Eccentric Flower:200906/Not Inaccurate
From Eccentric Flower
Not Inaccurate
Posting a comment about "Harrison Bergeron" and reading a couple of the Wikipedia pages in that general neighborhood reminded me of John Taylor Gatto.
Gatto is a retired teacher. Or, more precisely, he quit. He quit because he was disgusted.
That's from the essay he wrote upon leaving, which is reprinted in full with introductory material on this page. Gatto was the New York State Teacher of the Year at the time. Before that he had been named New York City Teacher of the Year three years running.
Socrates was right. Gatto is right too. When you hear me rail against teacher's unions this is why. But my venom is by no means exclusively reserved for them. There's plenty left for the timid politicians who are scared to disrupt the status quo, the bureacrats whose basic M.O. is obstructionism, the parents who get outraged and threaten lawyers at the slightest hint that anything is being taught outside their narrow ideas or prejudices, the textbook manufacturers and other hangers-on who see a financial reward in preserving mediocrity, and so on and so forth. There is no one involved in American primary and secondary education who deserves to be free of mud. Yet all the mud falls on the only innocents in the game: The students.
Gatto says he began to speculate:
He concludes that:
That was from his acceptance speech for New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. I bet that went over big.
I don't worry about dumbing down of people in the genetic sense. I don't worry that we are all becoming stupider by some diminishing of innate capability. I do worry that we have a system which is less and less interested in training, expanding, and exploiting our innate capabilities - that we have both an educational system and a workplace (indeed, the two are bound together) which has a vested interest in mediocrity, all the while it handwrings about its own poor performance and inefficiencies. Crocodile tears.
I won't go into the college debate here - its uses and purposes - because I get my head handed to me every time I go there by my friends who either (charitably) had a positive college experience and are therefore more optimistic about the whole thing than I am or who (uncharitably) have a few vested interests of their own. I will merely note that the sad state of pre-college education muddies this water - that you can't have a serious talk about the purpose of college if the first half of your college education is spent playing catch-up, at great expense, for the things the majority of students should have learned before they got there.
I think there is now a perception in society that college is when "real" education starts, and that's not only expensive and wasteful in several ways, but also creates a serious class barrier - after all, many people don't go to college at all; secondary education is all they get.
If you can't pay for a college education (and I readily concede that my sympathies are with the people who can't), then you are effectively left with twelve years where you probably could have learned more, however puny, by being turned loose every day to scrape together what learning you could on your own.
I could have been Gatto. I can write as effectively as he can. The difference is, I reached Gatto's conclusions at the beginning; I didn't spend several decades in the trenches, because I had the advantage of being born much later than he was, and by the time I tried to get into that meat grinder, the writing on the wall had become larger and bolder and much harder to miss. The stench of what was laughably called education in Louisiana was so formidable in 1990 that it would have been foolish to stay. And yet, because Gatto did his time in the trenches, he has credibility here that I do not. So: Listen to Gatto, even if you don't listen to me.
We are, as my friend Bob once famously said, busily knitting the handbag we are going to go to Hell in.
I can't do anything from here except shout and moan, and that only in a limited way. Gatto, who has a soapbox, has more ability to effect change - and he's trying to - but even then there are limits on what one person can do. The fact is, a lot of people need to get disgusted, a lot of people need to start shouting. Sometimes I am accused, when I write these entries about what's wrong with the world, of just wanting to bring people down without purpose. This is almost always not true. My purpose is to get as many other people as disgusted as I am as I can, because only once the disgusted people reach a critical mass will any change ever start to happen. Being disgusted is the necessary first step.
In an elegant essay which attempts to try to address these problems in a somewhat more polite way, education professor Wade Carpenter describes Gatto's work as "one-sided and hyperbolic, [but] not inaccurate." Indeed, Carpenter says many of the same things as Gatto, and clearly agrees on key points, but is obviously of the "catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" school. I am, I'm afraid, no longer in that school, not where education is concerned; I have seen what happens to attempts to smooth the waters, to compromise, to keep everyone happy, and I no longer have any faith in that approach whatsoever. I want to make people unhappy. I want to rub their nose in it, and say, "Look! This is what we have - this is what you're turning your head and pretending not to see. Look at it!" That's the only thing I can think of that might work, if enough people ask, "Hey, what's that smell?"
I think Gatto agrees with me on approach.
Ever since Bloomberg got control of the schools and emasculated the Bored of Education, NYC public schools have gotten a lot better. I plan to send Nathan to public school, something my parents never would have dreamed of doing with me in the 1970s.
Of course, the law giving the mayor control is about to expire, and the state senate is jerking off in a moronic power play that has paralyzed all legislative business, so the Bored of Ed. may yet rise again, zombie-like, and destroy all the improvements. And St. Ann's is running $17.5 for kindergarten.
-- 18:24, 30 June 2009 (BST)
My grandpa and Mr. Gatto's grandpa had similar things to say on the subject of boredom.
-- 18:29, 30 June 2009 (BST)
My grandmother was the same way.
For those of you who haven't read the block in question:
I have complained of many things over the years, but not boredom. The only times you'll ever see me gripe about boredom is when I am a captive audience - like, sitting in the theatre waiting for the movie to start. Any other time, boredom is something I have neither the patience nor time to indulge, and some of that is because I can see my grandmother giving me the look, the one that said she knew perfectly well I was full of malarkey because she had been a child like me once and knew exactly what was what.
I caught myself giving that look to my niece a couple of months back: Been there, kid, done that, not buying it.
-- 19:19, 30 June 2009 (BST)
"A man named Albert Shanker got ahold of an atomic bomb . . . ."
-- 01:31, 1 July 2009 (BST)
Sitting in the theatre waiting for the movie to start is not my canonical example of boredom because you don't have to concentrate on the screen in order to not miss the movie starting. They will make it as easy as possible for you to notice that the movie has started. Your attention can wander in the extreme, and as long as you're still conscious and sometimes if you're not, you'll still know that a movie has started. So you can plot a short story or chat or play word games with the person you brought with you or read your book if you're alone or with another bibliomane or think up ideas for meals for next week or etc.
Mine are things like being a solo driver going through Iowa in a snowstorm: you cannot let your mind wander to more interesting things, but the task at hand is not particularly interesting, either.
-- 17:19, 2 July 2009 (BST)
Since you griped about this post not being contentious enough.
These articles reinforce the exact same thing I have said to you every time you trot out your anti-college screed. Once you decide that the goals of an education are primarily vocational in nature, you suck all the soul right out of it. All you need to do to be an effective worker is to be a brainless drone who possesses an area of technical expertise but lacks the curiosity, the critical capacity, and the will to question orthodoxy and authority.
The people who originally articulated the need for a public education, both in classical antiquity and early in American history, were absolutely clear that the role of a public liberal arts education was the creation of citizens with the proper breadth of knowledge and the critical thinking skills to constitute a functioning democracy; in describing a liberal education, this sort of citizenship education was always clearly described as being in opposition to vocational education. The idea that the goal of public education is to train the next generation of worker bees is, as I have repeatedly said, both a corruption of the original purpose of the public education system and a pernicious, malignant lie that you reinforce every time you complain about your education failing to give you work skills. This historically inaccurate fiction is also the root cause of about 80% of the things you gripe about when you complain about the sorry state of American society and the lovely wicker handbasket it's in.
-- 19:40, 2 July 2009 (BST)
Just because you mentioned it in the subsequent entry: Massive agreement with Gatto here. I've read a bunch of him, he drops into a bit of clueless racism in some of his rants, but overall, yeah: education is about making kids march in line, and college is about making sure that people can follow stupid instructions (mandatory liberal arts classes are about beating the ability to think for one's-self out of the subject, because anyone who's sat through a modern sociology or philosophy crap with a straight face can't possibly have any critical thinking skills left).
So, yeah, the lack of comment from me was just silent agreement.
-- 06:20, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Peebles:
Aha! That's very important. The way you structure that remark (and thanks very much for making it), I can see where you might think I am contradicting myself, blaming a system for one thing and then praising it elsewhere for the exact same thing.
Here is the important distinction: 12th grade.
Specifically, I think the purpose of primary and secondary education is wholly different (or at least should be) from that of college education.
If you try, and succeed, in crushing the kids into being worker bees early on, they will never recover. Worker bees forever. Those of us who have escaped this are usually the ones who got so impatient with early school that the soul-crushing didn't take.
If, on the other hand, you instill kids in elementary/secondary with the drive to discover and create and explore knowledge on their own, then you have secured the beachhead. NOW you can concentrate on giving them worker-bee education in college, knowing that while you are teaching them the drone skills in college they will need, they also have the acumen and the spark to be doing creative and intellectual discovery on their own, around the edges, and outside the college curriculum completely, or at least tangential to it.
This is the way it should work, in a perfect world. Before college is about learning to think and explore and create and dream. College is about learning to work.
But you can't have one without the other. I can't argue against you on colleges right now because the proper foundation isn't being laid before then. As it stands right now, we have to make a last-ditch attempt to get students to look outside the narrow confines of their vocational studies - force them, almost - because they weren't properly given that before they ever got to college. But it's too little and too late by then, and by the time nine-tenths of students get to college today the fight is already lost.
-- 16:26, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Specifically, I think the purpose of primary and secondary education is wholly different (or at least should be) from that of college education.
I appreciate that this is what you think the role of college ought to be. The problem, as I am now saying for at least the fourth time, is that it isn't its goal at all. You have repeatedly eviscerated college educators for failing to perform a task they're not trying to perform. Your opinion of how the world should work notwithstanding, there's a history that lead to the creation of the American educational system that you are completely ignoring, there's a rationale for its creation, and you undermine it by buying into corrupt politicians' malignant fiction that college is just there to train more efficient worker bees that can make rich corporations richer. I don't understand how you don't find that concept as nauseating as I do.
I mean, Columbine, I know you think I just jump all over you for fun or because I've been brainwashed by the machine or whatever, but your logic becomes uniquely incoherent whenever you talk about this issue. I do admit that I find it deeply insulting to find how low your opinion of college educators is, but that's not why I (stupidly!) repeatedly attempt to shake you of this prejudice of yours. It's because you have bought into something that seems so completely contrary to a set of values that I think you and I share: that creativity, curiosity, rationality, and civic responsibility are important traits for a reasonable society and that it's vital that the nation invests in their cultivation. And yet you repeatedly undermine these values with an argument that falls apart upon inspection.
You acknowledge that you do not need college to learn job skills. You have capably demonstrated this by your own example. Moreover, it's evident that lots of people pick up job skills without college. And some people go to college, fail to ever learn to be creative or curious, and yet still learn how to do jobs that make good money. Clearly, you can get effective job skills without college. Why on earth, then, would people need to pay tens of thousand dollars a year to spend four years in the prime of their life learning how to do a job?
And the major problem with this idea, that the role of education is to get a job, is how wide-spread it has become. It's the rhetoric that politicians have bought into that leads to things like No Child Left Behind, that leads to cuts in high school music and arts programs, that makes people question why we need to read challenging literature, that reduces mathematics and science to boring soulless bores, that leaves no room for creativity or play as part of education, that is antithetical to what you want to achieve. The exact same arguments that you use to criticize the college education system are the ones people have used to turn primary education into this thing that you hate so much. Do you really not see why I get so worked up when you try to do the same thing to college education?
-- 05:40, 4 July 2009 (BST)
The exact same arguments that you use to criticize the college education system are the ones people have used to turn primary education into this thing that you hate so much.
Exactly!
...corrupt politicians' malignant fiction that college is just there to train more efficient worker bees that can make rich corporations richer.
Strike "fiction" from that and you've got my point of view.
I think college IS to train worker bees. I even think that in a few cases its train-worker-bees function is actually useful, like when it's time to learn parts of a profession you can't just pick up by happenstance or osmosis. Does that mean I approve of college's role as a trainer-of-worker-bees-and-nothing-else? I do not. But I call 'em like I see 'em.
My original beef about college, as you'll recall, was that kids who come there are often - I'll even say "mostly" - forced to learn the non-worker-bee stuff out of some misguided impulse to try to do the things you are defending here. I agree with you as to the need to defend them, I just don't agree with where and how.
College is voluntary. You choose to go to college and pay your money - a ridiculous, obscenely substantial amount of money - to do so. To my mind this means that when you go to college you should get the education that you choose (which is often the same as getting the education you deserve). That is, if you pay for college with the sole intention of becoming a better worker bee - and my observation of the student body suggests that most students DO, that they are just in college to chase a slightly higher grade of drone status and a slightly fancier piece of paper to hang on their wall - then that's what you pay for and that's what you should get, and godspeed to you, you poor thing.
If you come into college with the idea, "Wow, this is a huge fount of resources and information and I could learn all kinds of cool things here that I never knew before," and you want to pay money for that, I have two reactions:
1) Go you! You're my kind of person. You care more about knowing stuff and becoming a whole person than being a Good Do-Bee.
2) Pity that your college of choice is probably not going to give you what you're paying too much for. You poor thing.
It's one thing to disagree on what colleges should do. You and I are arguing from closer premises than you think. We agree on what is desirable flowering of the mind and what is nasty, insidious worker-beeism. The difference between us is not what you think. My point is that colleges, as they have presently evolved, do a lousy job of anything but worker-beeism, and given that neither you nor I can reform the entire system just by sitting here and jawing about it, we might as well accept it for what it is and only recommend it to people who are in a position to exploit it for what it does best.
I would no more send someone to college to love history or art or literature, or to learn how to think independently or creatively, than I would send someone to a typing school to learn how to repair a car.
The thing is, with elementary and secondary schools, I think they should be almost entirely about learning to think for oneself, explore, develop, because that is the prime developmental window, that's just about the only chance our brains have to learn those habits. I can't stand No Child Left Behind mentality, and the killing of music and arts in high school, for exactly the reasons you give - but that's a different fight.
By college it is too late. By college it has all rigidified, and by then you might as well give people what they pay for, however badly you do it, because you're not going to cram anything they didn't pay for into their brains with much success. The gate is already closed.
-- 16:45, 4 July 2009 (BST)
Summary Version
1. Elementary and high school should be about learning to think, learning to explore, learning to create, learning to discover, learning how to learn well.
2. All other topics, in elementary and high school, are secondary and ancillary. It's vitally important to get the ones above in, because after about age 16 or a little beyond, it's too damned late to teach those things - and there is evidence that the fossilization threshold is getting lower, thanks to cultural pressures. Minds close sooner now.
3. College is about whatever you damned well want it to be. You're paying (and you will pay and pay and pay). You're here voluntarily. You should get exactly what you paid for, nothing more, nothing less. A lá carte menu.
4. But you should know that colleges, as a rule, do not do some things very well, and if you didn't learn the essential things that should have been taught to you before high school, in many cases you are simply not going to get what you pay for - and in my opinion you are better off not going to college if you want to pursue those things.
-- 16:57, 4 July 2009 (BST)
I thought grade school, college grad school existed to facilitate my domination over people less intelligent than I, whether by enriching myself at their expense, or humiliating them for sport with my knowledge and analytical tools, or punishing them for intruding their stupidity in my life. It certainly seems to have worked out that way.
-- 18:18, 4 July 2009 (BST)
You know, Robert, it annoys me that you are probably being sincere about that statement. I won't bother pointing out the fifty thousand ways in which I think that is an atrocious, unconstructive sentiment, I will merely say that I don't see a qualitative difference between you punishing people for their stupidity and the kind of physical and mental abuse that characterized my entire life during the years of my primary and secondary education. A bully is a bully.
-- 00:24, 5 July 2009 (BST)
Mel:
"Wow, this is a huge fount of resources and information and I could learn all kinds of cool things here that I never knew before,"
Y'know, this is totally me. My parents, now, they thought they were sending me to college to get a career - ideally as a schoolteacher, and never mind that I never thought too much of that idea. But I never cared too much about a career (and still don't, which is pretty much the story of my life). I cared about the shiny.
And my parents did browbeat me into getting a teaching certificate, for all the good that did, and oh-my-god, let me tell you that education classes are the most frightening things I have ever seen. They basically tested you on your ability to regurgitate the reading in essay form. Awful.
I really recommend the pursuit of the shiny (whatever brand of "shiny" floats your boat). However, you also have to bear in mind that I am nearly 50 years old and therefore the finances of a college education were a whole different kettle of fish back when I was there. It's a lot easier to concentrate on the shiny and forget about the vocational-school aspect of things when you're not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to be educated.
Now I have to go study. Imagine that.
-- 07:26, 5 July 2009 (BST)
Mel:
I know that you said that everything is supposed to be editable, Col, but when I click on "edit" up there it does not give me my comment to edit. Just thought I'd mention it.
(What I wanted to edit was the sentence that currently reads "But I never cared too much about that (and still don't, which is pretty much the story of my life)." What I was trying to say is that I never cared too much about a career.)
Edited to add that this is now (hopefully) fixed. Mel 04:43, 5 July 2009 (EST)
-- 07:32, 5 July 2009 (BST)
Mel, I discovered by trial and error that your comment really is there. You just have to scroll through all the previous comments, and the field is only about four lines deep. Theoretically, you could edit anybody's comment, but then, why would one.
-- 08:02, 5 July 2009 (BST)
Most days I use my powers for good and not for evil. But I am also a big fan of making people feel the cost of their stupidity.
I can draw a pretty bright line between verbal and physical abuse. The latter is criminal. I have heard people who know say that verbal abuse is more harmful that physical abuse, to which I say, "So much the better." MWHAHAHAHAHAH.
But seriously, if you're not outsmarting idiots and making them feel the cost of the stupidity, how do you protect yourself from their intrusions? What incentive do you give them not to impose their imbecilities on you?
-- 15:39, 5 July 2009 (BST)
Columbina:
Since I am sure you are not going to read the Harper's reprint I linked above (It's the link behind the phrase "Listen to Gatto," and it's a fascinating if depressing article) I will say briefly that the premise of the article is, "What if our schools aren't a failure? What if they're doing exactly what they were designed to do?" And Gatto then produces a great deal of historical evidence to show that this is precisely the case. You'll have to go read all that for yourself; I'm quoting some of the closing remarks, as it were, just so you'll have something optimistic on this page:
-- 17:52, 30 June 2009 (BST)