Against school...???

[Makalakumu]

As part of my current reading projects, I've been digging into the roots of public education in order to see why it got the way that it did. On the way, I discovered this guy, who has quite a bit to say on the matter.

Against School...

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
...to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Thoughts?

 

[Makalakumu]

The complete text of his book "The Underground History of Education" can be found here.

 

[Makalakumu]

A lecture On the Paradox of Extended Childhood.

 

[Makalakumu]

Here is an interesting model for a school that I read in one of his books...

Sudbury Schools

 

[CuongNhuka]

Are you aware that Pre-Civil War North every one in the upper class and most of the middle class went to school until about high school. After that it depended. The South, well, liets just that literacy was less then 2% for a reason. So, being against public school (or school at all) is really nothing new.

 

[Makalakumu]

Are you aware that Pre-Civil War North every one in the upper class and most of the middle class went to school until about high school. After that it depended. The South, well, liets just that literacy was less then 2% for a reason. So, being against public school (or school at all) is really nothing new.

According to this source, this is what the literacy rates were in the North and South before mass compulsion schooling began.

Sheldon Richman quotes data showing that from 1650 to 1795, American male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent. Between 1800 and 1840 literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. In the South the rate grew from about 55 percent to 81 percent.

 

[Steel Tiger]

I'm not really sure what the educational structure is like in the US, but this guys seems to have some very strange ideas. I had a look at the full text of his book and found some things that are typical of this sort of analysis.

The biggest problem is that he is looking at a changing feature, the population of the United States, from a static position. Let me explain myself.

He first states that complex literacy was at 93-100% in 1840 and there was no compulsory schooling. OK, but there is a qualifier - where that sort of thing mattered. In effect he is saying that the literacy rate is high but not everywhere which means the literacy rate for the US is not that high. Furthermore the population in 1840 was only about 20 million.

When compulsory schooling was introduced in the early 20th century the Us population had grown to 110 million. That's more than five times that of 1840. Furthermore, this was no longer an agrarian population operating on a subsistence basis, it was an urbanised population. A farmer in 1840 might be able to get by with basic literacy and numeracy skills, but a city-dweller in 1920 probably could not.

The problem is again compounded by the rapid population growth of the 20th century. Now the US has a population of over 300 million and it is more diverse and complex than ever before.

I'm not really sure what Gatto is trying to say. Yes, he is obviously saying that compulsory schooling is designed to keep the sheep in the pen, but he also seems to be lamenting the time when a community only got schooling when it could afford to hire and pay a teacher. Does he want a system where some of the population have access to education and the rest should just get into the factories and down the mines? Does he have some utopian view of the US's education system before the 20th century?

Demographics is a dynamic system and I don't think that Gatto has taken that into account. Or maybe its all just elitist nonsense.

 

[Flying Crane]

I'd be willing to bet the literacy rate in the South during the early 1800s was actually a lot lower. I suspect the stats listed did not account for the slaves. Regardless of the literacy rate of the whites, i doubt a significant number of slaves were allowed to become literate during that time.

I'm no expert on education, nor the educational system. But it seems to me that the education one is meant to receive by high school graduation is meant to be a well-rounded yet basic education that gives you the skills to get by in life reasonably well. If you never progress beyond this, then yes, you may be kept in the fold with the rest of the sheep. If you want better than that, then you go to college and get an undergrad, then possibly graduate degree. At this level of education, you need to act upon your own initiative to get the tools needed to better your station in life.

I'm not saying it's a perfect system, obviously many people with potential are denied a college education due to things like economic shortcomings and whatnot. It's not fair, it's not equal opportunity, and it's not an even playing field.

I find the points made above to be interesting, and possibly with some merit, altho I'm not sure I buy the notion that it was systematically deliberate. It may be a simple default that mass education falls into. Not everyone has the capacity to rise to a high intellectual level. Mass education needs to be designed to hit the most people possible, so by its very nature it has to be brought down to something of a lowest common denominator. To rise above that, one needs personal initiative and motivation.

Regarding this issue:

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

I'd say that if this is true, it backfired big-time in the current US regime.

 

[Makalakumu]

I know, its very hard to pin down in some respects, but I think thesis of the argument is not just that schooling is designed to keep the sheep in the pen, but to intentionally dumb us down in order to accomplish this.

I think this section of his essay was salient to this thesis...

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

Modern School, according to Gatto, was intentionally designed as a socializing tool to bring America into an industrial age and to get used to the ministrations of a large corporate state. School does this by only giving us the knowledge that someone else thinks we need, stratifies us by use of standardized tests and grades, and enforces conformity through the use of bells and imbicilic rules.

When I look at the demands being made on the schools by NCLB legislation, this sort of argument really resonates. NCLB gives us...

1. Dumbed down standards and less electives.
2. More high stakes standardized tests.
3. More labels for students who do not do well.
4. Punishment for schools that do not follow the government's program.
5. Enforcement of official propaganda ie the standardized history tests.

Maybe Gatto is on to something...

 

[Makalakumu]

One of the things that Gatto advocates is Unschooling. He says that this is the ideal way to stimulate a child's intellect by instilling a real love of learning.

 

[CuongNhuka]

According to this source, this is what the literacy rates were in the North and South before mass compulsion schooling began.

Hu... I have some material that says otherwise, then again, it was probably acounting for slave populations.