A long but very interesting essay by a former teacher as to why kids and teachers are continually bored with school. Answer: They’re supposed to be. The purpose of public education is not to educate, but to subdue children into perpetual complacency.
we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
In other words to prepare the student to be a member of the society in which he’ll live? There is a constant battle between the taxpayers and the more educated leaders they hire to administer education. The taxpayers believe they are the employers and have the final word. You may not like what 51% of the population desires, but that’s all it takes to win most election; Presidential and some local electoral polices excluded. Hell on any given day I don’t approve of what 90% of the people believe. I’m a lonely and bitter soul.
Aha – when I read the subject, I wondered if this wan’t John Taylor Gatto – he’s written a very good book on the same subject that’s entirely available online (if you don’t mind paging through chapter after chapter) at his website, JohnTaylorGatto.com. It’s called The Underground History of American Education. Enthralling read.
should this surprise anyone who has actually attended school? the only approved initiative is grade-grubbing for yourself or informing on your fellow students
otherwise, you wander like a lab mouse in a maze of arbitrary rules and standardized tests. your reward pellet – a piece of paper – indicates nothing about your actual understanding, but rather only your ability to fill in ovals with a #2 pencil.
and so it goes.
I think its more on the route of CONFUSION.
Not really teaching, WHAT needs to be taught.
Training people to work in factories that are not even in the United States anymore. More than a little ironic.
It’s been easy enough to see that there’s something wrong with public education for a long time, but it’s been difficult (at least for me) to articulate exactly what the problem is. I think this guy has it right.
And that’s why you should NEVER place your kids in a christian school. Kids there come in two flavours: Naive and perverse.
That was too long? Maybe it really is a problem with public schools.
Personally, I never suspect a conspiracy where mediocrity is a suitable explaination. Certainly there is no reason not to think the functional elements — bordom and a prison environment — are correct.
We also don’t pay enough to fund a full-fledged conspiracy, and I can’t imagine anyone on Wall Street or Madison avenue shelling out the bucks for what they’d get for free.
My impression has always been that the school system arose out of the need for machine operators to be able to read instructions and have basic math skills. The reality beyond that isn’t so different — this is what the tax money goes towards. The teachers put their effort towards the students who have the presence of mind to want to learn, if any end up actually enrolled in their class, and everything else is trying to get thirty or so monkeys to demonstrate basic competancy in the form of test scores so that they’ve provided the appearance of doing the job.
If there’s anything insidious, its simply that so many schools are funded according to the ability to fill seats. While the name changes by location, most school districts maintain a status offender program of some kind — besides just keeping tabs on truancy, there’s also a fair amount of cooperation with the local police.
The practical side of this is simply that if you’re not showing up, not doing the work, the administration has a vested interest in getting you out of the school, since they aren’t collecting the money that they might otherwise get with a warm, complacent body occupying your empty desk.
Columbine was actually a perfect example of this principle. While Eric and Dylan were actually decent students that shouldn’t have been a problem in that regard, the people in their clique (the so-called trench coat mafia) did. Bright, unmotivated misfits. The reason bullying was such a problem was mostly that it was all directed more or less at the kids who would have otherwise cost the school with unoccupied desks. A lot of it was just the kind of midwestern xenophobia one would expect from an environment that produced Young Life and Tim LaHaye and where you’ve got kids whose value was largely a matter of where they fit in between school and civic athletic programs. But outside of there being a relationship between staff and student that was probably closer to a peer relationship than had been in the past (and its been edging that direction and continuing like that since I was in school) there wasn’t anything really complicated about it.
I’ve kept in touch with a couple of the school’s alumnus for a few years, though. One’s been stuck in slacker mode both as a product of being uninterested in much going on in that part of the world (and having had the town try to frame him as a murderer through police incompetance and having been part of the unpopular crowd) and the other is working in retail and trying to cope with living in a community that’s no less cliquish than the school.
Otherwise, there’s no reason to look for meaning in much of it outside of the fact that culturally, there’s not much value placed on intelligence or learning. There’s no reason to expect kids are going to place any more value on something the adults around them have zero interest in.
Just as food for thought, remember that this is just one point of view. As a PhD student in Education I can assure you that (at least at the University of Minnesota) teachers are required to take no less than two courses directly related to the “purpose of education” and “school and society”. Those interested in the topic of education (and all politicians who determine funding and put requirements in place, but that’s another story) should contact someone at one of your state universities and ask to audit a course such as one of these. There is a long, twisted, unique and important history of public schooling in the United States and very little has been done “just because”. Before railing on the system it would be a good idea to understand why it is the way it is and what has been done in the past. Some time in a modern classroom would be beneficial as well.
All that is needed to destroy education in a country is one generation. If the goverment schools can get through one generation of successful indoctrination, then the succeding generations will have no idea of what they’re missing.
Of course it helps the “cause” if the teachers unions and their government lackeys can supress Christian schools and home schooling. Then there is less competition to show how little the kids are learning.
One need not look futher than your local school board to see how John Gattos’ statements are enhanced. Elected to serve the community, but puppets of policy. Often listening to local school board meetings, the focus seems to revolve around money for the school instead of education within the shcool.
Schools are in the business of turning out good government citizens. Citizens that won’t turn against the government or think that there are alternatives to the social contract theory. That people want their children educated means that government must provide that service if they are to get the children in the seats, but it’s only going to be as good as it needs to be to keep parents from demand that school be separated from state.
And that’s the crux. People of the future will look back up on this time and consider the people of today as backward and barbaric as we consider our forefathers who used government force to mandate the forms of religious worship. They’ll wonder how it is that we could even consider it a good idea to have government bureaucrats educate children.