These excerpts are taken from the reading package prepared by the Zarnuji Institute for their "Beyond Schooling" conference.

Table of Contents:

Deschooling Our Lives: A History of the Albany Free School And Community

Deschooling Our Lives: A School for Today

The Parents' Guide to Alternatives in Education: Waldorf Education

Deschooling Our Lives: Leo Tolstoy on Education

Dumbing Us Down: The Seven Lesson School Teacher

Deschooling Our Lives: The Public School Nightmare: Why Try to Fix a System Designed to Destroy Individual Thought?

 

 

Profile excerpt taken from:

Mercongliano, Chris. Deschooling Our Lives: "A History Of The Albany Free School And Community"

Chris Mercogliano has been a teacher at the Free School in Albany, New York, since 1973, working with children from ages two to fourteen. In 1987 he was named co-director. An environmental activist, he has recently been appointed to the mayor’s advisory committee on recycling and waste reduction. He is also an essayist, poet, organic farmer, mason, plumber, and journeyman carpenter, and is currently writing a book about his experiences at the Free School over the past twenty years.

The Albany Free School, a truly amazing place, has been operating for more than twenty-five years, largely centering around its founder, including a natural foods store, a family life clinic, an investment group, a number of houses, and a wilderness retreat. The scope of the project is inspiring, and demonstrates how a genuine community-based experience can be created within a city.

Founded in 1969 by Mary Leue, the Free School in Albany, New York, is one of the oldest inner-city independent alternative schools in the country. Operating on a sliding tuition scale that slides all the way to zero when necessary, we are learning community of about forty-five children, with many from low-income families, and eight full-time teachers supported by numerous talented and creative volunteers and interns. We have thrived by developing an internal economy which enables us to avoid dependence on outside grants from government or the private sector, or on prohibitively high tuitions. (Never in our history have we turned away a single child for financial reasons.)

Over the years a group of about 35 (at last count) – Free School teachers, parents, children and others interested in exploring the realities of living and working together in community – has coalesced around the school and has gradually developed a more consciously spiritual dimension which has nourished deeper and more permanent community roots. Our still-evolving "spiritual tradition" is multifaceted, drawing from many diverse paths as we continue to seek out ways to draw ourselves closer to God and to each other. Our guiding principle could best be called what has been known through the ages as the Perennial Philosophy whose tenets lie at the core of all forms of religious practice.

According to Aldous Huxley, in his introduction to a 1944 translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Perennial Philosophy consists of four central doctrines:

1. The material world is a manifestation of the Divine Ground from which it derives its being;
2. Human beings are capable of a direct experience that Divine Ground, in such a way that the knower unites with the known;
3. Human beings have a double nature, a temporal ego and an eternal self, which is the divine spark within each of us, and which we can identify with at any time;
4. Human life on earth has but one true purpose: to identify with our eternal selves and seek out a united understanding of the Divine Ground.

As I will attempt to portray in this brief sketch, The Free School has acted like the dust particle at the center of every rain drop – or the irritating grain of sand which inspires the growth of the pearl! The story of how this meandering, organic development has occurred will best explain the what and the why of our school and community. At no point has there been a five-year plan or a single guiding philosophy or model; rather at every step, function and necessity – with occasional outside inspiration – have dictated form and process and there has always been a fascinating parallel between the internal growth of each participating individual and the external growth of the school and the community.

Put more simply, from day one we’ve been making it up as we go along. Lacking money, we’ve had to become our own experts, hashing out our own solutions together, and learning from our numerous mistakes along the way. As Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a wonderfully sage leader of the Jewish Renewal Movement, once said to us in one of our workshops, "The only way to get it together is together!" The eternal challenge seems to be trying to love out, on a daily basis, the basic principles of love, truthfulness, emotional honesty, peer-level leadership, and cooperation which are at the heart of the Free School’s philosophy of education. (Reb Zalman calls this "Walking your talk.")

The term "community" is grossly over- and ill-used these days and therefore, I think, it’s important first to define it carefully. As far as I am concerned, M. Scott Peck has written the book on community, and I always like to refer back to one of his definitions in The Different Drum:

If we are going to use the word meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together and to delight in each other, making others’ condition our own. (Back to Contents)

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Profile excerpt taken from:

Sadofsky, Mimsy. Deschooling Our Lives: "A School for Today."

Ms Sadofsky was one of the group of that founded Sudbury Valley School in 1968, and has been deeply involved in the establishment of over a dozen other schools throughout the world based on a similar educational philosophy. She has served in a wide variety of capacities at the school, has spoken extensively in public forums about education, has written several articles, and is co-author of the books, Legacy of Trust and Kingdom of Childhood, published by Sudbury Valley School Press. She has three children, all of whom attended SVS for virtually their entire schooling.

Like the Albany Free School, Sudbury Valley School (SVS) has been around for more than a quarter-century, with an amazing community and incredible facilities, and is equally successful. SVS, however, has thrived outside the city, largely self-contained. The school is particularly important in that it has been the model for literacy dozens of other free schools around the world, and its philosophy is widely disseminated.

In 1968, the group of people who started Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, began by examining the values common in American society in order to determine what values should guide our schools.

How, we asked, can a school best foster creativity? The answer was amazingly simple-and amazingly complex. People are learners. They are born already working on their education! They are born curious-and striving. How else can you explain the unbelievable development in the first few years of life from a pretty much helpless infant, with only the most fundamental communication skill, into a walking, talking toddler whose universe expands exponentially from month to month. They are born creative. No one at all has to explain learning processes to an infant. You can’t stop them, and each one learns differently: how to roll, or to sit up, how to explore with their fingers, to stand, to walk, to say a few words and then a few sentences, and then express an infinite number of thought, many complex and abstract. Infants begin life learning in ways we all use when we are learning for our pleasure. They explore. They imitate. They experience. They build more complex world views from trial and error. It is simple to understand, but terribly difficult to accept, that the individual is best served at every age by allowing that native curiosity and creativity to be undeflected and uninterrupted; that the best schooling may be the schooling that least impedes the mind’s free exploration of the environment.

Why don’t we have schools today that allow a tremendous amount of individual freedom to follow curiosity? Why do we have schools today that have not incorporated the basic notion that an individual has, from earliest childhood, a world view, and that each individual hungers constantly to expand that world view, to expand the size of their bubble, to bring what is outside their bubble in, to refine their perception of the world? To learn.

What is the school like? How so these principles get put into practice?

First let me set the stage. The school enrolls students from the age of four up. No one is too old, although most of our students are nineteen or younger. The people in the school, no matter what age they are, are each doing what they want to do. Usually that means that some people are doing things with others, who can be of the most various of ages, and some people are doing things alone. Usually it means that most people are doing things not done in most other schools, and some are doing things that are done in other schools with a very unusual intensity and concentration. It more often means that children are teaching adults than that adults are teaching children, but most often people are learning while unconscious that "learning" is taking place. Doing what they choose to do is the common theme; learning is the by-product. It is first and foremost a place where students are free to follow their inner dictates. They are free to do what we all do when we have the time to, and what we all find to be most satisfactory- they play.

Play is the most serious pursuit at Sudbury Valley. This is not an accident. Psychologists pretty much agree these days that allowing the mid to roam freely has the most potential for mind-expansion. In fact, when we talk about our most creative moments, we describe them as ‘playing with new ideas.’ This is a process that cannot be forced. Creativity can grow only in such freedom. Some people play at games, and some play at things which we who have more traditional educations are more comfortable with-writing or art or mathematics or music. But we are quite clear at Sudbury Valley that it is doing what you want to that counts! We have no curriculum and place no value on one pursuit over another. The reason that we are secure in feeling this way is that we constantly see that people play more and more sophisticated "games," explore more and more deeply, that they constantly expand their knowledge of the world, and their ability to handle themselves in it.

Children who play constantly do not draw artificial line between work and play. In fact, you could say that they are most usually identified with the pursuit of avocation. …

The students at Sudbury Valley are "doin’ what comes natur’ly." But they are not necessarily choosing what comes easily. A close look discovers that everyone is challenging her or himself; that every kid is acutely aware of her or his own weaknesses and strengths, and is extremely likely to be working hardest on her or his weaknesses. If the weaknesses are social, the child is very unlikely to be stuck away in a quiet room with a book. And if athletics are hard, the child is likely to be outdoors playing basketball. Along with the ebullient good spirits, there is an underlying seriousness—even the six-year-olds know that they, and only they, are responsible for their education. They have been given the gift of tremendous trust, and they understand that this gift is a big responsibility as it is a delight. They are acutely aware that very young people are not given this much freedom or this much responsibility almost anywhere in the world. But growing up shouldering this responsibility makes for a very early confidence in yrou own abilities—you get, as one graduate says, a "track record." Self-motivation is never even a question. That’s all there is. An ex-student has described some of these effects:

"There are a lot of things about Sudbury Valley that I think are on a personal level, that build your character, things that perhaps enable you to learn better, that public school students never have a chance to achieve. When you’re responsible for your own time, and spend it the way that you want to, you tend to put a lot more enthusiasm into what you do, instead of being a lethargic lump that’s molded and prodded into a certain direction. And when you end up the way you want to end up, you know you’ve been responsible for it. It’s a lot more rewarding, I think, than when you end up the way somebody else wants you to end up."

Who are the kids in this school? Are they chosen for creativity, intelligence, or perhaps some other standard? It is a private school—does that mean it appeals to only the well- to-do? Admission is on a first-come, first-serve basis, and we have never been full. That means that the students in this school consist of everyone who wants to come whose parents will allow them to. It includes the cerebral and the super-active, the ‘regular’ and the ‘zeroed-in"—the full gamut of possibilities. Most of the families who choose to send their children to SVS are looking for something they wish they could find in public schools, but cannot: simple freedom for their children to develop according to their own timetables and their own desires. Is it perfection? Hardly. But it is tremendously stimulating and exciting. …

We have no curriculum. If you send your children to this school, however, there are some certainties about what they learn. They learn how to debate, and how to ask for what they want, and see to it that they get it. They learn to ponder ethical questions. They learn how to concentrate: they can focus on things the way few adults that I know can, and this gives results. The same focus that a five-year-old puts into sand castles, a seven-year-old puts into drawing, an eleven-year-old into making a gingerbread house, a nine-year-old into chess, a twelve-year-old into Dungeons and Dragons, an eight-year-old into climbing forty feet up in the beech tree, a fifteen-year-old into writing a story, a seventeen-year-old into making armor, or an eighteen-year-old into preparing for graduation. That kind of preparation will serve them well in each and every pursuit they choose as adults.(Back to Contents)

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Profile excerpt taken from:

Koetzsch, Ronald E., Ph.D. The Parents’ Guide to Alternatives in Education.

Boston: Shambhala Press, 1997.

Waldorf Education

It was the spring of 1919, a few months after the end of World War I. Emil Mold, the director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany, approached Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner with a request. Concerned about the moral, social, and economic disorder of the time, Molt asked Steiner to design a school that would educate children to become free, responsible, and active human beings, able to create a just and peaceful society.

Steiner was an important figure in European cultural life. For many years he was head of the Theosophical Society in Germany, and in 1913 he founded a spiritual and cultural movement called Anthroposophy – "knowledge of the true nature of the human being." Lecturing and writing on such topics as philosophy, religion, psychology, art, history, economics, and politics, Steiner had attracted a large, sophisticated, and international following. He urged that modern humanity awaken to the reality of the spirit, both in the individual human being and in the universe as a whole, and that individual and social life be based on this reality.

Steiner accepted Molt’s invitation. He recruited teacher from among his followers and gave them an intensive training in his educational philosophy and its application. In autumn 1919, the Free Waldorf School opened in Stuttgart with 175 students, most of them children of workers in Molt’s factory, and with eight teachers. It was a radical school for that time. Free of government control, it educated all children in the same way, whether they were destined from university or for the factory workshop. The school emphasized art, music, and handcrafts as much as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Its explicit purpose was to create free, creative, independent, moral, and happy human beings. Steiner summarized the school’s task: "Accept the children in reverence; educate them with love; send them forth in freedom."

Waldorf education spread rapidly. Soon there were schools in other parts of Germany and in England, Holland, and Switzerland. The first Waldorf school in North America was founded in New York City in 1928. Today there are over 600 schools in over eight countries. There are now about 140 Waldorf in the United States. Virtually all are independent schools, but a number of public school Waldorf programs have been established. The movement continues to grow rapidly in the U.S. and around the world.

In the context of American education, Waldorf education is an anomaly. Unlike almost all of the other approaches to education presented in this book, it does not belong clearly to the traditional-religious or progressive-humanistic stream of educational theory and practice. It has elements characteristic of both, and many elements unique to itself. To understand Waldorf education as it is practiced at the kindergarten, elementary, and high-school level, one must understand Steiner’s view of the nature and development of the human being.

According to Steiner, there are three major human functions – willing, feeling, and thinking. Willing is manifested in physical movement and activity and is centered in the human limbs – in the arms and legs. Feeling is manifested in imagination, in sympathy and antipathy, and in the range of human emotions. It is connected to the organs that function in a rhythmical way – the heart and lungs. Thinking involves the use and manipulation of concepts and abstractions. Its locus is the brain and nervous system.

Steiner held that from birth the human being develops these functions in a predictable, universal pattern. During the first seven years of life, children are largely beings of will and movement. They are completely open to their immediate environment and constantly in motion as they explore the world through their senses and experiment with their own body as an object in the world. Preschool children are imitators, who internalize and then manifest as their own, the speech, movements, and even moods of those around them.

With the loss of the baby teeth at the age of six or seven, children enter the next stage of life. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, they are primarily being of feeling, aesthetic sensitivity, imagination, and artistic creativity. During these years, children will develop and learn at their best if they engage their aesthetic and affective capacities.

With puberty children enter yet another distinct stage. New faculties emerge. In the next seven years the thinking function develops and dominates. The adolescent becomes able to think abstractly, analyze, conceptualize, and be highly critical. At this stage of development, too, education must appeal to and nurture the special capacities that are emerging and developing. (Back to Contents)

 

History excerpt taken from:

Tolstoy, Leo. Deschooling Our Lives: "On Education."

Leo Tolstoy was born into Russian aristocracy, joined the army and fought in the Crimean War, then founded a school at his estate at the Yasnaya Polyana. He wrote prolifically: plays, novels, novellas, treatises, and letters, including Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Illyich and Resurrection. His writings on education, nonviolence, anarchism, asceticism, and spirituality found a worldwide audience, deeply influencing Gandhi and Martin Luther King among millions of others.

This article is conglomeration of excerpts from various essays Tolstoy wrote in the 1860s in the periodical he published called Yasnaya Polyana, named after, and based on his experiences at the school on his estate. Tolstoy’s thinking is unrelentingly honest, as he rigorously applies his Christian, anarchist, nonviolent, and communitarian ideals to his daily relations with the children. Although more than a century old, his writing still sheds much light on current educational theory and clearly anticipates much of the work of A.S. Neill and the free school movement.

On popular education

School justly presents itself to the child’s mind as an establishment where he is taught that which nobody understands; where he is generally compelled to speak not his native patois, Mundart, but a foreign language; where the teacher for the greater part sees in his pupils his natural enemies, who, out of their own malice and that of their parents, do not wish to learn that which he has learned; and where the pupils, on their side, look upon their teacher as their enemy, who only out of personal spite compels them to learn such difficult things. In such a situation they are obliged to pass six years and about six hours every day.

What the results must be, we again see from what they really are, not according to the reports, but from actual facts.

In Germany, nine-tenths of the school population take away from school a mechanical knowledge of reading and writing, and such a strong loathing for the paths of science traversed by them that they never again take a book into their hands.

*

It is enough to look at one and the same child at home, in the street, or at school: now you see a vivacious, curious child, with a smile in his eyes and on his lips, seeking instruction in everything, as he would seek pleasure, clearly and frequently strongly expressing his thoughts in his own words; now again you see a worn out, retiring being, with an expression of fatigue, terror, and ennui, repeating with the lips only strange words in a strange language, – a being whose soul has, like a snail, retreated into its house. It is enough to at these two conditions in order to decide which of the two is more advantageous for the child’s development.

That strange psychological condition which I will call the scholastic condition of the soul, and which all of us, unfortunately, know too well, consists in that all the higher faculties, imagination, creativeness, inventiveness, give way to other, semi-animal faculties, which consist in pronouncing sounds independently from any concept, in counting numbers in succession, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, in perceiving words, without allowing imagination to substitute images for these sounds, in short, in developing a faculty for crushing all higher faculties, so that only those might be evolved which coincide with the scholastic condition of fear, and of straining memory and attention.

Every pupil is so long an anomaly at school as he has not fallen into the rut of this semi-animal condition. The moment a child has reached that state and has lost all his independence and originality, the moment there appear in him various symptoms of disease – hypocrisy, aimless lying, dullness, and so forth – he no longer is an anomaly: has fallen into the rut, and the teacher begins to be satisfied with him. Then there happens those by no means accidental and frequently repeated phenomena, that the dullest boy becomes the best pupil, and the most intelligent the worst. It seems to me that this fact is sufficiently significant to make people think and try to explain it. It seems to me that one such fact serves as a palpable proof of the fallacy of the principle of compulsory education.

More than that. Besides this negative injury, which consists n removing the children from the unconscious education which they receive at home, at work, in the street, the schools are physically injurious – for the body, which at this early age is inseparable from the soul. This injury is especially important on account of the monotony of the scholastic education, even if it were good. For the agriculturist it is impossible to substitute anything for those conditions of labor, life in the field, conversation of elders, and so forth, which surround him; even so it is with the artisan and, in general, with the inhabitant of the city. Not by accident, but designedly, has Nature surrounded the agriculturist with rustic conditions, and the city dweller with urban conditions. These conditions are most highly instructive, and only in them can each develop. And yet, school lays down as the first condition of education the alienation from these conditions.

More than that. School is not satisfied with tearing the child away from life for six hours a day, during the best years of the child – it wants to tear three-year-old children away from the influence of their mothers. They have invented institutions (Kleinkinderbewahranstalt, infant schools, salles d’asile) of which we shall have occasion to speak more in detail. All that is lacking now is the invention of a steam engine to take the place of wet nurses. …

All the pupils meet together for the class of religion, which is the only regular class we have, because the teacher lives two versts away and comes only twice a week; they also meet together for the drawing class. Before those classes there is animation, fighting, shouting, and the most pronounced external disorder: some drag benches from one room to another; some fight; some of the children of the manorial servants run home for some bread, which they roast in the stove; one is taking something away from a boy; another is doing some gymnastics, and, just as in the disorder of the morning, it is much easier to allow them to quiet themselves and resume their natural order than forcibly settle them. With the present spirit of the school it would be physically impossible to stop them. The louder the teacher calls – this has actually happened – the louder they shout: his loud voice only excites them. If you stop them, or if you can not do that, if you carry them away into another direction, this small sea begins to billow less and less until it finally grows calm. In the majority of cases there is no need to say anything. The drawing class, everybody’s favorite class, is at noon when, after three hours’ work, the children are beginning to be hungry, and the benches and tables have to be taken from one room to another, and there is a terrible hubbub; and yet, in spite of it, the moment the teacher is ready, the pupils are, too, and if one of them should keep back from starting, he gets his punishment meted out to him by the children themselves.

I must explain myself. In presenting a description of the Yasnaya Polyana school, I do not meant offer a model of what is needed and is good for a school, but simply to furnish an actual description of the school. I presume that such descriptions may have their use. If I shall succeed in the following numbers in presenting a cleat account of the evolution of the school, it will become intelligible to the reader what is that has led to the formation of the present character of the school, why I regard such an order as good, and why it would be absolutely impossible for me to change it, even if I wanted.

The school has evolved freely from the principles introduced into it by teacher and pupils. In spite of the preponderating influence of the teacher, the pupil has always the right not to come to school, or, having come, not to listen to the teacher. The teacher has had the right not to admit a pupil, and has had the possibility of bringing to bear all the force of his influence on the majority of pupils, on the society, always composed of school children.

*

I am convinced that the school ought not to interfere in that part of education which belongs to the family; that the school has no right and ought not to reward and punish; that the best police and administration of a school consist in giving full liberty to the pupils to study and settle their disputes as they know best. I am convinced of it, and yet, in spite of it, the old habits of the educational schools are so strong in us that we frequently depart from that rule in the Yasnaya Polyana school. …

Education and Culture

… Culture in general is to be understood as the consequence of all those influences which life exerts on man. . . .Education is the action of one man upon another for the purpose of making the person under education acquire certain moral habits. . . .Instruction is the transmission of one man’s information to another (one may instruct in the game of chess, in history, in the shoemaker’s art). Teaching, a shade of instruction, is the action of one man upon another for the purpose of making the pupil acquire certain physical habits (one teachers how to sing, do carpentry, dance, row, declaim). Instruction and teaching are the means of culture, when they are free, and means of education, when the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when the instruction is exclusive, that is, when only those subjects are taught which the educator regards as necessary. The truth presents itself clearly and instinctively to everybody. However much we may try to ----- what is disconnected, and to subdivide what is inseparable, and subordinate thought to the existing order of things – truth is apparent.

Education is a compulsory, forcible action of one person upon another for the purpose of forming a man such as will appear to --- to be good; but culture is the free relation of people having for its basis the need of one man to acquire knowledge, and of the others to impart that which he has acquired. Instruction, Unterricht, is a means of both culture and education. The difference between education and culture lies only in the compulsion, which education deems itself in the right to exert. Education is culture under restraint. Culture is free.

*

I spoke in my first article on the right of compulsion in matter of education and have endeavored to prove that, firstly, compulsion is impossible; secondly, that it brings no results or only sad results; thirdly, that compulsion can have no other basis but arbitrary will. …Education as a subject of science does not exist. Education is the tendency toward moral despotism raised to a principle. Education is, I shall not say an expression of the bad side of human nature, but a phenomenon which proves the undeveloped condition of human thought, and therefore, it cannot be put at the base of intelligent human activity – of science.

Education is the tendency of one man to make another just like himself. (The tendency of a poor man to take the wealth away from the rich man, the feeling of envy in an old man at the sight of fresh vigorous youth – the feeling of envy, raised to a principle and theory). I am convinced that eh educator undertakes with such zeal the education of the child, because at the base of this tendency lies his envy of the child’s purity, and his desire to make him like himself, that is to spoil him.(Back to Contents)

 

State of education excerpt taken from:

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down: "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"

Call me Mr. Gatto please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do with myself at the time, I tried my hand at schooteaching. The license I have 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 from Harlem to Hollywood hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay 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.

1. CONFUSION

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 there 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 had it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I tech the un-relating of everything, I teach dis-connections. 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, parents’ nights, staff-development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world….What do any of these 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 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 fact, is what sane human beings seek and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and theories, the age-old human search for meaning 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 between "let’s do this" and "let’s do that" 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 the great natural sequences—like learning to walk and learning to talk; the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; the ancient procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; or the preparation of a Thanksgiving feast—all of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifies itself and illuminates the past and the 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 Thirty-nine 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. I a world where home is only a ghost, because both parents work, or because of too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny. That’s the first lesson I teach.

2. CLASS POSITION

The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. I don’t know who decides my kids belong there by 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 by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of numbers they carry. Numbering children is a big and very profitable undertaking, thought what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don’t even know why parents would, without a fight, allow it to be done to their kids.

In any case, that’s not my business. My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least to endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I’ve shown them 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 assumes that ninety-nine 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 low class as a reward. I frequently insinuate 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 tightly indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see the truth and schoolteaching are, at bottom, incompatible, just as Socrates said thousands of years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and there is no way out of your class except by number magic. Failing that, you must stay where you are put.

3. INDIFFERENCE

The third lesson I teach is indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, 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 they drop whatever it is we have been doing 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 class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of 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 school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

4. EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY

The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because right do not exist inside a school—not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has 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 behaviors 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, or they steal a private instant n the hallway on the grounds they need water. I know they don’t, but I allow them to "deceive" me because this conditions them to depend on my favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in pockets of children angry, depressed, or happy about things outside my ken; rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.

5. INTELLECUTAL DEPENDENCY

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good students 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, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

Bad kids fight this, of course, even thought 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 tested procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kids have respectable parents who come to their aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. No middle-class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid’s school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent in twenty-five 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 might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent; the social services 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, the prepared food industry, 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 plan, 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 continued to pour out o four schools each year.

Don’t be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do. It’s one of the biggest lessons I teach.

6. PROVISIONAL SELF-ESTEEM

The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. If you’ve ever tried to wrestle into line kids whose parents have convinced them to believe they’ll be loved 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 a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.

A monthly report, impressive in its provision, sent into a student’s home to elicit approval or mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be. The ecology of "good" schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just as the 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 these objective-seeming documents established a profile that compels children to arrive at certain decisions about themselves and their futures based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

7. ONE CAN’T HIDE

The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide. I teach students they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts exactly three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file reports about their own child’s waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.

I assign a type of extended schooling, called "homework," is that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, 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 imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host if 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.(Back to Contents)

State of education excerpt taken from:

Gatto, John Taylor. Deschooling Our Lives: "The Public School Nightmare: Why Fix a System Designed to Destroy Individual Thought?"

John Taylor Gatto was a Manhattan school teacher for almost thirty years. He was named New City’s Teacher of the Year in 1990, and State Teacher of the Year in 1991. He has spoken at the White House, at Yale, at scores of institutions, on dozens of television and radio shows, and to packed halls across the continent. He has taught at Cornell and California State, is a heavy pistol champion, a garlic farmer, a national authority on adoption, a chess player, and a talker of some repute. His two books, Dumbing Us Down and the Exhausted School, are both widely available.

John is one of the most compelling writers about schools today. His thinking is informed by more than two decades as a New York City public school teacher, and his perspective is deeply entrenched in American ideals as liberty and freedom. His commentary, specifically when talking about turning schools over to the free market, is considered by some to be right-wing. It is salutary, however, to consider the libertarian, radically democratic tradition from which his thinking has evolved. He is a genuinely inspiring person, and his vision is remarkably clear. The following is taken from a talk delivered to the Conference of Private Initiatives in Education, held in Indianapolis in 1991.

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 neighborhoods 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 became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned thought 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, the 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 seven years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and second grades here is that they don’t want to pay the large social bill that quickly wipes 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 teaches 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 twelve years, either – it’s nine. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the United States would be $75-100 billion – a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek 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 neighbor with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the broad in math and science? Whose interests are served by hidingd 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; that 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 any new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned – Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once brilliant teachers found out.

The guild in 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 before 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.

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The structure of American schooling, 20^th 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, according to Fichte, 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. Prussia 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, at 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 Volksschule, 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 eight 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 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 Remarque, in his classic All Quiet on the Western Front, tells us that the First World War was caused by 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 literally, not metaphorically: schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability for 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 19^th century, and fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of the 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 influences.

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 19^th century and brought home the PhD 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 John 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 "Seventh Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these.

By 1989, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. In that year the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collins 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. In 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 l
program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant stop 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 the 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.

Betrand 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 Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19^th 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 United States and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include four-year-olds. The movement toward state socialism is not some historical curiosity but a powerful 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 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 shakedown of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found tin 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 granter of contracts next to the Defense 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 do 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.

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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, not can here be without outside competition.

It cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to define accurately the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such, we have cut ourselves off form the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favorable, 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 daytime 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.

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