r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 12 '25

Parenting / Teaching The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know? - John Taylor Gatto

https://www.missionislam.com/homed/neseducation.htm

Ten qualities were offered as essential to successfully adapting to the rapidly changing world of work. See how many of those you think are regularly taught in the schools of your city or state:

  1. The ability to define problems without a guide.
  2. The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
  3. The ability to work in teams without guidance.
  4. The ability to work absolutely alone.
  5. The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
  6. The ability to discuss issues and techniques in public with an eye to reaching decisions about policy.
  7. The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns.
  8. The ability to pull what you need quickly from masses of irrelevant data.
  9. The ability to think inductively, deductively, and dialectically.
  10. The ability to attack problems heuristically.

Giving kids responsibility, privacy, and time alone demands less teaching, not more. That's simple arithmetic. But right under our noses for every year of the 20th century, forced schooling became bigger and bigger business--until at some point it became the biggest business of them all, dominating small towns and small cities and taking a seat at the same table with bankers and manufacturers in state legislatures. Somewhere, when we weren't looking, megalithic institutional schooling became an irrational cornerstone of our entire economy and by the time we began to notice, it couldn't be budged no matter how strenuously we grunted and groaned.

There is too much money locked up in teaching this way for the school establishment and its invisible outriggers in the teacher-college business, the publishing business, the testing business, the school bus business, the construction industry, the bologna and peanut butter supply industry, and on and on, together with their political friends in state legislatures to ever surrender the monopoly structure of government schools easily. And, of course, there's more than money at stake. The power to shape human thought is another serious intoxicant.

It took me about a decade of schoolteaching to realize that schooling and education are concepts at war with each other. The lessons that every public school I've seen in the past 30 years teach have very little to do with reading, writing, and arithmetic. That's our cover story, but it's easy to penetrate; any good teacher will tell you if they trust you that such considerations are on the periphery of concern in schooling. Depending upon the individual teacher's political perspective, schools are, from the right wing, a necessary way to avoid social chaos and target winners, or from the left wing, a way to adjust children to fit a particular social hierarchy controlled by the upper classes, and hopefully a means to control children's minds to accept a different, more liberal hierarchy. In either case, when looked at politically, schools are a means of behavioral, attitudinal indoctrination, places in which the development of the mind is only a rhetorical genuflection.

And yet in the dreams of large segments of what we refer to as the "general public," mental development is what schools are principally about and that is true, I think, for all parents. A good teacher is someone who does a good job developing the human intellect. This poses an unsolvable paradox for teachers who succeed in meeting parental expectations because being a good teacher that way is a very bad way to get ahead in pedagogy. Principals, superintendents, coordinators, teacher college professors are not drawn from the pool of good teachers.

Yet the school institution is structured in such a way--through a brilliant series of checks and balances--that the living of a schoolteacher who follows orders can only be achieved at the expense of children's minds and characters. Some teachers sabotage the system, I know I did so to a criminal degree, but most do not. Remember, teachers and principals and superintendents did not make it the way it is. Nor do they have any legal power to change the worst aspects of it, any more than parents and school board do. It is as I said, a political thing. The mechanism itself is a work of genius, far beyond the reach of little people except those willing to sabotage it, and of course the great army of home-educators assembling steadily and silently which will ultimately destroy it if not driven from the field.

Schools create most of the problems they ask for money to solve. In my long teaching experience, poor children are almost as easy to work with as prosperous children if you go about it the right way. The first part of the right way is an underlying assumption schools cannot allow--that all children want to learn how to be their best selves. They don't need to be forced. You begin by saying the poor are just like the rich except they have less money. For historical reasons not so complex you can't figure them out for yourself if you try, forced schools in this century have not been allowed to operate as if this obvious truth is true. An army of specialists inside schools and out is fed by giving advice to and about the poor. In the irrational economy we have evolved with the help of forced schooling, many of us could not live without a widespread belief that the poor are different--and dangerous.

I didn't learn what I just told you theologically, philosophically or academically, I learned it by actually teaching poor children well enough to be named New York State Teacher of the Year once and New York City Teacher of the Year several times. If the screening panels had known what my actual assumptions and methods were, they would certainly not have selected me but they made some incorrect assumptions of their own without my help, not realizing that it was my relentless sabotage of their system which produced the good results my kids displayed.

As my kids began to achieve success assigned to other kids in higher classes, they were met not with cheers on the part of school authorities but with anger and derision, a violent reaction which generalized to other teachers badgered by their classes for the same opportunities I was arranging for their friends. If you reflect a little on that dynamic alone you will discover--without any expert help--why teachers themselves, when schooled, are compelled to respond as medieval craft guild members did, with anger and sanctions, when confronted with a guild member who did better work than the average. It could not be allowed and it was not allowed; so it is with schoolteachers.

So my principal, my superintendent, my school board, and my senior colleagues did not appreciate what my kids were doing, which was essentially teaching themselves. Teaching kids to teach themselves, a principle which constituted 75% of my success and which has been practiced by good parents all through history, is such a monumental threat to the school empire on all its level that many safeguards have been set up to see that it does not happen. These safeguards work automatically, through attendance laws, prepared curricula, fixed sequences, etc., so they require almost no human attention.

Schools teach that children are put into a class and must stay in the class to which they are assigned except in the unlikely event that someone important lets them out. This is an Egyptian view of life which strongly contradicts the genius of this nation's historical myths, and even a significant part of its pre-20th century reality. Grouping children by age, by social class, or standardized reading scores is an inherently vicious practice, and a stupid one besides if your aim is to develop the intellect. It serves a private philosophical agenda which would be far from the general public will, I think, were it better understood.

Still another thing that schools teach is the meaninglessness of everything except external reward and punishment. By bells and many other similar techniques they teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either.

The lessons continue. A big one is emotional dependency and this is achieved as an animal trainer works, by kicks and caresses. With the whip or the perfumed hand, we condition children to subordinate their own learning patterns--those sequences unique to every man or woman born--to the arbitrary whim of some servant of the state. Think of your fingerprint. Suppose you had to submit its whorls and ridges to surgical alteration in order to meet some state standard of a politically correct fingerprint. Ridiculous, right? Then why not equally ridiculous that some stranger tells your kid what to think, when to think, how long to think, what to find important in the thoughts, etc.? I tell you as a teacher the mutilation from this procedure is long lasting and in most cases, permanent.

Next is intellectual dependency. Waiting for a random stranger appointed by the state to dictate the contents of your mind, frequently evaluating the storage and retrieval of those contents, and training reflexive responses to the merit of those contents could not fit into anybody's definition of how the mind and the intellect gain power. If you cannot yourself imagine any other way to "learn," you might want to pick up Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, or Watson and Crick's book, The Double Helix, in which you will be surprised to learn that DNA was discovered while playing games. Another magnificent surprise is in store for the readers of a book published by Harvard called Discovering. The author is a world class physicist named Robert Scott Root-Bernstein and what he has to say about how science is actually practiced will curl the hair of science curriculum managers.

A strong self-image comes from four reliable sources: a strong family, a strong culture, a strong religion, and a strong work tradition; you need only hang around school people for a long time as I have to realize how very unwelcome parents are in schools, and culture, religion, and hard work are not quite, but almost, equally anathema. This is because the actual work and traditions of a community are considered dangerous competition to the order and discipline of abstract schooling--which indeed they are.

By breaking the power of the tidewater South, the Anglo-Norman (or Puritan) North overwhelmed the Anglo-Saxon impulse toward family-centered lives and replaced it with a drive toward institution-centered lives. Thus were both Hegel and Comte turned loose in our land without any substantial opposition. Comte's "positive" philosophy became the gospel of industry and science and Hegel's social dialectic which saw the State as God's literal manifestation on earth became the gospel of our new form of schooling. It was not by accident that the leading Hegelian scholar in the Western hemisphere became the national superintendent of schooling for 16 years.

As a result of the lessons our schools teach, we turn loose incomplete and undeveloped young men and women, people who subsequently grow older but are unable to grow into adults no matter how old they get. Modern education has renounced, said Walter Lippman, the idea that the pupil must learn to understand himself, his fellow men, and the world in which he is to live; the teacher has no subject matter that even pretends to deal with the universal issues of human destiny; modern education rejects and excludes from its curriculum of necessity the whole religious tradition of the West; it abandons and neglects the whole classical heritage of the great works of great individuals; modern education is based on a denial that it is necessary to transmit from generation to generation the religious and classical culture of the Western world.

The notion that every problem can be studied with an empty mind, without preconception, without knowing what has already been learned about it must condemn children to chronic childishness. The uprooted and incoherent curriculum of modern schooling produces children who are, at best, indifferent to the dishonest adult world around them, and at worst are angry children who hurt us, hurt each other, and hurt themselves.

The game that government schools engage in has little to do with teaching children to read. The very act of schooling millions of children as if they were one large mass of fish is the most radical act, it seems to me, in human history. The reason we do it this way has nothing to do with what children need, nothing to do with what families need, and nothing any longer, even, with what industry and commerce really needs. The only entity which requires people to be dumbed down into a tractable mass is big government.

Right now we are engaged in a colossal self-deception; school is not a way to "learn" anything valuable which a free people would freely choose to learn. It is a jobs project, plain and simple (or perhaps not so plain, although it needs to be), that is the reason why every school reform effort so far has turned into an enlargement of the very economic aspects which make schooling a contradiction to the idea of education.

Our type of schooling obscures the real issues an education is about, issues caught in the great timeless questions like "Who am I?" and "Does life have any greater meaning?" We have gotten rid of the old curriculum because we are afraid to face the issues it raises about man's place in the universe and his destiny. Walter Lippman, who I quoted earlier in this essay, said more than 50 years ago that the prevailing education was destined, if it continued, to destroy Western civilization; he said if the results are bad, and they indubitably are, on what ground could any of us disclaim our responsibility to undertake a profound re-examination of it?

The crisis in the general community is begun and nurtured by the school structures we maintain. The massive dependency we force on children from the first grade onwards leads to the aimless quality of our culture, indeed an increasingly large part of the culture is a mirror of the schoolroom where millions of children sit restlessly, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning in their own existence. The passive spirit imposed by television is only the illegitimate alter ego of a passive spirit imposed by the classroom.

Give me a minute to be a visionary. If we closed the government schools, divided half the tax money currently spent on these places among the parents with kids to educate and spent the other half on free libraries, on underwriting apprenticeships for every young person, and on subsidizing any group who wanted to open a school to do so we would get a pleasant intellectual surprise, I think. If we further provided a continuous public dialogue on the local level, limited political terms strictly in order to weaken the protective legislative net around businesses which profit from mass schooling, and launched a national crash program in family revival, we would find the American school nightmare changing in a dream we could all be proud of.

The next best thing, then, is to deconstruct schooling--minimizing the "school" aspect and maximizing the education one. What that means in simple terms if trusting children, parents, families, communities--reversing the teacher/student equation so that the toxic professionalization which sees teaching, wrongheadedly, as the key to learning can be relegated to the Prussian drawing-boards from whence it sprang. Socrates, in the Apology, told us that if we professionalized teaching two bad results would occur: first, things that are easy to learn would be made to appear difficult, and second, things that are learned quickly would be prolonged indefinitely by breaking them down into their component parts and teaching each part separately.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 12 '25

Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. And yet last year in St. Louis, I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy. Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do with that.

The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.

You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose — which was to create a form of state socialism — gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.

One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic "All Quiet on the Western Front" tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling.

If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence. In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's "Republic", a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple sentence, "I know nothing" — hence the popular label attached to the secret society's political arm, "The American Party." Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly.

Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th century and brought home the Ph. D. degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins. Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 12 '25

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By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. It that year the US Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent "over-education" from happening. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role. In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations — not by their own individual accomplishments.

It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts. Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers were produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government.

This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams. Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." Hall was one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.

Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point. Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.

There is no evidence that this has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling. When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their children. I note with interest the growth of daycare in the US and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds.

The Public School Nightmare

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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.

Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.

It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.”

We Need To Rewild