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."