A letter-writer recently objected that I used great libertarian Rose Wilder Lane as a \u201csole source\u201d for the fact that American schooling was taken over, in the late 19th century, by statists enamored of the Prussian compulsion model, aiming to create a docile peasant class by crippling the American intellect — making reading seem real hard, for starters, by replacing the old system in which delighted kids learned to combine the sounds of the Roman letters, with a perverted \u201cwhole word\u201d method better suited to decoding hieroglyphics.<\/p>\n
In July of 1991, John Taylor Gatto, New York\u2019s Teacher of the Year, quit, saying he was tired of working for an institution that crippled the ability of children to learn. He explained why in an essay published that month in The Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look at that essay, and see if we can find our \u201csecond source\u201d:<\/p>\n
\u201cGovernment schooling is the most radical adventure in history,\u201d Mr. Gatto begins. \u201cIt kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.<\/p>\n
\u201cSocrates 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.\u2019 It has political allies to guard its marches, that\u2019s why reforms come and go without changing much. …<\/p>\n
\u201cDavid learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can\u2019t tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel \u201clearning disabled\u201d 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\u2019t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, ‘special education\u2019 fodder. She\u2019ll be locked in her place forever.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 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. …\u201d<\/p>\n
These are not the words of some sour-grapes loser who \u201ccouldn\u2019t make it\u201d as a teacher. Testimonials from Gatto\u2019s former students fill a whole book.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation,\u201d Gatto continues. \u201cThere isn\u2019t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don\u2019t need state-certified teachers to make education happen — that probably guarantees it won\u2019t. …<\/p>\n
\u201cGood schools don\u2019t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices. … I can\u2019t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don\u2019t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. …\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the next nine years, Mr. Gatto was invited to give 750 talks \u201cin 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Citing the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey, Gatto in his book \u201cUnderground History of American Education,\u201d reports only 3.5 percent of Americans are literate enough today \u201cto do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was already so bad by 1952 that the U.S. Army began quietly hiring hundreds of psychologists to figure out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy, Gatto reports. It turned out they weren\u2019t faking.<\/p>\n
This month, that majority is choosing our presidential candidates based on who looks better on TV.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years,\u201d Gatto\u2019s research shows. \u201cLater, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn\u2019t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. …\u201d<\/p>\n
Barbara Whiteside showed Gatto a poem written by a high school senior in Alton, Illinois, two weeks before he committed suicide:<\/p>\n
He drew… the things inside that needed saying.
\nBeautiful pictures he kept under his pillow.
\nWhen he started school he brought them…
\nTo have along like a friend.
\nIt was funny about school, he sat at a square brown desk
\nLike all the other square brown desks … and his room
\nWas a square brown room like all the other rooms, tight
\nAnd close and stiff.
\nHe hated to hold the pencil and chalk, his arms stiff
\nHis feet flat on the floor, stiff, the teacher watching
\nAnd watching. She told him to wear a tie like
\nAll the other boys, he said he didn\u2019t like them.
\nShe said it didn\u2019t matter what he liked. After that the class drew.
\nHe drew all yellow. It was the way he felt about Morning.
\nThe Teacher came and smiled, \u201cWhat\u2019s this?
\nWhy don\u2019t you draw something like Ken\u2019s drawing?\u201d
\nAfter that his mother bought him a tie, and he always
\nDrew airplanes and rocketships like everyone else.
\nHe was square inside and brown and his hands were stiff.
\nThe things inside that needed saying didn\u2019t need it
\nAnymore, they had stopped pushing… crushed, stiff
\nLike everything else.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\nPerhaps you\u2019ll say we\u2019re better off without losers who can\u2019t get with the program, anyway.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter I spoke in Nashville, a mother named Debbie pressed a handwritten note on me which I read on the airplane to Binghamton, New York,\u201d Gatto continues:<\/p>\n
‘We started to see Brandon flounder in the first grade, hives, depression, he cried every night after he asked his father, \u201cIs tomorrow school, too?\u201d In second grade the physical stress became apparent. The teacher pronounced his problem Attention Deficit Syndrome. My happy, bouncy child was now looked at as a medical problem, by us as well as the school.<\/p>\n
‘A doctor, a psychiatrist, and a school authority all determined he did have this affliction. Medication was stressed along with behavior modification. If it was suspected that Brandon had not been medicated he was sent home. My square peg needed a bit of whittling to fit their round hole. …<\/p>\n
‘I cried as I watched my parenting choices stripped away. My ignorance of options allowed Brandon to be medicated through second grade. The tears and hives continued another full year until I couldn\u2019t stand it. I began to homeschool Brandon. It was his salvation. No more pills, tears, or hives. He is thriving. He never cries now and does his work eagerly.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
You can read John Taylor Gatto\u2019s entire \u201cUnderground History of American Education,\u201d detailing just how Mann and Dewey and their gang imposed on us a Prussian system of coercive, totalitarian schooling, so ill-suited to a free people, at<\/p>\n