abolish

 If it doesn't make money they won't tell you the truth.

    First, let me show you the "quotes" this High Times article has to entice people to read it:

     "The current school system is a diseased organism. The standard song abonut school, that it makes good people, good citizens, is easy to believe if you want to believe it, and if you don't look with your own eyes at the mangled, mutilated mess that schools turn out." - John Taylor Gatto

     "Schooling as we know it is a powerful expression of the sickness of society. Only a shocking bill of charges will wake the public up." - John Taylor Gatto

     "The school system is not a repairable engine because it's doing what it's supposed to do. It is an engine of restraint and restriction and management." - Roland Legiardi-Laura

     "You have to betray the system...You have to operate as a saboteur in the system."

     "Schools were designed to mimic the shape, sound, and rhythms of factories. They were called factory schools, but they turned out not widgets but children."

     Ok, the article is titled Reform or Bust, John Taylor Gatto's War on Schooling. By Annie Nocenti. On page 38.

Reform or Bust

     "What would compel a three-time Teacher of the Year winner, education author and scholar, and 30-year veteran teacher to make such a statement? What kind of wall is this man up against? John Taylor Gatto is a self-styled saboteur at the forefront of a quiet little revolution of radical school reform. His call to arms requires teachers, parents, and students to unite in guerilla warfare in the classroom.
     "Just because your kids are being schooled doesn't mean they're being educated. Schooling is given or imposed," explains Gatto, "but an education is taken by the student. The kid is 90 percent sovereign in it. A kid should be the director of his life." When Gatto won the New York State Teacher of the Year award in 1991, his infamous response to the honor was to quit. He didn't want to "hurt kids" anymore. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal he wrote, "I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in."
     In Gatto's acceptance speech for that same award, he articulated some key problems: that teachers essentially teach confusion(they teach things out of context), indifference(the bell rings; drop what you're doing and move on), and emotional dependency(reinforced with gold stars, smiles, frowns, tests and grades). Students may like or hate school in equal number, but Gatto believes that what is learned in public school is not worth the ways in which the process can cripple a child.
     Does such a crisis warrant pulling your child out of the system?
     "There's genius in every child," Gatto declares, "but it hardly ever regrows once it's stomped out. Schools turn out incomplete people, people that have to be connected to some other source of meaning because they can't generate meaning from the inside. Schooling as it exists isn't nearly the most efficient way if you want mental development, and it's a catastrophe if you want moral development."
     An informal questioning of adults as to what they though of school elicits some telling responses. Ann Loeding is typical. Loeding, now a tugboat captain on the Hudson River, recalls how in her physics class she "didn't see the point of the theories - I couldn't see how they applied to my life. If you don't care about something, you won't learn it." But as an adult, it is those very same concepts - fluid dynamics, gravity, angles, displacement - that Loeding needs to dock her boat and navigate rivers. "I have to be able to predict how physical matter is going to behave in certain circumstances, like when I ballast a barge. I wish that teacher had found a way to show us how what we were studying in wave tanks applied to something real, so that shift from the intellectual world to the physical world would make sense and come alive." This is what Gatto means when he talks of a curriculum of confusion and indifference: things taught out of context and disassociated from life. This is why the central tenet of his reform is a call to simply get kids out of school.
     I first encountered Gatto's outlaw methods 12 years ago, while putting myself through Columbia graduate school working as a comic book writer. Two 13-year-olds, Jamal and Victor, tracked me down in a pizza joint with a slice as an offering and asked, would I teach them how to make comic books? Sure, I said. But why weren't they in school? "Oh well, Mr. Gatto lets us out if we find someone to mentor us." And so we began to meet on the Columbia campus lawn between my classes, where I taught them visual storytelling. One day, Roland Legiardi-Laura, who was in Gatto's eight grade class in 1996, showed up with a camera and shot my lawn class for a film he was making about Gatto.
     Who was this Gatto, this teacher who would allow his students to cut class and hang out with a comic book writer? Who was this Gatto, that his students stayed obsessed with him 25 years later?
     Fast-forward to 2003: Legiardi-Laura and Gatto are together again, this time on a common mission: to produce a megamovie about education that they hope will provoke radical reform. The proposed film, The Fourth Purpose, asks the questions: What's wrong with schooling? How did it get that way? What can we do about it? What the film calls the "fourth purpose" of education is the idea that schools were intended to serve the economic state.
     "How can the richest, most powerful country on the planet have a school system that is so potentially detrimental to our children?" asks Legiardi-Laura. "The American approach to education is full of anomalies - horrible diet, too many prescribed drugs, corporate penetration, of the so-called sacred learning environment. Kids are looked at as corporate targets. They're being taught math with Hershey's Kisses and M&M's. It's in the textbooks. While there was absolutely no conspiracy to do this, there is a completely uninhibited sense of the mission of school as having virtually nothing to do with education and a tremendous amount to do with the management of populations."
     As Gatto puts it, "the mass of kids learn, quite deliberately, to be bored. There's a reason for that. The truth is that bored people detach from their minds and connect with their appetites. They're desperately searching for something to put in their mouths, or to kiss, or to throw rocks at, or to kill. Bored people aren't serious competition. They don't gather together and form organizations to overthrow leadership. They're seeking some kind of solace and relief from their boredom, so they become the most dependable customers of all."
     Is the school system, then, designed to produce formulaic, obedient, predictable, dumbed-down, conformist consumers and workers, and, more nefariously, to discourage dissent? If this all sounds conspiratorial, turn to history. Here's a sample of what was being written about education a hundred years ago:

     "The raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY, dean of the School of Education, Stanford University, 1905

     "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - WOODROW WILSON, from an address to the New York City High School Teachers Association, January 9, 1909

     "Somewhere between the ages of 11 and 15, the average child begins to suffer from an atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble I should judge to lie with the schools." - THOMAS EDISON

     At a recent fund-raiser for the Fourth Purpose, Gatto said in his opening remarks, "What we are after in this film is the destruction of the pernicious school myth that has paralyzed social justice in the US for a century. Schooling as we know it is a powerful expression of the sickness of this society, not a cure for the sickness. What justice cries out for to break this logjam is shock treatment. Only a shocking bill of changes will wake the public up."
     Are things really that dire? If schooling really is in a state of crisis, shouldn't the system welcome that overhaul? Or is there something endemic in the system that resists this kind of change? "John believes that the school is not a repairable engine," says Legiardi-Laura, "because it's doing what it's supposed to do. It is an engine of restraint and restriction and management. No one wants to fix it, because they don't believe it's broken. John often says, "Genius is as common as dirt." If you were to release all the genius that is pent up in a human being, you'd have a hard time maintaining the current economic system. This terrifies people. So no, they don't want to 'fix' schools."
     When asked if the current school system is so damaging to children that we'd be better off with anything else, Gatto replies, "Yes. Absolutely. With anything else. Or nothing."
     What Gatto proposes, in order to wake up the system, is a kind of guerrilla warfare within the system, a covert revolt of private contracts and quietly disruptive acts to be committed by students, teachers and parents. In Gatto's final years of teaching, he had one rule: to commit an act of sabotage a day. "What kept him going in the end," says Legiardi-Laura, "was his anger. Every day he'd throw a wrench in the works: switch teachers' time cards, or ring the fire-alarm just to get the kids out of class." Gatto is reluctant, for obvious reasons, to go into detail about these antics. And while Gatto, a decorated teacher at the end of his teaching career, was able to risk acts of revolt that bent the law, there are a variety of other methods.
     Consider standardized testing. From school principals to parents and student, the most common complaint I heard about the education system was regarding the emphasis on tests, like the Regents exam and SAT's, which some believe only serve to reinforce the class system. Curriculums are routinely shoved aside to focus on training students in rote memorization, how to take and do well on tests. One assistant principal in New York City, who would only speak anonymously, told me, "It's all data-driven. [Mayor] Bloomberg brought in MBA's to 'fix' schools. They don't give a damn about the individual. You have to pass these tests or you don't get your diploma. It's corporate mentality. Why can't I speak to you on the record? Because there is no debate anymore. They don't allow it.'
     What does Gatto propose doing? At the fund-raising speech mentioned earlier, he offered this tactic: "It only takes a few determined people to temporarily grind these engines to a halt, sending reverberations of dissonance into every level of the system. Think only of the multibillion-dollar standardized testing aspect of the thing: With relatively little investment of time or money, a well-orchestrated campaign to sabotage these instruments could be launched and prosecuted over the Internet. You need only think of the mass of teenagers who brought the war in Vietnam to a premature conclusion to see that an essential linchpin of the fourth-purpose system - testing - could quickly be destroyed."
     What turns a devoted teacher into a saboteur? Gatto began his career with high ideals, teaching a rigorous academic curriculum. As Legiardi-Laura recalls, "We did a detailed analysis of Moby Dick, had a chess club, and watched films like Night and Fog. And this was eight grade! I was only 13!"
     In his second decade of teaching, Gatto realized he could be a more effective teacher if he simply got the students out of school. "He created a minifiefdom he called the lab school," says Legiardi-Laura. Gatto began finding ways to derail the process from within, ways to break rules. His students started neighborhood newspapers, student employment agencies, did community service, found mentors, did field research, studied businesses, started a public garden - whatever they wanted to try. Gatto was game. "The road to self-development is raw experience," says Gatto. "Anything that gets the child out of the classroom, involved in the community, but most important, self-directed." Gatto began to realize that being confined in the building was the problem. "I spent 30 years of my life as a teacher and another 18 years as a student, so I'd virtually spent my entire life locked up. I began to wonder, why were we doing it this way?"
     Good question. Just why is it that we warehouse our children in cell-block-style classrooms five days a week for 12 years, force-feed them a standardized diet of what we think they need to learn, and move it all along with boredom, bells, and tests? Who came up with this system of forced-confinement learning? Has it just devolved into easy daycare? Sure, kids learn things in school, get to socialize, get a needed break from their parents. But much of a child's time in school is squandered, and worse, the process itself has some ill effects. Is school a waste, or even a theft, of childhood? What are the real skills that actually get us through life? Self-assurance, independent thought, autonomy, a passion for learning - are these things taught or stifled in school? The fact that we tell students what they need to learn rather than allow them to help direct their own study - does this derail a child's natural ability to think for himself, one of the main skills necessary for survival?
     When it comes to asking and answering those questions, Gatto is an irrepressible firebrand. His usual outfit is khaki pants and a pocketed vest. He strides into a room with the physical presence of an ex-wrestler or ex-football pro, as if ready for combat, an impression offset by an angelic face ringed by a halo of white curls. He arrives for our interview several hours late and declares that he'll be more relaxed if he does one thing. He grabs the phone, dials a bookie in Costa Rica, asks for "No Dog," puts a bet on the Pittsburgh Steelers, hangs up and says, "Okay. Now I'm ready," then launches into a story about why he was late. He describes how he was driving down from his farm in Ithaca and got caught in a drug sweep in Ellenville, then offers this tidbit: "I never worked in a school where one of the teachers wasn't a minor-league drug dealer, and any stranger walking in could find out who it was and make a buy. I must have worked at 30 schools as a per-diem teacher, and there was always a teacher that was a drug dealer. Always. Every school I was ever in."
     Nothing Gatto does is traditional. He began his career as an imposter with a confidence game: He borrowed a license and began substitute teaching under someone else's name. He quickly discovered that there was an assumption that some kids were hopeless, an indoctrinated belief that they'd never excel, and those kids were being denied an education. One of his first gigs as a sub was a Spanish class. In less than an hour he taught the students how to tell time in Spanish, only to incur the wrath of the administration: Telling time was supposed to fill an entire month's curriculum! Now what were they going to teach? This is the kind of inane thinking Gatto was up against.
     By the third decade of his teaching career, "John realized just being in the school building was a death sentence," says Legiardi-Laura. Gatto began to break down the week as follows: a day each of field study, mentorship, community service, and internship in a workplace, with just one day in the classroom. Gatto's advice to teachers is: "You have to betray the system. To begin with, if the system knew it they were being betrayed, the teacher's tenure would be extremely short. So they have to operate as a saboteur in the system. They have to appear to be the best and most obedient. You benefit from the school's bewilderment and chaos. Anything that discomforts the system, the organization, gives you breathing room to make private contracts with kids and with parents, to let kids range through the outside community and identify resources."
     Key to Gatto's reform is this notion of busting out of the prison-style classroom. Where did our system of compulsory, factory-farm-style McSchooling come from? "The Prussians," says Legiardi-Laura. "They were defeated by Napoleon in 1806, so they redesigned their country to produce a better soldier. They were the first modern country in the world to have a national compulsory education system. That was around 1819. Before that, there were all kinds of eclectic setups. In the 1840s there was an aggressive debate about public schools in this country. Horace Mann was the most articulate advocate. He went to Prussia and reported back on its system in glowing terms. He proposed the Prussian model of an organized, efficient, compulsory school system, but instead of good soldiers, it would produce good citizens. There was a lot of native resistance. But America was becoming a truly industrial nation, and those fortunes - oil, railroads - needed to protect their capital. The creation of large mass schools was designed to mimic the shape, sound, and rhythms of factories. They were called factory schools, but they turned out not widgets but children. The intent was to process children and prepare them to accept a life as a working member of the lower ranks of society.
     Is there any hope of changing this grand experiment in social engineering? If Gatto is right, if school is crippling your child's free will, shouldn't you get him or her the hell out of there? But wait, you say. You can't abolish school. I have a job, I have to stick my kid somewhere all day. What's a parent to do? There are private schools, alternative schools, and a two-million-strong home-schooling movement. But what can a parent who doesn't have the time, money, or energy for any of this to do?
     "That fact that the kid's body is trapped is almost irrelevant," says Gatto. "A parent can free the kid's mind. Get him out of school in his head. The kid can enter the school as an anthropologist watching how other people are being bent and mutilated but be trained to observe closely, analyze, and evaluate. These are the marks of an educated mind, not getting into med school. All the colleges in the country are open to you regardless of what your school record is. Don't let them buffalo you. Get your name in the paper by refusing to take standardized tests."
     A provocative stance. What about repercussions? "Ignore liabilities," says Gatto. Sound dangerous? Maybe. But Gatto thinks these experiences help kids grow up, something that takes too long as it is. "We've artificially extended childhood. Admiral Farragut, at age 12, had a 60-hour work week. What he put himself through, in terms of academic exercise, a Yale senior wouldn't be able to do. The school system artificially extends childhood."
     What about the essentials, like reading? "How to read is probably a 30-day and not a 12-year undertaking. How actually to read. How to read between the lines. How to mark up a book. I used to tell my students, 'If this book comes back at the end of the year and it's fit for anyone else to read, you're destroyed as far as I'm concerned. I want to see that you've argued with every line in the damn book.' Bending your mind in a contest with the author produces effects that are undreamed of when you're just reading for the main idea, summarizing."
     Gatto also takes what he can from elite private boarding schools where children, although not immune to the crippling process of schooling, are getting exceptional educations. "What these schools do is distill what can be conveyed of value in an artificial confinement situation." Gatto taught his public school students how to mimic the privileged. Simple things, explains Gatto, like "repeated exercises in the forms of good manners. A modulated voice. Politeness, respect and civility are the foundation of all transactions. You teach the codes - and they're always superficial - by which insiders recognize each other. I had 13-year-old kids on a regular basis taking lecture classes at Columbia Law School, and not with permission. No one could tell the difference. I teach a complete theory of access to any institution, any person. Ghetto kids would say to me, constantly, that there was no point in them going to Wall Street or the Federal Reserve, because those world are shut to them. I thought that too for most of my life, but nine times out of ten what you're dealing with is not racial prejudice, it's class prejudice. It's some sign you're giving off - you're not looking at the person, there are cues that you're not part of that group. Study the culture of the organization you want access to. Just watch them. How they dress, carry themselves, behave. A spiral notebook in your hand says one thing, a clipboard another."
     For those who are able to, Gatto recommends an alternative school or some form of collective home-schooling. He offers the Amish as an example. "We raise kids to have a good job. The Amish raise children to have an independent livelihood so they can be sovereign. Even if the kid is born with one arm or half a brain, there are no exceptions to raising every kid to have an independent livelihood." Gatto deals with the objection that religion plays a role by offering up a secular society, the Mondragon Cooperative in Basque, Spain. "They more or less follow the same principles as the Amish but are resolutely atheistic. Now those are two potent living examples."
     There is a heady array of alternative school possibilities; indeed, something of a "boutique" mentality now pervades the field. Chater, Magnet, Essential, Multiple-Intelligence, Free, Progressive, Foxfire, Montessori, and Waldorf schools; schools without walls, homes-schooling, second-chance, and even something called "last-chance" schools - the choices are daunting. In general, the characteristics they share in some combination are small classes, high expectations, student-specific curricula, flexible schedules, community involvement, active rather than passive learning, multiple ages, and limited or no testing. Some of these alternatives fly below the radar of the state; others are state-funded places to dump "difficult" kids.
     The alternative to the nine-to-three bell-driven schooling can be as simple as an enriched afternoon program. If you look at Christian home-schooling, it looks traditional, yet the kids are with mom and dad," says Legiardi-Laura. At the other end of the spectrum, loose-knit groups of home-schoolers can function almost entirely outside of the classroom. Private alternative schools have to make money, and some fear that the profit motive combined with a lack or accountability will eventually turn them into something worse than public schools.
     How does one start an alternative school? I visited a brand new one, the Community School of New Paltz, to find out. It was started by Sue Fisk and Paul Tobin, after Tobin was inspired by a Waldorf school lecture. His son was finishing eight grade, and Tobin was considering home-schooling. "I didn't like the one-size-fits-all type of schooling," he says. Tobin and Fisk went shopping for a curriculum and decided to use the Waldorf academic curriculum for history, math, and science. "The idea behind Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf schools is a little esoteric, but kids learn 'live' - learning isn't a dead thing. When they're studying history, they study the turmoil and revolutions, then look to the self. At 14, you have all those hormones raging; it's like having a revolution inside. Academics are taught in the morning, and in the afternoon we bring in the artisans. We're going to perform a play and do community service, so that when they graduate, they'll feel they have a responsibility to the community. I want them to know that their voice will matter." Once they settled on a curriculum, Tobin and Fisk needed more students. "We did some open houses, advertised, used word of mouth. We got seven kids." How about financing? "By the seat of our pants. We charge tuition andget just enough for the teachers and to rent the space. We're applying for tax-exempt status and education grants."
     Tobin invited me to teach a class in journalism at this school, and as I entered the classroom, another "civilian," who had just taught a civics class, was leaving. She mentioned that the students were going to join a local political campaign, and suggested I relate my journalism lesson to the use of the press in politics. The students were eager and alert, despite the fact that this was their last class of the day and a glorious sun beckoned outside. A few had been home-schooled their whole lives; others had been only in public schools or alternative schools, and a few had done all three. They are all preferred alternative schooling. "Public school is way too crowded, there are no breaks, you don't get any attention. If you have a question, you have to wait till the end of the class to ask it, but then you'll be late for the next class." The students said that home-schooling depended on the parents. "I traveled. I got to see the world and learn about it," said one home-schooler. "I know home-school kids that do nothing, but I also know one kid, his parents really push him hard. Too hard." As another homeschooler put it, "I studied what I was interested in, so I'll hold onto it longer. My friends in public school don't care about their classes, so they're not learning anything."
     Some home-schoolers are quite off the grid. Home-schooling seems to be a fairly deregulated system, although many states are beginning to requite more accountability. All a parent need do is turn in quarterly reports that consist of hours spent learning and grades. "The state doesn't care," said one parent. "They're so overburdened, they're happy it's one less student they have to deal with." Statistically, home-schoolers test in the 80th percentile or better. Home-schoolers often share parent-teachers, with the teaching spread among a minicommunity team of rotated parents. One parent at the Community School of New Paltz, a firefighter, was upset by the Patriot Act that was enacted shortly after 9/11, how it broadened the power of law enforcement agencies and violated fundamental rights. He was inspired to teach a class in rights: the Magna Carta, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The class became so popular they were turning students away.
     At the extreme end of the movement is something called unschooling. "Unschooling is the most far out kind of home-schooling," says Legiardi-Luara. It's the fastest growing component of the movement. The child, from the earliest age possible, is allowed to direct their own education." I spoke with one "unschooler," and he described how he directed his own studies. For instance, he saw a monarch butterfly, became interested in where it was from, its colors, and how it migrated, which led to a study of Africa and its people and customs. He articulated what he'd learned, and it encompassed history, culture and biology. The learning appeared meandering but was self-directed, much like a butterfly's flight.
     One charge leveled at the home-schooling movement is that children miss out on socialization. Socialization in school is horrendous," counters Legiardi-Laura. "When I went to school, you learned institutional racism. There was unofficial racial tracking. There were 'special project' kids - always white. I was socialized to be a good consumer, follow someone else's instructions, taught age segregation, all in the personal environment of the demeaning cliques. Look at Columbine!"
     What about the quality of education received through home-schooling? "Look at the Colfax family in California," says Legiardi-Laura. "They were home-schooled. They lived on a hardscrabble homestead, earned money raising goats. All four sons were offered full scholarships to Harvard; three said yes. Kids rise to challenges. Look at Tanya Aebi. She was a troubled girl, a bike messenger hanging out in the East Village, when her father challenged her, said she could have a college education or a 26-foot slope, but if she took the boat she'd have to sail around the world alone and grow up. She took the challenge and became the youngest person ever to circumnavigate the globe alone. There's a book, Maiden Voyage, all about her. It's extraordinary what kids are capable of when challenged. Look at the Williams sisters. Piss poor, from Compton, LA. Their dad watched a tennis match on TV, was shocked at the hundred-thousand-dollar prize money, and thought, I can teach my girls this. He was a postal worker. He got them to carry the telephone books to get strong, he took them to crappy asphalt courts to practice. Look where they are now. That's home-schooling."
     All this requires time and energy, something that the parents of children in the worst crisis in public schools don't necessarily have. I spent a year teaching in the Bronx for LEAP(Learning through and Extended Arts Program), an organization that sends artists into the public school systems to make up for the lack of an arts curriculum. I remember my shock at the kids lined up to take their Ritalin, at the lack of essentials like paper, (I was told the paper shipment "didn't make it" that year), at the 30-plus students per class, at teenagers with a lack of basic reading and writing skills. Surmounting these things was exhausting, but what kept me going was the enormous untapped talent of the students. They had behavioral problems but no lack of talent. And in the teacher's lunchroom between classes, I encountered passionate, engaged, far-from-jaded teachers. If the problem is not with the teachers nor with the students, it has to be with the system.
     Cinema is rich in examples of both students in revolt against the system and heroic teachers struggling to make a difference. These days one finds Gatto and Legiardi-Laura hard at work on their film. "Film is the quintessential American medium," says Legiardi-Laura. "Film can generate a debate. The only way to affect education, which is the preamble to any meaningful change in American political life, is by challenging the education system that is its bedrock. That system has to change."
     Gatto spends his time lecturing on his theories, inspiring an army of defectors, viral elements in the system. His radical, questioning-what-is spirit is essentially toxic to the system. He's an antibody within the school system, spreading a virus of new thought, one person at a time.
     "What one single skill of all the millions available pays off best in American society? It's the ability to speak in a compelling fashion to any person you run into. How much energy do schools expend in allowing practice in that? Zero. If I were to found a school that would revolutionize schooling," says Gatto, "I'd concentrate on two things: public speaking and civility. Someone who is well spoken and graceful in their interactions is always taken care of. When you float through Harlem and touch the people who have risen out of the ghetto, they're people like Jesse Jackson. And those two things are very teachable, very learnable, by everybody. So the horseshit about bell curves and different styles of learning? Sweep the board clean of those. Give people those two gifts." HT

    Info about John Taylor Gatto, his books, Roland LEgiardi-Laura, and The Fourth Purpose can be found at johntaylorgatto.com

I just want to get some more stuff before I give the magazine back.

There's this quote from an article on Mark Webber that I like. It's, "I am a revolutionary, and I'm linked up with a movement, and I have a duty to let people know there is a movement in this country." I second that.

Here's another one from page 54, "It's good for your soul to take care of people. And it's time for people to stop thinking about jus