There’s a scene from that marvelous film, The Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams playing teacher John Keating has a brief conversation with Mr. Nolan, the headmaster of the school played by Norman Lloyd, about the purpose of his job.
“I thought my job was to teach them to think,” says Keating.
“Not on your life,” Mr. Nolan snaps back. “They can learn that in college.”
Or something like that. You get the point, anyway.
I just finished reading John Taylor Gatto’s thick, data-packed screed on American public schools, The Underground History of American Education. Gatto taught in New York City for 30 years and the year he achieved teacher-of-the-year status, both citywide and statewide, he resigned, fed up finally with fighting a losing battle against a system he declares page after page in this book to be fundamentally malign.
Not that the people who either set it up or run it are bad people—they did what they did and do what they do because they believe in it. And, Gatto stresses, like all true believers, their vision supersedes the reality in which they find themselves.
I found a lot in this book with which to disagree. Gatto’s history is right on the borderlands of conspiracy theory. He mentions the masons a few times and once at least accompanied the reference with a suggestive “I wonder what that is all about” line. But he insists this was never done with ill-intent in mind.
Ill intent or not, the result was a system that does not educate, by and large, except by accident. It is a system that chews up idealistic teachers and students on a daily basis because neither realize what exactly it is they are there to do. The system knows, has it built into its basic make-up, and after a century and a half of accrued inertia, the system cannot change. Not easily and not effectively. Those who charge the windmill get tossed thoughtlessly and sometimes crushed. He details instances where perfectly fine teachers have been summarily fired or forced to resign because they elected to do what they thought they were supposed to do instead of what was required of them and the further infuriating instances of teachers and administrators who resignedly continue doing things they know won’t work because they want their pension and sinecure.
So what is it that he suggests schools do?
To my surprise, it turns out to be what I’ve been suggesting for decades.
I’ve written about this before, but in this context it’s worth repeating. I hated school. Loathed it. Practically from the first year on. And it was a weird hatred because I would return every fall determined to like it, to get something out of it. This is something my parents likely would not believe, since from their point of view I wasted my time in school. But I showed up every year hoping something good would happen. It did, occasionally. One or two of my teachers were actually pretty good. But in toto the 12 years was a dreary, mind-numbing, frustrating experience…and I didn’t know why!
Learning was never a problem for me. I picked things up quickly. Once learned, however, I wanted to move on. The class, however, stayed stuck making me prove over and over again that I knew what I already did—and then occasionally making me feel like I really didn’t know it. Homework completely dismayed me. Some of it, true, I wasn’t very adept at—I didn’t do well in arithmetic (although I can do percentages in my head, as well as multiply and do some rudimentary fractions—a career in photography is impossible without some math skills, at least the way I practiced it)—but other things, once the teacher said I knew it, I was ready for the next thing. Which didn’t happen.
I was reading ahead of my grade practically from the beginning (I entered kindergarten knowing how to read, albeit my main reading was comic books) and that often was met with the kind of disapproval from my teachers that’s hard to pin down. I knew by their attitude and sometimes their actions that I was doing something wrong, but I for the life of me couldn’t understand what.
And then of course there was the social aspect. I was bullied from 1st grade to 8th. There was, I soon learned, nothing that would be done about it by the teachers.
Looking back on it now, I can characterize it handily—school was a prison. I had to be there, locked in a room with other prisoners who didn’t like being there, and the sociology of the playground was in its much milder way the sociology of the prison yard. Students had no power except over other students and it was exercised in cruel but, once the circumstances are clear, perfectly understandable ways. This also explained why there was such antagonism toward “good students”—they were seen as suck-ups, people who were trying to curry favor with the bosses and make an escape “for good behavior.”
Some schools were worse than others. There were public schools in my childhood everyone knew were bad places to go. No learning of any worth took place in them and the main requirement was to be tough.
My experience in school is consistent with Mr. Gatto’s diagnosis—public schools are not intended to educate but to socialize. They were established to take kids out of the home and turn them into “useful citizens.” Useful to whom and for what changes from time to time, but when you recognize the immense contributions of men like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to the establishment of modern public schooling, you start to get a hint. When I went to Roosevelt High School I was told that it was a traditional “blue collar” school—which meant it was there to turn out factory workers for local St. Louis industries. Some of the class selections made by the older counselors on behalf of students—who by then didn’t care all that much, school was school, what difference did it make what they had to take—reflected this idea.
Although at the time it made little real sense because the culture at large had changed during the Sixties and most of this was done by rote, because it had always been done, and wasn’t leading the students anywhere useful, even by the questionable standards of the early 20th Century.
One of the most telling statements in Gatto’s book concerns the era of court mandated overhauls and their many failures. “The problem [I’m paraphrasing] is not that all the money failed to fix the system, but that no one realized that the system wasn’t broken, not by its own metrics. it did what it did very well and all that money just gave it more to do the same with.”
In those places and schools where someone realized that the way things were being run was fundamentally flawed, real change happened. But these instances are rare.
You have to ask a basic question: in the instance of a situation like Garfield High School in East L.A. where a dedicate educator, Jaime Escalante, took dead-end kids and taught them to do calculus, why can’t this happen everywhere? Escalante proved that it wasn’t a lack of intelligence on the part of the students. If anything, they were brighter than their better-off counterparts, possibly because just surviving require a raw intelligence honed to a sharper edge. So what is it?
Kids know instinctively when they’re being handed a bad deal. After three years in many schools, the light is said to go out in many kids’ eyes. By then they realize that it was all a game—they aren’t there to learn, they are there to be turned into consumers. Maybe they can’t describe it that way, but they know they’re being handed a bill of goods. So the system becomes a nanny system, designed to get them to adulthood pliant and cooperative.
Gatto goes much farther. I am not so convinced as he is of the precision of the process. And the fact is, real learning does happen here and there, even within this cockamamie system.
What did I do? I paid little attention in class unless something was going on that interested me. I took charge of my own education, and believe me that was not the best idea. But no one stopped me. I ended up my senior year cutting two and three days a week. Most of those days I spent in the local library, a few blocks up the street from school, reading for five or six hours. It was a wholly unguided regimen, haphazard and chaotic—but I read a lot of good books. Gradually over time I was fortunate enough to find people who, all unknowingly, helped build a framework inside which all that reading turned into something coherent.
I agree the public school system as it stands in many places today probably ought to go away. It does not serve the people attending. But I have a profound antipathy for the current political cries for its demise—they have nothing to recommend to put in its place and because the system is not what we need doesn’t mean we don’t need one.
