4 Edu. Here is more reading from Gatto
American Schools were designed by Horace Mann, and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago, and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College, and by some other men;
They’re designed to be instruments of the scientific management of mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through application of these formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
In some experimental schools in Massachusetts children were given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cell blocks; they learned to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease. Those things made sense in the kind of life that unfolded around them.
But keep in mind that in the United States, almost nobody that reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets any respect. America is a land of talkers; We pay talkers the most and admire them the most; so, our children learn to talk constantly, following the public models of television, and their schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the "basics" anymore because those are NOT really basic to this society that we have made.
Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what they really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to live.
I want to tell you what the effect on our children is; of taking all their time from them - the time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it all on abstractions. You need to hear this because any reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be nothing more than a façade.
1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of 1,000's of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants children to grow up these days, least of all the children. And who can blame them; Toys are Us.
2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little they do have is transitory. They cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see the connection between the bells ringing again and again to change the classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, and how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they live in a continuous present, the exact moment they are in, is the boundary of their consciousness.
4. The children I teach are a-historical; they have no sense of how the past has predestined their own present, how it limits their choices, and how it shapes the values and their lives.
5. The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness; they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy and candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner fantasy self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate parents and teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade everything", and from television mentors who offer everything in the world for sale.
8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This timidity is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.
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I could name a few other conditions that school reform will have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies or television has, or both. It is a simple matter of arithmetic, - between schooling and television, all the time the children have is eaten up. There is simply not enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be any other significant causes.
School painfully does not work because the fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but those so controlled will always fight back with weapons of social pathology: drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, which are the symptoms I see in most of the children I teach.
Some elite schooling has a different focus. At the core of the elite system is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. At every age, in this system, you will find arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes it may be fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse, or making it jump over a ditch, but that of course is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who has mastered such a challenge to jump a horse, ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is to master solitude, such as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs houses.
For five years I ran a guerrilla school program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dippy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service.
Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, grown up, and told me that the experience of helping someone else had changed their lives. It has taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School program. It was only possible because, due to various breakdowns, my rich school district was in chaos. When "stability" returned 5 years later the Lab School was closed. It was too successful with a widely mixed group of kids, and at too small of a cost to be allowed to continue.
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