Well, we’ve made it to the final chapter in Dumbing Us Down, and I have really enjoyed this book I really encourage everyone to read it!

So let’s dive in, shall we? It seems like this chapter has come up in most of my conversations this week. It really is excellent.

Gatto starts the chapter by exploring a bit of a case study into the Colonial New England town of Dedham. He talks about the church there and how rigid they were when they first started. In town, only Congregationalists were welcome, and anyone else risked being “shunned, persecuted, or even burned at the stake”. He tells stories of Unitarians being treated like invaders when they came through the city. Needless to say, Dedham was not a place that welcomed new thoughts and ideas.

Even though this seems like a sea of conformity, Gatto shows how, ironically, their way of life actually demanded individuality. Their church services were free of liturgy, and emphasized local preaching on local issues. This means that there was a constant struggle as each person acted as their own priest and expert. This leads to a “progress toward truth.” This is also called “the dialectic.”

Central planners of any period despise the dialectic because it gets in the way of efficiently broadcasting “one right way” to do things. Half a century ago Bertrand Russell remarked that the United States was the only major country on earth that deliberately avoided teaching its children to think dialectically. He was talking about twentieth-century America, of course, the land of compulsory government schooling, not the New England of Congregational distinction… Roger Williams saw as clearly as any person of his time and recognized the inevitable connection between dissonance and quality of life. You can’t have one without the other.

Gatto is not referring to discipline here, but this topic came up in our “Young Parents” Bible study that we lead. We are going through Families Where Grace is in Place, and we came upon the part where VanVonderen addresses how part of what 2-year-olds have to learn is to disagree. Some parents feel that their children should never say “no”, never disagree, and only blindly accept, but that doesn’t teach children to grow up and make responsible decisions for themselves. That only raises robots who are paralyzed when they come to a decision point. You have to let your children practice in a safe environment where its ok to make mistakes. That will enable them to succeed once they are out in the real world.

But, back to Gatto’s point…. Each city in Colonial New England was able to set their own rules and there was no “one right way” of doing things. Some cities worked like a commune and shared their work, while others favored private ownership and individual choice. This allowed cities to work as they wished, and allowed for creativity and individual choice as opposed to forced compliance.

Something else that was special about those Colonial towns:

I think it hides a secret of great power, which social engineers who built and maintain our government monopoly schools are forced to overlook: Each town was able to exclude people it didn’t like! People were able to choose whom they wanted to work with, to sort themselves into a living curriculum that worked for them. The words of the first Dedham charter catch this feeling perfectly; the original settlers wanted to (and did) shut out “people whose dispositions do not suit us, whose very society will be hurtful to us.”

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of the politically correct culture, eh?

…these early towns functioned like selective clubs… narrowing human differences down to a range that could be managed by them humanely. If you consider the tremendous stresses the dialectical process sets up anyway — where all people are their own priests, their own final masters — it’s hard to see how a congregational society can do otherwise. If you have to accept everyone, no matter how hostile they may be to your own personality, philosophy, or mission, then an oganization would quickly become paralyzed by fatal disagreement.

The point is that there is not one perfect choice for everyone. Every town didn’t fit every person’s needs, so they needed to find a new town. The Greeks had a story about a man who tried to make everyone uniform

…his name was Procustes. He cut or stretched travellers to fit his guest bed. The system worked perfectly, but it played havoc with the traveller.

So the Greeks understood what we cannot.

These New Englanders invented a system where people who wanted to live and work together could do so… It was almost as if by taking care of your own business you succeeded in some magical fashion in taking care of public business too…

This catches a piece of what’s wrong with compulsory schools as large as New England towns, schools that don’t allow any choice of curricula, philosophy, or companions.

Its not that those were perfect times though. The citizens of Dedham whipped Quaker women out of town and did the same to Presbyterians. They were not exactly model citizens… And yet, Massachusetts has gone from being some of the most intolerant people in our nation’s history to being the most liberal state in the Union. So how did they manage to teach themselves to reform without government intervention? What made them change?

Something mysterious inside the structure of Congregationalism worked to have them abandon some of the exclusivity that adherence to Biblical elite dogma had taught them.
I am certain that “something” was nearly unconditional local choice. And it was self-correcting! Because the town churches did not team up to present an institutional orthodoxy that made each town just like another — as government monopoly schools do today — error in one church could be countered by its correction in another. As long as people had the choice to vote with their feet, the free market pushed severe errors by leaving a congregation empty, just as it could reward a good place by filling it up.

My friend was telling me the other day about a blog post that she read that addressed a similar issue. It was talking about choice on both ends. It describes a ridiculous scenario where you would be forced to grocery shop in a certain store based on your home location. The grocery store would not compete because it already had your business. They would stop stocking the shelves and soon you’d have to lie and cheat to find a grocery store that was satisfactory. This is the same idea that Gatto is presenting in this chapter.

But maybe you feel it takes too long for people to naturally correct, so we need to force it. Does forcing it really work?

…things legislated out of existence, like alcohol and drug abuse or racism, don’t seem to go away as religious exclusivity went away naturally in New England under a regime of local choice; instead, law appears to give bad habits an injection of virulent new life…

He then talks about the changes that have come around since the “women’s revolution”

…if sharply accelerated rates of suicide, heart disease, emotional illness, sterility, and other pathological conditions are an indicator, the admission of women en masse to the unisex workplace is not an unmixed blessing. Further, some disturbing evidence exists that the income of working couples in 1990 has only slightly more purchasing power than the income of the average working man did in 1910. In effect, two laborers are now being purchased for the price of one — an outcome Adam Smith or David Ricardo might have predicted. And an unseen social cost of all of this has been the destruction of family life, the loss of home as sanctuary or haven, and the bewilderment of children who, since infancy, have been raised by strangers.

Whoa. I’ll have to research that one and get back to you

Still, the point exists that Dedham changed without legislation.

But if they had been ordered to change, ordered, as other immmigrants were, to change their behavior and to abandon their culture to compulsory schools set up for that purpose, I think what would have happened is this: some of them would have seemed to change but would have harbored such powerful resentments at being deprived of choice that some way to exact vegence would have evolved.

OK, now I see where he was going with his examples of women (he also talks about “Black Americans” (as he says it) and drug policies…) He’s saying that if you force people to change, then they end up resentful and passive aggressively choosing the old way. Interesting.

Back to the free market in education though

By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling — teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, and others — has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.

We have no choice of schools. Gatto believes that our students are simply waiting to be fed. We need people to tell us every step of the way what should be done. We, on a whole, have problems doing tasks with creativity and instead wait for instructions.

I think we’ve all seen on tv when students are asked simple questions and they can’t answer them, but apparently this is not a new issue.

… in 1951, a survey made of 30,000 Los Angeles school children discovered that seventy-five percent of eighth graders couldn’t find the Atlantic Ocean on a map and most of them couldn’t calculate fifty percent of thirty-six. From my personal experiences, I stand witness that the situation is certainly not better today.

Yowsa. My 4 year old can find it on a globe

So Gatto wraps up the book and the chapter by suggesting several things:

1. Turn your back on national solutions and toward communities of families… Turn inward until we master “knowing thyself.”
2. Encourage and underwrite experimentation; trust children and families to know what is best for themselves; stop the segregation of children and the aged in walled compounds; involve everyone in every community in the education of the young: businesses, institutions, old people, whole families
3. Don’t be panicked by scare tactics into surrendering your children to experts. There is abundant evidence that less than a hundred hours is sufficient for a person to become totally literate and a self-teacher.
4. Give tax money back to families and let them choose their schools. Allow a free-market model to exist. Far better ideas will come out of a free market than could ever come from an institution

So, in the end, I really enjoyed this book. Thanks for kinda sorta reading along with me It helped to work through my feelings this way!

Florida Requires Majors in High School – New York Times

Hmmm, I’m not sure what I think of this.

In light of my John Taylor Gatto readings, I can see both good and bad.

The good: It is a step towards remomving the “one right way” path that students must currently travel. It would allow students to customize their education and study things that they enjoy.

It almost seems a little closer to the tradesman model. Where you could start focusing a little earlier.

The bad: Most college students can’t even pick and keep a major during their 4 years, so how can a 13 year old be expected to choose one as she enters high school? My career expectations at 13 were quite different from what they are now.

Could colleges start to look at high school majors and expect (or offer priority to) students who had selected the same major for both high school and college. Would it be more difficult to change your career path as you started college?

So… what do you think?