fuck you. They wear their stupid masks for YOU. Why? Because..they assume you give a shit.
I'm doing handyman all day long every fucking day I want to. I show up? Yea..they're wearing a mask. Then we start talking, they like me..they see I don't give a shit..take it off and don't give a shit.
You'd think they'd keep it on, right? Because they're worried, right? Nope. They lose it. They want to, but need assurance. And that's what YOU were suppose to do music guru. Be a role model instead of a slave.
They want the magic you have...something they can't just materialize with money. They need YOU to give a shit. And here you come..and certainly you give a shit..you are a wonderful awesome inspirational role model..and there you are..wearing your fucking mask. Helping the media make its point.
You...a star in the human constellation. Fuck me? No..fuck you for not listening when you were asked to lead instead of being the comfort and ("OMG HOMELESS!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHH") POS that you're making of yourself...conditioning's a bitch homie.
Still love you, but I'm not going to apologize for being tougher than you. Pick it up do0d. Pick it up a lot..cause you got it talent and gift-wise..but didn't get taught that you're a juggernaut. Sorry bout that. I just stopped listening to anyone that told me I was in danger, or stupid or anything. I also stopped listening tothe people that are feeding them and worshipping them and their money You know..the folks that think that homelessness is the worst thing that can happen to them as they suck metaphorical richie cock to survive?
For me (regardless of you opinion) ou are my good good homie. Your ideals failed you. Not my bad. I told you different almost 20 years ago.
Believe in yourself and stop calling money your god. Go be homeless for a month or 12 and find liberation in getting over fear. You might just see the goddess you are. Who knows? Not my call. I just cry for you once in awhile and cheer for you a lot. (When I care to risk crying over your wasted ass again. don't get me wrong..wasted ass recognizing waste when he sees it. *waves Gumpishly*)
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201202
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dafremen
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On teaching:
For 8 years, I watched the public education system turn 3 children into completely society dependent zombies.
One of them, the youngest, was put into special ed over mild autism and then treated like he was vegetative even though he was ACEing English tests. He was made to fee like an outcast, loser, less than the rest..etc.
4 years later, this young man is so clever. He talks to strangers, can speak with customers, stranger. He's got his own landscaping business at 16. What did the teachers at public school do for him?
Teach? I can teach all day if the student's worthy. But in a world of 8 billion people, teaching's a gift..a precious gold bar..like yours is.
I'll never sell it cheap and never hand it to those who don't really value it. I'd rather work as a handyman and do menial jobs until I build up enough reputation as someone who REALLY cares about the integrity of the art and won't contribute to anyone who doesn't have the real talent. My lyrics are for those who give a shit. I'll pay my bills some other way. No selling out the temple. Get another skill. You should so know this by now. The inner sanctum isn't for sale, no matter what the medium.
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201202
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unhinged
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ok
ill keep doing a mostly thankless job i hate that doesn't support me cause you're tougher than me and think i should continue to do a job i hate cause you attach some kind of noble meaning to it
i have been teaching from my living room on a screen since march
i have no intention of being homeless no matter what that makes me in your eyes
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201202
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dafremen
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You are what you are in my eyes. I only see energies. What you do with this life you've been given..well FUCK Holmes..it not like we're on the same stage. Choose your tragedy, comedy or drama. Shit, call it conviction. Tell yourself EVERY fucking thing that your character needs to hear.
You've got it figured out. That's why you're shaking your fist at me. Fuck off home-slice. Love you to death, but I've been doing this adulting thing since three and we're still talking after all of this elitist 30-something whining you're doing. Guess you must be doing something right. You still have people who care about you. But again..don't let it go to your head..semi-kept person.
Maybe the universe values you more than you value yourself. Wouldnt surprise me. You seem to have lost your sense of value along the way as money and desperation crept into your dreams.
Can't say I'm blameless in that regard, but damn do0d. What does it take to get you to punch your keepers in the face..oh college educated/extra-richie-conditioned friend of mine?
(Notice how I didn't say lapdog suck up? That's cuz I love you like family, Nicole and know you've tried to honor your passion for music.)
Go shake your fist at people who agree with your inner assessment of yourself. I only see you, do0d and you're pretty steady awesome when you're not being a punching bag for everyone that would let you. Gawd that shit sucked. So go take it out on someone else. You would think that watching me go through the same devoted bullshit myself would've given you a clue that the world is tired of watching good people waste their time on shitty causes. -- Love again man.
"Homeless?!! But that's for..for...THOSE people!!"
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201204
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unhinged
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ok
yet again, you somehow know me and my life better than i do based on what i write around here.
my actual dream at one point in my life was to be a performer but a head_on collision with a semi truck ended that dream
money is a real issue for everyone and the fact that you keep making that negligible makes me not listen to anything else you say. i don't need to be rich. my family never has been. i can live on way less than the average american and i have lived on that for twenty years. i have never driven a car cause i can't afford it and i used to take three buses one way to get to my teaching job. i spent three hours per day just on my commute. so that parents could tell me they were quitting lessons with me after years of teaching their child that barely spoke english at four years old for years and even learning a slight bit of japanese to help teach that child because of the books they wanted their child to learn out of....that child used to crawl up in my lap but i was no longer good enough to teach him because i did not continue to use a specific method book all the way to the end of the series. the emotional investment i had in that child was intense and being severed from that relationship over something that trivial is what actually ruined teaching for me.
parents very rarely acknowledge the struggle of teachers if at all, other than to say 'you're a shitty teacher' just like you did previously in this post. are there bad teachers? sure. but classroom teachers more specifically have to deal with more shit now than ever before in bigger classrooms than ever before. and where i currently live parents have decided it's the teachers job to raise their kids now. i.e. it's my job to get the student to do their homework. i have had parents tell me that if i was a good enough teacher the student would just pick up their violin at home and practice without the parent having to be involved in the practicing. i teach kids for their resumes to get into ivy league schools, not because the child or the parent gives a fuck about music or the violin. THAT is not my dream.
so while i should probably just ignore the bullshit you've been flinging at me on this page cause everyone should agree with you and do what you say, i am so tired of the judgement that i am lazy and greedy cause i am tired of worrying about how i can have a roof over my head and food to eat. you know, basic survival. i do not need to keep doing a job that goes unappreciated. especially if my basic needs are not met by that job. teaching kids that don't want to be taught so that they can go to harvard someday....i should keep doing that cause
cause? keeping a job like that is actually the definition of what you think is so horrible. letting the rich snobs pay me crumbs so that their kids can prop up the system that i hate, become the next bill gates. i used to take the bus through the community bill gates and jeff bezos live in to get to my teaching job. and still had to worry about how to pay my bills and eat. dreams are allowed to change just like people. i spent almost a decade in a union and ended up on picket lines trying to make a better life for myself and my coworkers. maybe that means more to me now than propping up the ivy league aspirations of rich assholes. my passion for music hasn't really changed. but my attitude towards teaching sure has. and that's my fucking choice to make based on my LIVED experience.
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201204
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