-Caveat Lector-
John Taylor Gatto Speech to the Vermont Homeschooling Conference
(Note: John Gatto is the former New York State Teacher of the
Year who renounced the public school system in his landmark book
DUMBING US DOWN).
He is constantly in demand as a public speaker. As a bit of
background, the industrial titans of the 1890's began to think
that not only could the production line be engineered, but
people's lives could be engineered as well, in order to work like
homogeneous robots with the machines. People like Rockefeller and
Carnegie gave huge sums to prominent academics to see if this
could be realized through the educational system. They found that
to a considerable extent this could be done, and it is still
being done. This is the story that John Gatto has to tell.-DB)
What I intend to talk to you about this afternoon is what I
understand you are aware of -- the positive goals and values that
you seek as homeschoolers. But I want to talk about the specifics
of what you're fleeing, because what you're fleeing is alive and
well in the green state of Vermont. Perhaps Vermont is one of a
half-a-dozen states that the U.S. Dept. of Education uses as
testing grounds. I believe they picked Vermont because they
understand that you people are so reasonable that you're always
willing to negotiate, anyway I have some information to bring to
you on a different outlook on what the intention of schools is,
the title of this talk is: A SHORT ANGRY HISTORY OF AMERICAN
FORCED SCHOOLING Between 1967 and 1974 teacher training in the US
was covertly revamped through the coordinated efforts of a small
number of private foundations, certain universities, global
corporations and several other interests working through the U.S.
Dept. of Education and through key state education departments,
one of which is the state of Vermont. Three critical documents in
this transformation are Benjamin Bloom's multivolume TAXONOMY OF
EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES.
That was the first. The second was a many-state project begun in
1967 called DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE, and it was set
forth in an enormous manual of nearly 1000 pages and finally the
BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL PROJECT which came in a manual of
over 1000 pages. These were inserted into every state education
department. in the country and moneys were inserted there to pay
faculty salaries a certain range of bribes for the school
districts that would pioneer the use of these things.
Let me start with the DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE papers.
They were the collusion with the Federal Education Dept. and the
presumably independent state agencies. They redefined education
after the 19th century Germanic fashion as a means (quoting now
from the document) "as a means to achieve important economic and
social goals for the national character" -- and I would hasten to
add that none of those goals included the maximum development of
your son or daughter. State agencies would henceforth "act as
Federal enforcers insuring compliance of local schools with
Federal directives". The document proclaimed that ( I'm quoting
again), "each state education department must be an agent of
change", proclaimed further "change must be institutionalized". I
doubt if an account of this appeared in any newspaper in the
state of Vermont or for that matter any newspaper in the country
(U.S.). Education departments. were, I am quoting a third time,
"to lose their identity as well as their authority in order to
form a partnership with the Federal Government".
The BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL PROJECT outlines specific
teaching reforms to be forced on the country, unwillingly of
course, after 1967. It also sets out, in clear language, the
outlook and intent of its invisible creators. Nothing less than
quoting again "the impersonal manipulation through schooling of a
future America in which few will be able to maintain control over
their own opinions", an America in which ( quoting again) "each
individual receives at birth, a multipurpose identification
number which enables employers and other controllers to keep
track of their [underlings]", underlings is my interpretation,
everything else came out of the document, "and to expose them to
the directors subliminal influence of the state education
department and the federal department acted through those
whenever necessary".
Readers learned in 1967, of course you and I were not among those
readers, that chemical experimentation on minors would be normal
procedure in the post 1967 world. That is a pointed foreshadowing
of the massive Ritalin interventions which would accompany the
student body of the future. Teachers were expected to function as
government change agents and their trainers, ( this the first
time reading this document that I realized that the expression
"teacher trainer", like animal trainer, is an odd locution). The
teacher trainers were notified that behavioral science would
henceforth replace academic curriculum in schools.
The project identified the future as one ( again I'm quoting) "in
which a small league would control all important matters, one in
which participatory democracy would largely disappear". Children
would be made to see that their classmates, and indeed the
average man or woman were so inadequate, were so irresponsible
that they had to be controlled and regulated. The tremendous rise
in school violence and general chaos in the late 1960's, a period
when teachers and schools across the land were stripped of their
ability to discipline children, might be seen as a convenient
public justification for sharp constrictions of traditional
liberty.
Each outburst resonated through the press like a billboard for
emergency measures. According to the BEHAVIORAL TEACHER
EDUCATIONAL PROJECT, post modern schooling would focus, I quote
directly from the document, "on pleasure cultivation and
interpersonal relationships and other attitudes and skills
compatible with a non-work world". It makes sense of course
doesn't it? That irresponsible semi-illiterate people could not
be trusted with much responsibility so in the new change agentry
schooling, which is called for by this national teacher training
document, the teacher is a therapist, translating the
prescriptions of the social psychologists into practical action
research in the classroom.
The third critical gospel signaling a great transformation was at
hand, to those in the know, was Bloom's TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL
OBJECTIVES, which has since its publication, spawned a number of
descendant forms, like mastery learning, outcomes based
educations and school to work business-government-economic
projects. Dr. Bloom's compilation was a tool, I'm quoting from
Dr. Bloom, "a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act,
think or feel is the result of participating in some unit of
instruction". I would be dubious if any parent in the U.S. would
send their children to schools under these auspices if they were
thinking people. In this fashion, children would learn proper
attitudes and have their improper attitudes (brought from home)
remediated. In all stages of the school manipulations testing
would be essential to locate the child's mind on a official
continuum.
But why is all of this being done? One large piece of the answer
can be found in the current edition of FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE,
which will be in all your libraries. It is surely one of the most
influential periodical in the U.S., perhaps in the world. which
extols the American economy with its massive lead over Europe and
Asia, and an article written by the owner of U.S. News and World
report in the New York daily news by Mort Zukerman. Zukerman
attributes our superiority which he claims can not be lost in the
21st century, that it is impossible for us to lose our lead in
the 21st century, so huge is it, to certain characteristics to
the American worker and the American workplace.
If you read between the lines of this article its quite easy to
see that the advantage that Zukerman boasts of can only come from
our training of the young. What does the advantage consist of
then?, According to Zukerman in the first position, the American
is a push over, dominated by management with little to say about
what happens. By contrast says Zukerman, Europe suffers from a
strong crafts tradition which demands a worker voice in decision
making.
Asia is even worse off, their tradition, religion and government
interferes with what business could do. The Islamic world is so
far behind, so crippled by religion that Zukerman doesn't even
bother to mention it. His analysis makes further telling points
about the American worker and the American consumer. Like nowhere
else, he says "workers in America live a constant state of panic,
a panic against being left out, they know that companies owe them
nothing, there is no power to appeal to for management's
decisions. Fear is our secret supercharger, it gives management
the flexibility other nations will never have". Zukerman says
that even after 6 years of economic expansion, American workers
including management workers fret they might not survive.
He is boasting of course, this is not a critical article, this a
laudatory article. In 1996 almost half the employees of large
firms feared being laid off. This is double the number fearful of
being laid off in 1991 when things were not nearly as good as
they are now. This keeps wages under control.
And finally, our endless consumption completes the golden circle.
Consumption driven, says Zukerman, by an astonishing American
addiction to novelty which provides American businesses with the
only domestic market in the world. Elsewhere else in hard times,
business dries up -- here we continue to shop till we drop,
mortgaging our futures to keep the flow of goods and services
coming.
Remember this is not in any way a critical article. There can be
no doubt that the fantastic wealth of American big business is a
direct result of school training. Schools training a social lump
to be needy, frightened, envious, bored, talentless and
incomplete. The successful mass-production economy demands such
an audience. It isn't anybody's fault. Just as the Amish small
business, small farm economy requires intelligence, competence,
thoughtfulness and compassion, ours needs a well managed mass,
level, anxious, spiritless, families, godless and conforming;
people who believe that the difference between Coke and Pepsi is
matter worth arguing about.
The American economy depends on schooling us that status is
purchased and others run our lives. We learn there that sources
of joy and accomplishment are external, that the contentment
comes with the possessions, seldom from within. School cuts our
ability to concentrate to a few minutes duration, creating a life
long craving for a relief from boredom through outside
stimulation. In conjunction with television and computer games,
which employ the identical teaching methodology, these lessons
are permanently inscribed. We become fearful, stupid, voiceless
and addicted to novelty. The secret of American schooling is that
it doesn't teach the way children learn -- nor is it supposed to.
Schools conceived to serve the economy and the social order
rather than kids and families -- that is why it is compulsory. As
a consequence the schools can not help anybody grow up, because
its prime directive is to retard maturity. It does that by
teaching that everything is difficult, that other people run our
lives, that our neighbors are untrustworthy even dangerous.
School is the first impression children get of society. Because
first impressions are often the decisive ones, school imprints
kids with fear, suspicion of one another, and certain addictions
for life. It ambushes natural intuition, faith and love of
adventure, wiping these out in favor of a gospel of rational
procedure and rational management.
About a month ago, the New York times sent a reporter to three
day care centers in Houston, Texas, one for white kids, one for
black kids, and one for Hispanic kids. To every one's surprise,
it found that all three were identical, they were wonderful
places, they were very well appointed, they were clean, bright,
they were colorful. All looked fine. But according to the
reporter, each gave only token personal attention to individual
kids, because mathematically no more than that was possible.
Communication was by cheerful admonitions like "Don't do that
Wilma" or to- whom- it- may- concern statements like "Its line-up
time!". Workers saw their goals more as managing children than
interacting with them. Managing children is what professional
childcare is about in America. Schools are part of the
professional child care empire and education has nothing what so
ever to do with it.
Behind the melodrama of lurid school headlines, hammer attacks on
pregnant school teachers', paramilitary assaults on elementary
schools by students who's cheeks have never felt a razor, pass
the red herring -- the falling or rising of S.A.T. scores. What
seems clear to me after 30 years inside the business, is that
school is a place where children learn to dislike each other.
What causes that? The self hatred, ineptitude, and generalized
antagonism are certainly the justification for a managed society
that deviates from the founding documents of this nation, which
conferred sovereignty on ordinary people, not on experts.
The U.C.L.A. study done recently of a 1000 public schools found
that the teachers" averaged 7 minutes daily in personal exchanges
with students, divided among 30 kids, that is a total of 14
seconds each. The constant scrambling for attention and status in
the close confines of the classroom., where those are only
officially conferred by an adult who lacks both the time or the
information (to be fair), teaches us to dislike and distrust each
other. This continuous auction of favors, has something to do
with our anger, and our inability to be honest or responsible,
even as grown-ups. Yet ironically irresponsibility serves the
management ideal much better than decent behavior ever could. It
demands close management, it explains all those lawyers, all
those courts, all those policemen and [sic] all those schools.
Now either we are structurally undependable (necessitating
constant policing) or somehow we have been robbed of our ability
to become responsible. Consider the strange possibility that we
have been deliberately taught to be irresponsible and to dislike
each other for some good purpose. I am not being sarcastic of
even cynical. I spent 19 years as a student, and 30 more as a
school teacher and in all that time I was seldom asked to be
responsible, unless you mistake obedience and responsibility for
the same thing, which they certainly are not.
Whether student or teacher, I gave reflective obedience to
strangers for 49 years. If that isn't a recipe for
irresponsibility then nothing is.
In school your payoff comes from giving up your personal
responsibility, just doing what your told by strangers even if
that violates the core principals of your household. There isn't
any way to grow up in school, school won't let you. As I watched
it happen, it takes three years to break a kid, 3 years confined
to an environment of emotional neediness, songs, smiles, bright
colors, cooperative games, these work much better than angry
words and punishment. Constant supplication for attention,
creates a chemistry whose products are the characteristics of
modern school children, whining, treachery, dishonesty, malice,
cruelty and similar traits.
Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of
the classroom, I have never seen this dynamic examined in the
public press... not in 50 years of reading the public press.
Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of
the classroom, reliably delivers cowardly children, toadies,
school stoolies, little people sunk into chronic boredom, little
people with no apparent purpose, just like caged rats, pressing a
bar for sustenance, who develop eccentric mannerisms on an
a-periodic reinforcement schedule. (Those of you who took rat
psychology in college will know what I'm referring to)......just
like the experience of rat psychology, the bizarre behavior kids
display is a function of the reinforcement schedule in the
confinement of schooling to a large degree. I'm certain of that.
Children like this need extensive management. Suppose that
producing incomplete beings is the purpose of modern schooling.
Further suppose, there is a rational defense for doing it,
Suppose a century ago, far sighted men and women, although they
were largely men, saw that to realize the potential in machinery
and fossil fuel, that the bulk of the population would have to be
dumbed down and made dependent...not to hurt people...but because
only in this fashion could a population of producers, which
surely characterizes the American scene then, be turned into the
consumers required by a commercially intense economy.
That the labor force could be made sufficiently adaptable to
endure modern machinery which must rapidly evolve for ever and
ever. This specific engineering problem confronting this key
group of business people and philosophers at the beginning of the
20th century. How could a proud liberty-loving nation of
independent families and villages be turned from its historic
tradition of self-reliance and independence?
Grown ups were unlikely to be tractable. The history, the highly
personalized practice of local schooling, offered another
possibility. Social thinkers have speculated for millennia, that
a political state which successfully seizes control of the young
could perform economic miracles. That idea is at least 2300 years
old. And while the only instrument adequate for such a project,
forced schooling, had never been more than a freak in the western
world, had been successful in one place, the military-theocracy
of Prussia and the Germanies.
Horace Mann's pilgrimage to Prussia in the 1840's became a
harbinger of our future set in motion. The 20th century ends with
mass schooling threatening to capture early childhood too -- in a
round of forced kindergarten exercises. And even after a century
of victorious laws of schooling, inspired by Horace Mann's love
of Prussia, there is no agreement on what an educated American
should look like.
School is still a police activity at the end of the 20th century
-- as it was at the beginning. And education for Americans
remains a slippery concept. At the beginning of the 20th century,
the power to determine what education meant was vested in the
managers of the new forced school institution. It was exactly as
if in winter an Eskimo gave over meat to a polar bear for safe
keeping. Here you big bear watch this seal meat until I get back.
The first decades of the new school century the group of famous
academics symbolically lead by Edward Thorndike, he is the
Thorndike of the Thorndike/Barnard dictionary, and John Dewey of
Columbia's Teacher's College and their industrialist allies
decided to bend government schooling to business and the
political state just exactly as it been bent in Prussia. A higher
mission would exist too. Schools would serve as "instruments of
managed evolution establishing conditions for selective breeding
before the masses take things into there own hands", now I quoted
that from a published essay by Edward Thorndike at Columbia
Teacher's college in 1911.
Standardized testing would separate those fit to breed and those
fit to work and those unfit. Back before WW1, educational
psychology, which was the creation of Edward Thorndike, had
established that certain kinds of mental training in history, in
philosophy, in rhetoric, for instance, made students resistant to
manipulation because it developed independent intellect, it
reduced their plasticity. That knowledge coupled with the new
German directive to serve corporation and government, provided a
sufficient motive to dumb instruction down.
Between 1906 and 1920, a handful of world famous industrialists
and financiers, together with their private foundations, hand
picked University administrators and house politicians, and spent
more attention and more money toward forced schooling than the
national government did.
Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller alone spent more money
than the government did between 1900 and 1920. In this fashion,
the system of modern schooling was constructed outside the public
eye and out side the public's representatives.
Now I want you to listen to a direct quote, I have not altered a
word and this is certainly traceable through your local
librarians. From the very first report issued by John D.
Rockefeller's General Education Board........this is their first
mission statement: "In our dreams, people yield themselves with
perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education
conventions of intellectual and character education fade from
their minds and unhampered by tradition we work [] own good will
upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make
these people or any of their children into men of learning or
philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from
them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists,
painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, creatures (he's really
covering the whole gamut of employment isn't he?) statesmen,
politicians, of whom we ample supply (whoever the pronoun we is
meant to stand for there). The task is simple. We will organize
children and teach them in an perfect way the things their
father's and mother's are doing in an imperfect way".
Now you might say that is quoting out of context and I would
speculate what the context of such a statement could possibly be,
but in any case, if you want to get the whole thing, that's
OCCASIONAL LETTER NO.1. OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD, which I
told you was spending more money than the Federal Government on
education of the first two decades of this century.
The real purpose of modern schooling was announced by the
legendary sociologist Edward Roth in his manifesto of 1906 called
SOCIAL CONTROL. Your librarian will easily be able to get a copy
of this book. In it Roth wrote, I am quoting "plans are underway
to replace family, community and church with propaganda,
mass-media and education (of course he meant schooling)...people
are only little plastic lumps of dough".
Another insider, H. H. Cadard, chairman for the Psychology Dept.
at Princeton, called government schooling approvingly -- "the
perfect organization of the hive with the anthill". Cadard wrote
further, "standardized testing would cause the lower classes to
confront their biological inferiority, sort of like wearing a
dunce cap. In time that would discourage reproduction of the ants
on the anthill".
The first curriculum was dumbed down, then national testing was
inserted, next morality was weakened and finally between 1970 and
1974, teacher training in the U.S. was comprehensively and
covertly revamped. In 1971, the U.S. office of Education, now
committed to gaining access to your private lives and thoughts,
granted contracts for seven volumes of change agent studies to
the Rand Corporation.
Change agent training was launched with Federal funding under the
EDUCATION PROFESSIONS DEVELOPMENT ACT. Soon afterward, a book
appeared called THE CHANGE AGENT'S GUIDE TO INNOVATION IN
EDUCATION. Grants were awarded to colleges for the training of
change agents while further Rand documents like FACTORS AFFECTING
CHANGE AGENTS PROJECTS continued to pour forth for implementation
to teacher training courses, Machievelli had been modernized.
Using schools as the principal forge, the building blocks for a
self- perpetuating ruling dynasty organized on scientific
principles moved into place during the first 5 decades of the
20th century. Obstacles like religion, tradition, family, the
natural rights guaranteed by our founding documents were steadily
beaten back. Schools slowly became, after WW1, a huge
reconstruction project conducted with the enthusiasm of an
evangelical religion. The traditional God was banished entirely
before 1950 to be replaced by psychological missionaries in a
social-work priesthood. Public school was transmuted into a
social laboratory with out public knowledge or public consent.
Think of what happened as a second American Revolution, striking
down those perverse founding documents which granted sovereignty
to ordinary people. School was a lie from the beginning and
continues to be a lie.
You hear a great deal of nonsense these days about the need of a
high tech economy for a well educated people, but the truth
staring you in the face is that it requires no such thing.
As our economy is rationalized into automaticity, globalization,
it becomes more and more an interlocking set of subsystems
coordinated centrally by mathematical formulae which simply can
not accommodate different ways of thinking and knowing. Our
profitable system demands radically incomplete customers and
workers to make it go. Educated people are its enemies, so is any
nonpragmatic morality. To get better schools that actually served
us instead of suffocating us, we would need to successfully
challenge certain scholastic and corporate assumptions. We would
need to abandon, entirely, the idea that any such reality as
mass-man actually exists.
We would have to believe what fingerprints and intuition tell us
-- that no two people are alike, that nobody can be accurately
described by numbers, that trying to do this sets up a future
chain of griefs.
We would have to accept that there is no such thing as a science
of pedagogy, nor is one possible.....that each individual has a
private destiny. We would need to transfer faith to such
principles and behave as if it were true. We would have to come
to our senses and admit that knowledge is not a substitute for
wisdom. We would have to believe each American has the right to
live as he or she deems wise providing only they do no harm to
others.
And if the way individuals chose to live means disaster for
global corporations, as the Amish way of life embraced by too
many would surely means disaster, the fateful choice would still
have to be honored because it is protected by the only contract
that defines us -- our founding documents and natural law.
The brilliant dialectical balance struck by our founders was a
way to keep power weak and off-balance. The official power and
popular power both.
Popular will would check government tyranny. Government would
check popular tyranny over minority rights. This constant
confrontation, this unwinable war between two permanently flawed
collectivizing principles, coercive government and bullying
public opinion, produces liberty for those who want it. In the
stalemate liberty escapes.
Lately what has happened is this, in an effort to avoid the
damnable arguments of the people and to become more efficient,
management has wrecked the political balance. It has made use all
prisoners of management systems. School is its vital ally. What
we have built, mass forced schooling, can not be reformed, it
must be bashed. It was created by people, people can take it
apart. Thank you very much. (Applause) ...
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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