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The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years
ago, having nothing better to do at thetime, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an
instructor of English language and English literature, but that
isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach
school -- and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means different things in different
places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to
Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you
pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as
well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to
regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say
I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the
things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach.
Make of them what you
will:
A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana the other
day: "What big ideas are important to little kids? Well,
the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are
learning isn't
idiosyncratic -- that this is some system to it all and it's not
just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb.
That's the task, to understand, to make coherent."
Kathy has it wrong.
The first lesson I teach is
confusion. Everything I teach is out of context... I
teach the unrelating of everything. I teach
disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets,
the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural
drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise
guests, fire drills, computer languages, parent's nights,
staff-development days, pull-out programs, guidance with
strangers you may never see again, standardized tests,
age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world...
what do any of these things have to do with each
other?
Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and
its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal
contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define
the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural
order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education.
The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave
school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from
economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to leave
with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education
entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is
thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone
with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending
for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.
Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek,
and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into
meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences, and the
school obsession with facts and theories the age-old human
search lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary
school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make
better sense because the good-natured simple relationship of
"let's do this" and "let's do that now" is just assumed to mean
something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned
how little substance is behind the play and pretense.
Think of all the great natural sequences like learning to walk
and learning to talk, following the progression of light from
sunrise to sunset, witnessing the ancient procedures of a farm,
a smithy, or a shoemaker, watching your mother prepare a
Thanksgiving feast -- all of the parts are in perfect harmony
with each other, each action justifies itself and illuminates
the past and future. School sequences aren't like that,
not inside a single class and not among the total menu of daily
classes. School sequences are crazy. There is no
particular reason for any of them, nothing that bears close
scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools
whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized
since everything must be accepted. School subjects are
learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the
catechism or memorize the 39 articles of Anglicanism. I
teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation
the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to
television programming than to making a scheme of order.
In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work
or because too many moves or too many job changes or too much
ambition or something else has left everybody too confused to
stay in a family relation I teach you how to accept confusion as
your destiny. That's the first lesson I teach.
The second lesson I teach is your class position. I
teach that you must stay in 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 plainly
under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children
is a big and
very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed
to accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents
would allow it to be done to their kid without a fight.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to
make them like it, being locked in together with children who
bear numbers like their own. Or at the least endure it
like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can't even
imagine themselves somewhere else because I've shown how to envy
and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the
dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class
mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the
real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You
come to know your place.
In spite of the overall class blueprint which assume that 99
percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless
make a public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test
success, hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a
reward. I frequently insinuate that the day will come when
an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and
grades, 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 schoolteaching are, at
bottom, incompatible just as Socrates said they were thousands
of years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that
everyone has a proper place in they pyramid and that there is no
way out of your class except by number magic. Until that
happens you must stay where you are put.
The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I
teach children not to care about anything too much, even though
they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is
very subtle. I do it by demanding 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.
It's heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even
me. When I'm at my best I plan lessons very carefully in
order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the
bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we've
been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station.
They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing
important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I
know of. Students never have a complete experience except
on the installment plan.
Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth
finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of
bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can
no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret
logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable. Bells
destroy the 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 fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency.
By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and
disgraces I teach you to surrender your will to the predestined
chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any
authority, without appeal because rights
do not exist inside a school, not even the right of free speech,
the Supreme Court has so ruled, unless school authorities say
they do. 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. Individuality is constantly trying
to assert itself among children and teenagers so my judgments
come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of
class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.
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. I know they don't but I
allow them to deceive me because this conditions they to depend
on my favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front
of me in children angry, depressed or happy by things outside my
ken; rights in such things cannot be recognized by
schoolteachers, only privileges which can be withdrawn, hostages
to good behavior.
The fifth lesson I teach is
intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a
teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important
lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than
ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert
makes all the important choices; only I can determine what you
must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those
decisions which I enforce. If I'm told that evolution is
fact instead of a theory I transmit that as
ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been to
think.
This power to control what
children will think lets me separate successful students from
failures very easily. Successful children do the thinking
I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and decent show of
enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I
decide what few we have time for, or it is decided by my
faceless employer. The choices are his, why should I argue?
Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the
concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make
decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when
they will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as
schoolteachers?
Fortunately there are procedures to break
the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally,
if the kid has respectable parents who come to his aid, but that
happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools.
Nobody in the middle class I ever met actually believes that
their kid's school is one of the bad ones. Not a single
parent in 26 years of teaching. That's amazing and
probably the best testimony to what
happens to families when mother and father have been
well-schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons.
Good people wait for an expert to
tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say
that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned.
Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained to be
dependent: The social-service businesses could hardly
survive, they would vanish I think, into the recent historical
limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists
would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids
vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including
television, would wither as people learned again how to make
their own fun. Restaurants, prepared-food and a whole host
of other assorted food services would be drastically down-sized
if people returned to making their own meals rather than
depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop and cook for them.
Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go, too, the
clothing business and schoolteaching as well, unless a
guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools
each year.
The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem.
If you've ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents
have convinced him to believe they'll love him in spite of
anything, you know how
impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform.
Our world wouldn't survive a flood of confident people very long
so I teach that your self-respect should depend on expert
opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.
A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into
students' homes to signal approval or to mark exactly down to a
single percentage point how dissatisfied with their children
parents should be. The ecology of good schooling depends
upon
perpetuating dissatisfaction just as much as commercial economy
depends on the same fertilizer. Although some people might
be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up
these mathematical records, the cumulative weight of the
objective-seeming documents establishes a profile of defect
which compels a child to arrive at 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 need to rely on the
evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told
what they are worth.
The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide.
I teach children they are always watched by keeping each student
under constant surveillance as 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. A family trained to snitch on each other
isn't likely to be able to conceal any dangerous secrets.
I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework", too, so
that the surveillance travels into private households, where
students might otherwise use free time to learn something
unauthorized from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some
wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of
schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is
that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.
Surveillance is an
ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers, a central
prescription set down Republic, in City of God, in Institutes of
the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan and many
other places.
All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the
same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep
a society under tight central control. Children will
follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed
marching band.
II.
It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly
mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers,
and among the best of my student's parents, only a small number
can imagine a different way to do things. "The kids have
to know how to read and write, don't they?" "They have to
know how to add and subtract, don't they?" "They have to
learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job."
Only a few lifetimes ago things were very 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, we Americans, all by ourselves, without
government sticking its nose into our lives, without
institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and
feel; no, all by ourselves we were something, as individuals.
We've had a society increasingly under central control in the
United States since just before the Civil War and such a society
requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling to
maintain itself. Before the society changed, schooling
wasn't very important anywhere. We had it, but not too
much of it and only as much as an individual wanted.
People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine
anyway, there are some studies which show literacy at the time
of the American Revolution, at least on the Eastern seaboard, as
close to total. Tom Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000
copies to a population of 2,500,000, 20 percent of which was
slave and another 50 percent indentured.
Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that
reading, writing and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to
transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn.
The trick is to wait until
someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on him.
Millions of people teach themselves these things; it really
isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth grad textbook in math or
rhetoric from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched
then on what would today be college level. The continuing cry
for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen behind which
schools preempt the time of children for 12 years and teach them
the seven 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. The
character of large compulsory institutions is inevitable, they
want more and until there isn't any more to give. School
takes our children away from any possibility of an active role
in community life -- in fact it destroys communities by
reserving the training of children to the hands of certified
experts -- and by doing so it ensures that they cannot grow up
fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active
role in community life you could not hope to become a healthy
human being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next
time you are near a school or an old people's reservation, that
will be the demonstration.
School as it was built is an essential support system for a
vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be
subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a
terminal of control. 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 right through the period of the early Republic we
had no schools to speak of -- read Franklin's Autobiography for
a man who had no time to waste in school -- 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 subordination for all. That was the
secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in The Republics when
Glaucon and Adeimantus exhorted from Socrates the plan for total
state control of human life that would be necessary to maintain
a society where some people took more than their share. "I
will show you," said Socrates, "how to bring about such a
feverish city, but you will not like what I am going to say."
And so the blueprint of the seven lesson school was first
sketched.
The current debate about whether we should have a national
curriculum is phony -- we already have one, locked up in the
seven lessons I just taught you and a few more I decided to
spare you. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and
intellectual paralysis and no curriculum of content will be
sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently
under discussion in our national school hysteria about failing
academic performance is a great irrelevancy that misses the
point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to
teach and they do it well -- How to be a good Egyptian and where
your place is in the pyramid.
III.
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is
impossible to overthrow. We do have a choice in how we
bring up young people and there is no one right way; if we broke
the power of Egyptian illusion we would see that. There is
no life and death international competition threatening our
national existence, difficult as that is to even think about,
let alone believe, in the face of a constant media barrage of
myth to the contrary. In every important material respect
our nation is self-sufficient, including energy. I realize
that runs counter to the most fashionable thinking of political
economists, but the "profound transformation" of our economy
these people talk about is neither
inevitable nor irreversible. Global economics does not
speak to the public need for jobs, affordable homes, adequate
schools and medical care, a clean environment, honest and
accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple
justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of
productivity and the good life so alienated from common human
reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people
would agree with me if they had a choice. We might be able
to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates
meaning where meaning is
genuinely to be found -- in families, in 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, in all the free and inexpensive
things out of which real families, real friends and real
communities are built. Then we would be truly
self-sufficient.
How did these awful places, these "schools", come about?
Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of
forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But
total-schooling as we know it is a byproduct of the two "Red
Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a
revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too,
total schooling came about because old-line American families
were revolted by the home cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin
immigrants --and revolted by the Catholic religion they brought with them.
Certainly a third contributing cause to making a jail for
children called school must be located in the prospect with
which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans
through the society after the Civil War.
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching:
confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and
intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance
-- all of these things are good training for permanent
underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of
their own special genius. And in later years it became the
training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to
regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school
bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries
that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged
this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the
sons and daughters of the middle classes.
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, preempting the teaching function that belongs to
everybody in a healthy community. Professional teaching tends to
another serious error: It makes things that are inherently easy
to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, seem difficult
by insisting they be taught through pedagogical procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, it should be
little wonder we have a national crisis the nature of the one we
have 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 who face the 21st century 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 (for we have divorced them from
significant parental attention); 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 nourished and
magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which prevents
effective personality development by its hidden curriculum.
Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and
inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all,
nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school
that actually dared to teach the use of dialectic, the
heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ would
last very long without being torn to pieces. School has
become a replacement for church in our secular society, and like
church its teachings must be taken on faith.
It is time that we faced the fact
squarely that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to
children. Nobody survives the 7-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 schools require would cost so much less than we are
spending now that powerful interests cannot afford to let it
happen. You must understand that first and foremost, the
business I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting
contracts. We cannot afford to save money by reducing the
scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer,
even to help children grow up right. That is the Iron Law
of institutional schooling -- it is a business neither subject
to normal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of
competition.
Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the
likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family
schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools
and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to
compete with government education. I'm trying to describe
a free market in schooling just exactly like the one the country
had right up until the Civil War, one in which students
volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if
that means self-education. It didn't hurt Benjamin
Franklin that I can see.
These options now exist in miniature, wonderful survivals of a
strong and vigorous past, but they are unavailable only to the
resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. The
near impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the
shattered families of the poor or the bewildered host camped on
the fringes of the urban middle class foretells the disaster of
7-Lesson Schools is goingto grow unless we do something bold and decisive with the mess
of government monopoly schooling.
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the
method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't
be fooled into thinking that good curriculum 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 with their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and
love and 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 up 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; a future which 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.
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