Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum in Compulsory Education

I found this in my dad's garage yesterday evening and finished reading it this morning:



The first half of the book is phenomenal; I think that everyone should read it. But as he goes on, I think his disdain for the current system gets a little carried away. I'll save my criticism for the moment; here are some excerpts from his first speech in the book, entitled "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher":

"Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is."


1. Confusion

"The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-related of everything. I teach dis-connections."

"Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning."


2. Class Position

"The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that the students must stay in the class where they belong. [...] The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned right to class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased drastically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of the numbers they carry."


3. Indifference

"The third lesson I teach is indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other in my favor. [...] But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. [...] Indeed the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?"


4. Emotional Dependency

"The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to a predestined chain of command."


5. Intellectual Dependency

"The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we wait for other people better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives."


6. Professional Self-Esteem

"The sixth lesson I teach is professional self-esteem. [...] A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent to a student's home to elicit approval or mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be. The ecology of "good" schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer."


7. One Can't Hide

"The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. [...] The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate [for learning, (as I'd prefer to interpret it)]."

As to the rest of the book... I do agree, adamantly, that there is a distinction to be had between schooling and education and that the current structure of public schools in the United States is not particularly conducive to the latter. However, I refuse to agree that compulsory schooling is of no value whatsoever, nor do I agree that there is no need for professional educators in the transmission of knowledge.

For one, I don't feel that we can leave the education of our nation's youth (especially those of lower socioeconomic status) entirely to the private sector. (By this, I mean the task of providing a supply of resources to assist in learning, e.g. books, supplies, teachers.) That is, in my mind, a necessary and warranted function of the state. I feel that knowledgeable citizens are necessary for a democracy to function, and to not provide the resources for all citizens to become so is absolutely against our values—that if economic circumstances ultimately shape the acuity of a child's intellectual development, the American dream is a façade. To this end, I feel that it is important to teach our children¹ (much better than we do now) how to think critically, as well as to enstill in them a solid foundational knowledge base. I feel that paid teachers can still play a crucial role in all of this, but again in a very different way. In addition, I feel that there is an undeniable need for professional educators to instruct those with special needs, although our current system tends (in my experience) to do this task very poorly.


Another thing caught my eye while I was reading:

Perhaps it is time to try something different. "Good fences make good neighbors," said Robert Frost. The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to live apart as individuals and as families. Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others.

As a junior high English teacher, Gatto surprised me by completely misinterpreting Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" in order to underscore one of his points. For one, "Good fences make good neighbors" is not the message of the poem. It is taken entirely out of context and contrary to its intended meaning. Secondly, to be picky, Robert Frost didn't "say" that, one of the two characters in the poem did. That is like quoting a murderous character in a Stephen King novel and attributing the quote to King.

For good measure, here's Frost's poem in its entirety:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me—
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Gatto also seems to have a very piecemeal working knowledge of philosophy. His frequent references to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are sometimes justified, but his insistence that the dialectics of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Marx were the same, as well as his insistence that "Lord [Bertrand] Russell" was the most important philosopher of the 20th century² (again to underscore a point), rubbed me the wrong way.


Public education is in need of radical reform, not abolition.

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¹And, if necessary, adults as well... once we ideally get rid of undue age segregation.
²It's actually all about Wittgenstein: TIME 100: Ludwig Wittgenstein