By John Taylor Gatto (1935 – 2018)
Rule-driven schooling gave America the most docile, predictable, and manageable population on earth, a joy for leaders of business and government to boss—Americans could be counted upon to do as told. But, in the 21st century, the dogged persistence of lockstep pedagogy is economically worrisome. You see, one of the insights that our stupendous balance of payments deficit and perilous condition of many giant corporations testifies to is that our leaders don’t know how to lead us out of trouble. The docility of the common population in this instance suggests we can expect no relief from that quarter which once was capable of revolting against England, the most powerful nation on earth.
There’s a widespread feeling these days, both here and abroad, that America has lost its way, that we’ve gone crazy, and that school has something to do with it. Personally, I agree. But what change in schooling could restore our lost national vigor?
Since 1983, the answer from policy circles has been: Even more of the same! More hours, more days, more homework, more tests, more college, and a more coercive transfer of officially-approved curricula designed to make classrooms teacher-proof. In this tight prescription, critical thinking, artistic expression, and actual applications of learning have received short shrift. But what if regimented schooling is the disease making us sick and not its cure? This essay is an old schoolteacher’s way of saying that it is the disease, and we need to be looking elsewhere for a solution: To less school, not more; to less college, not more; to no paper/pencil testing at all; and to a sharply reduced role for licensed school personnel.
My argument is called “Walkabout” because my inspiration for 30 years of classroom teaching was the rite of passage attributed to Australian aborigines, in which a young fellow grows up on a very long and solitary walk full of marvels and dangers. He educates himself on this walk. And, I call this presentation “Walkabout London” because a walking adventure changed the life of Sir Richard Branson, as he tells it in his autobiography, Losing My Virginity, and retells it in the May, 2007 issue of New Yorker.
Branson was four years old and out on a ride with his mother, miles from their home, when Mrs. Branson stopped the car and asked her little son whether he thought he could find his way back alone from where they were. He said “Yes”, whereupon Mother Branson told him to get out and do so. Then, she drove off. “My mother was determined to make us independent,” Branson remembered to the magazine reporter 52 years after the event. And, once he got home, he could never again submit easily to institutionalization. Eventually, he dropped out of high school, skipped college, and had his first important business at 19 while his friends were college undergraduates.
Branson considers that walk to be the important lesson of his life. Can you see how it might be? It wouldn’t cost anything to give every four-year-old an equivalent solitary adventure, would it? But, of course, no institutional school could permit that because their root mission is psychological—to institutionalize young people to certain routines and attitudes. If walkabouts were prescribed for all, the delicate web of controlled society would come apart.
Walkabout London
An undue, even irrational, respect for experts, specialists, and rules is conditioned into us by twelve years or more of rule-driven schooling. That’s why we find it hard to believe that a peasant could do a better job than professional German engineers or that an ignorant torch singer could take over the admissions office at America’s premier technical college and do such a fantastic job that she is given the school’s highest honor for administrators. More on that lady in a minute.
This softcore brainwashing is why we don’t know what to think when we learn that America’s first President, as a fatherless boy of eleven, started school by studying trigonometry, geometry, and surveying, gradually adding ship-building, architectural design, military science, horseback riding, and ballroom dancing to the curriculum. And, that his contemporaries didn’t consider him overly bright!
Rule-driven schooling creates a wonderful fit with factory work, clerical duties, hamburger flipping, and bureaucratic jobs, but it hurts our ability to think critically or creativity and, oddly enough, this disturbing fact has been quite well known for centuries. It helps us to see that the battle of Waterloo really was won on the playing fields of Eton or that WWII German forces were able to inflict many more casualties than they took, even when heavily outnumbered, because it trained the officer corps that war was a game, and to go at it that way.
Dense nets of rigid rules were built into the original design of forced institutional schooling a hundred years ago in preparation for the advent of a big industrial economy, and a big government to match. That’s why our schools function as they do, in order to construct a predictable proletariat who would serve the new economy faithfully because it didn’t know what else to do.
Trouble is, our big industrial economy is dying, and the big government set up to run interference for it has been spending over a half-trillion dollars a year more than it earns for some time now. So, the familiar bells and loudspeaker schools, built around low-grade and mostly irrelevant intellectual training, built around the strict rationing of skills-training and an absolute minimum of practice in applications—and a maximum of drills in passivity and obedience—tools which once served the older economy well (even as they dis-served and mutilated young lives) seems now to be unable to help produce the much different sort of citizen needed for the dangerous future ahead.
Letter From Tulsa
Many things in life defy strict definition, but we know them when we see them. One of those things is open-source learning. To define it precisely, to reduce it to a mere formula, is to ruin it. Nevertheless, I want to explain roughly what I’m trying to get at. In open-source, everything under the sun is a potential lesson; nothing is excluded automatically on grounds of age appropriateness, test scores, stage theories of human development, or anything else, and everybody alive or dead is a potential teacher, even mass murderers or the hopelessly insane. In open-source, teaching is a function, not a profession.
In open-source, nothing is standardized; the only tests are performance demonstrations, not displays of memory. Students are pushed into taking an increasingly active role in selecting and recruiting learning sources, establishing sequences, and evaluating progress, with the ultimate goal (being) comprehensive self-initiation, management, and judgment of learning. The fundamental assumption is that nobody else can give you an education; an education has to be taken. Teachers, textbooks, equipment and facilities play no decisive factor in education; the only sine qua non is the will and discipline of the learner.
A letter I received from a 16-year-old fellow in Tulsa will help to clarify these abstract ideas. As you read it, you’ll notice my correspondent builds his argument around an open-source use of the Internet. This is the way of a large and growing number of people. Its advantages aren’t hard to recognize, but it’s important not to tie the open-source phenomenon exclusively to technology. Open-sourcing is an attitude; a method of procedure. It can find materials for superb education in any situation, with or without technology.
“Dear Mr. Gatto:
Compulsory schooling indoctrinates people in the faith of arbitrary systems which are, or will soon become, obsolete. Schools teach as if what is now thought true will always be truth. They suppress the natural evolution of concepts and practices. But science, culture, politics, philosophy, and society aren’t static at all.
Schooling perpetuates itself by making people so dependent on obsolete systems they can’t change. Case in point: school upends natural learning priorities: instead of focusing on learning useful stuff, or on self-mastery, it concentrates on test scores and class rankings. But those things can be improved in clever ways without actually learning anything. Except how to game the system.
Now contrast the Internet with school: anything can be learned through the Internet, it transcends all boundaries and social distinctions, it makes knowledge difficult to hoard and free speech hard to curtail. Before the Internet, a student with a yen to pursue esoterica like number theory would wait for college, or buy some difficult books which follow an order designed for the average person. But average people don’t exist except as statistical fictions. So standardized presentations are an inherently inefficient educational compromise.
Learning doesn’t have to proceed that way. As quickly as I type “number theory” into a search engine, my study begins. I design my own curriculum, one that fits me. And as I do that I develop deeper understanding of the concept. On the Internet I learn what I choose, not limited by someone else’s curriculum or standards. As it stands, it’s possible to school yourself from kindergarten through PhD without ever entering a classroom. All you want is free. Ask in a forum—like magic many will answer.”
The institution of standardized schooling is needed less and less: It can’t adapt to individuals, it can’t provide the same depth of concept and quality of assistance. For my teenage friend, the Internet makes schooling irrelevant. Homeschooling does the same for millions of others; the international democratic school movement for many more. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, O school, it tolls for thee.
Shen Wenrong
A few years back, the ThyssenKrupp steel company decided to unload its huge Phoenix plant in Dortmund, Germany on China. Steel prices were stuck in a trough, long term, it appeared to management. What better time to dump Phoenix on unsophisticated China for two payoffs: Once in the sales price; once more to move it.
China swallowed the first hook, but not the second. It wouldn’t pay the moving bill which Thyssen estimated at three years’ work for an army of highly-paid engineers and specialized technicians. No, China would buy the place, but move Phoenix itself. And one fine day, a raggedy band of one thousand peasants, led by a ham-handed farmer from the Yangtze Delta, showed up in Dortmund.
Shen didn’t use a computer, he worked from behind a common school desk. And, he saw no need to pay housing or meal costs, so his crew’s first undertaking was to build dormitories and commissaries, which they did in three weeks. Then, they took down Phoenix, crated it, shipped it, uncrated it, and reassembled it near Shanghai in one year — not three. In performing this miracle, rules were broken or ignored left and right, but instead of calamity, it was a triumph in more ways than one.
In the time it had taken to dismantle and transport Phoenix, China’s huge orders for steel on world markets drove the price through the roof. So, Phoenix was a profit-maker from the start — just as it would have been if it had been kept in Germany. The Chinese had factored this predictable jump in steel prices into their original decision, of course, and the Germans had not. And so, sophisticated, German college-trained expertise was outfoxed by the working class from China.
Don’t forget Shen’s story; it will serve as a useful reference as you work to de-program yourself and to understand how rule-driven schooling, radically disconnected from real-world realities, is an exceedingly poor preparation for an uncertain future.
How did Shen learn to direct such a colossal operation with his rural background? Consider the possibility that you’ve been deceived all your life into believing that experts and specialists are needed for things which really are well within the reach of ordinary people. If a farmer and an unspecialized crew can tear down and put back together a gigantic steel plant three times faster than experts, then, you and I may need a new perspective on things; one which puts experts and expertise in their proper place.
Dropouts Are Dead Ducks?
Branson’s walkabout, and the dirt-farmer savvy of Shen Wenrong, are things more easily achieved outside school than in, which is the common historical experience of mankind and which helps to explain why it took almost all of recorded history before factory schooling came about. I hear all the time these days that people who don’t graduate high school are ruined, and those without college are doomed to be lifelong flunkies. And yet, something puzzles me: America’s two best Presidents, Washington and Lincoln, had almost no school and neither had college, either, and America’s two most potent industrial titans, Rockefeller and Carnegie, were in the same unschooled boat. “Yes, but what about scientists”, I hear you say. Well, two-time Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling, didn’t even have a high school diploma, (Pauling’s high school issued him a diploma after he received his second Nobel. He did go to college and after dropping out of his first, he got a degree from his second.) and the head of the Human Genome Project, Francis S. Collins didn’t see the inside of a classroom until high school, and followed a perfect open-source method until then.
On April 27, 2007, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal carried front-page stories about the firing of MIT’s Admissions Director, Marilee Jones who held the top spot there for ten years, and for eighteen more was a nationally famous admissions executive, also at MIT, specializing in recruiting women. During her tenure, she nearly tripled the female fraction of the student body. MIT gave her its highest honor for administrators, The Excellence Award for Leading Change.
So why was she fired after 28 years of superb service? It seems that on her original job application, she had claimed three college degrees, but her background was actually as a torch-singer in upstate New York nightclubs. Don’t laugh; it took MIT nearly three decades to flush out the scoundrel. Meanwhile, according to the press accounts, she had become “beloved,” “almost revered,” and considered “irreplaceable.” Even the man who fired her acknowledged that she was superb at what she did.
MIT Chancellor, Phillip Clay told the press the door was now closed to another Miss Jones. “In the future, we will take a big lesson from this experience.” You’ll forgive me for being rude, but Mr. Clay is clearly unable to see the real lesson in the Jones affair: That degrees are paper with no power to signal merit. Quality resides solely in an ability to add value to the community and on that score, torch-singer Jones gets an A+ and bureaucrat Clay flunks shamefully.
American genius has always been about making silk purses out of sow’s ears—judging people on merit, not titles. But the cancerous growth of test-driven schooling since the end of WWII has marked a return to the medieval outlook of Scholasticism, whereby the godly or ungodly can be deduced through faith-based syllogisms like honors degrees. Unfortunately, for the degreed, merit still demands visible works, not abstract promissory notes.
In the modern through-the-looking-glass universe, Jones lacked enough paper credentials to warrant her high position, but, even in this epidemic or credential-sickness, I hope you can see that a dropout is a dead duck only if he or she believes the propaganda. Dropping out of school doesn’t mean dropping out of education. George Eastman, who created Kodak and donated millions to MIT in Kodak’s heyday, understood that. He was a dropout, of course.
Under any wisdom-based form of governance, dropouts would be regarded as a major untapped source of ideas and pioneer-spirit energies and given subsidies, support, and encouragement. The same pragmatic perspective which produced Ben Franklin would see that the dropout was picking up a huge chunk of time and money at the most opportune moment in life to apply those things to advantage. Just as a fine chess player sacrifices immediate material advantage for a freedom to maneuver, any dropout capable of ignoring the mindless prejudice and insults to focus on a goal of his or her own choosing, can more than compensate for a loss of academic seat-time.
We’re talking here about 1¼ million people a year in the U.S. and, perhaps, ten times that number who would like to drop out if any respectable alternatives were offered. The reason my proposal isn’t possible is that schooling is the biggest employer of the civilized world when all associated forms of labor are factored in. And, the major contract-giver, too. When attendance dips, jobs are lost. No wiener roast without the wieners. The minute you take your blinders off and see schooling as a jobs project, you know why the dropout is despised.
And, there’s another reason just as strong or stronger: they represent an unpredictable “X-factor,” a potential fifth column to management because they’ve been insufficiently adjusted to accept standardization. It’s understandable in a short-sighted way, but over the long haul, an economy so dysfunctional it compels its citizens to accept services not wanted or needed, is a bed of Procrustes which spells trouble for the nation.
Every school day, 7000 students walk away and don’t look back in spite of the propaganda. Several million more, daily fake illness to buy some temporary respite from torture. Should all be dragged back screaming and jammed into cells with others who, in theory at least, want to be there? If that had been done to Abraham Lincoln who didn’t go to school, would his spirit have survived to become Abraham Lincoln?
Some say it’s only fair to force attendance because the kids don’t realize that without certificates you can’t find opportunity. But where that is true, it’s only so because law and prejudice make it so. Think of Merilee Jones at MIT.
Think of slum urchin, Lula da Silva, grown to the presidency of Brazil without a certificate. Think of John D. Rockefeller, who floated the future on a sea of oil, or the Wright brothers who taught us to fly. How did these folks figure things out? What effect should these facts — and thousands more just like them — have on our unexamined assumptions about seat-time in classrooms or about college degrees?
The Bully’s Pulpit
If you can get a dropout to talk, you’ll be told that school is a liar’s world, that it has nothing real to teach, that whatever can be memorized inside, can be memorized outside. Are they wrong?
Coke Stevenson, who many believe the best governor in twentieth century Texas history, grew up in the no-man’s land of south Texas, before WWI. By age eleven, he had a one-man overland freight business taking cattle and goods to and from the railhead ninety miles away, fording three rivers in all weathers through bandito country. If you need models to understand open-source, Coke is a good one. He taught himself so much through self-reliance in the badlands that one day he decided to become a lawyer, but not by going to law school. Instead, Coke lay on his belly on a grassy hill near the capitol in Austin reading cases on his own. When he felt ready, he took the bar exam, passed it, and argued himself into history.
Thomas Edison, holder of 1,003 patents, was a twelve-year-old “train boy” on a long-distance train running the length of Michigan, far away from his home. By using all his wits and small earnings to best advantage, he owned two small businesses operated by employees he hired by the time he was thirteen, a grocery store and a newsstand. Three streams of revenue. Three years later, he was publishing a newspaper carrying up-to-the-minute news of Civil War battles, using the train company’s telegraph. The London Times called it the first journal ever printed on a train in motion. As with farmer Shen and torch-singer Jones, these early lessons served Edison well. He eventually became patron saint of the electric light, electric power, and music-on-demand, the phonograph. As for college degrees, Edison pronounced them, “…a meaningless credential.”
With the coming of the Internet, a growing number of intelligent young men and women, like the Tulsa young man whose letter opened this discussion, find school a dead letter. By contrast, the Net offers uncontrolled access to uncontrolled information. For instance, 40 million pages of internal tobacco industry documents, forced to light by litigation, are there for anyone to examine. In such a climate, privileged information melts like ice in the sun. Education thrives, but formulaic schooling is a dead man walking.
Invisible Assumptions
The reason we force-school young people is wrapped up in invisible assumptions that important people hold about the ordinary. It would take a long book to tease out all the strands, but the main themes are easy enough to announce.
In every age, the powerful are convinced that ordinary people, particularly their children, are dangerous and have to be controlled or, to put it crudely, the bosses will be murdered in their beds. Because the ordinary are so numerous, it’s not enough to simply lock them up; there has to be some rational justification for it. Intellectuals, from priests to college professors, are then hired to invent such reasons, and since intellectuals have no way to eat other than by pleasing the powerful, rationales are duly produced. Here are just a few of the deadly narratives:
In 1535, John Calvin wrote (in Institutes of the Christian Religion) that the great mass of people were damned before birth by God and nothing could redeem them. Forget sin and redemption, the Catholic message. There was only sin. No redemption.
What, then, to do with sinners who greatly outnumbered the saved? The answer was to teach them to police themselves, said Calvin. Through intricate nets of rules and regulations, rewards and punishments, habit and attitude training, the Damned can be divided from themselves, and from others who might be their natural allies; converted into isolani. In that state they would work against their own interests, safely under control, without ever understanding what was going on. Calvin had, of course, invented our familiar schools.
In 1670, Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza, a secular Dutchman, hit on the same pessimistic conclusion as Calvin. The differences were cosmetic. For Spinoza, the Damned were a silly superstition, but the Dangerously Irrational were everywhere. And just like the Damned, the Irrational could not be cured. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico Politicus was read in the British colonies of North America, and taken seriously in some circles.
One hundred and fifty years later in northern Germany, Johann Fichte, a philosopher, picked up Spinoza’s warning and resonated it through the structure of Prussian schooling, and some decades later, Wilhelm Wundt, a scientific psychologist/physiologist, grounded Spinoza in the soil of materialism, declaring that human beings were only psycho-physical machinery, some small part of it efficient, most of it defective, requiring “adjustments” by the efficient machinery, to work at all. Bad human machinery could never, however, become efficient; only safe. Prussian pedagogy spread quickly through France and Britain and leaped over the Atlantic into America.
Then, in the second half of the 19th century, came the killer evidence that most of humanity was hopeless. It came in the form of Charles Darwin’s deadly classic, The Descent of Man, published in America in 1871. According to Darwin, the great mass of humanity was biologically degraded and no training could improve that condition, it could only be controlled. Entire segments of the human race, like the Irish and Spanish, were a disaster area. The romantic concept of “education” was a biological impossibility! Worse, if the degraded breeding stock mated with the advanced, evolution would march backwards into the swirling mists of the dawnless past. This message burned its way into the minds of the governing class. Something had to be done.
If ever there was a noble reason to crack down hard on the ordinary, Darwin had served it up with Descent of Man. At the beginning of the 20th century, the president of Indiana University personally taught an elite seminar course he called “Bionomics” in which strategies to take command of evolution and guide it were discussed. Restricted breeding for the biologically degraded was a main theme in Bionomics.
That college president was David Starr Jordan. Soon afterwards, he was headed to the West Coast where he became the brightest star in the university firmament as first president of brand-new Stanford University, “the Harvard of the west.” Jordan hired his star pupil in Bionomics from Indiana to be Stanford’s first Dean of Teacher Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley. Cubberley would soon become one of the small handful of men who built modern schooling.
By 1909, Cubberley was, de facto, the unofficial historian of American school history, and by 1971, the head of a shadowy national organization the press dubbed, “The Education Trust”. The Trust controlled important school superintendencies from coast to coast, and dominated state departments of education. Thus did the deadly assumptions of Calvin, Spinoza, Fichte, Wundt, and Darwin become the ghost in the machine of mass schooling.
These hidden gushers of negative judgment tipped the balance away from open-source learning, our national tradition, toward the day-prison model with its prescribed curriculum, its bulk process assignments, its lecturing as the principal mode of instruction, its standardized texts and inputs by which all are evaluated, and its instructor-chosen grades and administrator-chosen class rankings.
These negative assumptions explain radical procedures like confinement for the duration of youth, removal of all significant volition, denial of primary experience, public division of the confined into winners and losers sorted into publicly-identified groups—from heroes and heroines to pariahs–and a comprehensive dumbing-down policy spread from elementary schools through colleges, including elite colleges.
In 2006, the University of Connecticut surveyed 14,000 randomly chosen freshman and seniors from 50 American universities to measure growth of knowledge between freshman and senior years. The areas tested were American history, American government, international relations, and the market economy. In sixteen of the fifty, seniors knew less than freshmen, including Yale, Brown, and Georgetown, and in the other thirty-four, no statistically significant growth had occurred at all.
Copyright 2007 by John Taylor Gatto and 2022 by the Estate of John Taylor Gatto. All rights reserved.
