Tune in, Turn on, Dropout
Summary: John Taylor Gatto paints a grim picture of the public school system, comparing it to nothing less than mass mind control. What, exactly, is the hidden purpose of our schools?
What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook.
- Henry David Thoreau
John Taylor Gatto won the New York State Teacher of the Year award in 1990, then opened fire. While others made vague generalizations about how bad the public school system was, Gatto spelled out the reasons. School, he explained, was a program to manufacture consumers who would provide the base upon which a manufacturing industry would feed and a political system could control. Secondly, the schools themselves would be enormous job programs—with administrators, contractors, publishers, builders, and... oh yes... teachers. It's undoubtable that schools inflict severe damage on children, but is the problem going to be the end of our country, or the strength of it?
After 45 minutes, every child is interrupted by a bell... it teaches that nothing is ever worth finishing... or starting
Gatto's description of the public school system reads like a conspiracy theory, and would be one if the original conspirators hadn't made their agenda public a century ago. It begins with the removal of a child from her family at the earliest possible age and ends with the release of an adult who has commercially and politically desirable properties—not the least of which are a predilection to follow authority figures and a limited ability to think critically. The fact that a reasonably intelligent person can thrash a high-school graduate in a debate is by design, not failure. But schools are an unqualified success, taken from a certain point of view.
To understand what we mean, we should describe some of Gatto's observations.
- Every school is divided up into cells (classrooms) where stimulus is kept to a bare minimum. Classrooms are mind-numbing, they force attention on the state appointed authority (the teacher) and confine the children to chairs where they sit immobile for up to an hour. The world is taught to them without ever being shown to them. They're taught a world disconnected with reality.
- After 45 minutes to an hour, every child is interrupted by a bell that signals the end of whatever they were doing (reading a passage, writing down a thought, discussing an issue, etc.) and summons them to shuffle off into another cell in the building. It teaches them that nothing is ever worth finishing, and therefore—by extension—nothing is ever worth starting, either.
- The subjects are taught without context. You are taught Math. English. Science. History. And so-on, as if each were separate worlds. Children are not taught how Math affects science which affected history which affected English and so-on. This constant subdivision means that nobody finds out what's really going on.
- Meaningless goals (grades) are set, encouraging children to compete for something which has no value (no employer hires by grades).
- Children are policed into respecting state authorities, even to the point of denying basic human dignities (such as being able to go to the bathroom without having to ask permission and get a hall pass). They become dependent on the teacher to tell them what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.
- The early years of learning are trivialized with “balloons, songs and funny games.” Then, when they're older, students are suddenly put in competition with each other and segregated into age-based classes. So no matter how secure a student was with what she understood, it was always clear who was one or more grades superior to her.
What does this give us? It gives us people who want instant meaningless reward, depend on someone to tell them what to do, specialize in only one narrow subject, and lack the skills to investigate on their own. We call them “consumers,” and they're perfect for a production-line economy.
Our entire economy hinges on a cycle that starts with a production line and ends with a consumer. In order to justify a production line you must be expecting to manufacture hundreds of thousands to millions of identical products. To need so many copies of the same product you need to have proportionate demand. In order to generate that kind of demand you need a base of consumers who react to stimulus (marketing) in a predictable way. And in order to have a base of consumers who react in a predictable way... well... you gotta program them when they're youngA.
And that's what it's really all about; predictability. If you can predict a population's behavior, then you can control it. That's why schools are compulsory.
Unfair, but necessary. The schools have been a roaring success from the viewpoint of their architects. The armed forces are filled with muscle-heads who Just Follow Orders from their superiors, frighteningly effective, even if dumb as hammers. In the workplace they're happy cogs in the machine. They sit in their position on the production line, do the one job they're good at, have a debt-based (instead of investment based) financial life, and go home to be entertained by the things they've purchased because they no longer have the skills to entertain themselves.
You look at the way kids are taught dependancy, disconnection, and meaningless reward and social diseases such as drug abuse lose their mystery. Columbine was just sorta expected. But the system will deal with those problems (to the extreme, if necessary), or at least absorb the losses. The people who designed the system weren't evil, they just honestly believed there was no other way.
And all in all, it does work out quite well—as its original purpose goes.
After compulsory schooling was introduced, the literacy rate dropped from 98% to 91%, where it remains today
But expecting every child to come out of the sausage machine shaped the same way is absurd. What has become so clear, only after compulsory schooling put it in contrast, is that everybody learns differently. This shouldn't be news to you because it's been added to the mantras of so many school reform movements already, not the least of which is Gatto's. The public school system cannot accomodate it, however, no matter how many computers you install in the classroom. It would be like pretending an engraving machine at the end of a production line makes each ball-pen customized.
Gatto claims that a child who learns to read at five, and another who learns at nine, will be indistinguishable from each other at the age of fourteen. But the idea embodied by the school system is that they should both learn the same way and at the same pace, which means that the second child will slip into failure mode while the first trundles through the system as planned. Did the second kid need to be singled out and sent to a humiliating “special ed” class, or was she simply on a different internal schedule?
“You can predict the rise of a giant remediation industry.”
Yet two points become clear after studying Gatto's observations. The first is that not all kids are turned into imbeciles, in fact the imbecile seems to be the exception rather than the rule. How can this be?
Gatto contends that children need lots of contact with the real world in order to develop properly, something that the school system tends to deny—either through containing them in dull school-cells or annex their personal time with homework. Yet it obviously isn't so complete, because children still have enormous opportunities to have real-world experiences and find solid mentors on their own (consider the voluminous summer vacation period).
The life of an average schoolchild is saturated with non-curricular activity. The talents they exhibit after graduation are almost always self-taught and were developed outside of school walls.
The second point is that the modern school system is not going away, regardless of how evil its function seems to be.
Gatto's the first to point out that America's schools are an enormous jobs program, one of the single largest employers in the world. And if its impact on the political scene is as profound as claimed (nothing less than bulk-order mind control) then we can be sure that the worst any school reform movement could do is find out just how quickly an effective propaganda campaign can be engineered against them. This isn't meant to sound like a “The Man is out to getcha” line, but being as frank as we can, big money likes to protect big revenue streams.
Which leaves a handful of realistic options for those who resent what the school system is for and what it's doing to our children.
One is that we can leave it in place and quietly sabotage it on a child-by-child basis, starting with our own. This is what Gatto did when he was a schoolteacher; he arranged for as many field trips as he could so that children could see what the world was really like up close. This is a selfish move (where selfishness is a virtue) that recognizes liberty on a case-by-case basis.
Each child may go through the machine, but there's no law against flunking it. Every child for herself, let her take responsibility, that kind of thing. (We'd say that there are no laws against encouraging your own child to flunk school, either, but in fact there are. Say hello to the social worker when she knocks.)
The other option is to compete. The schools we know today were invented in response to a competitive challenge, specifically Napoleon's defeat of Prussia at the battle of Jena in 1806. The Prussians, having had their professional army's asses kicked around the block by a Frenchman's amateur army, figured it was about time they trained themselves some decent soldiers who would obey orders, but who wouldn't think for themselves in the heat of battle. The system they invented, designed to raise an elite top-5% to become leaders—but strap the remaining 95% in a straightjacket of obedience and ignorance—was imported to the United States and rolled out in Massachusetts in 1850 (where kids were marched into school at gunpoint).
(Incidentally, the literacy rate among non-slaves in Massachusetts at that time was 98%. After compulsory schooling was introduced, it dropped to 91%, where it's been ever since.)
Therefore the best way to replace the current system would be to introduce a competitive one. Gatto suggests this could be home schooling, but is unlikely to replace schools within our lifetimes. Most parents can't accommodate teaching responsibilities into a 9-to-5 workshift without some major changes for everybody.
But what if the competitive force came from another country, rather than from within?
Prussia, after bringing their labor force under control, became a model of economic prosperity in a few short years. Their system worked, and it worked damn good. It's that prosperity which guaranteed adoption of the system by other countries wanting a taste of the same tonic. It makes us think that if any alternative system is to replace the current one, then it needs to follow the same kind of path: switch to it, or else this other country is going to dwarf you.
It assumes such an alternate system exists with enough benefits to make its adoption, and the overthrow of the existing one, unquestionable—like the "Napster" of education systems. Gatto... you got any ideas?
John Taylor Gatto: resources available on the web.
Last 20 responses and inbound links
(These are discovered in real-time and sorted by newest first. See how to get listed.)
- markpasc.blog (May 29, 2001)Recollections of conflict at school and thoughts on what it will take to replace the current system.
- Tune in, Turn on, Dropout: markpasc.org
- http://markpasc.org/blog/2001/05/29.html
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/thatshykid/day/2001/08/20
- http://www.csgamer.org/ds/news_arc.shtml
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/pjammer
- Pjammer Chronicles on "Tune in, turn on..."An experiment with numbers and bottom lines leads one reader to wonder what $120,000 worth of school funding is being spent on per class (administrative costs, maybe?)
- Death Squadron News
- Brian's LiveJournal
- You have all been rapedA discussion thread that begins by comparing public schools to slavery
