I've decided to try something different this time. I'm going to write my thoughts, and then use them as a "script" of sorts for my video. I want to see if it cuts down the length of the videos, and organizes my thoughts better. I still aim to go through the chapter in the order in which it was written, but I hope to structure my summary such that I capture the essence more quickly.

In this second part of the Chapter, Gatto challenges the widely held belief that "schooling" is necessary by taking us on a brief trip back in the 'Wayback Machine,' to the time of the Revolution.

"People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3Mil, of whom 20% were slaves, and fifty percent were indentured servants."

The Civil War was a turning point for the country in just about every way, and education was no exception. Gatto doesn't mention it, but I will speculate that the trade-off for a war to free the slaves was a society more comfortable with central control, perhaps the suspicion after Lincoln's assassination empowered government to seize power in the name of "national security," who knows. Looking around at the barbed wire and troops currently wrapped around the Capitol, it seems as plausible as any other explanation.

The important point is, before the Civil War, formal schooling wasn't very important, and yet people were literate, and knew enough math to survive, even to run a business. Gatto seems to imagine we'll be surprised, so he tells us something even more shocking:

"....the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on."

In anticipation of our incredulity, Gatto reminds us

"There is no life-and-death international competition threatening our national existence, difficult as that idea is even to think about, let alone believe, in the face of a continual media barrage of myth to the contrary."

It's true. No matter how many times we're reminded how much "better" the children in other "industrialized nations" do on "standardized tests" in math and reading, it is, and will likely remain, irrelevant. As he points out

"In every important material respect, our nation is self-sufficient including in energy."

Considering this was 25 years ago, that says something. We are -- or rather have the capacity to be -- even stronger now because we can produce energy to sell to other nations who are not self-sufficient. If only our population understood basic supply-side economics, not to mention probability and statistics, we might not have so many people demanding regulations that would make us dependent on other nations, and increase our vulnerability, but I digress...

So after Gatto, an "expert" by even the school's definition of "expert," reminds us we didn't always have compulsory schooling, run by government, and were even more literate and numerate than we are now, and after he reassures us there is no grand international test our children must pass, for which only schooling can prepare them, he hits us squarely between the eyes with irony so glaring, only the most obtuse would miss it: Compulsory Government Schooling was borne of racism and xenophobia. Yes, as hard as it may be to believe, the system we're told on an almost daily basis MUST be preserved for the good of the poor, the minority, the immigrant, was created for the polar opposite purpose by people explicitly afraid of these same people. The goal? Control.

He says
"....'modern schooling' as we now know it is a by-product of the two 'Red Scares' of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line "American" families were appalled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance toward the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called 'school' must have been the consternation with which these same 'Americans' regarded the movement of African Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War."

Then he refers us back to the seven lessons: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. He calls these "prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius."

Starting to see it come together? But, as Gatto points out, that's not the whole story of how we got where we are today. Over time, the need to regulate the poor gave way to the need that comes to dominate every government bureaucracy: the need to maintain and grow the bureaucracy itself.

As Gatto dives into this final truth about public schooling (all schooling really, because they are all based on the government model, as they all fall under government oversight, regulation, accreditation, and even private schools now receive funding to defray the cost of awarding financial aid and pursuing "equity," he pulls no punches. He attacks the "growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is..."

He remarks that it's no wonder "Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach," and he predicts (accurately, as it turns out) we will someday have a national crisis because children rich and poor "cannot concentrate on anything for very long" because they have "poor sense of time past and time to come. He says

"They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction."

It bears repeating: He said these things twenty-five years ago!

Now add social media and 24 hour cable with hundreds of channels, video games, smart phones.

Why, after so many years, are schools still doing this to children?

Gatto argues:

“No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools—like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ—would last very long before being torn to pieces. In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church, it requires its teachings to be taken on faith.”



Then he delivers the blow that must’ve shocked the audience assembled to hear him:



“It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional school teaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it.”



There it is, what I’ve been saying for years, most recently to this audience. There is no fixing it. The solution for children — for your child if you’re a parent watching this — is NOT to find the right person, bend the right ear, assemble the right coalition, or elect the right politicians. The system is too big, too politically powerful, and too much of a “business.” 



If we’ve learned nothing else in the past year, it’s the truth of Gatto's claim:



“You must understand that first and foremost the business I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting contracts….This is the iron law of institutional schooling — it is a business, subject neither to formal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition.”



Look around….Unions, whose members have not missed a paycheck, insist their members not return to work, and horrifyingly those members overwhelmingly agree. They accuse parents, who want them to earn the pay they’re still getting, of everything from selfishness to racism, and a whole lot of other insults in between. These people whose jobs depend on the continued employment of people who can’t work because kids aren’t in school, don’t care. They think they can do as they like.

My hope is they're wrong, and are overplaying their hand. I believe there's hope, and we may be entering a 'Golden Age' of education, where solutions are the result of the free market. Gatto suggests the same in the final paragraphs of this chapter when he says:



“Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education.”


Notice he’s not describing private or charter schools that follow the same model or structure as public, and there’s a reason for that. As he says:



“I believe the method of mass schooling is its only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education.”



So yes to school choice, if that means let the dollars follow the child. Yes if it means parents have the final say in where their child will be all day when he or she is away from them. Not good enough if it just means movement to a public charter school, subject to the same regulations and oversight, using the same methods as the public school, but in a different building, in a nicer part of town, with the (allegedly) more motivated children of the certainly most dedicated parents. They use the same methods to teach what they teach. You may get a little more safety, or better teachers by "schoolteacher" standards, but here's the reality of school as we know it, as John Taylor Gatto knew it so well even a quarter century ago:

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.”



Shifting buildings and teachers won’t fix that.