Gatto writes in his Chapter, The Camino de Santiago, on p. 91 of Weapons of Mass Education:
"Feedback
Let me confess from the start I'm on the board of advisors of an organization called TV-Free America. As a school teacher I found that the kids who drove me crazy were always big TV watchers. Their behaviour profile wasn't pretty. TV addicted kids were irresponsible, childish, dishonest, malicious to one another; above all else they seemed to lack any sustaining purpose of their own, as if by consuming too many made-up stories, modeling themselves after too many men and women who were pretending to be somebody else, listening to too many talking hamburgers and too many explanations of the way things are (sponsored by oil companies and dairy councils) they had lost the power to behave with integrity - to grow up.
It was almost as if my stealing time children needed to write their own stories, television - like school itself - had dwarfed their spirits. When computers came along, I saw they often made the problem worse. Potentially, they were a better deal, because of the capacity to offer interactivity, but a majority of users I saw wallowed in porno, games spent playing against programs, not other people, and many spectator pursuits which required only consumption, not actively committed behavior.
Even with the internet I saw how easy it was to cross the line into a passive state unless good disciplin was exercised, and I knew from experience how hard that was ot come by."
After realizing that preaching about TV's negative effects to kids wouldn't work, Gatto writes, " Relief would have to come from a different quarter; if these things were truly as bad as I believed, if they diminished the intellect and corrupted the character as I felt, a solution would have to be found in the natural proclivity of the young to move around physically, not sit, before we suppress that urge with confinement to seats in school and with commercial blandishments to watch performers rather than to perform oneself.
The master mechanism at work to cause harm was a suppression of natural feedback circuits which allow us to learn from our mistakes. Somebody trying to learn to sail alone in a small boat will inevitably tack too far left and too far right when sailing into the wind, when the destination is straight ahead, but practice will correct that beginner's error because feedback will instruct the sailor's reaction and judgment. In the area of mastering speech, with all its complex rhythms of syntax, and myriad notes and tones of diction, the most crucial variable is time spent in practice. And in both instances the more challenging the situation, the quicker that competence is reached"
"The absolute necessity for feedback from everywhere in taking an education (even from one's enemies) forced me to look closely at how rigidly students were ordered about - in a way which made little use of their innate ability to grow through feedback. My guess was that by restoring this natural biological circuitry, the hideous displays of media-sickened behavior among my students would decline. And the guess proved right."
Gatto goes on to describe some of his Guerrilla Curriculum, for example, sending them out on expeditions, where they could be face to face with reality, challenged by the nerve-wracking and exhilarating waters of real life... READ IT!
The bottom line is that most TV and most schooling encourages passivity, and in it's pre-packaged, factory style production of consumers of disconnected knowledge bits and stuff to buy, limits our natural born abilities to use feedback, learn from experience, self-correct, and enjoy challenging ourselves.
Yep, Yep, Yep!
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Screen Time and D's Review of Learning Web Sites
Ah, to reduce screen time or not, that is the question!
I recently had the wonderful privilege (thanks C.!) of attending Gordon Neufeld's latest conference in Vancouver. This year's theme was Rest, Play, Grow. One among hundreds of useful notions I brought home from this superb event, was the questioning of our use of screen time: in front of the computer or TV.
Gordon believes that true growth (developmental) and learning only truly occur when children are at rest and filled up with love (unconditional acceptance, with all their needs met double!). Yet, he bemoans, we make them work all the time, work for our love, work for attention, work to compete in and manage peer social situations, work for grades, rewards and approval, work for outcomes, rather than truly be at peace, secure in love and safety, and at rest, so that their minds can truly process, play with and come to understand their world and the part they play in it. Gordon recommends that children need several hours a day of free play, alone play, a safe resting time, with no screen time.
What role does screen time play in your household?
In ours, I've tried to keep it minimal. I believe our son watches a fair amount of TV shows and movies at his dad's. Plus, he's a pretty over-scheduled little dude. What with living in a joint custody arrangement, switching homes every other day during the work week, and alternating weekends, as well as having to transition between 2.5 mornings of pre-school, to the socializing with our home daycare kids, and then if he's lucky a few evenings a week of down time. Now his dad has him enrolled in three evenings a week of extra-curricular classes, and one Saturday morning! So with this in mind, I try to limit screen time if only to provide that wonderfully free-flow creative place that occurs when he's left to his own thoughts and devices.
We watch one movie every one to two weeks, either fiction or nature / science. I may put on a short video during the day, if no naps occur, extremely infrequently, to get a "break" for myself. Finally over the last two years, my son has experimented with three "learning" websites on line. Which he pretty much self regulates now, using one perhaps once a month. Many have claimed that reading websites have helped their children a lot. I think that if Daniel spent more time with them, this might be the case for him. So far, their influence has been hard to see, one small element in the wonderful variety of learning opportunities that my son experiences all the time.
Poisson Rouge is definitely worth checking out, with no advertising, or character / brand recognition, pleasant sound effects, and an endless assortment of different types of games, learning tools, experiences with site, sound, shape, movement etc., this very simple site can be entertaining, introduce all kinds of concepts to a child, and give them practice in navigating on the computer, using a mouse to click, drag etc. and encouraging a little early "internet ethics". The site starts on one page, designed as a play room, and by clicking on each toy or play thing, you are taken to different pages, each with another array of things to click on. In other words, in order to find your way around, one must always go back. Some beautiful simple ideas here.
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
Many have recommended Star Fall, and I do too, with it's phonetics, games, read longs and early readers, there's and endless supply of levels, and approaches, which, after two years, my son has still not exhausted. At first he was not at all interested in the simple phonetics exercises, but now, after gaining more real time knowledge of sounds, sight words and the power of reading / writing, I notice he's going back to these exercises as if to consolidate what he already knows. Star Fall introduced my son to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which fascinated him for ages. He asked if he could watch the ballet, and this opened all kinds of other doors! Also his interest in Greek Myths was peaked by their over-simplified version of Theseus and The Minator. Now, he is well versed in the discussion of different versions of stories: comparative lit!!!
http://www.starfall.com/
We encountered Brainpop and did the trial - I believe it's the first two levels you get for free, and then you have to pay. Another, largely phonetically based reading site, I like the fact that it introduces whole sounds right away: 'ee' for example. It has funky animation with aliens etc., and cool sound effects, but relies mostly on rote learning, and that infuriating trick of making kids feel like they are interacting with the computer, like Dora shows: "Say, "ee"!___________Good that's right!" Yeeechhh!
https://secure.brainpop.com/trial/step1/
I love my son's review of the two. "I like Brain Pop because I think the animation, sound effects and ideas are cool, but it's totally directed by the computer, you have to do what they tell you, and have no choices. I prefer Star Fall because it's open ended, you can start or quit any activity, say whether you liked it or not, choose what kind of reading / learning you want to do, and choose any level you want. That way is definitely better for learning.
Oh, boy, I have to tear myself away from the SCREEN! And do some real time work!!!!!
AAcchhh! Chow for now.
I recently had the wonderful privilege (thanks C.!) of attending Gordon Neufeld's latest conference in Vancouver. This year's theme was Rest, Play, Grow. One among hundreds of useful notions I brought home from this superb event, was the questioning of our use of screen time: in front of the computer or TV.
Gordon believes that true growth (developmental) and learning only truly occur when children are at rest and filled up with love (unconditional acceptance, with all their needs met double!). Yet, he bemoans, we make them work all the time, work for our love, work for attention, work to compete in and manage peer social situations, work for grades, rewards and approval, work for outcomes, rather than truly be at peace, secure in love and safety, and at rest, so that their minds can truly process, play with and come to understand their world and the part they play in it. Gordon recommends that children need several hours a day of free play, alone play, a safe resting time, with no screen time.
What role does screen time play in your household?
In ours, I've tried to keep it minimal. I believe our son watches a fair amount of TV shows and movies at his dad's. Plus, he's a pretty over-scheduled little dude. What with living in a joint custody arrangement, switching homes every other day during the work week, and alternating weekends, as well as having to transition between 2.5 mornings of pre-school, to the socializing with our home daycare kids, and then if he's lucky a few evenings a week of down time. Now his dad has him enrolled in three evenings a week of extra-curricular classes, and one Saturday morning! So with this in mind, I try to limit screen time if only to provide that wonderfully free-flow creative place that occurs when he's left to his own thoughts and devices.
We watch one movie every one to two weeks, either fiction or nature / science. I may put on a short video during the day, if no naps occur, extremely infrequently, to get a "break" for myself. Finally over the last two years, my son has experimented with three "learning" websites on line. Which he pretty much self regulates now, using one perhaps once a month. Many have claimed that reading websites have helped their children a lot. I think that if Daniel spent more time with them, this might be the case for him. So far, their influence has been hard to see, one small element in the wonderful variety of learning opportunities that my son experiences all the time.
Poisson Rouge is definitely worth checking out, with no advertising, or character / brand recognition, pleasant sound effects, and an endless assortment of different types of games, learning tools, experiences with site, sound, shape, movement etc., this very simple site can be entertaining, introduce all kinds of concepts to a child, and give them practice in navigating on the computer, using a mouse to click, drag etc. and encouraging a little early "internet ethics". The site starts on one page, designed as a play room, and by clicking on each toy or play thing, you are taken to different pages, each with another array of things to click on. In other words, in order to find your way around, one must always go back. Some beautiful simple ideas here.
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
Many have recommended Star Fall, and I do too, with it's phonetics, games, read longs and early readers, there's and endless supply of levels, and approaches, which, after two years, my son has still not exhausted. At first he was not at all interested in the simple phonetics exercises, but now, after gaining more real time knowledge of sounds, sight words and the power of reading / writing, I notice he's going back to these exercises as if to consolidate what he already knows. Star Fall introduced my son to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which fascinated him for ages. He asked if he could watch the ballet, and this opened all kinds of other doors! Also his interest in Greek Myths was peaked by their over-simplified version of Theseus and The Minator. Now, he is well versed in the discussion of different versions of stories: comparative lit!!!
http://www.starfall.com/
We encountered Brainpop and did the trial - I believe it's the first two levels you get for free, and then you have to pay. Another, largely phonetically based reading site, I like the fact that it introduces whole sounds right away: 'ee' for example. It has funky animation with aliens etc., and cool sound effects, but relies mostly on rote learning, and that infuriating trick of making kids feel like they are interacting with the computer, like Dora shows: "Say, "ee"!___________Good that's right!" Yeeechhh!
https://secure.brainpop.com/trial/step1/
I love my son's review of the two. "I like Brain Pop because I think the animation, sound effects and ideas are cool, but it's totally directed by the computer, you have to do what they tell you, and have no choices. I prefer Star Fall because it's open ended, you can start or quit any activity, say whether you liked it or not, choose what kind of reading / learning you want to do, and choose any level you want. That way is definitely better for learning.
Oh, boy, I have to tear myself away from the SCREEN! And do some real time work!!!!!
AAcchhh! Chow for now.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Gatto's Take on Compulsory US Education
I'm just embarking on John T. Gatto's book, Weapons of Mass Education, and can't resist quoting exerts from his prologue. I'm not even sure if it's legal to essentially copy someone's writing like this onto one's blog...anyone know?
I'd love to know what others think. Is Gatto too extreme? Doe he misquote people, or skew quotes to suit his purpose? Is it really true?
The summary from the end says it all, p.xxii. If it means anything to you at all, I urge you to read on, and in fact get the book. I have put in bold stuff that speaks to me loudly.
` "Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, it's tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School teaches children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low thresh hold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on serious material, in history,literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff school teachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more important life, and they can.
First, though, wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhood's extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale student today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."
Bits and pieces from the beginning. P.xii to xxi.
"I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert of boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they were so bored, they always gave me the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block style forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience revealed to me what many other teachers must learn a long the way, too, yet keep to themselves for for fear of reprisal: if we wanted we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take and education rather than merely receive schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong, but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said he would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?"
"Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as rationale, because a million happy home-schoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out alright. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them to be sure, but they were not products of school system, and not one of them was "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high-school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think "success" is synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling", but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find ways to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?"
Gatto goes on to site and quote numerous powers and professionals involved in educational decision making whose words and work express the original and on-going purpose of compulsory mass education in the US.
H.L. Mencken, in The American Mercury, April 1924, wrote that the aim of public education is not "...to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be farther from the truth. The aim...is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United states..and that is its aim everywhere else."
Lest Mencken, reputedly a satirist, not be taken seriously, Gatto explains how his article traces our education's template back to the military state of Prussia.
"William James alluded to it [the Prussian origin of our educational system] many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Pussianization of American school back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh annual Report" to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here.}"
"What shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable"."
James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard for twenty years,WWI poison gas specialist, WWII executive of the Atomic bomb project, high commisioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and Gatto says, "truly one of the most influential figures of the Twentieth Century", wrote, in his 1959 book-length essay, The Child, the Parent,and the State, about the modern American educational system being the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. In this essay he directs the curious to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education.
"Inglis, for whom an honor lecture in education is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical intervention into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole."
"Lest you consider Inglis as isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South surely understood that the Prussian system was useful, in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force, but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them, Carnegie and J.D. Rockefeller."
"Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School teacher's association in 1909: "We want one class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind these disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by-now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed."
"Mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume non-stop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them, sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era - marketing.
Now you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older, but never grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book, Public Education in The United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years already, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley was an intimate colleague of Dr. Inglis: both were in charge of textbook publishing divisions at Houghton Mifflin - Cubberley as chief of elementary texts; Inglis of secondary texts``. Cubberley was dean of Stanford's influential school of education as well, a friendly correspondent of Conant at Harvard. He had written in his book Public School administration (1922) that "Our schools are..factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned...And that is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at our relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or no, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one, too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it."
I'd love to know what others think. Is Gatto too extreme? Doe he misquote people, or skew quotes to suit his purpose? Is it really true?
The summary from the end says it all, p.xxii. If it means anything to you at all, I urge you to read on, and in fact get the book. I have put in bold stuff that speaks to me loudly.
` "Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, it's tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School teaches children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low thresh hold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on serious material, in history,literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff school teachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more important life, and they can.
First, though, wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhood's extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale student today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."
Bits and pieces from the beginning. P.xii to xxi.
"I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert of boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they were so bored, they always gave me the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block style forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience revealed to me what many other teachers must learn a long the way, too, yet keep to themselves for for fear of reprisal: if we wanted we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take and education rather than merely receive schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong, but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said he would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?"
"Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as rationale, because a million happy home-schoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out alright. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them to be sure, but they were not products of school system, and not one of them was "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high-school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think "success" is synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling", but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find ways to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?"
Gatto goes on to site and quote numerous powers and professionals involved in educational decision making whose words and work express the original and on-going purpose of compulsory mass education in the US.
H.L. Mencken, in The American Mercury, April 1924, wrote that the aim of public education is not "...to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be farther from the truth. The aim...is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United states..and that is its aim everywhere else."
Lest Mencken, reputedly a satirist, not be taken seriously, Gatto explains how his article traces our education's template back to the military state of Prussia.
"William James alluded to it [the Prussian origin of our educational system] many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Pussianization of American school back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh annual Report" to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here.}"
"What shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable"."
James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard for twenty years,WWI poison gas specialist, WWII executive of the Atomic bomb project, high commisioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and Gatto says, "truly one of the most influential figures of the Twentieth Century", wrote, in his 1959 book-length essay, The Child, the Parent,and the State, about the modern American educational system being the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. In this essay he directs the curious to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education.
"Inglis, for whom an honor lecture in education is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical intervention into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole."
"Lest you consider Inglis as isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South surely understood that the Prussian system was useful, in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force, but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them, Carnegie and J.D. Rockefeller."
"Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School teacher's association in 1909: "We want one class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind these disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by-now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed."
"Mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume non-stop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them, sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era - marketing.
Now you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older, but never grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book, Public Education in The United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years already, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley was an intimate colleague of Dr. Inglis: both were in charge of textbook publishing divisions at Houghton Mifflin - Cubberley as chief of elementary texts; Inglis of secondary texts``. Cubberley was dean of Stanford's influential school of education as well, a friendly correspondent of Conant at Harvard. He had written in his book Public School administration (1922) that "Our schools are..factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned...And that is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at our relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or no, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one, too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it."
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Do you teach your children religion or spirituality?
Around the age of three, my son became interested in discussing Halloween and The Day of the Dead. We'd found a board book on the Mexican tradition and it helped to introduce a discussion for us of both traditions from different cultures (his papa is from Mexico) and ideas about death, rebirth, and the cycles of nature.
At the time, we had a friend who was sick and seemed to be close to death. My son wanted to understand. Is it too young? Should children be sheltered from such realities until older? What if it is their reality?
My son wanted to know. Many other children I have met and cared for have shown interest in the many hidden and mysterious aspects of life.
How do we teach or guide them through this curiosity?
Portraying death and the cycling of nature as "natural" - let that pumpkin rot on the patio and take it to the compost or leave it in the yard for its ceremonious return to the earth!
We spoke of the notions of spirits, ghosts, heaven, human's scientific knowledge of the breakdown of life into death and regeneration...always as 'Some people believe...Others believe....I personally believe...what do you think?'
It might be different for a family that believes in a specific religion or spiritual way and dearly wants to pass on this knowledge and the 'code of behaviour / mind' that may belong to it....
In my humble experience, whether you choose the route of pluralism, tolerance, relativity or one of guided spiritual / moral /religious teachings, children are drawn intuitively and happily to the mysteries.
My son loved the poster we made of the cycles of nature, with the leaves and seeds falling, rotting, mingling with earth, the new life sprouting forth, the trees and humans ever reaching to the skies, the roughly drawn, almost invisible spirits floating up among the leaves and clouds. For him, these figures were no more or less real than witches, fairies, dragons, dinosaurs....
At an early age, he awoke one morning, laying in bed beside me, to ask where I thought the spirit was. I replied, 'I'm not sure, what do you think?' He pointed up to the ceiling and said, 'Up there.' 'Where, above or below the ceiling?' I asked. 'Both above and below. It is everywhere.' says he. I had not spoken these words to him.
At first, he had no fears of death, skeletons, the symbols we see in Halloween, then gradually they started. Since then his expressions of belief, fear, wonder have wafted, based on cultural and media exposure, growing awareness, the steady development of rationalizing fears, risk factors, and, in tow, the joys of wonderment.
He is a story-teller by nature and has largely grasped the value of flights of fantasy, the power our imagination has, the escape, the sense of self power and connection to the vastness and mystery of life....
These musings that help our children make connections between themselves and their natural surroundings - 'Look mum, I see signs of raspberries, from the flower comes the fruit, from the fruit comes the seed...', 'Mum, if you close your eyes to slits and look at the sun, you can see volcanoes erupting on the surface - it's amazing, you should try it. Just think how hot it is, but we can't live without it." These musings that help our children make connections between themselves and the people and society around them, aging folk, sick folk, homeless folk, growing up, change, time....'We have a long life ahead of us', says my son to a friend who doesn't want to grow up, 'We have many dreams to live, don't worry.'
Are these musings any less important than learning to read, write, calculate, shop, socialize, watch TV?
In a consumer world of cars, pollution, fashion, Barbies, and Bionicles, what would we have our children dream of when they lay in bed?
Some time after my son had encountered Star Wars around the age of four, he awoke again laying in bed beside me to say: 'You know, mum, many people don't believe in the force, but if they just closed their eyes and concentrated, they could feel it, everyone has it, it's up there, out there everywhere, you just need to believe in it and you will feel it. It can help you a lot to be brave and concentrate.'
Of course he still spends most of his time imagining the battles, the weapons, the armor, but the force will always be with him (I hope).
Peter Pan's message that fairies will cease to exist if we don't believe in them has helped.
Always, when I spin fantastical tales about how statues used to be real but were turned to stone by some evil sorcerer for some reason or other, like they held the secret for saving the planet etc., his doubts appear: 'Are you making this up, mum?' It's up to you to decide I say.
He's latched on to the idea that the hidden mysteries are useful, palpable, delicious, and life-empowering. And so he has the power of wonderment, questing. Is this bad? I think not.
I've noticed that the children love the Greek Myths, First Nations' Tales and many others that embody powers or nature and animals. I believe it's natural, as children grow to experience otherness outside of their own bodies and those of their parents and other attached care-givers, they start to experience the dogs, birds, planes, trucks, bugs, trees waving in the wind, lightening - they yearn not only for names and explanations, but also identities, forces, essences, relationships (morals?), mostly stories that bind.
Have you compared the original "Little Mermaid" to the Disney "Ariel" ? In the former, the women are all empowered, none are evil or stupid or meek, the story line is about death, eternal life, rebirth, sacrifice for the good of others, love, personal choice and transformation. Wow! How much children's stories have changed!
I am absolutely blessed to be raising my own boy, and have the great privilege of sharing in the raising of others' children. My boy is fascinated by, among many other things, fighting, warriors, heroes and war-play. Yet, when we make up stories with Bionicles (Have you seen the world they inhabit?) he begs for my story lines, that usually begin with something like: 'I'm only a skeleton of my former self, I'm on a quest to recover my heart / spirit, will you help me?'
Our children are yearning for meaning, and I believe, much more meaning than ABC, 2+2=4, and if you boil water it turns into a gas. They are yearning to exercise one of the many gifts they are born with, likely the most important gift, the gift to imagine, and with this gift, the power to create hope and solutions for their future and far beyond, to feel intimately inter-connected and cherish life in all its forms and expressions.
I would pray with all my childhood wonder (I thank my mother and father for this) that we would not neglect this teaching through the myriad of forms we have available to us in our times.
There is no greater task.
At the time, we had a friend who was sick and seemed to be close to death. My son wanted to understand. Is it too young? Should children be sheltered from such realities until older? What if it is their reality?
My son wanted to know. Many other children I have met and cared for have shown interest in the many hidden and mysterious aspects of life.
How do we teach or guide them through this curiosity?
Portraying death and the cycling of nature as "natural" - let that pumpkin rot on the patio and take it to the compost or leave it in the yard for its ceremonious return to the earth!
We spoke of the notions of spirits, ghosts, heaven, human's scientific knowledge of the breakdown of life into death and regeneration...always as 'Some people believe...Others believe....I personally believe...what do you think?'
It might be different for a family that believes in a specific religion or spiritual way and dearly wants to pass on this knowledge and the 'code of behaviour / mind' that may belong to it....
In my humble experience, whether you choose the route of pluralism, tolerance, relativity or one of guided spiritual / moral /religious teachings, children are drawn intuitively and happily to the mysteries.
My son loved the poster we made of the cycles of nature, with the leaves and seeds falling, rotting, mingling with earth, the new life sprouting forth, the trees and humans ever reaching to the skies, the roughly drawn, almost invisible spirits floating up among the leaves and clouds. For him, these figures were no more or less real than witches, fairies, dragons, dinosaurs....
At an early age, he awoke one morning, laying in bed beside me, to ask where I thought the spirit was. I replied, 'I'm not sure, what do you think?' He pointed up to the ceiling and said, 'Up there.' 'Where, above or below the ceiling?' I asked. 'Both above and below. It is everywhere.' says he. I had not spoken these words to him.
At first, he had no fears of death, skeletons, the symbols we see in Halloween, then gradually they started. Since then his expressions of belief, fear, wonder have wafted, based on cultural and media exposure, growing awareness, the steady development of rationalizing fears, risk factors, and, in tow, the joys of wonderment.
He is a story-teller by nature and has largely grasped the value of flights of fantasy, the power our imagination has, the escape, the sense of self power and connection to the vastness and mystery of life....
These musings that help our children make connections between themselves and their natural surroundings - 'Look mum, I see signs of raspberries, from the flower comes the fruit, from the fruit comes the seed...', 'Mum, if you close your eyes to slits and look at the sun, you can see volcanoes erupting on the surface - it's amazing, you should try it. Just think how hot it is, but we can't live without it." These musings that help our children make connections between themselves and the people and society around them, aging folk, sick folk, homeless folk, growing up, change, time....'We have a long life ahead of us', says my son to a friend who doesn't want to grow up, 'We have many dreams to live, don't worry.'
Are these musings any less important than learning to read, write, calculate, shop, socialize, watch TV?
In a consumer world of cars, pollution, fashion, Barbies, and Bionicles, what would we have our children dream of when they lay in bed?
Some time after my son had encountered Star Wars around the age of four, he awoke again laying in bed beside me to say: 'You know, mum, many people don't believe in the force, but if they just closed their eyes and concentrated, they could feel it, everyone has it, it's up there, out there everywhere, you just need to believe in it and you will feel it. It can help you a lot to be brave and concentrate.'
Of course he still spends most of his time imagining the battles, the weapons, the armor, but the force will always be with him (I hope).
Peter Pan's message that fairies will cease to exist if we don't believe in them has helped.
Always, when I spin fantastical tales about how statues used to be real but were turned to stone by some evil sorcerer for some reason or other, like they held the secret for saving the planet etc., his doubts appear: 'Are you making this up, mum?' It's up to you to decide I say.
He's latched on to the idea that the hidden mysteries are useful, palpable, delicious, and life-empowering. And so he has the power of wonderment, questing. Is this bad? I think not.
I've noticed that the children love the Greek Myths, First Nations' Tales and many others that embody powers or nature and animals. I believe it's natural, as children grow to experience otherness outside of their own bodies and those of their parents and other attached care-givers, they start to experience the dogs, birds, planes, trucks, bugs, trees waving in the wind, lightening - they yearn not only for names and explanations, but also identities, forces, essences, relationships (morals?), mostly stories that bind.
Have you compared the original "Little Mermaid" to the Disney "Ariel" ? In the former, the women are all empowered, none are evil or stupid or meek, the story line is about death, eternal life, rebirth, sacrifice for the good of others, love, personal choice and transformation. Wow! How much children's stories have changed!
I am absolutely blessed to be raising my own boy, and have the great privilege of sharing in the raising of others' children. My boy is fascinated by, among many other things, fighting, warriors, heroes and war-play. Yet, when we make up stories with Bionicles (Have you seen the world they inhabit?) he begs for my story lines, that usually begin with something like: 'I'm only a skeleton of my former self, I'm on a quest to recover my heart / spirit, will you help me?'
Our children are yearning for meaning, and I believe, much more meaning than ABC, 2+2=4, and if you boil water it turns into a gas. They are yearning to exercise one of the many gifts they are born with, likely the most important gift, the gift to imagine, and with this gift, the power to create hope and solutions for their future and far beyond, to feel intimately inter-connected and cherish life in all its forms and expressions.
I would pray with all my childhood wonder (I thank my mother and father for this) that we would not neglect this teaching through the myriad of forms we have available to us in our times.
There is no greater task.
What of Religion / Spriituality
A post from yahoo group, parents on the Drive in response to questions and concerns about children being taught religion in daycare/pre-school.....
Just as a potential farmer may be born into a family of academics that push their youngster, who would rather dig in the dirt and plant seeds, towards "higher" academic learning, so a family of antheists /agnsotics may have a child who yearns for spiritual / mystical / godly connection....tricky stuff!
I love this topic!! I love too, what you, Yvette said about hearts, well chosen, beautiful words!
My son started asking 'spiritual questions' early, and I run a home daycare. I have chosen to tell mythical and moral tales at our daycare, some Christian, some Buddhist, many Greek, pagan etc. Children are naturally drawn to deep meaning, moral tales, fantasy, and roles of dark and light, cycles, powers of nature...this is why they love fairy tales AND super heroes, many children as young as four will love to tell you what they believe in and find out if you agree, so my approach has always been to go with their interest, explain that different people believe different stories, that in each their is a seed of knowledge that they may enjoy or relate to, that each person as they grow comes to their own belief. If a child wants ot see the inside of a church or temple, in we go! Why not?
I've watched my son's vision of Santa be destroyed by an older child's non-belief....it was hard, but considering where we live, I think these discussions amoungst children, and between children and adults will come at some point, no? Better than, do you prefer puma or nike, no?
We live in a pluralistic society, children want to know from us, primarily what we believe as their parents. At daycare or school if they are being "force-fed" some ideas you don't believe in (of course you should discuss this with the staff, yet...consumer culture is force-feeding us all around!), then you can and should be able to tell your own story and your child will most likely want more than anything else to come to understand it - yours!
My parents had two different religions, neither of which they were that attached to. Instead, they chose to 'grace' us with ideas of tolerance, a smattering of the pagan roots of Christianity, a good dose of history, and finally, atheism. Still, by the age of 10, I was very interested in world religions and of my own accord decided to visit a variety of places of worship...
Just as a potential farmer may be born into a family of academics that push their youngster, who would rather dig in the dirt and plant seeds, towards "higher" academic learning, so a family of antheists /agnsotics may have a child who yearns for spiritual / mystical / godly connection....tricky stuff!
I love this topic!! I love too, what you, Yvette said about hearts, well chosen, beautiful words!
My son started asking 'spiritual questions' early, and I run a home daycare. I have chosen to tell mythical and moral tales at our daycare, some Christian, some Buddhist, many Greek, pagan etc. Children are naturally drawn to deep meaning, moral tales, fantasy, and roles of dark and light, cycles, powers of nature...this is why they love fairy tales AND super heroes, many children as young as four will love to tell you what they believe in and find out if you agree, so my approach has always been to go with their interest, explain that different people believe different stories, that in each their is a seed of knowledge that they may enjoy or relate to, that each person as they grow comes to their own belief. If a child wants ot see the inside of a church or temple, in we go! Why not?
I've watched my son's vision of Santa be destroyed by an older child's non-belief....it was hard, but considering where we live, I think these discussions amoungst children, and between children and adults will come at some point, no? Better than, do you prefer puma or nike, no?
We live in a pluralistic society, children want to know from us, primarily what we believe as their parents. At daycare or school if they are being "force-fed" some ideas you don't believe in (of course you should discuss this with the staff, yet...consumer culture is force-feeding us all around!), then you can and should be able to tell your own story and your child will most likely want more than anything else to come to understand it - yours!
My parents had two different religions, neither of which they were that attached to. Instead, they chose to 'grace' us with ideas of tolerance, a smattering of the pagan roots of Christianity, a good dose of history, and finally, atheism. Still, by the age of 10, I was very interested in world religions and of my own accord decided to visit a variety of places of worship...
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