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A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling
    
by John Taylor Gatto
reviewed by Jeremy Solomon
  
What is wrong with the school system to Gatto is not bad teachers, bad administrators, nor even bad parents.

Rather, it is the design of the institution altogether from inception.  Instead of superficially searching for quick fix reforms, Gatto desires to see the system junked altogether.

Gatto sees most schools as prisons of coercion, where students are regulated by a
life of fragmented knowledge, where they show obedience to strangers, where the design of education is dependency, obedience, regulation and subordination.

Schools make childhood surreal by:

   • enforcing sensory deprivation

   • sorting children into rigid categories (read: standardized testing)

   • training children to stop at the sound of a buzzer

   • keeping children under constant surveillance and depriving
      them of private time and space

   • assigning numbers to children which feigns the ability to
      discriminate personal qualities

   • insisting that every moment be filled with low level abstractions

   • forbidding children to make their own intellectual discoveries

To counter this process his goals for school reforms are as follows:

   • teaching needs to be deconstructed - teachers need to be centrally 
     involved in the development and maintenance of standards and    practices, not just the drones of someone else's blueprints.

   • decentralize school systems - no one right way to teach but allow
     for other possibilities, such as home schooling.

   • developing areas for privacy and solitude in character development
     - schools are too big and too concerned with surveillance.

   • less policing in schools - trim bureaucracy for more teachers.

   • eliminating artificial subject divisions -students should solve real 
    world problems not abstractions in an interdisciplinary fashion and should
    not mimic a Henry Ford assembly line with classes limited to 40 minutes.

Gatto also looks at a corollary issue: why do schools cost so much?  Statistics have shown that home schooled students have higher test scores on average than students who go to public schools.  Even many high school dropouts do quite well.  So why doesn't money generate into better educated students?  New York state, for example, spends 51% of its budget on administrative costs.  Local administration reduces this to only 25% spent on students.  Gatto sees this a "protection money paid to the school ring."  

How did this happen on a nation wide scale?  Government schooling came to function as a jobs project where "the primary mission of schools and compulsion laws guaranteed an audience no matter how bad the show" (25).  Indeed administrators nationally have grown 110% from 1983 to 1991 and increased spending by the federal government has only aggravated the problem rather than solving it.

How did the school system get so bad?  Between 1896 and 1920 a small group of industrialists and financiers subsidized university chairs and researchers with the aim of bending schooling to the service of business and the political state.   For leading industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John T. Rockefeller, public schooling was engineered to serve a modified command economy and an increasingly layered social order.  And how best to do this?   By copying the Prussian model of public education.

The Prussian way was to train only a leadership cadre while other students would be taught to fit in their place.  Moreover, fear of European immigrants in the 1840s, specifically Catholics, made it essential to leading industrialists and educators to adopt a system based on three Prussian principles:

  • The state is sovereign, the only true parents of children.

  • State appointed teachers are the guardians of children.

  • The schoolroom and the workplace shall be dumbed down into simplified fragments.

The Prussian systems explains the inordinate interest the foundations of Carnegie and  Rockefeller took in shaping early public schooling around compulsory education, which to Gatto, has been from the beginning a scheme of indoctrination designed to create a harmless proletariat held hostage by its addiction to luxury and security.

The Prussian school system relied heavily on the French philosopher August Comté who argued that one could create a useful proletariat by breaking connections between children and their families, their communities, their God and themselves.  Rather than family enterprise and individual effort as the main agencies of personal definition, state institutions would do this better with an army of specialists.

So if the present school system is so awful, how can it be reformed?  Gatto argues that there is no one way to teach, that schooling should be what the parents, community and even the children want it to be, an experiment not codified by the state.  Rather than have standards set by politicians or administrators, schools should survive the market place, much like a business, with plenty of competition.  Before the "Progressive" era of mid 19th century compulsory education laws there was great diversity and autonomy in education rather than one best system which was forced on everyone. Though not a proponent of vouchers, Gatto believes that a portion of school taxes should be given back to parents so they could shop around for better options than public education has to offer.

For schools to be worthwhile they need to have worthwhile goals such as:

  • creating independent, resourceful and fearless citizens

  • tapping the educational power of family life

  • bestowing significance on personal choices

  • arresting the epidemic of alienation and loneliness

  • restoring democracy as a natural mission

  • reversing the growing isolation of social classes

  • regenerating community life

Gatto believes schools can pursue these goals and still teach reading writing and arithmetic.

Gatto, J. (2000) A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling, Berkeley Hills Books; ISBN: 1893163210

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Dumbing Us Down - The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
  
A brilliant book by New York State teacher of the year: John Taylor Gatto
    
Reviewed by Shaun Kerry, M.D.
Diplomate, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology

"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any."  --Hannah Arendt

In this rare and insightful book, Gatto explains the seven lessons that are taught in most schools.  They constitute a damaging and costly national curriculum.  Here is a summary of those principles, as expressed by the author in the first person voice:

1. Confusion: I teach too much, and everything that I teach is out of context. The orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, assemblies, etc.

2.Class Position: I teach students that they must remain in the class into which they were born, the class where they belong. If I do my job well, my students will be unable to imagine themselves somewhere else. They will envy and fear the upper classes, and have contempt for the lower classes.

3. Indifference: I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they may desire to do so. I demand that my students become completely involved in my lessons, vigorously competing with each other for my favor.

4.Emotional Dependency: By using stars and red checks; smiles and frowns; prizes and punishments; or honors and disgraces, I force children to become emotionally dependent upon my praise.  This ensures my power over them.  My students surrender their 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.  Even the right to free speech - free thought as well - is suspended within the confines of the classroom. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory.

5. Intellectual Dependency: Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson that is imparted to our children in school: We must wait for other people - better trained than ourselves - to direct us and give meaning to our lives.

6. Provisional Self-Esteem: I teach children that their self-respect should depend upon expert opinion.  My student's are constantly evaluated and judged.  Report cards, grades, and tests all teach us that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but instead, should rely upon the expert evaluations of certified officials.  People need to be told what they are worth.

7. One Can't Hide: I teach students they are always watched; that each individual is under constant surveillance by either my colleagues or myself.  This forces my students to behave appropriately, because they fear that someone is watching them, and will punish them if they behave wrongly.  There is no private time.  Furthermore, I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework", which ensures that the effects of my classroom travel into private households.  Where students might otherwise use free time to learn something  unauthorized from a parent, through exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood, they are kept occupied with homework.

Presently, few people can imagine a different educational system.  When proponents of educational reform bring up the aforementioned flaws, they are met with traditional opposition: "Kids have to learn to follow orders, if they ever expect to keep a job."  or  "They have to go to school so they can learn to read and write."

Prior to around 1850, schooling - as it is understood in the traditional sense - was not considered very important anywhere.  Schooling existed, but not to the extent that it presently does.  Furthermore, students only attended the amount of school that they felt necessary.  Even without rigid curriculum and mandatory attendance policies, people still learned to read, write, and do arithmetic.  Recently, Senator Kennedy's office released a paper stating that prior to compulsory education, the literacy rate was 98%.  Following the implementation of compulsory education, the figure never exceeded 91%. Additionally, the skills of reading, writing, and performing arithmetic - when the pupil is eager and willing to learn - can be mastered much more quickly than our present school system leads people to believe.  When an individual genuinely wants to learn something, the speed at which he is able to comprehend that subject matter is greatly increased.

Gatto's book strikes at the heart of modern social dysfunction.  It is a critical component of our understanding the problems - high rates of mental illness, family dysfunction, violence, crime, drug addiction, income inequity - that plague our society.