A loyal vassal of BipolarNation sent me an interesting essay you can find in the inset text at this link. It’s the “I Quit, I Think” essay written by John Taylor Gatto, a former New York Teacher of the Year who has this to say:

If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know.

Needless to say, I think I like this guy.

Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.” It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education” fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.

The first question is, how on earth did someone who hates public education so much become Teacher of the Year? In fact, how was he Teacher of the Year in 1991, the same year he wrote this?

Well, turns out in order to teach his kids - actually educate them - he had to break a lot of rules, like letting them go to apprenticeships. Meanwhile, he watched other teachers belittle students in order to put them in their place. Their place? What’s their place? It’s an artificial social construction that harms kids when they could, instead, be learning about life instead of learning their place.

Says Gatto:

During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.

…

You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood…

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

Our school system is inarguably nearly worthless - sure, it helps us learn how to read and do basic math, but people were learning those things long before publik edyoo-kayshun, long before they had to be sorted into mechanical groups and forced to learn that their place is among the passive factory jobs. As Aristotle said, you are what you repeatedly do. In school, what you repeatedly do is sit and listen. I don’t care if you’re learning nuclear physics - if that’s all you’re doing, you’re being intellectually neutered.

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