Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
By John Taylor Gatto.

A highly praised best-seller for over a decade, this is a radical treatise on public education that concludes that compulsory government schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in a machine.

Famous quotes from the book:

More quotes

PDF Book Download:

https://ia801609.us.archive.org/7/items/DumbingUsDown-TheHiddenAgendaOfCompulsoryEducation/JohnTaylorGatto-dumbingUsDown_TheHiddenCurriculumOfCompulsorySchooling2002.pdf

People just write tosh.

Commentor:
People just write tosh.

Nice Comment.

Gatto provided, and continues to provide the key to comprehending this conundrum. Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing.

On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have
been intended to do since their inception.

The system,perfected at places like the University of Chicago,Columbia Teachers College, Carnegie-Mellon, andHarvard, and funded by the captains of industry, was explicitly set up to ensure a docile, malleable workforce to meet the growing, changing demands of corporate capitalism — “to meet the new demands of the 20th century,” they would have said back then.

The Combine ensures a workforce that will not rebel — the greatest fear at the turn of the 20th century— that will be physically, intellectually, and emotionally
dependent upon corporate institutions for their incomes,self-esteem, and stimulation, and that will learn to find
social meaning in their lives solely in the production and consumption of material goods.

We all grew up in these institutions and we know they work.
They haven’t changed much since the 1890s because they don’t need
to – they perform precisely as they are intended.

Over the past thirty years, I’ve used my
classes as a laboratory where I could learn a broader range of what human possibility is — the whole catalogue of
hopes and fears — and also as a place where I could studywhat releases and what inhibits human power.

During that time, I’ve come to believe that geniusis an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn’t want to accept that
notion — far from it: my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curveand that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable scientific facts, was as
rigorously determined as John Calvin contended.

The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence — insight, wisdom,
justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality — that I became confused. They didn’t do this often enough to
make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible
that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down.

Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like
the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled
to emerge.

It is a crucial distinction.In other words, I dropped the idea that I was an expert whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.

I no longer felt comfortable defining my work as bestowing wisdom on a
struggling classroom audience. Although I continue to this day in those futile assays because of the nature of
institutional teaching, wherever possible I have broken with teaching tradition and sent kids down their separate
paths to their own private truths.
The sociology of government monopoly schoolshas evolved in such a way that a premise like mine jeopardizes the total institution if it spreads.

Kept contained, the occasional teacher who makes a discovery like mine is at worst an annoyance to the chain of command(which has evolved automatic defenses to isolate such bacilli and then to neutralize or destroy them).
But once loose, the idea could imperil the central assumptions which allow the institutional school to sustain itself, such
as the false assumption that it is difficult to learn to read, or that kids resist learning, and many more.

Indeed, the very stability of our economy is threatened by any form of education that might change the nature of the human product schools now turn out: the economy school children currently expect to live under and serve would
not survive a generation of young people trained, for example, to think critically.

Success in my practice involves a large component of automatic trust, categorical trust, not the kind conditional on performance.
People have to be allowed to make their own mistakes and to try again, or they will never master themselves, although they may well seem to be competent when they have in fact only memorized or imitated someone else’s performance.

Success in my practice also involves challenging many comfortable
assumptions about what is worth learning and out of what material a good life is fashioned.
Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable.

They cannot function if their
central myths are exposed and abandoned. Over the years I have come to see that whatever I thought I was
doing as a teacher, most of what I actually was doing was teaching an invisible curriculum that reinforced the
myths of the school institution and those of an economy based on caste.

When I was trying to decide what to say
to you that might make my experience as a schoolteacher useful, it occurred to me that I could best serve by telling you what I do that is wrong, rather than what I do that is right. What I do that is right is simple to understand: I get out of kids’ way, I give them space and time and respect.
What I do that is wrong, however, is
strange, complex, and frightening.
Let me begin to show you what that is.

THE SEVEN-LESSON SCHOOLTEACHER

1. CONFUSION
A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana, the other day:
"What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are
learning isn’t idiosyncratic — that there is some system to it all and it’s not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb".

That’s the task, to understand,to make coherent. Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the
un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large num-
bers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests,
fire drills, computer languages, parents’ nights, staff development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside
world ... What do any of these things have to do witheach other?

Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence,
a host of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they
feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education.

The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm.

But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.

Think of the great natural sequences — like learning to walk and learning to talk; the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; the ancient procedures of a
farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; or the preparation of a Thanksgiving feast.

All of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifying itself and illuminating the past and the future. School sequences aren’t like that, not inside a single class and not among
the total menu of daily classes. School sequences arecrazy. There is no particular reason for any of them,
nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a
teacher could be criticized, since everything must be accepted.

School subjects are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the catechism or memorize the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism.
I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making
a scheme of order.

In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work, or because of too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny.
That’s the first lesson I teach.

The Specter of Overproduction

it took a very down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts economic idea to seal the fate of hundreds of millions of schoolchildren to come.
The idea went by the name, overproduction, and it's still with US
(although now referred to as overcapacity), and it's a very important
concept indeed, one whose effects had staggered American prosperity than once in the nineteenth century.

In essence, to overproduce is to make more goods and services for sale than there are customers for those things. When that happens, prices fall. Depending on the degree of overproduction they continue to fall, even below the cost of
production. Even so far below costs that the capital required to produce at all is wiped out.
Hidden behind a bonanza for customers when that happens, a dangerous reality lurks: to produce at all in a mass production sense requires huge amounts of money to be assembled from investors for the purchase of production machinery, and for its repair and upgrading, training programs, advertising, a distribution infrastructure, and so on.

Unless protection against overproduction is promised inves-
tors, why would anyone risk capital to produce in the first place:' What nineteenth century American experience demonstrated
unmistakably is that an independent, resourcefUl, too well-educated
common population has the irresistible urge to produce - and the ability to do so. Many famous "panics" of nineteenth century America were caused in part by a hangover from early Federal times and Colonial days when the common ideal was to produce your own food, your own clothing, your own shelter, your own education, your own medical care, your own entertainment, etc.

The common population was still insufficiently conditioned to be interdependent and specialized.
And added to this burden of self-sufficiency (from' a corporate point of view) was the incredible inventiveness of the American people, a natural by-product of three factors: an open-source learning tradition; a heterogeneous, mixed-age society which didn't exclude
the young from fUll participation; and a government presence without heavy-handedness. Given this heady brew, inventions poured out of the American population with dazzling speed, at a pace unknown in the rest of the world's experience.

Unexpected invention is probably the easiest way to provoke the creative destruction which ends the
career of otherwise dominant enterprises under capitalism. Ideas are
just as deadly in overproduction as hats are, or bushels of corn.
From 1880 to 1930, the term "overproduction" was heard every-
where, in boardrooms, elite universities, gentlemen's clubs, and
highbrow magazines. It was a demon which had to be locked in the
dungeon. And rationalized pedagogy was a natural vehicle to implant
habits and attitudes to accomplish that end. Under this outlook, the
classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to
consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas,
only to consume the ideas of others. The ultimate goal implanted in
student minds, which replaced the earlier goal of independent livelihoods, was getting a good job.

The Graduate

You're on the road to being educated when you know yourself so thoroughly you write your own script instead of taking a part written by others.
A migrant fruit picker named Charles Webb fits this description for me. You've very likely consumed a piece of Mr. Webb's imagination, if not the fruit, if you've ever seen the classic American film, The Graduate.

Webb sold millions of copies of the book, and his film became a beacon to an entire generation of American young people.
It's theme, that a life built around buying things is a disaster, helped turn the film into a runaway hit, still shown and still rented years later.
Charles and his wife made millions and were on every A-team guest
list from Easthampton to Maui.

As their life turned into the non-life of perpetual celebrity and
celebrity projects, Webb and his wife made the copyright over to the
Anti-Defamation League, gave their entire fortune away, and set out
as vagabonds in a trailer, at one time becoming migrants picking fruit
in California.
"Wealth didn't work for us;' he said.

Dropouts

Every single school day in America, 7,000 students drop out, some confused, some angry, but all are brave. If we had the sense our ancestors did, we'd look on these dropouts as a grand resource, as people whose minds the standard programming couldn't tame.

We'd treat them with respect. One and a quarter million people a year, perhaps
more, with potential not necessarily inferior to Ben Franklin, the dropout, or Branson, the dropout, or the dropout Wright brothers, or slum urchin Lula da Silva, grown to the presidency of Brazil without a certificate and on the verge of making his country the first major na-
tion to be free of petroleum out of the ground.

What does it say to us that a million and a quarter young people a year don't want to be in classrooms, don't want to be there so much they're willing to
endure scorn, insult, and constant discrimination as the price of escape?

Are they just unfortunates who have earned a future of misery, or is it we, the self-imprisoned and perpetually fright-
ened, waving our wallets and homes in the burbs as evidence we must
be alive, who are the truly miserable?

Wake up! If things were really as you've been conditioned to believe, how could slum urchin Lula govern a complex modern nation?
How could lower-middle-class semi-urchin Adolf Hider have risen to command the best-schooled nation in history? How could Thomas Edison have dropped out of elementary school, gone west alone with no money or contacts, and by age 15 be enjoying multiple streams of revenue and be earning four times the wages of a skilled workman?

How could penniless elementary school dropout Edison grow up on his own in a working-class environment, invent the electric light, the phonograph, win 1,003 patents, and build General Electric? Edi-
son had contempt for college graduates and discriminated against them in hiring all his life.

If school were the life-and-death matter you've always been told, none of this could have happened. How could George Bernard Shaw drop out of school at 14 and teach himself to be the greatest dramatist of the 20th century? Why has no school, no college, no politician, no foundation, no social thinker ever connected the dots for you as I just did?

Another Inconvenient Truth In 2006, the University of Connecticut set out to discover how much learning happens in a student between entering as freshmen and graduating as a senior. Five academic areas were selected to measure, using 14,000 students at 50 American colleges, including Yale, Brown, and Georgetown.

At 16 of those 50 - including Yale, Brown, and Georgetown - graduating seniors knew less than incoming fresh-
men. Negative growth had occurred. In the other 34, no measurable change had taken place.

A bald summary might look like this: after spending an average of six years in search of a BA degree or its equivalent, and spending an average of a quarter million in cash and loans, a great many young people had nothing or even less than nothing to show for the investment. What they had was a piece of magical paper. This is a script out of the Marx Brothers.

Glaring Uncomfortable Truths

Personally. Got to learn a whole LOT after I left school. Been trying to come to terms with this.mad!!