A Critical Appraisal
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the new school institution slowly took root after the Civil War in big cities and the defeated South, some of the best minds in the land, people fit by their social rank to comment publicly, spoke out as they watched its first phalanx of graduates take their place in the traditional American world. All these speakers had been trained themselves in the older, a-systematic, noninstitutional schools. At the beginning of another new century, it is eerie to hear what these great-grandfathers of ours had to say about the mass schooling phenomenon as they approached their own fateful new century.
In 1867, world-famous American physician and academic Vincent Youmans lectured the London College of Preceptors about the school institution just coming into being:
School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain. It is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are frequently aggravated by the lessons of school.
Thirteen years later, Francis Parkman (of Oregon Trail fame) delivered a similar judgment. The year was 1880, at the very moment Wundt was founding his laboratory of scientific psychology in Germany:
Many had hoped that by giving a partial teaching to great numbers of persons, a thirst for knowledge might be awakened. Thus far, the results have not equaled expectations. Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have cause to congratulate ourselves. (emphasis added)
In 1885, the president of Columbia University said:
The results actually attained under our present system of instruction are neither very flattering nor very encouraging.
In 1895, the president of Harvard said:
Ordinary schooling produces dullness. A young man whose intellectual powers are worth cultivating cannot be willing to cultivate them by pursuing phantoms as the schools now insist upon.
When he said this, compulsion schooling in its first manifestation was approaching its forty-fifth year of operations in Massachusetts, and running at high efficiency in the city of Cambridge, home to Harvard.
Then, in the early years of the twentieth century, pedagogy underwent another metamorphosis that resulted in an even more efficient scientific form of schooling. Four years before WWI broke out, a well-known European thinker and schoolman, Paul Geheeb, whom Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer all were to claim as a friend, made this commentary on English and German types of forced schooling:
The dissatisfaction with public schools is widely felt. Countless attempts to reform them have failed. People complain about the "overburdening" of schools; educators argue about which parts of curriculum should be cut; but school cannot be reformed with a pair of scissors. The solution is not to be found in educational institutions. (emphasis added)
In 1930, the yearly Inglis Lecturer at Harvard made the same case:
We have absolutely nothing to show for our colossal investment in common schooling after 80 years of trying.
Thirty years passed before John Gardner’s "Annual Report to the Carnegie Corporation," in 1960, added this:
Too many young people gain nothing [from school] except the conviction they are misfits.
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.
Here are three more notable quotes regarding the state of public schools at the time they were published:
"The teaching of reading--all over the United States, in all of the schools, in all of the textbooks--is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense. Johnny couldn't read...for the simple reason that nobody ever showed him how. Johnny's only problem was that he was unfortunately exposed to an ordinary American public school...Did you know that the teaching of reading was never a problem anywhere in the world uintil the United States switched to the present system?"
Rudolph Flesch, "Why Johnny Can't Read", 1955.
"It is common knowlege among educators that at least one third of our school children lag behind their age and grade in reading, all the way through school. Thousands emerge from high school totally unable to read and comprehend so much as the daily paper. As for reading for pleasure - only a lucky minority ever learn to do that...It's nothing new, it's been going on for years."
Colliers Magazine, 1946.
"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.
ping
Ping
Education ping.
How many years did Gatto spend in the public schools before he figured this out?
I know I have posted this before on a homeschool thread but it is interesting. I honestly don't think I could do so well. I don't ever recall learning much of it in my school days.
This is worth reading!!
Could you have passed the 8th grade
...in 1895?
Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? (LOOK CLOSELY... THAT'S EIGHTEEN NINETY FIVE!)
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
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> 8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895