Posted on 04/08/2005 10:12:00 PM PDT by Zack Nguyen
I Quit, I Think
In the first year of the last decade of the twentieth century during my thirtieth year as a school teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools in the district, crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me, after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and terminated covertly once while I was on medical leave of absence, after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a lecturer in the Education Department (and the faculty rating handbook published by the Student Council gave me the highest ratings in the department my last three years), after planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school fund-raiser in New York City history, after placing a single eighth-grade class into 30,000 hours of volunteer community service, after organizing and financing a student-run food cooperative, after securing over a thousand apprenticeships, directing the collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of private student libraries, after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals, and launching an armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students within a larger human reality, I quit.
I was New York State Teacher of the Year when it happened. An accumulation of disgust and frustration which grew too heavy to be borne finally did me in. To test my resolve I sent a short essay to The Wall Street Journal titled "I Quit, I Think." In it I explained my reasons for deciding to wrap it up, even though I had no savings and not the slightest idea what else I might do in my mid-fifties to pay the rent. In its entirety it read like this:
"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of Biology. It’s a religious notion, School is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.
In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.
How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work."
The little essay went off in March and I forgot it. Somewhere along the way I must have gotten a note saying it would be published at the editor’s discretion, but if so, it was quickly forgotten in the press of turbulent feelings that accompanied my own internal struggle. Finally, on July 5, 1991, I swallowed hard and quit. Twenty days later the Journal published the piece. A week later I was studying invitations to speak at NASA Space Center, the Western White House, the Nashville Center for the Arts, Columbia Graduate Business School, the Colorado Librarian’s Convention, Apple Computer, and the financial control board of United Technologies Corporation. Nine years later, still enveloped in the orbit of compulsion schooling, I had spoken 750 times in fifty states and seven foreign countries. I had no agent and never advertised, but a lot of people made an effort to find me. It was as if parents were starving for someone to tell them the truth.
My hunch is it wasn’t so much what I was saying that kept the lecture round unfolding, but that a teacher was speaking out at all and the curious fact that I represented nobody except myself. In the great school debate, this is unheard of. Every single voice allowed regular access to the national podium is the mouthpiece of some association, corporation, university, agency, or institutionalized cause. The poles of debate blocked out by these ritualized, figurehead voices are extremely narrow. Each has a stake in continuing forced schooling much as it is.
As I traveled, I discovered a universal hunger, often unvoiced, to be free of managed debate. A desire to be given untainted information. Nobody seemed to have maps of where this thing had come from or why it acted as it did, but the ability to smell a rat was alive and well all over America.
Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.
Dewey called this transformation "the new individualism." When I stepped into the job of schoolteacher in 1961, the new individualism was sitting in the driver’s seat all over urban America, a far cry from my own school days on the Monongahela when the Lone Ranger, not Sesame Street, was our nation’s teacher, and school things weren’t nearly so oppressive. But gradually they became something else in the euphoric times following WWII. Easy money and easy travel provided welcome relief from wartime austerity, the advent of television, the new nonstop theater, offered easy laughs, effortless entertainment. Thus preoccupied, Americans failed to notice the deliberate conversion of formal education that was taking place, a transformation that would turn school into an instrument of the leviathan state. Who made that happen and why is part of the story I have to tell.
fascinating.
"John Taylor Gatto"
Wasn't he name a teacher of the year or something like that at some point?
Looks interesting. Thanx!
It isn't just the big city school systems that are going into the SHITTER, small towns show it too. There are so many mandated courses that mean absolutely nothing, they don't teach the TREE R'S anymore. Thats why so many kids can't read past the 7th grade level as seniors. If the cash register doesn't tell them how much change to give they can't figure it out in their heads, What ever happened to the days when the teacher was the first one at school and the last one to leave, now they almost beat the kids out the door. My grandaughter is being home schooled and she is two years ahead of the kids her own age.
And we need teachers who are willing to take risks too, to teach on a one year renewable contract and to negotiate their salary with the school with the full knowledge that some teachers are more valuable than others.
I believe there are some things that need to be taught sequentially and while individual learning is fine in theory, class learning can be successful as well. This means that some things are taugh in certain years, and kids need to accept a little regimentation. This is not to say that each teacher cannot explore teaching side subjects that motivate or are of special interest to the teacher. But this does not include politics, diversity, multiculturism, or so much off the subject that the class cannot succeed in annual standard tests.
Sorry should be the three R's, tried to go too fast.
When you cash a check at the bank you better count it right there in front of them, because they don't count it out to you like they used to and most of them sure can't get it right!!!!
The-government-schools-are-a-disgrace-BUMP!
I've lived in Germany for the past 12 years...and my son attends a German school. There are one or two areas where their education system greatly exceeds the American system...but overall...the American education sector is still better. I think there are alot of lazy American eductators out there...and certainly the amount they pay a teacher doesn't help to keep the better ones...but we are doing alot of good things.
My son...in the 7th grade in Germany...has barely gotten any history or civics ever. Science is a on-again, off-again subject that you simply laugh about. They waste 90 minutes per week on art and dance (mandatory)...which the vast majority of the kids really just sleep through. Math is the sole area where excellence is demanded...he is probably two years ahead of any American-schooled kid...but only because of the demands put upon students in the class. PE is limited to 120 minutes per week. And religion is actually a class (45 minutes)...which teaches relgious openess (yes, Muslims are good...so they are taught).
Marker Bump
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
read later - Education
I like your 3 R's, very good.
In our state (Mississippi) some districts employ by the mirror method, hold a mirror up to their mouth, have them breath on it and if it fogs over, hire them.
Yes, he was. HE was New York State Teacher of the Year right before he quit teaching entirely. As he describes in the book he was more or less forced out.
As I understand it we have national testing standards as a part of No Child Left Behind. Am I wrong on that?
IF we have national testing, it might be said that we have something akin to a national curriculum.
Ive met a former Math teacher who was absolutely dumbfounded by the concept of percents. Im not kidding either..
Ugh. That's just painful. Gatto's fundamental thesis (at least thus far in my reading) is that schooling and education are not the same thing. He believes that schooling - the rigorous, structured, identical environmental - often works against education.
Not saying I agree with him completely, but I do find it intriguing.
bump
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