The Crisis in American Education (excerpts)

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The following is from the book, The Crisis in American Education published by the Sudbury Valley School Press.  To purchase the book, please visit their website at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/crisis-american-education

Part 1: Where we Stand Today

Chapter 1: The Problem

The educational institutions of this country are being challenged on every side with an intensity unparalleled in history.

There have been attacks before, by isolated individuals or groups. But the schools have always enjoyed the solid support of the great masses of people whom they served.

Today, the onslaught takes place on broad fronts, and the mass support is no longer evident.

A year ago many could still say the problems are elsewhere but not here. Now only those who choose not to see are still complacent. The mood has changed from “It can’t happen here” to “How soon?”

Let us look at just a few examples of danger points in the school set-up.

The central purpose of our schools is to provide students with an education. For generations, the vast majority of students were satisfied clients of the system, accepting the services performed for them, and giving in return a fair degree of effort and obedience. Most educational reforms came not as a result of student protest, but as a result of the work of devoted teachers and administrators, who sought to improve even further an already excellent product.

What a far cry from the situation today. Now, students of all ages, in all schools — public, parochial, and private; inner-city, suburban, and country; primary, secondary, and higher — are in a turmoil of protest and rebellion.

Students find their studies irrelevant, their teachers arbitrary, and their work excessive. Regardless of the number and kind of curriculum reforms introduced, at great expense, every year, academic performance shows no significant improvement.

At worst, students hate their schools, and vent their hatred in tens of millions of dollars of active vandalism every year. At best, they are apathetic. Walk into the finest modern school building, and you will find littered rooms, carved desks, filthy lavatories, and violated walls that we are accustomed to expect of old buildings. Examine the educational resources of most recent acquisition, and you will find torn books, theft-ridden libraries, scratched records, smashed audio-visual machines, and ravaged equipment.

Students resent — even hate — their teachers, not so much as people, but as wielders of arbitrary and unchallengeable authority. They hate their administrators for the absolute power these people are allowed to exercise.

They hate themselves, and engage in a breathtaking frenzy of self-destructive activity: poor work, irresponsible behavior, petty — and later, not so pretty — delinquency, drugs, to blow their minds and “trip out” to a never-never land of lethargy, dissociation, and insanity.

Adults try to hide from the realities, try to find reassurance in statistics, in promises, in confessions; but the truth, known to most adults and all students, is that the student world of schools at all levels has become a nightmare of resentment, hatred, and rebellion.

The mainstay of the schools has been the teachers who, in their hundreds of thousands, have been society’s agents for transmitting its culture from one generation to the next. The job had in itself great rewards, greatest of which was the knowledge each teacher had of his role in serving society by training its youth. And there were other compensations — community respect, job security, and fair, if not lavish, pay.

How far from this is the teacher’s position today! He finds his clients, the students, no longer accepting his product, and he finds that he himself is dissatisfied with the material he is called upon to teach. And, when he tries to change the material, he comes face to face with the realization that he is virtually powerless to affect the contents of the curriculum he is called upon to present. Though he has been trained for years in schools of higher learning, though he has often continued his studies beyond his degree, though he is fully aware of the currents and trends sweeping the community in which he lives as a citizen, he is almost totally without say as to what he may do in his own classroom.

He finds himself given little responsibility, and rarely held to account for successes or failures. His colleagues come and go with an alarming turnover rate. His work is drab and routine. And, like so many others in the same sort of deteriorating position, he seeks salvation in ever shorter working hours, ever higher pay, ever greater material benefits — but without changing his basic situation in the least. And he brings on himself the added onus of community resentment against the escalating demands, resulting in escalating taxes on an already overtaxed citizenry.

The traditional leadership of the educational community has been the central school administration, in all types of schools at all levels. Their plight today has become almost legendary. Not long ago, it was common to find university presidents who were serving their second or third decades in their posts; department chairmen who were hiring the children of their earliest staff members; school superintendents who had presided over the education of their replacements. Today, administrative turnover is surprisingly rapid, and replacements are ever harder to find. A top job has a life-expectancy of a few years at most, and its occupants leave as bitter and spent men.

Administrators bear the brunt of all the discontents, and add a full measure of their own resentments. Though possessors of vast domains of control, they can rarely exercise their best judgment unhampered. They are burdened with formal powers, but they have little influence on the course of events from day to day.

They are lonely people, beset by enmity and hostility.

The basic backing for the schools, public and private alike, has come from the community at large, from the citizens whose children attend the schools, and whose moneys pay for the schools.

As long as community support was forthcoming, the schools could withstand any disaffections coming from within or without. And nowhere is the plight of our schools more evident than in the area of community support.

For generations, the overwhelming majority of citizens were basically satisfied with what the schools were doing. Of course, there were often complaints, but these came from the outer fringes, from minorities, from political extremists.

Today, community support is a thing of the past. Whatever the issue, the public is ferocious in its division over the schools, and hardly a person is satisfied with what is being done: harder discipline vs. permissiveness; adult authority vs. student demands; integration vs. segregation; busing vs. community schools; sex education at school vs. sex education at home; school prayers vs. separation of church and school; escalating costs vs. holding the line; censorship vs. unfettered expression — and the list of issues seems endless, the depth and intensity of division seems immeasurable, and the ability of schools to maintain any sort of public support seems seriously in question.

We have glanced at only a few areas in which the schools are presently engaged in a struggle for existence. There is a real question, desperately serious, as to whether our educational institutions can survive at all into the next decade.

What is noteworthy — and this cannot be sufficiently stressed — is the broad scope of the challenge to the schools. We are not talking about a few sniping attacks here and there. We are talking about attacks from people of all ages, in all positions relative to the school, of all political affiliations, of all economic and social strata — all of them deeply disaffected with an educational system that is about to come apart at the seams.

The present threat to our schools is as broadly based as the support for these same schools once was.

There is a reason for the present evil, just as there was a reason for the past good.

The support of the schools in the past was based on the many successful services they rendered to the public. We will have occasion to go into more details later in the book.

The present widespread failure of our schools is due to the simple fact that they are wholly out of harmony with this country’s way of life. They no longer can represent the culture that they serve.

The educational system in this country today is the most un-American institution we have in our midst. That is why it must change, root and branch, to survive and regain its support.

Chapter 2: The American Dream

There are three root ideas underlying the ethical, political, and social structure of the United States. Each of these three, taken alone, has a long history in other cultures, and occasionally two of them have appeared together. America has been unique, until recently, in combining all three into that particular mix that gives our country its special character.

These three ideas serve as guiding principles for the nation as a whole. They are, in a sense, over-arching ideals towards which we strive. There is no denying that the American people have, at different times of their history, and at different places on their far-flung continent, fallen short of converting these ideas into practical reality; but the ideas nevertheless remain, clear and sharp, as our basic underpinning, and our failures to live by them have always filled us with guilt.

The first of these is the idea of Individual Rights: every person is endowed with certain “inalienable rights,” rights that belong to him as his own, as his inherent possession — not granted as a gift by some benevolent ruler, not given as a privilege by an all-powerful state, but belonging to him, without qualification, as his rights. They cannot be removed, or explained away; nor can they be violated by any person, government, or power, as long as law and order prevail.

It is not essential to agree on the source of these rights. Some people hold that they emanate from God. Other people think that they derive from some natural law governing man. Still others think they are rooted in a science of man and society. There are many philosophical theories about the rights of man — and many people who have no theory whatsoever believe in them intuitively. All agree that sacred individual rights exist, and are essential to our way of life. In fact, we are all aware of how even the ratification of our constitution depended on the subsequent passage of our Bill of Rights as the first ten amendments, where many of the specific rights recognized in this country were spelled out in detail.

It is also not essential to agree on the exact number and nature of these rights. Different people, different communities, and different times have somewhat different lists. For example, the right of privacy is only now gradually coming into its own. By contrast, the right of free speech is high on everyone’s list, and has been from the beginning of our history. Of course, in the day to day progress of our lives, it is important to know exactly what rights are recognized. But for the purposes of understanding the basis of our way of life, all we have to do is realize that a set of individual rights belonging to every person does in fact exist.

Many societies exist today where the concept of Individual Rights does not play any role at all. For example, societies in which the State is held to be the highest good — such as the Soviet Union — do not recognize any limitations on the power of the State to enter into an individual’s life for the presumed good of the State. Historically speaking, the English have long been known as the champions of the idea of personal rights, and Britishers carried this idea with them to their colonies around the globe — including the thirteen colonies from which the United States was formed.

There has been much unevenness in the unfolding history of individual rights in this country. Specific rights mentioned and protected by the Federal Constitution, and generally agreed upon by the population at large, were not always recognized by state and local courts. Only after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment were Federal rights gradually extended, through the courts, to all jurisdictions, a process still going on today.

More significantly, there have been several changes in the meaning of the word “person,” to whom rights belong. Not until the time of the Civil War, after the elimination of slavery, were blacks considered “persons” who had all the rights belonging to their former masters. And not until the early part of the twentieth century was the concept of personal rights extended to fully half the adult population — the female half! We often like to forget how recently these extensions of rights have taken place; it is embarrassing to think that when this century dawned on our nation, three-quarters of us were disenfranchised and devoid of rights.

How much more embarrassing to realize that even now, the concept of Individual Rights does not extend to a huge fraction of our population — namely, to children. At varying ages before twenty-one, a few rights are dribbled here and there at children, but only at age twenty-one are people fully persons before the law.

We still have a way to go before this universally recognized root idea of American civilization is universally applied. But there is no denying that the concept of Individual Rights has always been a cornerstone of our culture, and that its very history of gradual extension has been due to its daily presence in our national consciousness.

The second root idea is Political Democracy: all decisions governing the community are decided by the community in a politically democratic way. The first root idea, of Individual Rights, covers those actions in a person’s life that primarily affect himself, and for which he is individually responsible. The second root idea, of Political Democracy, covers those actions that primarily affect other people, and for which the community is responsible. There is no sharp dividing line; there never are sharp dividing lines in real life. But there are large areas to which each of these ideas applies independently, and these areas are generally agreed upon.

Also, there is no precise definition to the word “community.” The general principle is that the people most affected by the action participate in deciding on it. That is the basis for the separation of powers in this country between local, county, state, and Federal government. Matters affecting one town alone are decided by that town; matters affecting a county are decided by that county; and so on up the line. Again, the lines of authority are never clear, and always subject to debate and court action. One of the great questions of this age has been the extent of the Federal government’s jurisdiction over affairs that were once considered to be purely local. There is no doubt that the existence of a fast, efficient nationwide communications network — telephone, telegraph, radio, television, postal service, and transportation system — has blurred the boundaries that once clearly separated groups of people in the horse-and-buggy days.

Finally, there is no simple meaning to the words “politically democratic decision-making.” Basically, they refer to a process where issues are decided by vote, and not by decree. But there are many variations. Voting can be by secret ballot, by voice, by show of hands, or by other means. Decisions can be by majority, plurality, two-thirds, or other proportion. The voters can be the entire eligible population, as in old — and some present day — New England Town Meetings, or they can be representatives chosen in some way by the population. None of these variations change the essence of the process, however, which is that of a group vote rather than an arbitrary autocratic issuance of orders.

Political Democracy has a distinguished history. We are taught that Athens of ancient Greece was the birthplace of democracy. There were probably many other earlier instances, but Athens is certainly the first case that is well known and well documented today. Many, many other tribes, cities, states, and countries have since been governed democratically. In modern times, the greatest exponent of political democracy was England, which gradually developed forms and concepts of democratic government over a period of centuries. As in the case of Individual Rights, the English took the root concept of Political Democracy with them all over the world, to all their colonies, including the thirteen American colonies from which our country was fashioned.

Although Individual Rights and Political Democracy developed together in England, it is worth remembering that the two are not inseparable, and they often don’t go hand in hand. In fact, democracy without the protection of individual rights is so distasteful to us that we often refer to it in derogatory terms, such as “mob rule.” Athens is a case in point: the majority could decide anything it wanted to, at any time, governing any citizen, and that was that. The same thing happened in the days of the French Revolution, when many a person went to the guillotine at the instant wish of a majority, without being able to exercise even a semblance of the rights that we all possess here today.

By the same token, individual rights exist in societies where democracy has never set foot. Indeed, in England rights were established well before meaningful democratic procedures had been adopted — rights that protected the citizenry from the arbitrary rule of kings and princes.

The root idea of Political Democracy has not always been honored in practice. We have had, and still have, many instances of corrupt government, of boss rule, of privilege and favoritism. But the forms and ideas of democratic government are everywhere, and an aware, sensitive populace has always been able to restore honesty and pure government when it chose to do so.

The third root idea is Equal Opportunity: every person has an equal chance to obtain any goal. There is no privilege in America, a phenomenon stressed even in our written Constitution. People are born equal, and they start out with equal chances in life.

Present-day realities fall far short of realizing this idea, but that should not blind us to the existence of the idea and to the immense role it has always played in our history. The personal histories of our presidents and our other top leaders is testimony to this, as is the Horatio Alger phenomenon in our popular literature.

We have always striven for equal opportunity for all people, and some of our greatest internal conflicts have occurred around this theme: the Civil War, the battles fought by successive waves of immigrants, the repeated struggles of minority groups. These conflicts could take place only because the deprived groups could wave the universally recognized banner of Equal Opportunity. The final outcome was always a foregone conclusion: privilege had to yield, because privilege had no basis for survival in this country.

Equal Opportunity does not, of course, mean an equal outcome for everybody. That is what differentiates the traditional American approach from the various Socialist approaches to society. We have insisted on giving everyone the same place in the starting line, and then having them run where and how they wished; we have not insisted on making everyone run together in step.

It might be worth noting that England was not a pioneer of Equal Opportunity, and that has been the key difference between the English experience and the American experience. England gloried in privilege, and the vestiges of privilege can still be found there on all sides. America was, by contrast, a beacon-light of Equal Opportunity to the whole world from its earliest history. Here, people from every country and every walk of life could dream of making a fresh start, with the same odds as everyone else. This dream populated our country through various waves of immigration. Now that unlimited immigration has stopped, the idea of Equal Opportunity remains to govern each person’s fate at birth, at the start of his life-struggle, and at every instance when he chooses to make a move to other places and other pursuits.

Individual Rights, Political Democracy, and Equal Opportunity — these are the three root ideas of the American way of life. Our country has pioneered in their development individually and, especially, together. Take any one of them away, and you are in another country, another tradition, another culture. And we shall stand or fall on our ability to continue to give meaning to all three ideas in our unfolding history.

It is impossible to exaggerate the depth of our commitment to these ideas. We are fanatics about them, and we insist on universal adherence to them. No government or authority could get to first base trying to strip us of our Individual Rights; each and every citizen guards these rights with jealousy and passion. No government or authority could impose itself as a monarchy or dictatorship — indeed, we would not even allow the citizens of a city or state to freely vote that a person should be king or dictator. No government or authority could impose privilege by law, and none can long survive the imposition of privilege by corrupt deed.

These three root ideas are inseparable from each other, and from our country’s fate. They are the American Dream. To the extent that they are practiced, the American Dream becomes the American Reality.

Chapter 3: Our Un-American Schools

One would think that our schools would be the most persistent and vigorous expounders of the American Dream.

After all, what is the ultimate goal of education, if not to prepare the nation’s youth for a lifetime of responsible, mature citizenship? And who is charged with implementing this goal, if not the nation’s schools?

How tragic, then, how ominous for our future, that our educational system is the most un-American institution in this country today.

Students in our schools, from pre-nursery to postgraduate levels, have virtually no Individual Rights. They are at the arbitrary mercy of teachers, staff, and administrators in everything they do at school. This fact has become so blatant that, recently, the courts have begun to intervene in schools on behalf of students, for the first time in our history.

A student has no right of free speech, no right of dissent, no right of peaceful assembly, no right to confront his accuser, no right of privacy. The list can be extended to cover any and all of the traditional rights.

During the entire formative period of his growth, a youth is committed by law — and, after age sixteen, by economic and social pressure — to serve time in educational institutions which, like prisons, simply do not recognize the existence of individual rights. In the case of prisons, dealing with criminals and lawbreakers, one can certainly argue the merits of this situation one way or another. In the case of schools, one can only wonder at the “logic” which has led to this situation.

Does anyone really think that the way to prepare a person for the responsible exercise and jealous guardianship of his rights is to raise him in an environment devoid of these rights? Would we for a moment do this in any other area? Would we expect a person to become literate in an environment devoid of the printed word? Would we expect someone to learn how to talk on a deserted island?

But by far the most serious deprivation of rights occurs with the one absolute, inviolate right that we all have, and that never can be challenged even in the severest emergency: the right to think what we please — the right of freedom of thought.

There are situations where other rights may be suspended. In times of national upheaval, the right of habeas corpus is suspended. In a crowded theater, the Supreme Court has held that the right of free speech is limited, and that a person cannot get up and shout “fire!”.

There is no situation, however critical, when we permit the suspension or limitation of a person’s inviolate right to think what he pleases, to do with his mind what he wishes. We look with abhorrence on states that allow or encourage thought control; we use such epithets as “brain-washing” to describe this process. We are aghast at stories of the mass indoctrination of the Chinese people with the thoughts of Mao, or tales of intensive training sessions of Soviet youth in the doctrines of Marx and Lenin.

Yet, we allow all our schools to determine, unchecked, what our children should do with their minds. We allow teachers, curriculum committees, administrators, and other school officials to set out what every student must know; we allow them to institute an elaborate system of pressures and threats and sanctions that forces every student to learn what has been prescribed; and we allow them to put into effect a system of tests, reports, and evaluations that constantly monitors their minds and informs on their thoughts.

In short, we allow our schools to take liberties with students that we would never, never under any circumstances, allow any institution to take with us as adults. We would rise up as one man against any attempt to force us to think or learn anything we had not chosen to learn of our own free will.

Students are not the only ones deprived of rights in the educational system. Teachers too must sacrifice most of their rights when they cross the threshold into the school building. On the job, teachers must be pliant tools; they must do as instructed, teach what they are told to teach, say what they are permitted to say. This is how we provide our youth with models of adult behavior!

If our youth would be confined to school twenty-four hours a day until graduation, they would never know that the concept of Individual Rights exists, much less that it applies to them. Luckily for our nation’s survival till now, the schools occupy only a part of the student’s day.

Unluckily for the prospects of our schools’ survival, even part of a day is becoming too much time to allow our youth exposure to an institution that does not recognize the existence of Individual Rights for its population.

If Individual Rights are barely known in schools, Political Democracy is even further removed from the realities of school life. In no area of our educational system does decision-making take place according to the tenets of political democracy. In fact, our educational system is the only major institution in the country which officially recognizes Autocratic Hierarchy as its principle of government.

It is not a question of “student government.” It is nothing so simple as that. It is, rather, that the schools categorically deny that the people affected by decisions should be the ones making these decisions. this denial applies across the board. Teachers are not involved in decisions about the curriculum they must teach in their classrooms. Students are not involved in decisions about what they learn and how they behave. And in some communities, even parents are not involved in decisions about the schools for their children.

The schools are almost a perfect model of political Autocracy. There is a well-defined hierarchy, a clear chain of command. Each level has almost unlimited control over the next level below, the student being at the bottom of the heap. There is no regular means of appeal, only the hope of moving someone higher-up by playing on his good will. Rules and regulations are promulgated without the necessity for debate or consent.

One predictable result of this set-up has already been mentioned: the system is permeated with resentment and hatred, and at every level enormous energies are spent breaking or subverting the rules. The architects of our educational system apparently forgot one of the great benefits of Political Democracy: laws created through the consent of those to whom they apply — government by the consent of the governed — gain a respect and a level of observance that no other system of laws can approach, not even one backed up by massive terror. The law you have helped to make is not one you will readily break.

The absence of Equal Opportunity in our schools is well known in some areas, but hardly appreciated in other areas that are far more significant.

It is, for example, well known that the way our present schools are set up often leaves students belonging to a particular race, or a particular economic class, or particular geographic location, at a terrible disadvantage relative to other students from the beginning. These failures are at the focus of many efforts at educational reform today, as well they should be. It will not be long before the pressure of the idea of Equal Opportunity will force such practiced inequities to be abandoned and replaced by a truer realization of the idea.

But there are other, hidden, more sinister areas where the idea of Equal Opportunity is flouted, to everyone’s detriment, and most people don’t even realize what is happening.

For example, multiple-track programs deprive students once and for all of an equal shot at every target. What vocational student can expect to get into Harvard?

Another example is the ever-expanding area of “Guidance,” which threatens to deny Equal Opportunity more and more as time goes on. In fact, it is the avowed aim of good guidance programs to find out at an ever-earlier age, on the basis of tests, interviews, and background investigations, what course of life is “most suitable” for each student, and to “help” direct each student along the path thus determined. The better and more expensive the guidance program, the closer it wishes to reach this aim. Today it is a regular occurrence in our schools to have a student say he wants to pursue a certain course, and to have his guidance counselors advise him that this would be unwise, and even often prevent him from seeing through his plans. What guidance counselor would have given the poor math student Albert Einstein a chance to major in physics?

Equal Opportunity means that every student expressing a wish to pursue a given course should be given the same chance to try it. A person’s life-destiny is his to decide, and the only guidance program consistent with our ideals is one that gives everyone the same chance at everything.

The autocratic, authoritarian school system with which we are burdened is no longer accepted. Shorn of its support, it is threatened with imminent collapse.

The reason the problem has come to a head is that our country can no longer afford to maintain its un-American schools. Neither the people who attend these schools, nor those who run them, nor those who have so long supported them, can tolerate any longer the contradictions between what the schools stand for and what the country stands for.

Chapter 4: The Solution: A Strategy for Education in America Today

The solution of the problem cannot be found by tinkering with the schools, piece-meal. It is not a question of introducing a new, more “relevant” social studies program; nor of allowing more electives; nor of selecting a student observer to Boards of Trustees or School Committees; nor of setting up grievance committees for teachers; nor of any of the miniscule reforms so hotly debated in the world of education today. Taken all, together, and viewed in perspective, these appear painfully reminiscent of the patchwork proposals tendered by the King’s ministers on the eve of the French Revolution, by the Colonial government on the eve of the American Revolution, by the Czarist ministers on the eve of the Russian Revolution — in short, by men of narrow vision in eras where sweeping changes were altering whole landscapes.

Our situation today is not unlike that of the Founding Fathers of our country. Tinkering with the Articles of Confederation of the Thirteen States no longer sufficed. The problem was vast, and the solution could only be found by going back to first principles, to root ideas, and constructing a bold new solution from scratch.

For the Founding Fathers, the solution was to write a new Constitution. Two hundred years of history have shown their work to have been well done.

For us today, the solution is to create a new educational system. Our challenge is to do the job so well that the next two hundred years will show our work, too, to have been well done.

We must create an educational system worthy of the American nation, based on the three root ideas of the American Dream.

Our schools must guarantee everyone in them, by right and not by privilege, all the Individual Rights belonging to adult citizens in the community at large. This guarantee must be unconditional, and must carry its safeguards with it.

Respect for individual rights must be as natural to people in schools as it is to people outside them. This means that each student, teacher, and administrator not only must have and protect his own rights, but also must guard and protect the rights of every other student, teacher, and administrator in the system.

The practical consequences readily come to mind, and are easy to envision in detail. Respect for law and order, a firm and fair system of justice, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of peaceful assembly — these and much else immediately take their place on the school scene.

The right of privacy is extended to all people of all ages. A six-year-old’s private affairs are as much protected from unwanted outside intrusion as a sixty-year-old’s. A student’s desk is his castle as much as is his father’s home.

Above all, the right to use one’s mind as one pleases prevails absolutely, without qualification. It becomes as abhorrent to force, or seduce, or cajole a child to think or learn what you want him to, as it is abhorrent to force, or seduce, or cajole an adult to think or learn what you want him to.

School becomes a place where students freely do what they wish with their minds, where students freely choose what they wish to learn, or whether they wish to learn, and how, and when, and from whom, and by what means. School becomes a place where teachers freely offer what they have to teach, to whomever wishes to purchase their wares. School becomes a place where administrators freely offer their services in organizing and maintaining institutions to whomever asks for and requires these services.

School becomes a free marketplace of ideas, a free enterprise system of talents.

Our schools must also guarantee everyone associated with them a fair and equitable voice in determining, through politically democratic means, the way in which he will be governed.

There are many ways this can be done — but none of the legitimate ways allows for the exercise of arbitrary authority in any facet of school life.

The people providing financial backing for the school, whether through voluntary tuition payments or donations or taxation, must share in determining how the funds will be spent. “No taxation without representation,” our age-old cry, must be honored in schools as well as elsewhere.

The people actually constituting the school community — teachers, staff, administrators, and students — must share in determining the rules by which the school community will be governed, and must share also in the responsibility for enforcing these rules fairly. “One man, one vote” must prevail in the schools as well as elsewhere.

Political Democracy should be as natural in the schools as it is in the country.

Our schools must guarantee everyone in them an Equal Opportunity to realize his goals in life.

No one should have the power to stand in the way of any student’s life goal, providing only that the goal is within the law. What is legitimate for one person to dare, must be legitimate and available for everyone to dare.

No fair pursuit or subject should be preferred over another. Money, time, effort, and interest available to any study or any student should be equally available to all. Available, but of course not necessarily given. Equality of opportunity, but not necessarily equality of distribution. Ability, need, persistence, merit — all enter into the ultimate distribution of a pie originally round, originally accessible to all.

We should not be disheartened at the apparent magnitude of the task. The radical restructuring of our educational institutions is not beyond our means, nor beyond our intellectual abilities, nor beyond our organizational skills — not if we have the will to see it through.

Many factors can help us do the job. Most important, the root ideas underlying this reformation are well known to us, thanks to our country’s long and stable history. Many of the practical details flow naturally from these root ideas. We have the means of communication available to enable us all to help each other constantly, and to advise each other in times of need or stress. We have the organizational skills to effect rapid administrative changes on a large scale, as we have repeatedly demonstrated on a national scale in business, public welfare, defense, and technology. We even have a functioning model of such a school, The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts.

The following chapters will spell out many details: how such educational institutions might look and operate, how they can be formed out of what exists at present, how they can function with the support our present institutions once had.

But these will all be details, readily modifiable in practice. The central thesis remains unaffected by any details: namely, the thesis that for education in America today, the grand strategy must be to make the schools the embodiment of the American Dream for young and old alike — to make the schools bastions of Individual Rights, Political Democracy, and Equal Opportunity for all people and for all time.

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Injustice

Written by

The following was written by a staff member of the Sudbury Valley School.  For more information about the Sudbury Valley School, visit: http://sudburyvalley.org/

Realizing that youth is the time in which most of our long-standing opinions and personality traits are formed, those of us between the ages of six and sixteen were herded like cattle onto buses. Many of us had only heard rumors about the place we were going; we didn’t know what these camps were to really consist of.

Most of the parents didn’t want to think about the terror we would go through. A few fought back tears as we embarked on that first ride. Other, bolder parents, tried to prevent their children from being so humiliated and abused; and refused to give their children. But these parents were found guilty of breaking the truancy laws and subjected to the same kinds of humiliation as their children; being told by the Authorities that the State knew what was best for them.

We were then herded, in a straight line off the bus, into a large classroom; all thirty of us. There, we were assured that we would be supplied all the information we would ever need in life; and that They surely knew what was best for us. After being told to recite rote poetry in praise of freedom, we were sat down to begin the process of acquiring culture.

When we tried to stand together with friends, they grew nervous. Intent on breaking up any alliances before they began, many of Them insisted that we change our seating arrangements each period (for the day was broken up into periods). During recess (more on that shortly) we were coerced to spend time with different children each day.

When parents were summoned for conferences — at which the failure of the student’s family to provide a suitable environment would be discussed — we were always denied admittance and the right to face our accusers. The one of us who requested a lawyer was laughed at.

Perhaps most humiliating were the lines. We were put in line for food. We were lined up in a row to urinate. We were lined up to enter and leave the building. If we needed to perform even the most private acts, we were expected to raise our hands and explain our need to the warden — with all the other inmates looking on.

Any books, games or other diversions we had with us were stripped away. We were forced to take periodic tests. Sometimes, a person fared poorly on the test and was dropped to a lower grade. When this happened, we rarely ever saw the person again, except glances in the hallways.

Some of us developed secret signals, and passed notes. We were so destitute of hope that we never seriously dared revolt; we merely wished to humanize our time together. This was most frowned upon.

At one period of the day, we were given the opportunity to work off the built up hostility of the day. Recess consisted not so much in free time to do as one pleased, but in angered frustrated people taking out their aggressions on smaller weaker inmates.

They found all kinds of ways to divide us. They gave us worthless tokens and trinkets, made up of gold stars and letters one would be forced to wear branded on their papers — and for all their lives on records about them maintained by the State. Many fell for this brainwashing, and extolled the virtues of the State; being held up as examples to the rest of us.

As we grew older, and the physical differences between us and our oppressors disappeared, they began to rely on psychological mechanisms. The basic fear of authority, and unwillingness to think for ourselves, instilled as youth made us easier subjects as teens. Though we were still divided; the drones who bought the whole corrupt system helped perpetrate it, and the rest of us were labeled delinquents.

To help keep us quiet, various tactics of crowd control were brought to bear. Bread and circuses were given; a free lunch and high school football.

By this point, some finally found the courage to fight for free speech, free thought, free assembly, privacy and other basic rights. Those who did were often sent to detention, or labeled “emotionally disturbed” and sent to the “special class” which was only spoken of in whispers. Those who so vehemently demanded their freedom were thereby ostracized; and the State would often blame the parents, sometimes sending specialists to “examine the home situation.”

It ended for most of us only after twelve years of humiliation. We, who were given this punishment — greater than that received by rapists in this country — were never accused of any crimes; let alone found guilty in the courts through due process of law. We were given certificates to prove that we had served our time — and done so in a manner satisfactory with the mores of our keepers.

The system is such a corrupting influence that many of the other prisoners — years after being released — believe that it taught them useful skills. Can our culture survive when the only people deemed fit to protect it are trained in such a brutal fashion?

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Connor’s List

Written by

Why do you want to go to The Circle School, anyway, Connor? Connor attended the summer session and liked what he saw. He dictated this list of his own personal reasons, as part of his family’s discussions prior to his enrollment this fall.

  1. I’ll learn Japanese at TCS.
  2. I can do math at my own level and at my own speed.
  3. I can go outside and eat whenever I want.
  4. I can do origami. Some of my friends and I have started a store [at TCS] and we have made 60 cents. I also have plans to make people want to come and buy stuff.
  5. I can be with friends a lot at TCS. At public school I could only play with them 40 minutes a day.
  6. At public school I couldn’t share my ideas, except during a special class with Mrs. XXXXX. At TCS I can share ideas with everyone all the time.
  7. I can be upstairs whenever I want.
  8. I can use whatever computer programs I want, whenever I want. At public school I had to play the games the teachers told me and only in certain classes. In computer class I would always be finished before everybody else and so I would have to do the same things tons and tons of times and also in other classes.
  9. I like being on the JC [Judicial Committee at TCS] so when kids break rules, instead of standing at the wall for 20 minutes [as in public school] we think of other ways to help them understand the rules – like if they broke them for the first time they just get a warning, and if they have already done it before, a harder consequence [TCS jargon for “sentence”]. Like if someone hits someone then they can’t be around that person for an hour or something like that.
  10. At TCS you can go on field trips if you plan it. Michel was only five years old when he arranged a trip to the aquarium in Baltimore. I would like to plan trips to the new TCS building.
  11. I like it when Mommy dissects frogs with us.
  12. I like to play with Technics.
  13. I want to go to TCS. I don’t really want to go to public school and I get throw-up in the back of my mouth. I get up at 6:30am to get dressed and tell Mom it’s time to go to TCS.
  14. The public school says they are going to do things and they never do it. They said my friend was going to get to go to Special Interest, but he didn’t almost until the end of first grade.
  15. At public school I do the papers in about 20 seconds and then I have to wait a long time. I especially hate it when we do problems one at a time and have to wait up for everybody to finish. While I’m waiting I do algebra in my head. I know negative numbers and algebra like x + x = 12, then x = 6. I have to wait till eighth grade for that.
  16. I like The Circle School because I don’t have to be there for like seven hours. I can be there as long as I want, like maybe ten hours.
  17. At public school I was so bored once I fell asleep. And sometimes when I’m not paying attention and the teacher asks me a question, I know the answer anyway – whew!
  18. I like the way at TCS you get warnings. At public school you never get warnings, you always get five minutes on the wall, even if it’s your first time.
  19. [At public school] you couldn’t really talk at lunch and sometimes if you did you’d get five minutes on the wall. At TCS you can take a bite and then go play and come back.
  20. The rules at TCS are good because we get to make them. At public school they have all these rules and you can’t make any others because they are already made. At public school the teacher that teaches the class makes the rules before you even get there. At TCS the rules can change all through the year by teachers or kids. At public school the teachers make you follow the rules and punish you. At TCS everyone can write up someone else for breaking rules, and the JC [Judicial Committee] thinks of the consequence for the kid or whoever it is.
  21. At public school the only time you get to use your imagination is when you are not paying attention, and you are supposed to pay attention. At TCS you can imagine whenever you want, and I like that. I like to imagine.
  22. In public school I didn’t feel good about everyone else getting in trouble; I never got in trouble. The reason I said that I was no good was because that was the way I felt. I don’t know why I felt that way. I don’t like it when kids get consequences at TCS either. It sometimes makes me feel bad, sort of, but most of the time I think consequences are good.
  23. At TCS when I come up with an idea I can do something about it. The origami store was my idea and quite a few people decided to do it together. In public school I can’t really do that kind of thing- only the teachers can.
  24. I would like to practice typing more. I would like to learn more about Sweden and Japan. I’m already taking Japanese. I would like to study music, especially on the baritone ukulele, and art, by visiting art museums and getting some classes.

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

Written by

John Taylor Gatto has been named the New York City Teacher of the Year on 3 occasions. In 1991 he was named the New York State Teacher of the Year. His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001)

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:

The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.” I don’t know who decides that my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.

In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make the kids like it — being locked in together, I mean — or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can’t imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.

The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study (rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!

In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students’ homes to spread approval or to mark exactly — down to a single percentage point — how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.

Self-evaluation — the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet — is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness, too.

I assign “homework” so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.

The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for “basic skills” practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I’ve just taught you.

We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.

Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

“School” is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. “School” is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I’ve told you about and a few more I’ve spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.

None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no “international competition” that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located — in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy — then we would be truly self-sufficient.

How did these awful places, these “schools”, come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two “Red Scares” of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration — and the Catholic religion — after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.

Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling’s original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.

Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult — by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.

With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.

“Critical thinking” is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.

Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children’s development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.

At the pass we’ve come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.

After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter’s schooltime. All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love — and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.

Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

The Public School Nightmare

Written by

John Taylor Gatto has been named the New York City Teacher of the Year on 3 occasions. In 1991 he was named the New York State Teacher of the Year. His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001).

Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?

I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up–and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children’s lives and away from their homes and families and neighbourhoods and private explorations–gets in the way of education.

That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. And yet last year in St. Louis, I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy. Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do with that.

Then what do you make of the fact that you can’t go to school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and seconds grades here is that they don’t want to pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers at home too early.

It just isn’t worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can’t be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn’t 12 years, either–it’s nine. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the US would be $75-100 billion, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek an education.

Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbour with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from you?

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we’re in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. That’s because school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned–as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once-brilliant teachers found out.

The guild reality cannot be broken without returning primary decision-making to parents, letting them buy what they want to buy in schooling, and encouraging the entrepreneurial reality that existed until 1852. That is why I urge any business to think twice before entering a cooperative relationship with the schools we currently have. Cooperating with these places will only make them worse.

The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous “Address to the German Nation” which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

  1. Obedient soldiers to the army;
  2. Obedient workers to the mines;
  3. Well subordinated civil servants to government;
  4. Well subordinated clerks to industry
  5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.

Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.

Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty-six years after this form of schooling began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, as the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own.

You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose–which was to create a form of state socialism–gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.

In Prussia the purpose of the Volksshule, which educated 92 percent of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8 percent of the kids participated. But for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles.

Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.

There were many more techniques of training, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. “Lesser” men would be unable to interfere with policy makers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively.

One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic “All Quiet on the Wester Front” tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling.

It’s important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically–schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the moral will as well as the intellect. It’s true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped.

We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, and fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shores. If Prussia’s ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence.

In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato’s “Republic”, a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous “Know-Nothing” legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as “The Order of the Star Spangled Banner,” whose password was the simple sentence, “I know nothing”–hence the popular label attached to the secret society’s political arm, “The American Party.”

Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this–the children who could afford to be privately educated.

It’s important to note that the underlying premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children–the State is sovereign over the family. At the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted.

How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in American schools? Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th century and brought home the Ph. D. degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins.

Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann’s famous “7th Report” of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these.

By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. It that year the US Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were “scientifically designed” to prevent “over-education” from happening. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role.

In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations–not by their own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don’t know by themselves, without consulting experts.

Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers were produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams.

Dewey’s former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, “Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading.” Hall was one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.

Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word “reform” takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point.

Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that this has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.

When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a “garden for children” in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their children. I note with interest the growth of daycare in the US and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds. The movement toward state socialism is not some historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children’s lives, and even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that this control requires.

A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.

While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defence Department. Both of these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies. This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School people are in a position to outlast any storm and to keep short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.

An overview of the short history of this institution reveals a pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case.

After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good, some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. It relentlessly marginalizes all significant change. There are no incentives for the “owners” of the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition.

What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favourable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast.

But the future is not so clear. Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness…all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood, can be called to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people.

Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a generation.

What’s the Buzz?

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The buzzing sound is always present. Sometimes it swells up, loudly cloaking us all in an almost tangible roar. Sometimes it softens to background murmur. But always it changes, moment to moment, day by day, a living force, an electromagnetic surge of power and energy.

It can be disorienting to hit it cold – particularly when you enter later in the morning when the force is “up and running” for the day. I imagine it can seem overwhelming, chaotic, to a visitor or a parent stopping by briefly. I know sometimes it feels overpowering to me and I have to create a space around me or inside myself to “catch up.”

It has certain fairly predictable peaks – mass arrivals, mass departures, the time right before a big event or trip, and the times when everyone is gathered in the same room by serendipity or design. And not so predictable, but also happening frequently every day, there are these little magical moments when the volume drops off suddenly and if you’re listening with a bigger ear you can hear growing, exploring, becoming – real education – going on all around you.

It’s people. It’s people talking, talking, talking… in groups, in pairs, in threes, in informal sessions, in meetings, in side by side play activities, in games, in the office, on the stage, over lunch, during football, during cooking, hamming it up, or arguing an idea… talking. It’s people finding their way, learning about choices, making new beginnings, trying new things, building and existing in community.

Over the short haul, this is definitely not the most efficient looking way to get things done. The community or one of its members defines a need. People talk about it. Perhaps a committee forms or a motion is made to the School Meeting. We try an idea out or vote a policy into being. We talk about it some more. People spread the word through signs, conversation, question/answer, complaint forms, or by accident. We modify the idea, and the process starts all over again and so it goes.

For example, the community is completing its third week of working out just how the chore system will operate this year. We started with the modified summer style with people choosing a chore each day, discussed it at School Meeting, asked the School Aesthetics Committee to deal with learning how to computerize the schedule, hand wrote it, struggled with the problems of individuals’ abilities matching with the chores demands and all throughout have been daily, as a community, getting the work done. It is definitely more “short term” efficient to have a teacher assign a chore to each person and that’s that; you do your chore all year, period. One person decides, 42 people are impacted. In the TCS way, for this particular issue, by my personal knowledge alone, at least 18 people have been involved in discussing and creating the process. And I’m sure I don’t know about everyone, so it’s easily 50% of the community involved in some way in this one issue. There’s been a lot of talking.>

Which way creates ownership, community, and creative independent thinking? Which way, in the long run, more efficiently allows individuals to become adults who can make choices, handle decisions, make judgments, take responsibility, and have initiative?

And why am I paying so much attention to chores and what is going on with them this year? I really just drew the chore issue out of my mystical hat. The same process goes on in the creation and operation of the corporations. An idea or an interest surfaces and the talking begins. The meetings, the sharing of visions, the hammering out of purposes, bylaws, certifications, the plans and activities, the talking goes on and on. It is the same sort of process for committees, for School Meeting business, for Judicial Committee operations and actions and for all of the other structures which cradle the school.

This process of the school finding its way, of the collection of individuals that make up the school community forging social and educational structures by which we will be guided, is mirrored in each individual’s finding his or her way also. The new year has begun with a much larger community, a much older community and many new members making up the community. The talking is ceaseless, like the ocean’s waves.

Individuals slowly expand, trying on new roles, relaxing into activities they’ve never tried before, or which had become labeled as inefficient or unworthy or they were “just not talented enough for” in earlier school situations. The talking goes on… “Did you read this book?” “What if we take this apart?” “I can do that all day???” “I feel…” “I need a nap.” ‘What do you like to……… I don’t want to…”, “Anyone want to?”, “I’m going to…

This school is not a quiet place. This school is not a place for facile expediency. It vibrates, it hums, it buzzes and lurches along. It takes getting used to and growing into. It takes time to figure out how to create one’s place and space within it.

Let’s celebrate the sound- all over the world adults and nations are trying to learn to talk to each other. TCS is a graduate course in communication.

But loud voices are still for outside – Laws #11.2, 12.2, and 13.5 are still in effect!