The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

[LiberalUprising]

It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.

Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.

How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.

Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.

http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2006/04/educational-system-was-designed-to.html

[Flabbergasted]

1. Uh....What does Un-educated mean?

[LiberalUprising]

5. From dictionary.com

Uneducated

adj

1: not having a good education

2: not adequately educated in the use of numerical terms and concepts

[Flabbergasted]

7. Umm....What does education mean?

[BrotherBuzz]

15. Education means edumacation...

without the intelligent design. ;)

[Flabbergasted]

19. Oh....!

[XemaSab]

2. There was an article about this in Harper's a few years back

Formal education as it is practiced today is designed to turn us into sheep.

[niyad]

3. Signs magazine had an article about 17 years ago stating this very

thing--this system is producing exactly the results that were intended. after all, an uneducated populace, unable to think critically, is far easier to control and manipulate.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

4. I'm working on a hypothosis...

Disclaimer: I haven't gotten past the "I wonder why" stage...

1. I have incredibly intelligent kids, yet the first two have dropped out of school because "it's boring" (as did I, and their dad, and their uncle)

2. Companies are "in-sourcing" people from other countries because they are better educated than US persons. (Intel, specifically from family experience)

3. kids are not taught :how: to think. Especially with NCLB they are taught to memorize. How does this help them get through life?


It's late, and I'm tired... and this is still a work in progress. Thanks for the link. :)

[Ladyhawk]

16. There was a lot of emphasis on rote memorization in my fundy school.

A lot of it had to do with respecting authority. Yes, you read that correctly. I had to memorize lists of why it was important to obey god, my father, the teachers, males, authority figured, etc. Is it any wonder I didn't know how to think critically?

Schools must teach according to what is on standardized tests. A standardized test doesn't measure the ability to think critically.

I didn't learn to think critically until I was in college.

During my fifth year (to get a teaching credential), I learned that kids could not think for themselves very well. Most of the curriculum was designed to elicit rote answers. The one refreshing difference was my second master teacher, who bucked teaching kids to pass the standardized test. Her classes were completely different and geared toward getting the kids to think for themselves.

She found the idea of "no stupid questions" to be the height of stupidity. Of course there are stupid questions. Kids will ask them until they're blue in the face. Whenever a student would ask a question, this teacher would say, "What do you think?" About 90% of the time, the student would already know the answer to the question, at which point the teacher would (very nicely) say, "Then why did you ask me? You're smart. You figured it out by yourself."

This teacher's students did terrible on the standardized tests, but her students learned to think for themselves. Class discussions were surprisingly stimulating considering the kids were in the second grade. Each one progressed at his or her own pace in reading and writing. (The teacher was still trying to work out the best way to teach arithmetic so it would be fun and stimulate thinking.)

Just thought I'd throw this experience out there.

My opinion is that standardized tests have stilted individual creative thought. I'm not sure how to rectify the situation because there should be some standards, but perhaps those standards should include the ability to think critically. That ability can't be easily measured, so it is neglected.

/end of random thoughts

[SmokingJacket]

37. Here's what I did when I was a teacher...

1/3 rote, 1/3 critical thinking, 1/3 creativity.

Yes, that's a lot of rote, but I believe there IS value in memorization of some things. For instance, math facts: if kids have math facts down pat, not only will they do well on their standardized tests, but they'll find higher math MUCH easier to do. You can't think critically if you're sitting there trying to work out arithmetic on your fingers and getting all mixed up. In my classroom we spent time first thing drilling math facts -- it was a little bit of drudgery, but it was also fun and satisfying for the kids to get better and better at it.

Also, memorizing spelling words is actually a great thing. I didn't realize this until I became a teacher myself, and I saw that some kids -- special ed kids, for example -- could work hard on the spelling words and master them, even if reading happened to be difficult for them otherwise. It provided an enormous sense of accomplishment for the kids to get good grades based on hard work alone. And for all kids, learning how words are spelled really does increase their confidence when it comes to writing, and helps reading too.

One other thing worth memorizing: poetry. I had my students memorize poems and recite them to the class if they wanted to. Some kids who otherwise struggled in school really took to this, and it increased vocabulary, appreciation for literature, self-confidence and poise.

Critical thinking: math algorithms, paragraph construction, all of science, etc. This is basically the important backbone of school. Still, I maintain that you can't think critically unless you have something to think critically *about* -- so we spent a lot of time just reading and discussing.

Creativity: writing, art, music, drama. Besides the other obvious benefits of the arts, creativity is FUN and keeps kids stimulated and interested in school.

I was a good teacher. I got their test scores up, which kept everyone happy, without sacrificing what I thought was really important: enthusiasm for learning. The principal put all the notoriously difficult kids in my class, because I liked the challenge they presented. But -- I ended up quitting teaching. Why? Because teaching well takes all of your energy, all the time. And aside from my principal, who was great, the adminstration was awful: stupid and wrong-headed and actually evil (members of the KKK, I kid you not).

[12345]

23. I splept through school, and became valedictorian..

I've been working ever since (more than 10 years) to undo the damage. I hate myself for it now, but I was always praised because I got straight A's and great test scores. I didn't care much at the time that I was learning not to learn and not to be independent. I had other priorities. Now that I have a child, sending him to school scares me. My husband thinks that even though school is mind-numbing, it's worthwhile for the socialization. I worry that the bad outweighs the good, and I'm not convinced that kids are being socialized in way that accurately reflects the real word. What to do, what to do...

Anyway, I'm in that same "I wonder why" stage...

[Journeyman]

6. "I'm a self-educated man," said a visitor to Oscar Wilde.

"As are we all," came the reply. "As are we all."

[rwenos]

8. I Don't Buy Your Major Premise

If American schooling is so terrible, why do we lead the world in Nobel Laureates? Why do American companies and universities create the most dazzling technology in the world (both civilian and military)? Why are American universities flooded with international students?

If your kids are bored and dropped out of school -- and you did the same thing -- maybe your kids watched you, and listened to you, and did what you did.

I've heard these arguments about American public schools, and universities, many times.

I don't buy it. But then I'm looking at the ENTIRE education system, not just K-12.

[LiberalUprising]

17. From the article

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."

[ChristianLibrul]

9. Total bullshit

I taught junior and senior high school English here in Tennessee for 26 years. None of what this fool says ever applied to my (large) school system. We strove for the exact opposite of what he says. We had regular in-services, workshops, guest speakers, many other continuing education efforts. We took classes in the summer. Hell, I taught classes to other teachers in the summers. We worked hard to get better every year.

Who didn't make similar efforts? Parents.

Each year of my career, kids were less disciplined, less mannered, less prepared to learn, less prepared to simply sit still in class. Or even to show up at all.

If parents as a group put in the training and continuing education that teachers as a group do, not to mention the planned daily, task-oriented, motivational time with kids, schools would be very different places.

To everyone who blames teachers for kids' bad behavior and performance, I say, "Screw you." And, "Shut the hell up." You simply don't know what the hell you're talking about. Spend a day at a school, and then tell me what does and doesn't go on is the teachers' fault.

[LiberalUprising]

11. Where did the author slam teachers?

He is saying it's the sytem by design that's fucked up

[bliss_eternal]

14. It's a difficult, thankless job

that comes with little respect and pay. Given that so many parents have their children scheduled to do so much these days, one would think on the way to a play date or activity there may be some time to teach children to say "please," "excuse me," or "thank you."

[ChristianLibrul]

20. That's not the problem

The problem is that most parents schedule their kids for nothing beyond watching tv and playing video games--if they can afford them.

My dad read to me when I was little. We played catch. He taught me chess. He taught me tennis. He taught me cribbage. He played Benny Goodman records and talked about seeing him live. He took me to buy books. He took me camping.

My mother was drilled with "safety" working at DuPont, and taught me that stuff. She taught me to cook (better than my ex-wife, it turned out). She was a Den Mother. She went fishing with us sometimes. She cooked wonderful meals with real biscuits and other great breads.

Nowadays, parents buy their kids too much stuff--do they really need cellphones, iPods and new shoes every week?--and feed them takeout or microwave meals. They never tell them, "No." At "play dates," moms sit over there and chat while kids play without getting dirty.

But when kids misbehave in school, it's the teachers' fault.

[400Years]

26. sheesh what a reactionary you are, try reading the info again

before you start foaming at the mouth

[knitter4democracy]

28. I taught high school English, too.

Granted, it was only for three years in the only job I could find in Cleveland, the Catholic schools. My mom taught public high school art for 33 years, though, and she agrees with Gatto.

Gatto is saying that the teachers do the very best they can with the system they work in. He blames the system, not the teachers. He looks at the Montessori system and Waldorf and other educational systems with better outcomes, even taking differences in student population bases into account, and he makes a strong point that the Dewey system sucks.

Try reading one or two of his pieces, both essays and books, and see what you think of his ideas.

[procopia]

10. American schools aren't perfect, but ...

they are not as bad as propagandists would have you believe.

Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation.

Conservatives like to compare international test scores, because that enables them to promote vouchers. The truth is, there are too many variables to accurately compare students internationally. In some cases, American students are tested on concepts they haven't yet studied; sometimes they compete against students who are several years older.

Yes, some American students are unmotivated, but that isn't necessarily the fault of the school. We have a different work ethic than other countries, and the biggest factor in a child's education is his parents.

[LiberalUprising]

12. Did you bother reading past the first paragraph?

[procopia]

18. Yes, and I disagree

with the author. Is that OK?

(age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)

Schools have evolved and changed since they were first designed, but some elements of practicality are still necessary and always will be. Educators have experimented with all kinds of techniques and formats, for example, classrooms that are not age-segregated, and successful ideas have been adopted for use. I taught for nearly 30 years, and saw many changes and improvements during that time, but emphasis on rote memorization was never a technique that I observed, and I have known few teachers who "lorded over" their students.

[Ladyhawk]

13. Here's a link to Gatto's book:

http://www.rit.edu/~cma8660/mirror/www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

I haven't read it, but the ideas expressed in the article were interesting.

[KyuzoGator]

21. In my opinion, a child's education has little to do with school.

I learned more about social interactions between different kinds of people in school than I ever learned about the academic "subjects" taught.

Everything worth learning I've taught myself. I was always ahead of the curve in math and history classes because I worked ahead on my own.

To me, education isn't learning...it's learning to learn. You have to condition yourself to learn for the rest of your life, not just until you turn 18 or 22.

[KittyWampus]

30. IMO, learning to get along with & work with others is the most valuable

lesson school can give us. And America is unique when it comes to having many different types of kids in the same classrooms togther.

Anyhow, Authority figures aren't inherently bad or undesirable and neither is learning to respect them. It's the blind acceptance and unwillingness to ever raise questions that's unhealthy.

[JCMach1]

22. Read Foucault- Discipline and Punish

It's all there.

[Reader Rabbit]

24. "Subversive" Teachers?

In my experience, there are one heck of a lot of teachers out there who didn't get the memo that we are supposed to be programming robots. I would agree that NCLB and the obsession with test scores is an attempt to make public education into one big assembly line for the manufacture of a homegrown underclass, but I would also like to point out that those of us in the trenches—most teachers, I suspect, although I won't speak for all my peers—are working actively against this cookie-cutter approach to education.

I know the article wasn't intended as an attack on teachers, but considering that we're always being blamed for so many of the ills of society, we can't help but be a little tetchy when the cause to which we have dedicated our lives gets called into question. Don't take this guy's words as gospel. Check out a few of your local schools yourself. You'll probably find that not all teachers are simple cogs in an enormous prole-manufacturing scheme; many of us are on the front lines in the battle to subvert the dominant paradigm.

And we could use a little help, instead of sniping and criticism from folks standing at a safe distance.

[slaveplanet]

25. Nothing new, they've had the same problems in England

try it for yourself

Taking the Test

A Victorian-era test was recently found. The questions covered Latin, British history, English grammar and arithmetic. This was an entrance exam for 11-year-olds! The test and its difficulty has started a furor in the British educational establishment.

Experts said A-level and GCSE students would struggle to pass the papers, which were published by The Spectator after being discovered by reader Humphrey Stanbury, whose father sat them and passed.

Chris Woodhead, the former chief inspector of schools, said politicians needed to accept the "sad truth" of falling standards. "We're spending more and more to keep our children at school longer and longer, and yet they know less than their peers did 20, 50, 100 years ago," he said.

But Paul Woodruff, the director of studies at St Paul's School in London, said the papers "read like Sellars and Yeatman in 1066 and All That". The questions "look mind-numbingly dull and not very difficult to mug up on", he said. "It is not evidence of dumbing down, just that the goalposts have moved. What would 1898 candidates have made of: 'Use a spreadsheet to answer the arithmetic questions. Use the internet to find answers to the geography and history questions.'"

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said it would be a "damning indictment" ofthe education system if there had been no change in 100 years. "It is no comment on standards to say things are simply different."

The current headmaster of King Edward's School, Roger Dancey, said: "Looking at this paper is great fun but not proof we've dumbed down ... education moves on."

A spokeswoman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said it was difficult to compare an entrance exam for one of Victorian Britain's top schools with today's tests.

You take the test. How would you do?

THE 1898 EXAM

No reference aids or calculators allowed. And certainly not Google

QUESTIONS

Arithmetic

1. Multiply 642035 by 24506

2. Subtract 3.25741 from 3.3; multiply 28.436 by 8.245; and divide .86655 by 26.5

3. Find the square root of 5.185,440,100

Geography

1. Where are silver, platinum, tin, wool, wheat, palm oil, furs and cacao from?

2. Name the conditions upon which the climate of a country depends, and explain the reason for any one of them

3. Where are Omdurman, Wai-Hei-Wai, Crete, Santiago, and West Key, and what are they noted for?

English history

1. What kings of England began to reign in the years 871, 1135, 1216, 1377, 1422, 1509, 1625, 1685, 1727 and 1830?

2. What important results followed the raising of the siege of Orleans, the Gunpowder Plot, the Scottish rebellion of 1639, the surrender at Yorktown and the battles of Bannockburn, Bosworth, Ethandune, La Hogue, Plassey and Vittoria?

3. How are the following people connected with English history: Harold Hardrada, Saladin, James IV of Scotland, Philip II of Spain, Frederick, Elector of Palatine?

ANSWERS

Arithmetic

1. 15,733,709,710 <2 marks>

2. 0.04259; 234.45482; 0.0327. <2 for each, total 6>

3. 2.2771561 <3>

Geography

1. South Africa; South Africa; Australia; Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina; Britain and France; Malaya and the Middle East; France and Eastern Europe; West Indies.

2. Climate depends on hemisphere, latitude, elevation, distance inland, sea surface temperature upwind, upwind topography, local topography. <1 for each factor, plus 2 for a detailed explanation of one factor, up to a total of 7>

3. Omdurman, the Sudan, was the site of a battle in 1898 between the Dervishes and troops led by General Horatio Kitchener. Wai-Hei-Wai, on the eastern shore of China, was the site of a conflict between the Chinese and the Japanese navies in 1879. Crete, in the Mediterranean, gained independence from Turkish occupancy in 1898. The Battle of Santiago, Cuba, in 1898 was the largest engagement of the Spanish-American War and resulted in Spain's failure to prevent a blockade of the island. West Key, Florida, was a war port in the Spanish-American War.

English history

1. Alfred the Great, Stephen, Henry III, Richard II, Henry VI, Henry VIII, Charles I, James II, George II, William IV.

2. The French Dauphin Charles was crowned king of France at Rheims; Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake for heresy. Guido Fawkes and seven others were hanged; a huge persecution of Catholics in England followed. Charles I tried to raise taxes to fight the rebellion, and he declared war on Parliament when it refused, leading to the Civil War. The surrender of such a large section of the British Army at Yorktown, America, secured the independence of the United States. The Scottish victory at Bannockburn established Robert Bruce upon the Scottish throne; independence followed 14 years later. The death of Richard III at Bosworth ended the Wars of the Roses and Henry VII started the Tudor dynasty. In 878, King Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, led his men to victory over the Danes at the Battle of Ethandune; a treaty was signed restricting the Danes to the north of the island. Plassey in 1757 marked the start of British conquest of India. Napoleon lost his grip on Spain at Vittoria 1813 (the defining moment of the Peninsula War), which became independent of France.

3. None were born in England but all made a claim to its throne. <1 for the connection, up to 2 for details, total 3>

HOW DID YOU SCORE?

0-5 Back to primary school

5-15 At least you tried

15-25 Respectable effort

25-35 Suspiciously competent

35+ Get off Google and put the calculator away. Start again without the "educational aids"

Other question on the exam include:

1.
Explain the meaning of o' Dee, dank with foam, western tide, round and round the sand, the rolling mist.
2.
On the outline map provided, mark the position of Carlisle, Canterbury, Plymouth, Hull, Gloucester, Swansea, Southampton, Worcester, Leeds, Leicester and Norwich; Morecambe Bay, The Wash, Solent, Menai Straits and Lyme Bay; St Bees Head, The Naze, Lizard Point, and state on a separate paper what the towns named above are noted for.
3.
State what you know of - Henry II's quarrel with Becket, the taking of Calais by Edward III, the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey queen, the Gordon riots.
4.
Write in columns the nominative singular, genitive plural, gender, and meaning of: operibus, principe, imperatori, genere, apro, nivem, vires, frondi, muri.
5.
Write these phrases in a column and put opposite to each its Latin: he will go; he may wish; he had; he had been; he will be heard; and give in a column the English of fore, amatum, regendus.



How'd you do?

[knitter4democracy]

27. Gatto rocks.

I love reading his stuff.

You know, I had a repuke for my Education in American Society class in college, and even he had to admit that our system is poorly designed for what we need it to do now and that Montessori's system works better. Interesting stuff.

[donco6]

29. You need to catch up.

No schools in my district have a 7 period day. Most are on block schedules - 85 minutes a day.

We still have a few schools with bells - most just look at the clock. They're all GPS coordinated time.

All of our high schools are small - 400 kids or fewer. Parents and students can choose from any of them. We provide transportation to their choice.

We have Expeditionary Learning Arts, The Academy, an International school, New Tech High (not a vocational school), Big Picture (completely individualized), and Early College (earn an AA degree in 5 years of HS).

Our staffing ratios at High school are 18:1, except for Big Picture and Early College which are 15:1.

Sometimes we age-segregate, sometimes not. Depends on what the kid needs. If he's ready for college calculus, he goes with the rest of the kids of any age.

We're a small district (5,500 students). We get about $6,500 per pupil in funding. 65% Hispanic. 55% Free lunch.

[Dora]

31. You know, the OP does have a salient point.

And you're very fortunate that Denver schools are as enlightened as your post describes them to be. My parents were/are career educators (elementary and university) and grass-roots agitators in the field; I spent a good 20 years of my life hearing their concerns, witnessing the realities of elementary and college education from their perspective, and later working in educational support, professional development, and teacher empowerment. I can attest that much of what the OP contains is in fact correct.

Gatto's concerns are real and his criticisms are prescient. Perhaps you have some catching up of your own to do. Just because your schools are doing something right doesn't also mean that the rest our country's schools are too.

[donco6]

34. What I get tired of,

is people such as the OP, who seem to assume that all public schools suck, because of his experience somewhere. I've read Gatto's work, and the work it's based on. It's not new. And we've been working hard to combat the very things he talks about - the industrialization of schools, the impersonalization, the "treating kids as widgets." And I know that many large city systems cannot seem to get any sort of change moving - for a myriad of reasons, and not the least of which is their sheer size (I personally don't think school districts should exceed 10,000 students).

But not all public schools are operating in large systems, and some are doing really good things - not just us, either. It's true that we're a bit unique, in that our entire district has been reinvented. But I think it's wrong to say that public education's very foundation is faulty, and that the only solution seems to be to blow the whole thing up and start over. That's entirely too defeatist for me, in MY experience. Which I think is just as valid as anyone's.

[leesa]

32. You get out of it what you put into it. Our SOCIETY doesn't value

education...look around you at all the scorn heaped onto intellectuals. Most kids are taught from the time they are little on that education is a waste of time in this country.

[BoneDaddy]

33. Actually that is only partly true

The main reason is the incredible apathy that exists not only among some kids but when you meet their parents you realize that education is not a value and that they have better things to do.

How do you expect the school systems to have all the responsiblity and yet NONE OF THE POWER to make any lasting change if what you do is either not supported at home or is undone.

The education system certainly has some faults, no denying that but we are limited in what we can do if the student has no desire to learn.

[RobinA]

36. My Issue Here

is that the education establishment has knuckled under to pressure rather than taking the lead. Students arrive with nanosecond attention spans? Don't insist that they develop an attention span by giving work that requires it, give shorter literature, excerpts from literature instead of the whole book, and high school science text books filled with pictures. SAT scores dropping like stones? Renorm them so no one will know. Kids behave like cretins? Don't take action because Mamma might sue. Let Mamma sue. Take it to court. Tell it to the judge and see how sympathetic to Mamma he/she is when junior got detention for threatening the teacher.

[BoneDaddy]

38. Can't disagree with that

The schools have certainly been hamstrung by No Child Left Behind too. With the litigiousness of so many parents, who enable their children, schools have become gunshy and have simply rolled over.

[Jose Diablo]

35. A fender stamping factory

from the link in the OP

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

Thats education in the 'industrial' world. Stamping out fenders for the future.

Let me see, this one's a fender for a Ford, he will work in the factory. Hmmm, this one looks like he'd make a good door for a Lincoln, Harvard for you buddy. Ahh, here we go, no doubt about it, cannon fodder, easy for us, shop classes. He'll be able to practice his artillery skills by shooting spit wads through a straw.

And so it went.

http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2006/04/educational-system-was-designed-to.html

Edit to add link and comment, so I can go back to the link.