Picking up where I left off…

So if grades don’t equal money, and the school is only protecting itself, then what is the purpose of mass schooling? Mr. Gatto has some ideas

Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit — and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time.

True.

Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt that it does, why wouldn’t any sane community look on such an education as positively wrong? It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as “low-class” material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff!

Uh, yeah, it really doesn’t make sense when you put it that way, does it? Are we really that materialistic? Well, yeah… probably.

So what is education?

Discovering meaining for yourself as well as discovering satisfying purpose for yourself, is a big part of what education is. How this can be done by locking children away from the world is beyond me.

I mentioned The Purpose Driven Life in a recent post, and the above quote really struck me for this reason. Perhaps if we were able to explore and learn the things about ourselves when we were younger, then we wouldn’t have to have someone spoon-feed it to us through a book… y’think?

Do we need networks in order to accomplish complex tasks? Are they just a neccessary evil?

The Cathedral of Rheims is the best evidence I know of what a community can do and what we stand to lose when we don’t know the difference between these human miracles and the social machinery we call “networks.” Rheims was built without power tools by people working day and night for a hundred years. Everybody worked willingly; nobody was slave labor. No school taught cathedral building as a subject.

So what possessed these people to build this cathedral? How was it done without brute force?

We know the workers were profoundly united as families and as friends, and as friends they knew what they really wanted in the way of a church. Popes and archbishops had nothing to do with it. Gothic architecture itself was invented out of sheer aspiration — the Gothic cathedral stands like a lighthouse illuminating what is possible in the way of uncoerced human union.

Very interesting indeed. So we could do that again? That’s tough to imagine.

And yet, despite examples like this throughout history where mankind accomplished far more amazing things without being forced to do it, there is a push in our society to extend the reach of schools.

Schools, I hear it argued, would make better sense and be a better value as nine-to-five operations or even nine-to-nine ones, working year-round. We’re not a farming community anymore, I hear, that we need to give kids time off to tend the crops. This new-world-order schooling would serve dinner, provide evening recreation, offer therapy, medical attention, and a whole range of other services, which would convert the institution into a true synthetic community for children, better than the original one for many poor kids, it is said…

Yep, I’ve heard that one too. But that would only cause weaker families, not fix them!

…they blame the family for its failure to be a family. It’s like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.

Hmm, it is indeed.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist

Oooh, yes. I like that! I love non-conformists And, again, what is our goal here?

The heart of a defense for the cherished American ideals of privacy, variety, and individuality lies in the way we bring up our young. Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet, and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

Ouch. True. Although it sounds like an exagerration, but I think we’ve all lived at least one of those examples.

Yet he points out that families, individuality, and community are never about “one-right-way” thinking on a grand scale. Private time is essential for a private identity to develop. We don’t want everyone to think the same and feel so black-and-white about life. Sure, there are things that are non-negotiable, but much of life is lived in the gray areas.

Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and intimidation. The schools… can’t work to teach nonmaterial values… because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination have no connection with education; they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not of freedom.

Yes. I was required to volunteer in order to graduate both high school and to advance in college, and it did not teach me those nonmaterial values. I learned them at home. The forced volunteerism was not from the heart nor a true lesson.

Sixty-five years ago Bertrand Russell… saw that mass schooling in the United States had a profoundly anti-democratic intent, that it was a scheme to artifically deliver national unity by eliminating human variation and by eliminating the forge that produces variation: the family. According to Lord Russell, mass schooling produced a recognizably American student: anti-intellectual, superstitious, lacking self-confidence, and having less of what Russell called “inner freedom” than his or her counterpart in any other nation he knew of, past or present… These children became citizens… with a thin “mass character,” holding excellence and aesthetics equally in contempt, being inadequate to the personal crisis of their lives.

Mr. Russell, who was a close relation to the King of England, pointed out something that was said to me when I was overseas. I was often told that Americans walked different, stood different, and could be identified before we even opened our mouths. They felt that Americans looked more confident, but Mr. Russell recognized that this is just a fascade.

So how do we solve this problem? Mr. Gatto’s solution is not to do away with schools, but to change the system. I hope you enjoy my future discussion of the last chapter. I hope to finish it today or tomorrow

I just finished Dumbing Us Down, and I am hoping to get the rest of my commentary up today so that I can return the book to the library and allow someone else to learn from it

Chapter 4 addresses the current trend towards solving school problems with more school. Good stuff.

Much of the chapter compares and contrasts networks and communities. He says that Aristotle spoke of the differences by saying:

…that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human… What is gained from consulting a specialist and surrendering all judgment is often more than outweighed by a permanent loss of one’s own volition

Therefore, a true community is when there is a collection of real families who perform acts of participation. They are participating, but not functioning in narrow parts. They are fully human.

By contrast

Networks, however, don’t require the whole person, but only a narrow piece. If… you function in a network, it asks you to supress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part… In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the purpose of some limited aim. This is, in fact, a devil’s bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one’s present humanity

So then, by definition, schools, corporations, colleges, armies, hospitals, etc. are not real communities. They are networks. He proves part of this by the fact that we don’t forget people who are our familiy, and yet how many have experienced

Even with college dorm “communities,” those most engaging and intimate simulations of community imaginable, who among us has not experienced the awful realization after graduation that we cannot remember our friends’ names or faces very well? Or who, if we can remember, feels much desire to renew those associations?

So he goes on to say that even though it is not fully understood yet, the “caring” in networks is somehow feigned. Its not due to malicious intent, but it happens. Another common place for it to happen is in sports teams, where you can experience a high and a closeness together, and then never be close again.

Since we’ve now established the differences between community and networks, we can see why more of a network will not fill our needs. Children (and all of us) need more real connections, we need to be used and appreciated for our whole, not just a part. Although networks will efficiently meet their end goals, they will not meet our needs for connection and meaning. They will leave us feeling empty.

Schools limit the use of the full human by isolating people based on age and ability. This means that the whole person is not used or valued. They are just stuck in a slot.

If performance within these narrow confines is conceived to be the supreme measure of success, if for instance, an A average is considered the central purpose of adolescent life — the requirements for which to take the most time and attention of the aspirant — and if the worth of thie individual is reckoned by victory or defeat in this abstract pursuit, then a social machine has been constructed which, by attaching purpose and meaning to essentially meaningless and fantastic behavior, will certainly dehumanize students, alienate them from their own human nature, and break the natural connection between them and their parents, to whom they would otherwise look for signification affirmations.

Wow. Yes. How did I get sucked into believing this? When my son was born, I immediately started thinking of how smart he was, how well he’d fit into this “meaningless and fantastic behavior” and how he would not be a “failure” because he could certainly get many A’s! Perhaps more than any of his peers! So what?! What does that teach him about life? Where does the value lie?

Just months before my son was born, I had gone through a real slump upon leaving the workforce and leaving college. My whole life worth had been built upon “successes” like straight-As, skipping a grade, starting college at 14, regular promotions at work, working 3 jobs at a time, and when I no longer had those external measures of my worth, my self-value plummeted. I felt useless. I felt unworthy. I felt like no one noticed I was special anymore, and therefore I wasn’t. If only I had known that the reason I felt this way was because I had been trained to feel that way. Its only natural that I felt that way. Natural, but sad.

Just as we have left behind real community for networks in our education and work, we’re even leaving it behind in our neighborhoods.

…”Community in cities and suburbs is a thin illusion, confined to simulated events like street festivals. If you have moved from one neighborhood to another or from one suburb to another and have quickly forgotten the friends you left behind, then you will have experienced the phenomenon I refer to.

Yes. I have felt that. I am feeling it right now. We are in the process of selling our home and buying a new one, and much of what I want from a future neighborhood is a real community. A community where the whole of the person is used. Not just an artificial community where staged events make us appear close. This is nearly impossible to find.

And so why do schools exist if they are not teaching adequately and are not forming real communities?

Nearly a century ago a French sociologist wrote that every instution’s unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has normally staked out for itself.

Of course. This was lesson #1 in my Operational Management class last semester.

It was this philistine potential — that teaching the young for pay would inevitable expand into an institution for the protection of teachers, not students — that made Socrates condemn the Sophists so strongly long ago in ancient Greece.

We’ve all heard the stories of teachers who can’t be fired… My mom is a teacher, and she’s told me dozens of stories like this. Back when I was in high school, our assistant principal was found engaging in s*xual activities with young men in a public bathroom. He was arrested. Rather than being fired, he was just relocated though, because he was under contract of the union and couldn’t be fired. The children were not protected… he was.

So if schools aren’t looking out for students first, are they at least preparing them for their lives (even secondarily?). We have long been told that…

…Good education = good job, good money, good things. This has become the universal national banner, hoisted by Harvards as well as high schools… Interestingly enough, the American Federation of Teachers identifies one of its main missions as persuading the business community to hire and promote on the basis of school grades so that the grades = money formula will obtain, just as it was made to obtain for medicine and law after years of political lobbying. So far, the common sense of businesspeople has kept them hiring and promoting the old-fashioned way, using performance and private judgment as the preferred measures…

My dh and I were talking about this the other day, because for the past 8-10 years, there has been a huge boom in certifications for tech jobs. Since we both work in the tech industry, this matters to us. The problem with hiring someone who is certified is that you end up getting someone who knows all the right book answers, but can’t figure out the problems in real life. Even though I’m a Mac girl, I was forced in a previous job to go through the MCSE certification classes. I learned tons about the way that Microsoft expects Windows servers to work. The only little problem is that they don’t work that way at all The training was useless.

Now certifications are losing their importance again. The market is correcting itself. How did I realize that certifications were useless and yet I still thought that traditional compulsory schooling was fabulous?

Well, this one is getting super long, so I’m going to go make a PBJ and come back and finish the chapter as a “Part 2″ post Happy reading!