I admit it; I am a lover of books, literature, bookstores, libraries and the joys of reading. In the fast paced, contemporary world of web-based technology, fully loaded cell phones, Ipods and every other conceivable gadget, I find nothing more pleasurable than sitting in a comfortable chair with a mug of hot chocolate and reading a book. I have a lot of interests, so my reading tends to cover many diverse subject areas.
I came of age during a time when parents, particularly African American parents, told their young charges: “Education is important and an educated man that can read can not be enslaved.” I also was exposed to a heavy dose of African American literature in junior high school, namely the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas and the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which recalled how literacy and reading were the keys to their personal uplift. Then there are also the stories and historical narratives that tell of the newly emancipated black Americans (many of them old enough to be grandparents) eagerly and unashamedly, taking seats in one-room school houses beside children, half their age, to learn to read. Who can forget the poignant television commercials I that proclaimed: “Reading is fundamental” and “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
In-depth reading of books beyond the Harlequin variety appear to be a thing of the past for many Americans. One-hundred and forty plus years after the ending of slavery, the sons and daughters of slave and slave master alike—students at America’s universities are foregoing reading or any semblance of literacy—for DVDs and new media literacy. In a September 21, 2006 online article, MSNBC.com columnist Michael Rogers http://www.michaelrogers.com/home.html, postulates that in the near future of 2025: “most Americans don’t need to understand more than a hundred or so words at a time, and certainly will never read anything approaching the length of an old-fashioned book.” Rogers also contends that whereas in the 19th and 20th centuries the ability to read was a social good—albeit a social necessity—in 2025 only higher level managers or 10% of the work force will only have to possess this higher level of literacy. Rogers resolutely opinions that “reading itself is an inherently artificial human activity, an invention that in evolutionary terms has existed only for a blink of an eye” and that “school districts have wasted billions of dollars in recent decades to correct “reading disabilities” when in fact there is no such thing as ‘reading ability’ to start with.” While Rogers sees reading literacy as a desirable attribute and enjoyable past time, he also believes that for most students populating American schools today reading and writing are complex tasks with limited payoffs in modern society. This may or may not be true—depending on which sides of the technological/digital divide you are currently sitting on!
But suffice to say, there are serious issues that educators/parents have to address concerning the reading aptitude of current high school and college students. In a December 25, 2005 Washington Post Online article according to Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University at Fresno “only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That’s not saying much for the remainder.” According to a 2006 study http://www.air.org/news/documents/The%20Literacy%20of%20Americas%20College%20Students_final%20report.pdf funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts for the American Institutes for Research (AIR) there is no major quantitative literacy difference, between today’s college graduate and previous generations. Basic quantitative literacy is the literacy you need to figure out the price of a sandwich on a menu or calculate the cost of a dress after a sale discount. However, there are some major differences when it comes to prose literature and reading comprehension. The published report determined the following:
*More than 75 percent of students at 2-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.
*Students in 2- and 4-year colleges have the greatest difficulty with quantitative literacy: approximately 30 percent of students in 2-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in 4-year institutions have only Basic quantitative literacy. Basic skills are those necessary to compare ticket prices or calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad from a menu.
*Students about to graduate from college have higher prose and document literacy than previous graduates with similar levels of education; for quantitative literacy, differences between current and former college graduates are not significant. *There are no significant differences in the literacy of students graduating from public and private institutions. Additionally, in assessing literacy levels, there are no differences between part-time and full-time students. No overall relationship exists between literacy and the length of time it takes to earn a degree, or between literacy and an academic major.
*There are no significant differences between men and women in college in their average prose, document, and quantitative literacy – indicating that women may be bridging a divide that has long existed between the sexes. *The average prose and quantitative literacy of Whites in 4-year institutions is higher than for any other racial/ethnic group, mirroring trends in the general population. The fact that white students also have the highest prose and document literacy among students in 2-year colleges provides further evidence that the literacy gap between minority and non-minority students persists.
*The literacy skills of college students are directly related to the education of their parents: children whose parents graduated college or attended graduate school have higher literacy than students whose parents did not graduate high school or stopped after receiving a high school diploma or GED.
*Despite variations in income, most differences in the literacy of students across income groups are not significant. The most significant disparity exists between students in 4-year institutions with the lowest and highest income backgrounds. Students in the highest income group (either their personal income or the income of their parents) have higher prose and document literacy than students in the lowest income group. *Literacy level is significantly higher among students who say their coursework places a strong emphasis on applying theories or concepts to practical problems, in comparison to students who say their coursework rarely touch on these skills. The talk show host and comedian Jay Leno does not utilize sound research methodology when he test the general knowledge skills of random college students (future leaders of the U.S.) on his television show, by asking basic questions about U.S. government, history and geography. But it is a pretty good indicator of why the
U.S. has fallen behind many industrialized and non-industrialized nations in science, math and innovation. Well, I guess we can give ourselves a hooray for American literacy. Right? Wrong? Maybe? According to some, in the world of globalization and economic one-world internationalization, U.S. student brain power lags far behind the rest of the world’s students.
In an online, January 21, 2007, article Washington Post article entitled “Five Myths About U.S. Kids Outclassed by the Rest of the World” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/19/AR2007011901360.html journalist Paul Farhi disputes claims that U.S. students lag woefully behind a great portion of the world’s students. Suffice to say, America, the world super power has a lot of work to do. How many American television viewers cringed during and after John Stossel’s television special “Stupid in America” http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338? The sobering moment of Stossel’s rant came when one of the European students thought the American students were not very bright at all.
According to former New York City Teacher of the Year recipient John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com People in the colonial America “learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine without school. In his groundbreaking book “The Underground History of American Education” http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm, Tom Paine’s Common Sense http://www.ushistory.org/PAINE/commonsense/index.htm sold 600,000 copies to a population of 2,500,000, 20 percent of which was slave and another 50 percent indentured.
Being the curious person that I am, I asked random junior and senior level students frequenting C.G. O’Kelly Library@ Winston-Salem State University to read the online version of Common Sense. Each one had a difficult time comprehending the primary premise of Paine’s tome. Even more shocking was the fact that of 20 random computer users seated in C.G. O’Kelly Library, all 20 had never heard of Paine or Common Sense. Maybe it is time American citizens moved beyond blame and knee-jerk reactionary-ism and looked at the historical origins of American education. Do we truly understand the difference between education and schooling? I highly suggest that all parents, teachers and students read John Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm . If you can not read Gatto’s massive tome then ponder the following points from The Six-Lesson School Teacher:
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to school teaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.” I don’t know who decides that my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make the kids like it — being locked in together, I mean — or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can’t imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory. Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist. The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students’ homes to spread approval or to mark exactly — down to a single percentage point — how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation — the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet — is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness, too.
I assign “homework” so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood. The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control. It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for “basic skills” practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I’ve just taught you.
We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.
“School” is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. “School” is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I’ve told you about and a few more I’ve spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no “international competition” that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located — in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy — then we would be truly self-sufficient. How did these awful places, these “schools”, come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two “Red Scares” of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration — and the Catholic religion — after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling’s original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult — by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.
“Critical thinking” is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children’s development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.
At the pass we’ve come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter’s schooltime. All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love — and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
