“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” — Woodrow Wilson
Education and school have been the subject, direct or tangential, of a number of posts lately. Most notably this fantastic, honest piece about Antigone’s school experience. Government schooling is an emotionally charged subject since most of us attended school every non-summer weekday for 12+ years. Many of us are sending or planning to send our children to this institution for the same duration.
The “public education” narrative is that the fabric of our civic society is founded on universal, compulsory education. According to this narrative, the difficult and time consuming job of distilling curricula and applying it to individuals and groups of children in a scientifically validated manner should be left to state-certified professionals, freeing the parents for work more suited to their specific talents. Deviating from this model will result in a society in which only the sufficiently wealthy and privileged will receive the education to succeed in life while the poor will not have access to the tools to remove themselves from poverty. Additionally, many adults will not be capable of critical thought, but will instead learn about gods, ghosts, creationism, and a worldview supporting racism, nationalism, sexism and homophobia. As with most state-centered narratives, the consequences it claims will inevitably occur are already manifest all around us. State education has been, if not wholly responsible, at least a large component in creating the reality that we’re told we should fear.
The purpose of this post is to introduce and wildly recommend the works of John Taylor Gatto. He was a teacher for 30 years, was awarded New York City teacher of the year 3 times and retired after winning New York State teacher of the year in 1991. He’s got a handful of books–an online version of one is available via the prior link–plus he and his former students have been covered fairly regularly in mainstream’ish media.
My prescient partner Alisa got me a collection of his essays, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling, during my brief stint as a high-school math teacher. I expected it to be a motivational, Lean on Me style book. Instead it was The People’s History of the United States, shredding everything I had previously been taught and understood about the role of state education in society. Anyone who wants to speak authoritatively about education reform and definitely anyone who is considering how their own children are or will be educated would benefit tremendously from Gatto’s experience and research.
Well, that’s kindof it for the post–more of a slightly-too-large-for-a-comment-comment. I am comforted by the fact that, should you read a few dozen pages of his work, your mind will be sufficiently blown to justify this recommendation.
I will leave you with a couple sample passages with links to the relevant resources to tempt your palette:
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era – marketing. — Harper’s Magazine (easier to read in this reprint)
Something in the structure of schooling calls forth violence. While latter-day schools don’t allow energetic physical discipline, certainly they are state-of-the-art laboratories in humiliation, as your own experience should remind you. In my first years of teaching I was told over and over that humiliation was my best friend, more effective than whipping. I witnessed this theory in practice through my time as a teacher. If you were to ask me now whether physical or psychological violence does more damage, I would reply that slurs, aspersion, formal ranking, insult, and inference are far and away the more deadly. Nor does law protect the tongue-lashed. — The Underground History of American Education (the entire book is available online)
I will tell you this – a kid who learns to read at five, and a kid who learns to read
at 9, will be indistinguishable to each other at the age of fourteen, assuming
they both like what they’re doing. On the other hand, we can say its too
inconvenient, or too expensive, to allow that and impose a learning curve in
first grade that produces this wonderful bell, we can then assign the people on
the fringes of the bell to special ed and the people in the middle of the bells
- the walls of the curve – to the dull classes and so on. And we will create a
class system by simply doing that. Inside of a year or two, the kids will impose
that kind of class system on themselves! It’s a phenomenally intricate, but
rather easy to unravel puzzle there – reading is pathetically easy to teach, you
assume that once you assemble 30 people in a room, and do it in the same
routines, that you’ll fail to teach it to some of them, that this bell will
appear, and the atmosphere in the classroom is that the humiliation of being a
dull reader or bad reader will never wear off. You can predict the rise of a
giant remediation industry. — Interview with Jerry Brown
I don’t know if it’s just your writing style or what, but the problems I have with what you write here are very similar to your last post.
This is like saying, “The doctor didn’t cure all disease, therefore doctors CAUSE disease.” Another giant WTF statement you don’t actually give any argument for (maybe it’s in Gatto’s book? throw us a bone, here).
Without providing at least some evidence supporting this claim, I’m gonna have to go ahead and provisionally conclude that your cause/effect module is long past its warranty.
What’s the takeaway here? Public schools have some serious drawbacks, therefore…everyone should be homeschooled? You really think homeschooling is going to reduce, say, the belief in creationism? Buddy, have I got a bridge to sell you…
You decry the fact that we still have “a society in which only the sufficiently wealthy and privileged will receive the education to succeed in life” but you’re entirely missing the fact that this was A SHIT TON WORSE before public schooling.
This is not to even mention the sheer obliviousness it would take to suggest that every child COULD be home schooled, assuming that universal homeschooling is even desirable. How is a single parent, or two parents who work full-time supposed to do this? It’s nice for you if you or your kids have access to someone who can capably teach them, but not every kid has that opportunity. I don’t want to spend too much more time on this since (I hope) it might be a strawman of your position but since you haven’t actually given any prescription you’re kind of inviting readers to fill in the blanks. Shrug.
MH, I had the same initial reaction to the post, but I’m thinking that maybe he’s not so much advocating homeschooling as advocating a revamp of the current public school system. I’m waiting for him to weigh in before I think about it any further.
I worry about a return to homeschooling because the work of raising kids falls to mothers too often already. I believe that public education and the consequent alleviation of women’s role in that area has been one factor in the increasing participation of women in society beyond the home. I’m a supporter of universal childcare for the same reason.
I also worry that this will only serve to increase the inequity between rich and poor. Wealthy people can afford to have experts teach their children, and although poor parents are equally concerned with their children’s education, there’s a fundamental difference in resources available to them. Ideally, public schooling should give kids a level playing field no matter what their family’s socioeconomic circumstances. I know we often fail at that, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to toss out the entire system.
For the poorest families, the cessation of public education may mean their kids don’t get what they need for education simply because their parents can’t afford to take the time away from earning an income to support their kids. When you’re working two or three jobs just to feed and house your family, there’s not a lot of time left to teach your child to read.
In an ideal society, people would find collective arrangements to educate children so that no parent had to carry an undue load. However, I really don’t think that in our current model, we can tear down the public education system without creating an even wider class division in education than we have now and without putting even more responsibility for parenting on mothers.
This is like saying, “The doctor didn’t cure all disease, therefore doctors CAUSE disease.” –MH
I believe it’s more like saying, “30% of the people who come in for a yearly checkup die during the visit, and 50% of them emerge paralyzed. Maybe it’s worth investigating if this guy is really a doctor.”
“Without providing at least some evidence supporting this claim, I’m gonna have to go ahead and provisionally conclude that your cause/effect module is long past its warranty.” –MH
I am comfortable with you concluding that. I’m not sure what you would accept as evidence in any case. Most people lack basic critical thinking skills: 89% approval rating for George Bush as U.S. soldiers began butchering central asians, 89% lack the basic understanding of reason and evidence to disbelieve miracles, over half believe in ghosts, 69% believe in hell. Half the country (well, geographically anyway) is trying to push “science” curricula to include creationism. Of course, it could be worse. Without the 20,000 hours of state schooling, maybe 100% of people would supported Bush as he rolled out his worldwide assault on humanity. Maybe 0% as opposed to 10% would have had the ability to critically analyze circumstances, reason about cause effect and conclude that the best way to deal with murderous and insane ideological fanatics was not to become a nation of murderous and insane ideological fanatics.
BTW: 20,000 hours, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s research, is enough time to become a world-class-genius-master-badass in not one, but two disciplines. What the fuck does 20,000 hours of state school teach the poorest 30% of american students?
“You decry the fact that we still have “a society in which only the sufficiently wealthy and privileged will receive the education to succeed in life” but you’re entirely missing the fact that this was A SHIT TON WORSE before public schooling.” — MH
Without providing at least some evidence supporting this claim, I’m gonna have to go ahead and provisionally conclude that your cause/effect module is long past its warranty. If you decide to look for evidence, I recommend John Gatto who has spent 50 years studying the history of public schooling in America
If you decide, as I’m assuming you have until now, to skip my recommendation and look elsewhere, I’ll give you a hint to start your research. The public school movement had nothing to do with rectifying disparities between rich and poor. It replicates a homogenizing model pioneered by another militant imperial nation most notable in history (to most of us) for its warmongering, nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia and genocide.
Lisa, MH,
I’m not proposing universal anything. Using the threat of violence to force others to obey my preferences isn’t my bag. Gatto concludes that human individuality dooms centrally planned educational approaches to failure–the very nature of how each person relates to the world around them precludes a “recommendation” other than decentralize.
The purpose of my post was merely to recommend an essential source of mind-blowing information for those interested in such things. We cannot intelligently discuss race, sex and gender without dispelling the mythologies that we’ve been sold, historically, as fact. We cannot intelligently discuss war without clearing away the propaganda around the history of U.S. foreign policy. In the same way, no progress will be made in the discussion of state education without uncovering our eyes, unplugging our ears, and accepting the hard realities about the role that schools have played and continue to play in promoting much of the sickness we deplore in the world around us.
“Lisa, MH,
I’m not proposing universal anything. Using the threat of violence to force others to obey my preferences isn’t my bag”
Jad,
If you genuinely think I was suggesting that it was, I can’t begin to imagine where you got that idea from what little I said, unless the only way you can imagine “proposing” anything is doing so via physical violence. If you don’t, why are you being facetious? I can hardly be considered a troll, as I blog here myself. If you don’t want, for whatever reason, to have an upfront discussion of your ideas, please just say so and I won’t comment on anything you post here on out. But behaving in the above fashion won’t get you anywhere constructive.
Oddly other nations also have public school systems, and yet… apparently they are not as nationalist, racist, sexist, etc as the US.
Maybe it’s our particular public school system? That is not clear from your post.
Certainly I don’t much like our propogandistic, sugar-saturated public schools. But it is the particular, not the general, that I think is at fault here. Gatto – and you – are evidently throwing out schooling in its entirety. I think that might be a mistake.
The problem in a world in which the poor are left to their own devices to educate their children is one of resources. Consider every textbook you ever stuffed into a backpack or locker, all the factual knowledge imparted to you, and ask yourself – would your parents have all that? With the internet, emphatically yes, but they still have to work to understand it and impart it well, but before the internet? Gods no. My friends once passed around a question at a social gathering: what one thing would you bring with you on a trip 500 years into the past? Antigone was there and IIRC she answered “a recipe for penicillin”. My answer was “My ability to read and write english characters” because back then even THAT was a valuable skill because it was rare. Public school has improved us above such a terrible level of literacy at least.
This is where MH was coming from – once upon a time nobody had any education because the people responsible for that education didn’t have anything either, except maybe for their own trade. I don’t want to be trapped to follow in the footsteps of my parents, and nobody ever should be, because that is what seals the bounds between classes. And before you mention that the classes are effectively sealed, read this, specifically the section on page 2 entitled “How Much Mobility?” It actually seems to be substantial, and vastly above the inescapable bounds of poverty of the serf lifestyle.
TRH
whoops, sorry, forgot the link: http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/opp_031.pdf
TRH
Actually, if memory serves me correctly, I said “A book identifying common herbs and their uses that included a recipe for penicillin”
It was a fun exercise, to be sure, but I think ferlessleeder makes a good point: people specialize their knowledge, and always have. “Teaching” is a specialized field, and by claiming everyone could do it, it diminishes what they always have done.
All,
Sorry in advance for the WOT comment. I appreciate the concern for the disempowered and your understanding that we have the same ultimate goal in our thinking and discussing the issue of education–a just, peaceful and equitable world.
Lisa KS,
Sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth–and I certainly didn’t/don’t regard you as a troll. Once I thought about it, there are a number of ways to “revamp” the current system without using force. The state could no longer make school attendance compulsory, for example. Thanks for your comments.
I think you are spot-on about literacy. I agree 100% that literacy is the part of the key, the other part is not hating reading more than death because you have to read (or pretend to read) shit-tons of crap that is not relevant to you written by people who have no knowledge of your experience and have probably been dead for multiple decades if not centuries *breathe*. A literate child with access to a library (and, now, computers) and the freedom to explore can learn anything s/he wants to.
This actually touches upon another of my favorite Gatto passages:
So
1) Literacy is the essential tool that is the gateway to a lifetime of access to knowledge.
2) After 20,000 hours of schooling 1/4 of Americans are functionally illiterate.
3) Previous to the advent of public schooling 99% of those not actively enslaved by or at war with the state were literate.
4) ?
5) Profit
BTW feerlessleedr, the same passage linked to above is also relevant to the value of textbooks issue in your comment.
That’s a really good point. Clearly other countries have better results than the U.S. system. I can’t find the reference, but I recall that Gatto points out shorter school years, fewer years of compulsory education and other factors in a number of Northern European countries. But I accept your point, it’s obviously possible to have state schooling without the noted disastrous consequences.
Antigone: “’Teaching’ is a specialized field, and by claiming everyone could do it, it diminishes what they always have done.”
No, teaching is not a specialized field. Everybody does do it. Being a professional teacher, doing it all day every day for one’s living, is a specialized field, and that’s fine. Pointing out that everyone teaches no more “diminishes what they have always done” than, say, pointing out that everybody can learn to play soccer, or sing, diminishes what professional singers or soccer players do.
Jad: “Most people lack basic critical thinking skills… Without the 20,000 hours of state schooling, maybe 100% of people would supported Bush as he rolled out his worldwide assault on humanity. Maybe 0% as opposed to 10% would have had the ability to critically analyze circumstances, reason about cause effect and conclude that the best way to deal with murderous and insane ideological fanatics was not to become a nation of murderous and insane ideological fanatics.”
The trouble with this is that schooling indoctrinates, and is meant to. The people who make the policies you’re objecting to, like killing central Asians, are themselves products of elite schools. They always have been. “Critical thinking skills”? Considering that you are here simply repeating cliched talking points, you’re not really in a position to cast asparagus. Highly trained professionals brought about the current financial crisis, for example. There are times when I think it’s a shame I don’t believe in hell.
Absolutely. You may have misunderstood my point, which is likely to do with my punchy, cliched delivery. I don’t think the ruling class goes on global killing sprees because they can’t think critically. My claim is that the 90% approval rating indicates that the population isn’t thinking critically about why the ruling class is going to war. This is because of the indoctrination that is attendant to state schooling and it is intentional, as you correctly indicate.
Ha! It’s true too. I’ve only had 5 or 6 years of practice thinking critically–I’m a product of public schools and enrolled for 8 additional years of post-highschool education. I myself was a teacher just 3 years ago. However, I would be interested in which of my cliched talking point(s) you’re referring to. Labeling something a talking point is not a valid argument against its truth value.
It would diminish soccer players if we say that everyone could play professional soccer. And that’s basically what are saying if we say that anyone could do a teacher’s job; that it’s not difficult, that everyone would be as good at it: everyone has the skill level of a professional teacher.
“In fact, the first national census conducted in 1840 indicated that near-universal (about 97%) literacy among the white population had been achieved”
-Was this testing for basic ability to read a string of English characters, or was it testing for actual comprehension of said string? I ask because the most basic idea of literacy is that one can both read and write in a language, while parsing that language is a slightly different skill.
Also, I think it’s not just disrespectful, but downright dangerous to say that anyone can do a teacher’s job. Are you going to include Young Earth Creationists in that model? What about even more extreme fundamentalists who believe POC constitute a separate species? What about the people who think that educating women is immoral? Do you think that these people would make good teachers, or would allow their children anywhere near a good teacher, if it weren’t mandated? And what about the children themselves? They don’t have any say in who their parents are, and it will be a long time before any of them could appreciate the doors that are opened and closed based on (the lack of) education.
Most fundamentalist sects can only retain their youth by denying them information about the outside world. Consider the fact the Amish. They fought their case before the Supreme Court to pull their children out of public schooling after the 8th grade, because they thought it was ‘corrupting their children’ (read: teaching their children at least some critical thinking skills and an awareness of the wider world). The Supreme Court gave them their way noting that the children would at least be taken care of in the Amish community despite the lack of education, and thus would not be a burden on society. At no point were the desires of the children taken into account, nor the implications of a culture that could only maintain itself by starving its children of knowledge as early as possible. Tourist dollars speak, and so numerous problems are overlooked- not only the lack of education, but also rampant rape and incest.
This is not to say that our system is perfect. It isn’t. But I don’t think discarding a nationalized system is the answer. We need to tighten guidelines on core comprehension. We need curriculum designed by actual scientists and other assorted experts in their fields, not based on the outrage of ignorant parents who don’t want their children learning that homosexuals are people too. In the link provided Gatto took issue with our reliance on so-called experts. (I think he meant blind reliance, but I came away with a broader reading, so I’m clarifying here.) I don’t think that reliance on experts is a problem. It is humanly impossible for one person to become an expert in all things. You wouldn’t hire a heart surgeon to build your house, nor would you hire a plumber for your appendectomy. What our educational system lacks is an emphasis on how we discern which experts and authorities are reliable and which are not. Our current system places too much emphasis on outcomes and rote memorization of steps, not true comprehension of the how and why those steps reach the outcome.
Bullying is a problem with a less clear cut solution. As in all life, it is a balancing act between the individual rights. On the one hand, everyone should have the right to feel safe in a public area. On the other hand, people also have the rights to free speech, etc… so how can you tell when one has begun to outweigh the other? How do you stop a whisper campaign against a 12 year old girl when you aren’t sure who started it? Do you punish anyone who says anything bad about her? What if she’s the one known for bullying others, and this is just a warning that’s being passed around? Do you insist that there be no rough housing at all on the playground, and that all children must play carefully prescribed games where no one can ever hit each other with a ball or tackle each other into the ground face first and then say they were ‘just playing’?
The things I’ve outlined are ridiculous, of course. It’s not right to deny children their rights on the basis that they might be abused any more than it would be fair to do so to adults. What we need are teachers and administrators who genuinely care about the students and who have the time, energy, and resources to know them well enough to tell what’s play gotten out of hand and what’s deliberate bullying. Some things aren’t acceptable at any age; slapping and flipping up skirts among them. If the parents haven’t taught their kids this by the time they get to school then school officials need to step in for the sake of all the students.
To get to that point, and to significantly ameliorate the problems of our system in general, we need more teachers, period. We need to offer higher salaries to attract more applicants and of those we need a more stringent screening process to ensure that the only ones hired are those with a genuine passion for their subject and who genuinely want to help kids succeed. Kids aren’t stupid and they can tell when these things are lacking. We also, as a society, need to place greater value in education for its own sake. Learning for the sake of learning and not as some necessary obstacle to get a certain career.
Finally, I’d say that we should ditch the F*ing standardized tests. They’re dull, they’re boring, and all they measure is the ability to take F*ing standardized tests. It would be much better to have a set of comprehension guidelines that could be met in a number of different ways as long as the students demonstrated _comprehension_. Maybe a poster or power point project instead of an essay. Or performing a skit to show understanding about a particular historical event. There are some skills would require certain formats (e.g. the ability to _write_ a five paragraph essay) but in those situations students might be more interested if they could pick their own topics.
Out of curiosity, do we have any particular reason to believe this indoctrination works? It seems like there are many rather more plausible vectors for that sort of thing. Personally, I’d rank “effective propaganda delivered through the public education system” slightly higher than, oh, say, “CIA mind control rays.”
(And sure, the structure and curriculum of public schools reinforces all sorts of patriarchal norms, but so does everything else. Nobody goes through health class and says, “well, golly, before, I thought date rape was wrong, but now I see it’s okey-dokey!” Nor the converse. Schools oughtn’t be let off the hook, but really.)
Is that really his only recommendation? Does he explore or suggest alternate models? Does he consider the effects on communities?
I think that’s incorrect. If you add up the statistics cited in the article, you get an 82.2% literacy rate. But what’s more—and I could be wrong about this, since I didn’t look at the methodology in-depth—it looks like the classification of “illiterate” means, “has never attended school.” That is, it looks like anyone who reported a level of education beyond “none” is considered “literate” by those statistics.
And that’s without considering the free black population. Which, hey, if I’m wrong about the methodology, I’m glad there’s a proven way to teach all (or nearly all) white men to read. That must be very nice for them.
Some thoughts on past literacy and present:
Not that Wikipedia is the be-all and end-all of factual information, but what it has to say about the oft-quoted Census of 1840 data is the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States
The implication here seems to be that high literacy rates correlated with an increase in schooling conducted outside the home–what do you think?
Another thought in regards to 1840 literacy rates–I can pretty much guarantee you that hardly any of the population at that time was as well-educated as I was in the math and sciences by the time I graduated high school. To be honest, I doubt many of them were as educated as I was in math and sciences by the time I finished ninth grade. That type of education simply wasn’t offered to children then, and the sciences, at least, are very difficult to learn out of a library, as you talk about higher up in the comments. Lab facilities and experimental techniques and equipment and perishables are some of the invaluable resources provided that certainly 1840 era children schooled at home, and libraries today, don’t offer.
In terms of indoctrination–well. I find it difficult to believe that there is any evidence that children in the 1840s were less indoctrinated by their teachers or parents in what to believe and how to think than children are today. Frankly, I can’t imagine it’s not the opposite. A truth outside Biblical is at least heard of by children today–I rather suspect it wasn’t, too much, in centuries past, don’t you? And I imagine that historical detail was, if anything, more whitewashed than it is now.
As far as compulsory public school education goes–I don’t know your background, but I think it must not have been the same as mine. In my milieu, there was a scarily large number of families who, without fear of the law, would never have bothered to send their kids to school, and certainly wouldn’t have bothered to give them much of an education at home to replace it. They simply didn’t care. It makes me wonder about that 1840 census–I have a hard time believing there weren’t a massive amount of trashy, ignorant-and-proud-of-it families just like there are now–I have a hard time believing that everybody back then was totally different from general humanity now. I’d love to see more details on exactly how and of whom that census was conducted on and by.
I can and do totally sympathize with your feelings about school indoctrination, and of course it exists–anyone who disputes that, I have to believe they don’t remember their own school days. Nor do they remember how pernicious an idea acquired in childhood can be, even once you’re an adult and know better. One of my favorite lines ever from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee:
“Once a week [in school], we had a Current
Events period. Each child was supposed to clip an item from a
newspaper, absorb its contents, and reveal them to the class. This
practice allegedly overcame a variety of evils: standing in front of
his fellows encouraged good posture and gave a child poise; delivering
a short talk made him word-conscious; learning his current event
strengthened his memory; being singled out made him more than ever
anxious to return to the Group.”
When I was a child, and I had to deal with the fuck-ups that were disrupting MY class time (yes, in many ways, I was that self-involved), I used to fantasize that school was compulsory, but that class time wasn’t. I had a vision that everyone HAD to come to the physical school building, required by law, but that no one actually had to be in class if they didn’t want to. I envisioned nothing but motivated people who wanted to learn in the class; and if a class was going really well, then we’d just keep talking.
The compulsory part of it was so that people’s parents couldn’t keep them out of school, but if they were idiots who didn’t want it for themselves, they could stop bothering me.
This idea, like so many utopian ideas, falls completely on it’s face when you start thinking about things like, oh, bullying.
I’m sure you’re correct. Very few households, I imagine, could spare the labor of a parent for education of children. Many probably couldn’t spare the labor of a child. Geography also played a large part and it wasn’t (I’m making this up, but it seems reasonable) likely that community education solutions existed until the population grew dense enough to support dedicating resources to education (teachers, buildings, etc.). It’s not my position that homeschooling is the end-all-be-all of education. Many (most? all?) community based solutions that were available in the past are illegal or so bound by regulation as to make them economically impossible–especially in impoverished communities.
I don’t doubt this is true. However, a significant portion of the population of the 1840s was better educated vis math and literacy than a significant portion of the population today and at a fraction of the cost in time and resources.
Agreed. This is as much to do with the overall level of wealth and technology as it is with compulsory vs. voluntary schooling. In the 1880s, when school had become (largely) compulsory, I doubt that lab facilities were any more prevalent at the new state schools than they were 40 years earlier in the community schools. For those students interested in chemistry or other lab-based sciences, resources and avenues of satisfying their curiosity can be found. Many homeschooled students, for example, attend community college courses in their later (13-18) education.
Agreed. Again, though, this has alot to do with the state of knowledge of the time–Darwin hadn’t even published in 1840. Compulsory schooling was not intended to fight superstition, but, rather, to homoginize it. A central purpose of compulsory schooling was to combat the growth of catholic based community schools which were on the rise with increased catholic immigration in the mid 19th century. I think that there’s value in the heterogeneity of error as well. Having two views presented in a monolithic school system is less valuable than having dozens or hundreds of view presented in a variety of offered educational solutions.
Oh, I assure you our backgrounds are probably very similar in this arena. I doubt there is a public school in america that doesn’t include a population of disinterested, angry, abused children whose parents don’t give a shit about them. Of course, at the time, we experienced them as bullies and idiots who made boring, slow classes yet more slow and boring.
And here I will tread back onto the thin ice (assuming I’ve avoid it above), because the root of compulsory schooling is the threat of violence. Making schooling compulsory is surrendering to the violation of basic human rights because, in our opinion, other people are too stupid or evil to take care of themselves or their children. Of course, this opinion is almost certainly true in *some* cases. Can we engineer more elegant, voluntary solutions to the problem?
Is the heart of this concern the fact that the child is seen as property of the parent in the eyes of the law? Rather than increase the level of coercion, both by threatening parents *and* by subjecting children to 12 years in a hierarchical and absolutist authoritarian structure–both components of which assign a higher value to violent solutions than the creation of an environment of universal respect for persons–can we resolve the issues of provision of education, and satisfy all the participants, in a non-violent manner?
For example, in the situation where the parent(s) is/are damaging the future of the child, can we remove the restrictions on the freedom of the child to self-emancipate, find alternative living arrangements, call upon charities for assistance, seek employment or apprenticeship (*wince*) etc.? Can we empower groups of concerned individuals to offer aid? I realize these avenues are fraught with their own peril–but, as with the cases of non-abused children, empowering the child to take action on his/her own behalf and respecting his/her humanity is certainly less perilous than threating already terrible parents on behalf of a victimized child.
And I love the Harper Lee quote.
Antigone,
I had the same fantasy as a student and as a teacher. From the other perspective how much more sane would the non-students be if they didn’t have to sit in a room bored out of their mind for 8 hours a day 50 minutes at a time. But why make them go to the building at all?
Jad-
You’re one of those “everything the government does is built on an implicit threat of violence” types aren’t you? I don’t agree with that. If you don’t send your kids to school, the most violence you’re going to get is a letter from the state telling you when to test (depending on the state). At the very worst, you’re going to get your kids removed from your home, (which, considering the terrible parents I know of, wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world). That’s not exactly violent in the way I think of as “violent”.
And, like I said, they had to go the building to keep parents from keeping them home. There are plenty of parents who don’t fit the definition of abusive, but are extremely hostile to education and learning, that if they didn’t have to have their kids go to school, they wouldn’t.
1) Who gets to decide if the parents are damaging the future of their child?
2) How many children know about emancipation? It isn’t exactly common knowledge, and it isn’t taught at school. Additionally, I know some who did it; it’s a hard, stressed life that almost inevitably gets their grades down.
3) Charities are unreliable. During times of economic downturns, when they’re needed the most, is when they have the least amount of donations.
4) Employment and apprenticeships have the same problems that emancipation has; namely you’re going to see a lot of low incomes railroaded into these fields.
The Australian and Canadian Aboriginal peoples might disagree with that.
I’m speaking of this assuming you’re not taking the kids away for racist reasons.
Antigone,
If it’s not rooted in violence, then there’s no problem, simply don’t let them take your kids away. I sort of imagine, based on . . . everything that’s ever happened . . . that, should you try that tactic, you (and everyone near you) would die in a hail of bullets. Or set on fire.
You may hold the position that violence is necessary because you want to force people to do things you think are good. But the position that governments could exert any control at all without the threat of, not just violence, but massive, overwhelming, disproportionate violence is unsustainable. At least, I’ve not heard a valid argument to that end–I am interested in hearing your reasoning.
And the difference in reasoning for the kidnapping (in your response to Vi) has no bearing on whether or not it’s violent–the same is true for any violation of a person.
About 60% of children in the foster care system are children of color (as of about ten years ago; I’m not sure about more recent statistics). Do we need an official program for it to qualify as racism?
Community accountability processes provide models for communities coercing individuals into participating, being accountable, and honouring the community’s wishes, without any threat of violence.
There’s still the question: what do you do if the abusers just don’t care, refuse to participate, and maybe leave? I don’t think that problem is fatal, if it happens infrequently enough and restorative justice still produces better results overall, but it’s definitely a point that requires work.
I work the social work classes at the university students, so I know those social workers that are charged with “taking your kids away”. I doubt any of these people are capable of the most basic level of violence. The only violent ones are the abusive parents who inflict the scars on them.
You don’t have a “right” to people, not even your children. You have responsibilities towards your children. If you don’t meet those responsibilities, the child is taken to someone who will.
If I could be in more than 100% agreement, I would be. I would hesitate to call such processes “government,” but that’s a minor semantic point. If we agree on that as a possible definition of government, then I retract my claim that all government requires violence (and my opposition to being governed by all possible models
Antigone,
I understand that social workers are not gunmen and that they are often rescuing children from terrible circumstances–I believe them to be motivated by the very best instinct humans possess: protection of the innocent.
If you do not obey the demands of the social worker, however, it is a fact that a legion of heavily armed men (and women) will be dispatched to your residence. I’m not even claiming this is wrong (not in this line of discussion anyway), but it is the initiation of violence–that’s undeniable.
I entirely agree that people do not have a “right” to their children. Unfortunately the state (and their legions of guys with guns) enforce laws that make children, in essence, property of the parents.
Jad,
You say:
Yet, in the absence of a state, aren’t you making children the property of their parents? Because most children (and many in abusive or neglectful situations) clearly don’t have the ability (or even just the sense of entitlement) to just walk away from their parents, right? Your model seems to say, “I refuse to interfere with parents,” but its result is “children have no rights not granted them by their parents.” Because nobody is ever going to be there to help a kid who’s in a bad spot.
You may answer with the mythical catch-all of “community,” but
1) can you show me evidence of any model that works or has worked like this?
2) who’s to say that many communities won’t simply adopt a belief different from yours, that parents do own their children and can do whatever they like? certainly much of human history has recorded people believing and acting this way.
3) if a community pressures a parent to “be better” or somehow to give the child independence or to another family, and that abusive parent refuses, what is the community to do? how does it help that child?
Jad,
I agree that any law made by any governing body does, at its end, use violence for coercion. That is the final end result of a continued refusal to obey any law. Backing up to educational resources outside of schools, you say:
“For those students interested in chemistry or other lab-based sciences, resources and avenues of satisfying their curiosity can be found. Many homeschooled students, for example, attend community college courses in their later (13-18) education.”
But those aren’t free, and neither is physically getting to them free, as the facilities provided by public schools and the transportation to them are. Which brings us back to square one–if your parents won’t provide it, and there’s no public school system, the kid simply has no way to learn it.
Children will always be the people most likely to be exploited in a society due to the power disparity inherent in all their relationships. Between the ages of say, 6, and 18, however, children have agency and the ability to express preferences. In the absence of a state, these preferences *might* at least find expression. In the presence of the state–at least the current and all historical states–one adult, usually a parent, is given “guardianship” of the child. If the child seeks asylum elsewhere, s/he is returned to the parent. If s/he begs and pleads for alternative living arrangements, s/he is returned to the parent. If the parent does anything other than openly torture the child, s/he is the de facto owner of the child.
Everybody, especially outside the immediate family, is legally powerless to do so, unless they want to follow the road to build a case to spring the child into the state foster care system. This is a) difficult and b) of questionable benefit since the state foster care system is fraught with rape and abuse as well. (BTW, I am not going to sit in judgment on somebody who uses the state to remove a child from a dangerous situation. Currently, it’s the only available course of action.)
I understand that there are (very very rarely) exceptions: grandparents can, sometimes, exercise some legal authority under very special circumstances.
Damn, you caught on to my catch all solution! No I can’t show you a model that works. To my knowledge no model has ever worked at all–at least not sustainably. My position is that this will always be the case so long as we accept that violence of the powerful over the weak, and not negotiation among equals, is the method by which challenging social problems should be solved.
You say “much.” What part of human history is excepted from this thinking? Why shouldn’t people believe and act this way when we’ve legitimized and enshrined the principle of “might makes right,” in all of our human institutions?
These are excellent questions and the short answer is that I don’t know how these situations can be best addressed.
How to go about addressing a particular situation in a non-absolutist, non-violent manner requires context which only people in situ have. Who are the families of the abused child and the one who wants to study chemistry? Who are their friends? Who are the parents peers, coworkers, pastors, and friends? Where do they work? Where do they shop and recreate? Who are the respected members of the community where they live? What educational institutions exist around them and do they have an interest in healthy, educated children? What businesspeople exist that may want to foster a climate of peaceful commerce and learning?
Can we imagine that all of these people might be able to come up with some way to address these issues as equals of the people causing and finding themselves victims?
I’m not a utopianist, I am very realistic, IMO, about human nature–which is why I oppose the institutionalizing and worship of overwhelmingly assymetrical power dynamics. I am certain children will suffer in a stateless society, and I don’t have answers to every question (this is not a dispersion on yous guys’ few and relevant questions). I am certain that the way forward is in de-legitimizing authoritarian, violently coercive, human institutions and empowering voluntary negotiated solutions to problems which respect the humanity of the people involved to the utmost.
Jad, are you at all familiar with Mexican Mennonites? I’d be surprised—I’m not sure how things work Stateside, but few people in Canada know about them.
At least in Canada, the state has coercive rules about education. Children between the ages of 5 and 16 must be enrolled in and attend a school that is recognized as such by the province in which those children live. Alternatively, they can be homeschooled, if the parents write a letter to the local school board notifying the board of their intention to homeschool their children. That policy is relatively recent, though—it came into effect in 2002, and prior to that, homeschooling families could be inspected by representatives of the school board for evidence of satisfactory compliance with educational standards.
One of the educational standards of the Ontario school system is that children be taught either English or French. They may receive additional instruction in any language—Ojibway, Cree, Ukranian, Klingon, Japanese, whatever—but they need to receive a certain level of instruction in the official languages of the country in which they reside.
A number of very conservative Mennonite families found this overly restrictive. Seems they wanted to be sure that their female children spoke Pennsylvania Dutch almost exclusively, and had only a smattering of English or any other actual language of commerce. So they moved to Mexico while all their kids were school-aged, returning to Canada when the kids were too old to be affected by Ontario’s repressive laws.
Of course, in both Canada and Mexico, the Mennonite families lived in Mennonite communities where their values are respected and traditions upheld—where nobody sees it as at all problematic if the daughters are unable to call 911 in case of an emergency, or seek legal or social assistance, or run their own businesses outside their communities. The community takes care of its own, don’t you know.
There was a family came to help with the tomato harvest: Dad, one teenaged son, two teenaged daughters. The son spoke some Spanish and some English, the dad spoke both reasonably fluently. The daughters couldn’t function in English or Spanish (we mostly spoke Spanish in the greenhouses, because most of the migrant workers were from Mexico—that’s a whole ‘nother story), so their dad had to translate all of their instructions into Pennsylvania Dutch. He asked me to teach the family some English, but they didn’t want to take classes with the Mexicans whom I taught in the evenings [eyeroll]. So we did a lunchtime class for the Mennonites, but I stipulated that I was not going to exclude any of their co-workers who wanted additional English practice.
I spoke with the daughters, using a combination of their minimal English and my abysmal German. One liked making dresses. The other wanted to get married so that she wouldn’t have to do farm labour anymore. They had never read any books that were not Bible stories. They could not conceive of doing anything other than getting married and having kids as soon as possible. They had no opinions of what kind of person they wanted to marry. As far as I could tell, and I realise that the language barrier and the fact that I was a complete stranger to them meant that I really have no hope of knowing what they really thought or felt, these young women had learned that there was no possibility of any other future beyond marriage. And they were going to be as dependent on their husbands as they were on their father.
So, you know, I’m not real big on the idea that a community will step in to ensure that children have access to choice and information. I’m not convinced that these girls would have been worse served by the coercive public education system, which would have coerced them into learning at least one language that is spoken outside their communities, and enough math to handle their own finances, and some tools for functioning outside their communities, if in the fullness of time they should find themselves wanting to choose a different future from that permitted by their communities. Because right now, they don’t have access to that choice. Nobody was going to let them negotiate their own educational choices. The scope for negotiation didn’t exist for these girls.
I’m not convinced that the power dynamics of the public education system would have been any more overwhelmingly stacked against these girls’ parents than their parents and communities are stacked against them. At least at primary school, they’d have learned how to dial 911.
I might humbly suggest that the way to delegitimize harmful institutions is to build better ones. I mean, if community-based schools based on equality and discovery are a good option (and I certainly think they are), why not fuckin’ build one? Even the state won’t stand in your way. Oh, sure, it’ll impose some requirements that seem stupid, but they’ll also provide roads, fire departments, and cheap shit made by brown slave labor, so it’s not all bad.
You can’t trust the state to do this work, but you also can’t sit around waiting for the Revolution To Come and sweep It all away. It doesn’t work like that.