Lesson Plans
"Look...at the seven lessons of school teaching -- confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over this time the training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s, the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle class as well. "
-- John Taylor Gatto
(3-Time New York City & One-Time New York State Teacher of the Year)
With the release of the movies "Waiting for Superman," a documentary film from the director of "An Inconvenient Truth," the country is all abuzz about the education crisis in America. This latest iteration of an old theme has been stoked by various other fuel-logs. NBC is doing an "Education Nation" week of features, highlighting the appalling condition of American pedagogy in comparison to our international competitors. Oprah is running the usual string of inspirational stories (hey, who knew that Tony Danza is now a real, honest to goodness teacher?). Bill and Melinda Gates have been joined in their educational philanthropy by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, who is donating $100 million to the Newark public schools.
Of course, if one wanted to be cynical, it could be pointed out that the schools have been "failing" for decades, and that no matter how many times we circle around to cover this 'disaster,' nothing fundamental ever seems to change. Politicians get to fire up the public on an emotional issue for the next election cycle. Networks get to run a spate of controversial and inspirational stories about overcomers, overachievers, and intrepid system-buckers. And the isolated, usually privatized, success stories get far more attention than they deserve, considering the general impossibility of scaling their approaches to broader levels.
But aside from that cynical stuff, let's look at the major features of the latest education-catastrophe discourse and see what's really in there.
Union Bashing -- "Waiting for Superman" is generally negative in its portrayal of teachers' unions. This dovetails with the general conservative tilt of talk radio and the pro-business mainstream press. All unionization is bad, because it rewards fatcat teachers, cops, and firefighters with bloated pensions, undeserved tenure, bogus overtime rules, etc. What these freeloaders need is market discipline. Let them earn their pay and face the consequences if they get no results. Sounds sensible, right? But really, this has nothing to do with wanting to improve education or hold teachers accountable. It's just flat-out resentment that the tiny remaining sliver of unionized workers (about 7%) has been able to carve out and preserve some decent wages. The whole point of a union is that every single worker shouldn't have to bust their ass all the time just to barely tread water. The owners of capital get to sit on their tushes all the time, making money from credit default swaps, capital gains (now extremely under-taxed), collateralized debt obligations, property rental fees and the like. Why shouldn't unions claw back a little semi-soft cash for the working man and woman? Back when larger portions of American workers were unionized, even just 20 years ago, this would have made sense to more people. But now that we've all been pummeled into service-sector wage scales for three and a half decades, we have so internalized pro-capital values that we begrudge any union that 's been able to hang on. So we drink the corporate Kool Aid that tells us that teachers unions are inhibiting good old fashioned American entrepreneurial gumption. By golly, if we just turn those honest businessmen loose on the travails of our schools, they'll be ship-shape in no time. Which brings me to...
Market Fetishization -- Charter schools, standardized testing, classroom technology, market-pegged teacher salaries: these are all species of the same genus. They all send the message that financial and business motivations are the only ones that can be trusted. If something doesn't make money, what good is it? If schools can't survive the purifying fire of market discipline, then they don't deserve to survive. Dinosaur approaches to education should step aside, allowing true competition and innovation to work their magic. Of course, the added bonus is that schools that are run like businesses can churn out pupils who are already prepared to grab the brass ring of the "future economy." And that leads us to....
Panic Over Falling Behind -- perhaps the most disingenuous and ridiculous part of the current educational hysteria is the worry of "falling behind" our international counterparts, especially in math and science. Now, are American kids doing poorly in comparison to the brainboxes from China, Japan, India, Canada, and the like? Probably, I guess. But do we really think that decades of huge macro-trends in technology, globalization, international finance, corporate legal structure, and international trade agreements are all going to be overturned by getting our kids' pre-calc and chemistry scores up? In case anyone noticed, we have pushed all of our chips in on a hyper-consumptive, service-sector-heavy way of life. Our landscapes, our architecture, our mores, and our culture are all predicated on gobs of de-skilling and non-practical symbolic knowledge. As our waning skills are replaced by both foreign labor and domestic technology, the ratios of necessary labor to overall production will totally unravel. This is the logic of the current 'jobless recovery': companies just don't need to rehire at old wages or levels to keep making money at roughly the same clip. Yes, we may eventually face total demand destruction (and thus a nasty second recessional dip, maybe even a depression), but that's another story. For now, all we need to say is that the hyped-up panic over falling behind other nations' kids is just another ploy for shoveling more money into the maws of corporate universities and their benefactors. Which brings us to....
The College Racket -- Now, I went to college and beyond, so maybe I'm speaking out of school here (pun intended); but I'm sick and tired of seeing every schmaltzy, motivational educational piece on TV revolve around a spunky, hard-working inner-city kid who overcomes three generations of crack addiction or whatever, to fulfill their dreams of going to RPI on a full scholarship. Again, don't get me wrong, college can be great for a lot of students. But there is such a relentless and desperate pressure to get kids to college -- it's as if there are no other avenues to a successful, rewarding life. The ubiquitous admonition of athletes, movie stars, and singers is for kids to "believe in themselves and follow their dreams." But those dreams always seem to involve going to college, as if there is no other way of living in the world without that degree. And unfortunately, that seems to be exactly the point, especially in the "escape the mean streets" motif that so dominates the discourse of our abandoned cities and rural areas. College as the only real way out thus serves as a surrogate for any deeper discussions about urban development policy, zoning laws, predatory lending and property rental policies, etc. Schooling thus carries an outrageously unrealistic set of expectations for social improvement, with college-bound diamonds in the rough being singled out for nonrepresentative media coverage. Add to this the absurdly high prices of private university tuition, and the likely collapse of state-funded public colleges, and you're looking at shoehorning millions of kids into a bleak future of heavy debt-servicing.
Failed Schools or Failed Society? -- As mentioned above, schools get overloaded with unrealistic expectations for social improvement. As a nation, we have essentially created "a way of life that has no future," as Jim Kunstler likes to describe it. We have gambled that cheap oil will always be available, that a hyper-consumptive lifestyle is normal, and that the environment will always be able to absorb the by-products of this social form. We have built oodles of massive, ugly sprawl, believing that private physical space filled with lots of nifty doodads would make up for the loss of dignified work and social capital. We have allowed corporate ideology and language to push out all other sources of value, at least as far as political and social action go, so that the only 'qualified people' left in the public sphere are businessmen, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, pundits, and military men. And perhaps most importantly, we have allowed wealth and power to accumulate into so few hands that no real alternatives to our destructive way of life are ever heard.
Sure, I would love for all schools, whether public or private, to be real havens for childrens' self-discovery and intellectual development. I would also like to see schools teach civics, comparative religion, local history and ecology, small business practices, philosophy, ethics, and many other things. But as long as the only purpose for schools is to create fodder for overpriced universities or crappy service-sector jobs, then a broad curriculum for creating well-rounded American citizens will never happen.
In our current conditions, we're demanding that crappy schools improve their delivery of people for service to a much shittier society. And as long as that is the case, I would rather see public schools close altogether, leaving education to for-profit enterprises, homeschooling, and integrated community learning. Integrated community learning is the best option here, as it would embed children in multiple work and service settings, allowing them to learn real skills in their local areas. Integrated community learning is a form of deschooling, which cannot be fully covered here. Suffice it to say that we need to create economic and social settings that we are not ashamed to put our children into from a very young age. Once we do that, the specialized institution of the school can be left by the wayside.
-- John Taylor Gatto
(3-Time New York City & One-Time New York State Teacher of the Year)
With the release of the movies "Waiting for Superman," a documentary film from the director of "An Inconvenient Truth," the country is all abuzz about the education crisis in America. This latest iteration of an old theme has been stoked by various other fuel-logs. NBC is doing an "Education Nation" week of features, highlighting the appalling condition of American pedagogy in comparison to our international competitors. Oprah is running the usual string of inspirational stories (hey, who knew that Tony Danza is now a real, honest to goodness teacher?). Bill and Melinda Gates have been joined in their educational philanthropy by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, who is donating $100 million to the Newark public schools.
Of course, if one wanted to be cynical, it could be pointed out that the schools have been "failing" for decades, and that no matter how many times we circle around to cover this 'disaster,' nothing fundamental ever seems to change. Politicians get to fire up the public on an emotional issue for the next election cycle. Networks get to run a spate of controversial and inspirational stories about overcomers, overachievers, and intrepid system-buckers. And the isolated, usually privatized, success stories get far more attention than they deserve, considering the general impossibility of scaling their approaches to broader levels.
But aside from that cynical stuff, let's look at the major features of the latest education-catastrophe discourse and see what's really in there.
Union Bashing -- "Waiting for Superman" is generally negative in its portrayal of teachers' unions. This dovetails with the general conservative tilt of talk radio and the pro-business mainstream press. All unionization is bad, because it rewards fatcat teachers, cops, and firefighters with bloated pensions, undeserved tenure, bogus overtime rules, etc. What these freeloaders need is market discipline. Let them earn their pay and face the consequences if they get no results. Sounds sensible, right? But really, this has nothing to do with wanting to improve education or hold teachers accountable. It's just flat-out resentment that the tiny remaining sliver of unionized workers (about 7%) has been able to carve out and preserve some decent wages. The whole point of a union is that every single worker shouldn't have to bust their ass all the time just to barely tread water. The owners of capital get to sit on their tushes all the time, making money from credit default swaps, capital gains (now extremely under-taxed), collateralized debt obligations, property rental fees and the like. Why shouldn't unions claw back a little semi-soft cash for the working man and woman? Back when larger portions of American workers were unionized, even just 20 years ago, this would have made sense to more people. But now that we've all been pummeled into service-sector wage scales for three and a half decades, we have so internalized pro-capital values that we begrudge any union that 's been able to hang on. So we drink the corporate Kool Aid that tells us that teachers unions are inhibiting good old fashioned American entrepreneurial gumption. By golly, if we just turn those honest businessmen loose on the travails of our schools, they'll be ship-shape in no time. Which brings me to...
Market Fetishization -- Charter schools, standardized testing, classroom technology, market-pegged teacher salaries: these are all species of the same genus. They all send the message that financial and business motivations are the only ones that can be trusted. If something doesn't make money, what good is it? If schools can't survive the purifying fire of market discipline, then they don't deserve to survive. Dinosaur approaches to education should step aside, allowing true competition and innovation to work their magic. Of course, the added bonus is that schools that are run like businesses can churn out pupils who are already prepared to grab the brass ring of the "future economy." And that leads us to....
Panic Over Falling Behind -- perhaps the most disingenuous and ridiculous part of the current educational hysteria is the worry of "falling behind" our international counterparts, especially in math and science. Now, are American kids doing poorly in comparison to the brainboxes from China, Japan, India, Canada, and the like? Probably, I guess. But do we really think that decades of huge macro-trends in technology, globalization, international finance, corporate legal structure, and international trade agreements are all going to be overturned by getting our kids' pre-calc and chemistry scores up? In case anyone noticed, we have pushed all of our chips in on a hyper-consumptive, service-sector-heavy way of life. Our landscapes, our architecture, our mores, and our culture are all predicated on gobs of de-skilling and non-practical symbolic knowledge. As our waning skills are replaced by both foreign labor and domestic technology, the ratios of necessary labor to overall production will totally unravel. This is the logic of the current 'jobless recovery': companies just don't need to rehire at old wages or levels to keep making money at roughly the same clip. Yes, we may eventually face total demand destruction (and thus a nasty second recessional dip, maybe even a depression), but that's another story. For now, all we need to say is that the hyped-up panic over falling behind other nations' kids is just another ploy for shoveling more money into the maws of corporate universities and their benefactors. Which brings us to....
The College Racket -- Now, I went to college and beyond, so maybe I'm speaking out of school here (pun intended); but I'm sick and tired of seeing every schmaltzy, motivational educational piece on TV revolve around a spunky, hard-working inner-city kid who overcomes three generations of crack addiction or whatever, to fulfill their dreams of going to RPI on a full scholarship. Again, don't get me wrong, college can be great for a lot of students. But there is such a relentless and desperate pressure to get kids to college -- it's as if there are no other avenues to a successful, rewarding life. The ubiquitous admonition of athletes, movie stars, and singers is for kids to "believe in themselves and follow their dreams." But those dreams always seem to involve going to college, as if there is no other way of living in the world without that degree. And unfortunately, that seems to be exactly the point, especially in the "escape the mean streets" motif that so dominates the discourse of our abandoned cities and rural areas. College as the only real way out thus serves as a surrogate for any deeper discussions about urban development policy, zoning laws, predatory lending and property rental policies, etc. Schooling thus carries an outrageously unrealistic set of expectations for social improvement, with college-bound diamonds in the rough being singled out for nonrepresentative media coverage. Add to this the absurdly high prices of private university tuition, and the likely collapse of state-funded public colleges, and you're looking at shoehorning millions of kids into a bleak future of heavy debt-servicing.
Failed Schools or Failed Society? -- As mentioned above, schools get overloaded with unrealistic expectations for social improvement. As a nation, we have essentially created "a way of life that has no future," as Jim Kunstler likes to describe it. We have gambled that cheap oil will always be available, that a hyper-consumptive lifestyle is normal, and that the environment will always be able to absorb the by-products of this social form. We have built oodles of massive, ugly sprawl, believing that private physical space filled with lots of nifty doodads would make up for the loss of dignified work and social capital. We have allowed corporate ideology and language to push out all other sources of value, at least as far as political and social action go, so that the only 'qualified people' left in the public sphere are businessmen, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, pundits, and military men. And perhaps most importantly, we have allowed wealth and power to accumulate into so few hands that no real alternatives to our destructive way of life are ever heard.
Sure, I would love for all schools, whether public or private, to be real havens for childrens' self-discovery and intellectual development. I would also like to see schools teach civics, comparative religion, local history and ecology, small business practices, philosophy, ethics, and many other things. But as long as the only purpose for schools is to create fodder for overpriced universities or crappy service-sector jobs, then a broad curriculum for creating well-rounded American citizens will never happen.
In our current conditions, we're demanding that crappy schools improve their delivery of people for service to a much shittier society. And as long as that is the case, I would rather see public schools close altogether, leaving education to for-profit enterprises, homeschooling, and integrated community learning. Integrated community learning is the best option here, as it would embed children in multiple work and service settings, allowing them to learn real skills in their local areas. Integrated community learning is a form of deschooling, which cannot be fully covered here. Suffice it to say that we need to create economic and social settings that we are not ashamed to put our children into from a very young age. Once we do that, the specialized institution of the school can be left by the wayside.
Posted by Jeremy Raymondjack at 9/27/2010 11:23 PM 
Categories: Culture and Society
Tags: John Taylor Gatto education crisis Waiting for Superman American educational system deschooling
Categories: Culture and Society
Tags: John Taylor Gatto education crisis Waiting for Superman American educational system deschooling
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