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The Fourth Purpose
Posted by Lev/Christopher on June 17, 2009 at 6:51pm in Home Education
by John Taylor Gatto
Address presented on Thursday April 8th at HEC’99
- Home Education Conference -
Friends House, Euston Road, London.
The secret of modern institutional schooling is that it is indifferent to the way children learn best and hostile to their private hopes and dreams. It was constituted quite deliberately almost from the beginning as it is today, to serve the economy of mass production and to stabilize the social order which exists, whatever its lack of justice. This is why modern institutional schooling was made compulsory.
My great grandmother Isabelle Waddington, a trouble-maker from Yorkshire, was the family spirit I summoned to help me prepare this talk, so if you find yourself incensed at what I say, then blame it on Granny Waddington.
In preparing to speak before the inventors of the language I’ve been using for almost 65 years, I began to read British newspapers some months ago, mostly broadsheet ones like the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, the Observer and the Independent. In doing this I was struck by their literacy and thoughtful qualities, characteristics which would be uncommon in American journals, but I was also taken by their sly love of the drôle, the bizarre, and the grotesque, an appetite usually associated with the tabloid press in both our countries, yet running beneath the surface even in your responsible papers. Both this thoughtful quality and this sharp eye for anomaly emboldened me to speak honestly to you this morning.
To illustrate let me take an account from the Times entitled “Boy Who Lived Like A Chicken.” It was about a form of homeschooling, for the boy lived from birth locked in a hen-house by his stepfather and learned “to crow like a rooster, cluck like a hen and pick up food with his mouth as if it were a beak.” According to social work authorities, he “scrambled round his coop, flapping his wings as if trying to fly.”
From the Observer I learned that Newton’s second law of thermodynamics proved long ago the folly of human aspiration. We are stuck, said the writer, in a gently decaying cosmos in which all systems are gradually moving towards the condition of heat, which is energy in its most disorganized form. The universe has no purpose, it will not conclude significantly, but only peter out, and the destiny of everyone is to become "inanimate slurry." That attitude is more important than it sounds, so try to keep it in mind as the text proceeds.
From the Independent I learned that a burglar in Hong Kong, Chau Chao-Ping, has been jailed for a year for a break-in in which he boiled and ate the victim's pet turtle. Finding three turtles in the flat he was robbing, Chau Chao-Ping "picked the biggest one to eat, leaving the shell with his fingerprints on it in a wash basin when he left." - I think this illustrates how easily human beings can be swerved from their true purpose.
From the Telegraph I learned that the buildings of the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright are deteriorating rapidly because they were badly built. I learned that his famous flat roofs leak, a fact any illiterate peasant would have told him had he asked, and that his structure "Fallingwater", voted in 1991 the "best all-time work of American architecture" by the American Institute of Architects was in danger of falling into the water because Wright perversely refused to reinforce the concrete properly.
In concert with the Y2K thing - another expert slip - slated to withdraw a trillion dollars from the world economy (enough to end all poverty on earth) this surely gave readers pause to consider the modern tropism to specialist decision-making in general which has largely replaced the notion of citizen management.
The most interesting news item I encountered was a story by Christine Purkis, who was once a teaching colleague of Chris Woodhead, the British educational authority. If I read correctly, Miss Purkis contends that back in 1975 Woodhead had an affair with one of his sixth formers, an affair which was the talk of the faculty and students alike. Purkis says she was summoned into Woodhead's presence and warned to say nothing. And she didn't, at least not until 23 years later when Woodhead's former wife made the same charge. Woodhead has acknowledged the affair, but denied it happened on school time, the press has shown little interest in the matter, school authorities none. Miss Purkis, plainly beside herself that justice is not being served, plaintively asked in her newspaper piece:
… does it matter that someone with the most influential and powerful position on education today had an affair 23 years ago (with one of his students), subsequently lied about it and used his power and position to bully and intimidate people into resentful silence?
It's a measure, I think, how little we are aware of the imperatives of modern schooling, that she can ask such a question. No, it does not matter to the logic of schooling. What that logic is is the beast we shall track today. Somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century, schooling in the four great coal powers of the planet - Germany, England, France, and the United States - abandoned its three great historical purposes: to find a path of transcendence, to make good citizens, and to develop personal genius, and lent its energies to schooling for a Fourth Purpose. Actually Germany had taken this path in her northern states nearly a century before and it was the perceived need, commercially, industrially, and financially, to compete with Germany which provided the excuse for the other three political states. No public announcement was made, but abundant surviving documentation allows us to conclude it was a deliberate project… call it Fourth Purpose Schooling to separate it from what has gone before.
Fourth Purpose Schooling arose from the Hindu caste system which the British had thoroughly studied after their corporate conquest of India. It was grounded in the teachings of Georg Hegel about controlling history, in the teachings of Malthus, Darwin, and his first cousin Galton about inferior people and inferior germ plasm, in the financial insight of Lord Rothschild and J.P.Morgan that central control of money power was the key to efficient political dominance and social discipline, in the experience of great American industrials like Carnegie and Rockefeller, in the progressive philosophy of the Frenchman, Comte, and in the dazzling accomplishments of the British adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, which illustrated dramatically what titanic effects the concentrated efforts of a tiny handful of determined men really could produce.
Whatever the final tally may be on the list of architects of modern schooling, one thing is certain: none of the great pedagogical names like Horace Mann, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Edgerton Ryerson, or John Dewey et al. Had much of importance to do with the shape of modern schooling, (although they are often used as unwitting front men for Fourth Purpose Schooling).
This will seem a less radical proposition to consider if you keep in mind that each of the traditional purposes of schooling, as well as the new version, is undergirded by particular attitudes toward the meaning and uses of life, out of attitudes toward people and about the nature of human nature and the reality of moral rules. It isn't hard to see that a belief we are all destined to be inanimate slurry would provide a solid justification for British school authorities to be indifferent to whether Mr. Woodhead was employing one of his students for private amusement or not. It is irrelevant.
The London Times for 6th December, 1998, provides us with some data to make coming to grips with the Fourth Purpose easier, and suggests why it is making us all sick. In an article entitled, "Richer Britain Gets Depressed," the latest results of something called "The World Happiness Survey" are given. This study purports to record the level of happiness in 54 nations once income is taken into account.
Britons get less enjoyment and happiness from their money than 31 out of the 54 nations surveyed do. Britons have twice as much to spend in real terms as in 1959 but better lives haven’t followed suit. The people of Bangladesh, we are told, get far more happiness from their small incomes than the British do with their relatively larger ones. Professor Worcester of the London School of Economics (who co-wrote the study) says, "People in Britain are generally less happy than they were 10 years ago."
Most Britons still believe that money brings happiness. This message is steadily communicated by competitive, class-based schooling from kindergarten through college. All rich countries, the study concludes, suffer from advanced emotional poverty caused by the destruction of communities and by an obsession to buy and discard things, the purchases losing most of their satisfaction soon after being made because they weren't necessary or even really wanted in the first place.
The weight of the research discloses that the high valuation placed on wealth is actually contradicted by human behavior - happiness is universally dependent upon at least three conditions unconnected with wealth:
1: Close personal relationships
2: Good mental and physical health
3: Satisfying work.
None of the rich English-speaking nations are happy, although poor nations as diverse as India, Ghana, Venezuela, and Mexico are. And if Britain is poorly placed in this ranking as 32nd, think of the greater gloom in clean and rich Canada which ranks 43rd of 54 countries, or in super-rich and super-powerful America which comes in 46th, near the bottom.
We needn't place inordinate value on as obviously political instrument like a World Happiness Survey to arrive at the same conclusion it did. Many common-sense indicators show that something is going wrong in wealthy nations, those which bend schooling to the impersonal project of national wealth-building. Think only of the stupendous rise in prison inmates which has quintupled the incarcerated population on the U.S. in the past 50 years, and doubled the British number in the last five. Think of the staggering fraction of human time spent in a vegetative state, not in living but in virtual life before television or computer screens, think on the substantial portion of personal income expended on alcohol, narcotic drugs, hypocondriacal medical care, sports spectaculars in which a few score individuals actively exercise and thousands or even millions sit passively watching. These and many other indicators tell us that the World Happiness Survey is tracking something real.
Our personal importance, the source of true happiness and human satisfaction, have been massively trivialized across the 20th century. It isn't paranoid to suspect that the principal forced training institution of youth has had something to do with this. Let no-one say we lack sufficient data upon which to base analysis. There is a universe hidden just under our noses in which it doesn't matter in the least to the managers of the system whether Mr. Woodhead turned his student into his dolly or not. Long ago I discovered this universe by accident. How that happened I'll turn to next.
I confess I didn't enter teaching nearly 40 years ago out of any irresistible need to be near children or from a semi-religious calling, but simply because I was bored with my first real job out of college as an advertising copywriter. There is a limit to how many times a sane person can sit through meetings debating the lure of a particular adjective, or what false promises you can get away with according to the legal staff.
This confluence of circumstance, together with the any-warm-body-will-do hiring policy of New York City, propelled me into schoolteaching during the Cuba missile Crisis of 1962. When the smoke settled I began to investigate the reality of government schooling in a modern metropolis and it began to investigate me.
My first attention was drawn away from the bureaucracy I had become a part of to the strangeness of the children I confronted because their evident purpose, it seemed, was to drive me insane.
It was no regard for children but only a matter of personal survival which motivated me sufficiently to try to discover why these kids - to whom I mean no harm - seemed so intent on making my life miserable. In worrying that question I hit on a hypothesis whose testing was to serve me in good stead ever after. It seemed that in the short time I had left middle school myself, and in the short 400 miles between Pittsburgh and New York, a vast shift had taken place in the nature of the school experience. Whereas in my own place and time school had been regarded as useful, but only as one of the paths to a good life, in New York City it had evolved from an important but not vitally essential institution like a monster, feared as the monopoly gatekeeper over the future of children.
What I perceived as a New York problem was, of course, becoming the universal standard around the U.S., thanks to the strategic interventions on the part of the Federal Education Department, key private corporate foundations like those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, and behind-the-scenes assistance from influential American business interests and government agencies like the Labor Department and the Defence Department.
But meanwhile back in my classroom, though I knew nothing of this then, I could see that one result of this transformation had been to strip away almost entirely a base of primary experience from children. My kids were starved of experience, the rich ones almost as much as the poor. Experience had been replaced by a non-stop diet of low-level abstraction, continuing exhortation, and frequent pencil and paper testing of the type called "standardized."
Standardized testing. The language we use to talk about education determines how we think about it. There are no neutral words. We have been grossly misled to believe that the metaphor of standards has anything inevitable to do with quality, it is taken from assembly lines. Meeting standards is not about high level attainment, it is about standardisation.
So standardized testing which assigns half of all children a label as sub-standard doesn't mean the better half have achieved anything that correlates with real world achievement, only that they've met the degree of standardisation assigned by the unseen test designers. No significant study has ever proven otherwise. |The fact this was and is widely known should have ended the career of these expensive bogus "instruments" long ago. but these phoney challenges steadily increase in importance, pronouncing huge numbers of children sub-standard every year. That should give you a real clue to the purpose of official schooling.
One cause of my classroom grief, I decided, was that my kids had been stripped of significant experience and subjected to a relentless course of standardized exercises employing fear and humiliation as prods, and the threat that a poor school record would shut them away from future work and status. This seemed amazingly cruel in light of significant historical experience that school and life accomplishment are two different things, and that the various mechanisms of standardisation employed have been calibrated in advance to guarantee the failure of most of the students. Some other goal was afoot than bringing each child to his or her own maximum excellence.
The second cause of my grief as a classroom teacher was, I concluded, that the subjects of study I had encountered as a boy in Scotch-Irish western Pennsylvania had been radically simplified - 'dumbed down' in the street jargon I used as the title of my first book. By some lucky accident I had gone to third grade at a Jesuit boarding-school during which time, without any serious strain on our young spirits, my classes had been exposed to an intellectual curriculum whose intensity I was never again to encounter, even at college. This gave me a benchmark of the possible. I learned something else, too, of immense value to me as a schoolteacher and as a man - the difference between active and passive literacy.
Active literacy involves ease in public speaking and facility with written prose as well as the ability to read and evaluate the best thinking available, active literacy enables its possessor to reach out to other people, giving instruction to them as well as taking it from others. Passive literacy on the other hand teaches the ability to read simple instructions from the boss, deliver information about oneself on official forms to social managers, and perhaps to read and understand basic propaganda appeals or respond to advertisements.
According to the Jesuits, those eternally political soldiers of Christ, the British empire and other historical oppressors had gone to great lengths to prevent the spread of active literacy among its subject peoples, which included its own industrial proletariat. As early as the 1820's, British schools known as "Bell Schools" in some circles, were organized systematically to prevent active literacy from occurring; a counterpart of the Bell School known as the Lancaster School performed this task in early to mid-19th century America. The effectiveness of both was improved by hybridising the form with insights drawn from their Prussian counterparts - also intended to curtail the spread of active literacy.
Armed with an awareness how potent a power active literacy could be in combating the powerlessness generally associated with being young, and dimly aware that the reason the kids persecuted me was that they unconsciously perceived I was stealing their minds and robbing them of the right to test themselves in the world - and further encouraged by my own lack of interest in schoolteaching as a lifetime career (thus spared any fear of losing my job), I experimented freely, recklessly, and often illegally, always without permission, to make curriculum, space, time, text and sequence so fully flexible that classroom matters under my direction approached a condition where each kid had a privately tailored school experience and as often as resourcefulness and circumstances allowed, the run of New York City.
I could hardly know in those days that this novel approach was terrain homeschoolers had pioneered long before me.
One other thing Jesuit training enable me to do was feel confident about challenging kids' minds just as far and as honestly as my own could take them - without fear they would be bored or despairing about their own inability to respond. And once I had moved these two themes of free-ranging experience and intense intellectual training into daily practice most of my discipline problems ceased. Even when the balance of the school building was in chaos, I could look forward to getting to school each morning to find out what I would learn that day from the children while I was getting paid for it!
As the years passed and my satisfying work proved too interesting to leave, I came to see the specific pathological effects which government schooling seemed to cause. During this time I had sufficient exposure to children of wealth, middle-class children, and poor children alike to conclude that not only was the Galtonian bell curve which purports to describe distribution of intellect largely false, but also that the negative psychological conditions I'm about to describe are common to rich and poor alike. The unifying thread is long exposure in the confinement we call government education.
I'll offer eight characteristics commonly found in school populations that I think will be familiar to most of you who've thought about these things or who've had experience with schoolchildren. To think these conditions are common characteristics of youth would be a gross error as even a cursory look at say, Amish children, or Chinese children, or children of Mondragon Co-operative in the Basque region of Spain would amply demonstrate.
Large numbers of children I taught over the years displayed these disturbing behaviors:
1) An indifference and hostility to the adult world and contempt for its announced standards.
2) An absence of both any curiosity that could be sustained, and of any ability to concentrate for very long.
3) A difficulty connecting present time with future opportunity.
4) A difficulty in connecting both the present and the future to events in the past.
5) A taste for cruelty very near the surface, a numbness to moral questions beyond superficial lip service.
6) A genuine unease with intimacy, a readiness to be disloyal to both family and friends.
7) A quality of obsessive materialism, which produced a steady state of both envy and boredom, even when catered to by adults.
8) A timidity to face new ideas or new situations, grading into passivity, fear, and even rage if the novelty persisted.
Obviously you can find such situations outside of school. What I’m suggesting is that their prevalence and intensity among schoolchildren occurs as a natural by-product of the structure of institutional schooling.
Let me offer just a few of the processes I believe produce these results, all firmly embedded in the architecture of schooling. Virtually nothing selected by schools as basic really is basic – although it sometimes happens quite arbitrarily – virtually no school sequence is logically defensible. Sane people, including children, seek meaning, not disconnected facts. Schools teach the unrelating of everything.
Schools teach class position bordering on caste. They teach that children must stay in the class to which they have been assigned, no matter how humiliating or inappropriate that is. It is an Egyptian view of life strongly contradicting the natural genius of children, and in the United States, at least, radically violating its historical covenants.
continued in Part 2....
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Reply by Lev/Christopher on June 17, 2009 at 6:52pm
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Reply by Lev/Christopher on June 17, 2009 at 7:09pm
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