Why Traditional Schools Suck, part 3 of 3: The Solution

Or - why we're now homeschooling our kids

Book Review: 25th Anniversary Edition of Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

...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.
- John Taylor Gatto

This groundbreaking book, an essential read - not just for parents, but for all Americans, imho - isn't all doom and gloom:

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its 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 trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so they’ll never get bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers 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 childhoods extended, even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British Warship as a preteen, if Benjamin Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior 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.
(pages 104-105)

Earlier in the book, Mr. Gatto gives a classic example:

It’s high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with, given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.
At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.
Right now we are taking from our children all the time that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back. We need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school, but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curricula where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self- reliance.
(pages 28-29)

Children must be allowed the freedom to explore, so they can discover their own passions.

Steve Jobs described just how much more he learned on his own, than with a structured, mandated curriculum:

The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting... much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

John Taylor Gatto describes his own alt-education experiences as a young man growing up in Pennsylvania:

In Monongahela by that river everyone was my teacher. Daily, it seemed to a boy, one of the mile-long trains would stop in town to take on water and coal, or for some mysterious reason; the brakeman and engineer would step among snot-nosed kids and spin railroad yarns, let us run in and out of boxcars, over and under flat- cars, tank cars, coal cars, and numbers of other specialty cars whose function we memorized as easily as we memorized enemy plane silhouettes. Once a year, maybe, we got taken into the caboose that reeked of stale beer to be offered a bologna-on-white-bread sandwich. The anonymous men lectured, advised, and inspired the boys of Monongahela — that was as much their job as driving the trains.
Sometimes a riverboat would stop in mid-channel and discharge a crew who would row to shore, tying their skiff to one of the willows. That was the excuse for every rickety skiff in the twelve-block-long town to fill up with kids, pulling like Vikings, sometimes with sticks instead of oars, to raid the “Belle of Pittsburgh” or “The Original River Queen.” Some kind of natural etiquette was at work in Monongahela. The rules didn’t need to be written down; if men had time they showed boys how to grow up. We didn’t whine when our time was up: men had work to do — we understood that and scam- pered away, grateful for the flash of our own futures they had had time to reveal, however small it was.
(pages 35-36)

Further, he described how he helped some of his own students enjoy the same.

A short time ago I took $70 and sent a twelve-year-old girl from my class, with her non-English-speaking mother, on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Seabright to lunch and apologize for pol- luting his beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small-town police procedures. A few days later two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone from Harlem to West Thirty-first street where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor; later three of my kids found themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at six in the morning, studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatched eighteen- wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Are these “special” children in a “special” program? Well, in one sense yes, but nobody knows about this pro- gram except I and the kids. They’re just nice kids from central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them couldn’t add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far New York is from California.
Does that worry me? Of course! But I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they’ll also become self- teachers — and only self-teaching has any lasting value. We’ve got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that their independent time can be spent on something other than abstraction. This is an emergency — it requires drastic action to correct.
(pages 29-32)

Thomas Moore, the son of a teacher, and himself a teacher for 40 years, describes the success of his own alt-education experience in the Foreward to the 2005 edition:

The most enjoyable teaching I ever did took place in a classroom that had thick carpeting but no chairs. My thirty students had no textbooks, no syllabus, and no purpose. I picked up on whatever appeared in the room on any particular day and followed it through. I’ve never seen so much learning take place, for me and my students, anywhere else.
(page xii)

The truth is that we live in a time very different from our parents, and drastically different from that of our forefathers.

Your iPhone contains access to the entire annals of human knowledge for less than the price of a textbook at Harvard. You are six circles removed from any expert on the face of the planet and can contact them instantly with an email. You can create a business in an hour and launch a website in 15 minutes, all for less than the price of an hour of class at Penn.
(page xv)

And now, with the recent blooming of AI into an industries changing phenomena, we are likely entering a golden age of production and progress, including and especially in the field of education. AI tutors, knowledgeable, patient, and customized to your learning experience, are freely and readily available to everyone with an Internet connection. Soon, you won't even need one - they'll be embedded into every smart phone and every new computer, preconfigured with fundamental knowledge, or eager to be trained with new knowledge, and ready, willing, and able to take us all to new heights of understanding and productivity.

All of this begs the question... do we even need public schools??

I believe we do. But that, more than anything, we need the option of public schooling. And certainly that the institution is in definite need of reform.

So... now that you know the truth... what will you do?

Will you continue to subject yourself and your children to the same old system of control, subjugation and subservience? Or... will you shatter those same chains, freeing yourselves for something more? For something greater? For something more independent and wonderful and fulfilling?

What will you choose?

The red pill? Or the blue pill?