A local reader writes in:<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been reading your series of columns on schools with much interest and I\u2019m in full agreement with you. But I was wondering if you are aware of what goes on in the Clark County school system in regards to the treatment of students, … policies and actions that border on something straight out of a prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents who are deemed \u2018behavior\u2019 problems are expelled from regular school and sent to something called \u2018behavior school\u2019. Once there they can expect to be strip searched — strip searched. I still find this hard to comprehend. The system apparently treats children as some sort of enemy, to be controlled, to ensure docile compliance.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome schools have instituted dress codes whereby a student can be expelled if their clothes are wrinkled, if they wear a belt deemed \u2018inappropriate.\u2019 … One mother expressed to me her feeling that it\u2019s almost as if the district wants students to quit, rather than bother trying to actually educate them in anything.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack in the day, as they say, when a student misbehaved they might get detention or expelled for a week. They were not viewed as criminals, beyond redemption. When parents start telling me THEY would prefer to have their children quit simply to get out of the gulags that our public schools have apparently become I have to add yet another chapter to the bizarre, upside-down world that is Clark County, where police are always justified in killing someone, politicians are expected to be crooked and the gaming industry is an untouchable God-like being that must never be criticized.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let us now conclude our occasional series on this topic by pointing out, once again, that this all seems far less puzzling and more predictable to those who have dug into \u201cThe Underground History of American Education,\u201d 2003, by former New York City (and state) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto.<\/p>\n
By the beginning of the 20th Century, those who organized our current government schooling system on the European model were well on their way to perfecting a system in which, in their view, \u201ceffective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now freed from the obsolete straitjacket of democratic traditions and historic American libertarian attitudes,\u201d Mr. Gatto reports in his masterwork.<\/p>\n
\u201cForced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a \u2018human resource\u2019 and managed as a \u2018workforce.\u2019 No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled. …<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a considerable time, … social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:<\/p>\n
\u201c \u2018We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cBy 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as \u2018the Education Trust\u2019 … (including) representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to \u2018impose on the young the ideal of subordination.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be extinguished, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren\u2019t conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents. …<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley\u2019s Public Education in the United States is explicit about what happened and why. As Cubberley puts it: \u2018It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking … [is] opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThe statement occurs in a section of Public Education called \u2018A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence,\u2019 in which Cubberley explains that \u2018the coming of the factory system\u2019 has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor … an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cFurthermore, modern industry needs such workers. … According to Cubberley, with \u2018much ridicule from the public press\u2019 the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and \u2018a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad.\u2019 …<\/p>\n
\u201cArthur Calhoun\u2019s 1919 \u2018Social History of the Family\u2019 … declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family \u2018into the custody of community experts.\u2019 …<\/p>\n
\u201cSchools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about. …<\/p>\n
\u201cSchool is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that\u2019s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom\u2019s lesson, however indirectly delivered.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren\u2019t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn\u2019t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn\u2019t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn\u2019t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. …<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I watched it happen, it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do. …<\/p>\n
\u201cThe strongest meshes of the school net are invisible. Constant bidding for a stranger\u2019s attention creates a chemistry producing the common characteristics of modern schoolchildren: whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty. Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive. …<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most destructive dynamic is identical to that which causes caged rats to develop eccentric or even violent mannerisms when they press a bar for sustenance on an aperiodic reinforcement schedule (one where food is delivered at random, but the rat doesn\u2019t suspect). Much of the weird behavior school kids display is a function of the aperiodic reinforcement schedule. And the endless confinement and inactivity to slowly drive children out of their minds. Trapped children, like trapped rats, need close management. Any rat psychologist will tell you that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thus endeth our reading from the brilliant man — finally awakened to what he was really being asked to do — who is conceivably the greatest government-school teacher of our time.<\/p>\n
Though I must add, as a postcript, that I find the response of his former educrat colleagues to Mr. Gatto’s research, insights and revelations among the most intriguing things I have encountered in 35 years of newspapering. That response is: no response. It’s as though they put their fingers in their ears, softly chanting ‘Dum-de-dum-de-dum; I can’t HEAR you …” until the impolite noises from the far end of the room trail off and they can pick up their conversation where they left off.<\/p>\n
If they continue to ignore the truth — the only independently confirmable explanation that adequately explains and predicts the ongoing “failures” of the current schooling system to turn out happy, well-rounded, well-read citizens — do they really believe it will go away?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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