[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 109, Issue 52

[Tony Anderson]

Great find.

Thanks,

Tony

On 04/23/2017 11:28 PM, iaep-request at lists.sugarlabs.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>     1. Sugar Labs Mission & The 6 lesson Schoolteacher (Dave Crossland)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2017 11:28:47 -0400
> From: Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com>
> To: iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>, Walter Bender
> 	<walter.bender at gmail.com>
> Subject: [IAEP] Sugar Labs Mission & The 6 lesson Schoolteacher
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAEozd0yKXXW73b6iOzPxWO4PENDhPP66poUUcAH=kO0qjCr6xw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi
>
> What motivates me to contribute to sugar labs is an intuition that it is a
> reasonable response to the topics raised in the following essay.
>
> Since we are talking about the mission, I wonder if my intuition is
> correct. Is the mission of sugar labs to counter schoolteaching as
> described below?
> The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
>
> by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
>
> *Call me* Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to
> do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an
> instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at
> all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
>
> Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to
> schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more
> ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
>
> *The first* lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I
> don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my
> business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be
> returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children
> are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human
> being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a
> big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to
> accomplish is elusive.
>
> In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like
> it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If
> things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy
> and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So
> the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real
> lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
>
> Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge
> children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from
> the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when
> an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own
> experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I
> never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching
> are incompatible.
>
> The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class
> except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
>
> *The second* lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch.
> I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and
> down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other
> for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at
> once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is
> ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
>
> The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too
> deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their
> argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every
> interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain
> and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each
> undertaking with indifference.
>
> *The third* lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined
> chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without
> appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing
> a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary
> confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come
> thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself
> in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification,
> a contradiction of class theory.
>
> Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private
> moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me
> out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need
> water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry,
> depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things
> cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn,
> exist.
>
> *The fourth* lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you
> will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay
> me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good
> kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of
> enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few
> we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in
> my work, only conformity.
>
> Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make
> decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that
> and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break
> the will of those who resist.
>
> This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for
> a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of
> all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to
> make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our
> entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would
> fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The
> social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing
> counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with
> television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun;
> the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if
> people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on
> strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering
> would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply
> of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way
> of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't
> know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!
>
> *In lesson* five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an
> observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and
> judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into
> students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single
> percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be.
> Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes
> into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective-
> seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to
> arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the
> casual judgment of strangers.
>
> Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever
> appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of
> report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust
> themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified
> officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
>
> *In lesson* six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each
> student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no
> private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts
> 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are
> encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of
> course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.
>
> I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household,
> where students might otherwise use the time to learn something
> unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some
> wiser person in the neighborhood.
>
> The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that
> privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain
> influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in
> the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis
> Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be
> closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.
>
> *It is* the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my
> fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small
> number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few
> lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and
> variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the
> miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to
> cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do
> many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all
> by ourselves, as individuals.
>
> It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math
> skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for
> "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the
> time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just
> taught you.
>
> We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States
> since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear,
> the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to
> coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the
> epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening
> of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our
> lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central
> control imposes.
>
> Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a
> complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look
> around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.
>
> "School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering
> that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that
> narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which
> makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a
> premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial
> days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to
> speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We
> turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of
> Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory
> schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when
> he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
>
> *The current* debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is
> phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you
> about and a few more I've spared you. This curriculum produces moral and
> intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to
> reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.
>
> None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change.
> We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way.
> There is no "international competition" that compels our existence,
> difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media
> barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our
> nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that
> found meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the
> passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in
> curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent
> independence and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.
>
> *How did* these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we know them,
> they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful
> interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they
> are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the
> waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion
> -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the
> revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of
> Africans through the society after the Civil War.
>
> Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent
> underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center
> of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its
> original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the
> well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde
> of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged
> schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle
> class.
>
> Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money
> to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the
> professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching
> function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most
> clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny.
> Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that
> are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic,
> difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.
>
> *With lessons* like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we
> have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the
> adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the
> diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot
> concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past
> and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce
> they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent,
> passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to
> distraction.
>
> All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque
> extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality
> development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and
> inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I
> as a certified schoolteacher.
>
> "Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of
> training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will,
> if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of
> dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year
> without being torn to pieces.
>
> Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development.
> Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the
> instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No
> tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the
> massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are
> spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the
> business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot
> afford to save money, not even to help children.
>
> *At the* pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I
> must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most
> families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de-
> institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for
> public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near
> impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and
> for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the
> disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
>
> After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of
> schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking
> that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical
> determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies
> we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school
> prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and
> their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance,
> self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in
> service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
>
> Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after
> school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of
> television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent
> families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids
> have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to
> do it in.
>
> *A future* is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of
> us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as
> the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in
> material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are.
> School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad
> habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards
> doing it. I should know.
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