A Critical Appraisal (of public schools over the years)

JohnTaylorGatto.com ^ | John Taylor Gatto

[Clintonfatigued]

The record after 1960 is no different. It is hardly unfair to say that the stupidity of 1867, the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness of 1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960 have continued into the schools of today. We pay four times more in real dollars than we did in 1930 and thus we buy even more of what mass schooling dollars always bought.

[after dark]

Are you against ,or are you for the massive use of IQ tests?

Are you saying only non emotional people make good parents?

What do think of the posted article?

Do you have a high opinion of the public school system?If so or no, why?

Don't be cryptic.

[after dark]

Another factor that you have neglected by focusing on IQs is that the cost of schooling has risen dramatically in the last hundred years. If I have read you correctly, you are somewhat tight fisted. Why not return to traditional community schools which were cheaper? You could set up a foundation for the identification of super bright children ,then you could place them in your wonderful schools.

[GSlob]

Diverse it gets, da worse it is...

[timtoews5292004]

I've read Gatto's "Underground History of Education" and it seems he figured it early, but tried to fight it.

[after dark]

I am not against specialized schools which search out and develop talent in children.

Our ugly factory schools were never meant to be centers for excellence.

[mcvey]

Didn't think I was being cryptic and apologize if I seemed so.

I prefer hard standardized testing in classes to IQ tests. I don't think the standardized tests should make up the only component in a grade, but certainly the majority. I believe in flunking students and do so with frequency. And I believe that at least K-12 the tests should be on content regardless of topic.

Emotional, non-emotional, shomotional. Emotions have nothing to do with it. With my eldest stepson I "did not know nothing." And I did not have a battle plan for preparing him to succeed and be happy. So he partied and such and then had to catch up in his 20's and 30's for what he had lost.

The younger stepson (five years younger) ran into a McVey with a plan which included music lessons, intense exposure to different types of intellectual stimulus, a slight nudge toward something athletic (he surprised me and became a lineman) and above all an air of commitment by myself and my wife to the idea that his job was to be a student and our job was to supervise his growth. Worked much better. Nowadays I note that there is a ton of research that supports this approach--most of which is hated by the educational establishment.

The posted article is too long for me to go through it with a fine tooth comb. I generally agree with what I read--and I read it all--but would emphasize something more than the author did and that is what I would call the "defeat of the soft middle." Most of my students fall into the area in secondary school where they do not test high enough or low enough to get special attention or they are not sufficiently "troubled" to get extra help. They drift and usually their parents have few clues as to what should be happening and is not. These are the students who would benefit the most by home-schooling, even if it was not the best available.

I don't have much of an opinion of the public school system one way or another. We pump in to these schools students who spend far more time watching TV than they do going to class. They do malls, video games, hang-out and spin from relationship to relationship before they are prepared to do so. They often have two or three "fathers" or "mothers." They have a range of half-sisters and half-brothers because every one remarries and starts another families. Their lives are chaotic and self-centered and, given the lack of structure, even feral. Then we ask teachers to somehow or another make it right.

Meanwhile many schools of education are beyond horrible. Invariably the weakest students in my classes come from our ed department. And then they go out to teach. It is appalling, but most of them seem to me to be pretty dedicated, even if, as the article points out, they have been criminally instructed in what constitutes educational methodology.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to expound.

McVey

[GSlob]

As for being tight fisted - yes and no. Where no [or not much] return could be expected - there yes, I am tight fisted. But in direct proportion with the return expected the fist becomes [as it ought to be] less and less tight. Running costs of a really good program for the super brights could easily run into more than 50K per nose per year, and it could be the money very well spent.
Why, 15 year old Michelangelo was given [by Lorenzo Medici, the Magnificent] a room, board, a stipend of 3 gold florins a month [about $2500 a year in purchasing power equivalent], an employment of his father in customs [at another $1500/yr equivalent] plus the opportunity of rubbing noses with the best scholars there were at the time, albeit what, if any, he picked from them is open to question. At the times such expenditure [Lorenzo could afford it] was still exorbitant. Well, for 500 years nobody has yet claimed that it was wasted money.

[GSlob]

Well, learning anything at really high level takes both abilities and an early start - you are absolutely right. Gary Kasparov started playing chess at about age 3.

[GSlob]

I have seen the workings of, and highly appreciate, the IQ, but I would be even more interested in analogous [hypothetical] quotient - should we call it "CQ", "creativity quotient". It is a subset of IQ, but no significant work has yet been done on its structure and development, to my knowledge. As for the nurture - it is not quantifiable, beyond negative nurture [i.e. abuse and malnutrition]. There is a good quatrain by Igor Guberman on the topic:
Vesomy i sil'ny sreda i sluchaj,
No glavnoye-tainstvennye geny
I kak obrazovaniem ni muchaj
Ot bochek ne rodyatsya Diogeny"
[Milieu and circumstances are strong and weighty [matters]
But mysterious genes still trump everything -
And no matter how much you torture them with education,
The barrels do not give birth to the likes of Diogenes.]

[after dark]

When you bring up Michelangelo you have left the realm of formal schooling all together. You have entered the realm of apprenticeships. Many of histories great men were apprenticed. Captain Bligh was apprenticed at age seven. Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain were also apprentices. The cost of training apprentices are offset because those who do the training will get a cut of future earnings , the parents pay some of the training costs, and the kid is expected to work while being trained.Apprenticeships would never cost 50,000 dollars a year. Apprenticeships ,because children work with adults who are demanding and intelligent ,tend to instill in their charges humility a trait sadly lacking in kids who have been brainwashed to believe they are gifted and talented.

[after dark]

Thanks for being clear.

I do not disagree with you .

[Clintonfatigued]

Gatto was a teacher for approximately 30 years.

[GSlob]

Nonsensical objection. And what is the education if not an apprenticeship in the skilled use of one's brain? No difference in principle with any other apprenticeship here. And form does not matter that much. What matters is the quality of material [pupils] and quality of instruction. As was told before, unless you are a high level polymath like Aristotle, you alone will never be able to give as much as a good collection of interested high level [university professors] specialist instructors. Thus the school.

[after dark]

If you think I object, to apprenticeships you are wrong.I think apprenticeships in spite of their brutality were a better mode of education than most people receive today.I think your plan is no better or worse than the super exclusive private boarding schools for the rich. Which as you know the super wealthy tend to be the super intelligent(based on the bell curve). Those schools have not yet produced any Michel Angelo's. The teachers run around flattering the kids for fear of angering the parents. Mathematicians tend to do their best work when they are young. So pairing a talented child with a once talented adult might enable the adult to contribute more to progress. Plus the adult would be given credit for any early achievements the child made.

[cinives]

There is a huge difference. Apprenticeships are real, in-depth learning in a topic in which the student has a deep interest and the instructor is a master. School takes the scattershot approach - throw it all at the kid using an undereducated drone (or even a computer) and see what sticks.

Schools cannot succeed like one-on-one instruction can. No matter how high quality the instructor and the pupils, if there are even 10 kids in a class there will always be some kids struggling and some kids already way ahead of any given concept. Schools are a very inefficient delivery method for any type of learning.

I prefer W.B. Yeates take on the subject - education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire. The best method of instruction after self-instruction is the tutorial.

[GSlob]

The single class which [to my knowledge] produced at least a dozen full professors [two in Ivy League, the rest in Europe] was 35 or 36 pupils [all with high IQ - there are schools and then there are schools]. Thus think first, and speak or write later. These were interested pupils/apprentices, and they were taught by masters.

[after dark]

If all you say is true then the "apprentices"should be able to pay back their education without using taxpayer money.The great men I named were not apprenticed to the great minds of their time, but they were apprenticed to intelligent men. They did not use taxpayer money to acquire their education and they became better educated than either our private students or our public students (gifted and non gifted).A tight fisted person such as yourself should appreciate the beauty of such a system.

[GSlob]

It has to be exclusive, but not on monetary basis.
"Which as you know the super wealthy tend to be the super intelligent(based on the bell curve). "
A fallacy. From the super intelligent tending to be at least affluent ("most super-intelligent are rich") does not follow the reverse - that the rich tend to be super- intelligent. Some are, but far from all. What follows is that the idiots tend to be poor.("most non-rich people are not super-intelligent", under the necessary conditions on the total numbers of rich, super-intelligent, and non-rich). Re-read Aristotle's "Logic" - it is an excellent textbook for, among other things, homeschooling.

[Aquinasfan]

Too many young people gain nothing [from school] except the conviction they are misfits.

JTG is the only education writer that matters.

[Aquinasfan]

"School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existance. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one cares very much whether he learns it or not. His parents, unless they are infantile in mind, tend to be bored with his lessons and labors, and are unable to conceal it from his sharp eyes...There should be more sympathy for school-children. The idea that they are happy is of a piece with the idea that the lobster in the pot is happy."

H.L Mencken, "The Baltimore Sun", 1928.

I'm not particularly fond of Mencken, but he hit the bullseye on this one.