Tree Of Knowledge

An Entelechis Revolution

"The current school system is a diseased organism.
The standard song about 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
2003 United States Teacher of the Year
New York Teacher of the Year (three times before he quit)

 

YNOT AN ENTELECHIS REVOLUTION

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 defiance of custom and law-in short, to engage in non-violent guerilla warfare in the classroom.

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. Just because your kids are being schooled doesn’t mean they’re being educated. Schooling is given or imposed," explains Gatto, "but true education is 'taken' by the student" (when parents are 10 percent and the kid is 90 percent sovereign in it).

Studies show 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 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?

IT MIGHT BE GOOD TO ASK...YNOT?

There’s genius in every child, but it hardly ever re-grows 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. They are taught lots of "how to", but little to no "why to". 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 thought 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 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 academic curriculum world to the physical world would make sense and come alive." This is what it means to talk of a curriculum of confusion and indifference: things taught out of context and disassociated from life. This is why the central tenet of the Entelechis Revolution is a call to simply get kids out of school, at least mentally if not physically.

I first encountered Gatto’s outlaw methods 12 years ago. Two 13-year-olds, Jamaal and Victor, tracked down in a pizza joint a comic book writer with a slice as an offering and asked; would he teach them how to make comic books? Sure he said. But why weren’t they in school? "Oh, well, Mr. Gatto lets us out if we find someone to mentor us" (Bingo: Fist step to true eduk8tion).

Who was this Gatto, that his students stayed obsessed with him 25 years later?

Fast-forward to 2005, Entelechis is on mission: to produce a Retro Futuris of educational products, high-tech and low-tech that will provoke radical reform to ask ynot. What’s wrong with schooling? How did it get that way? What can we do about it? The purpose of education as we know it is the idea that schools were intended to serve the economic state.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SCHOOLING?

How can the richest, most powerful country on the planet have a school system that is so potentially detrimental to our children? 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.

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 the leadership. They’re seeking some kind of solace and relief from their boredom, so they become the most dependable customers of all.

BUT THINK ABOUT IT, AFTER ALL,

OUR COUNTRY WAS NOT FOUNDED ON THE "DECLARATION OF BLENDING IN"

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 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

ENTELECHIS: "WHAT WE ARE AFTER!"

What we are after at Entelechis 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 does justice cry out for to break this logjam?

FIRST: THE SHOCK TREATMENT

"Schooling as we know it is a powerful expression of the sickness of this society. Only a shocking bill of charges will wake the public up."
JOHN TAYLOR GATTO

SECONDLY: APPLIED IMAGINATION

RESURRECTION OF THE FORGOTTEN METHODS OF APPLYING IMAGINATION TO LEARNING.

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? Evidence shows that 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. No one wants to fix it, because they don’t believe it’s broken. Genius is 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 Gatto is asked if the current school system is so damaging to children that we’d be better off with anything else, "Yes. Absolutely. With anything else. Or nothing."

We at Entelechis agree with what Gatto proposes, in order to wake up the system, there needs to be 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 was his anger. Every day he threw a wrench in the works: switch teachers’ time cards, or ring the fire alarm just to get the kids out of class. There are other methods.

CONSIDER STANDARDIZED TESTING

From school principals to parents to students, the most common complaint we hear about the education system is regarding the emphasis on tests, like the Regents exams and SATs, 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. SCHOOLS CREATE EDUCATIONAL BOLEMICS...feast on data, puke it out on tests…forget it...move on to the next test!

"It’s all data-driven. [Mayor] Bloomberg brought in MBAs 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 a corporate mentality. Why can’t I speak to you on the record? Because there is no debate anymore. They don’t allow it."
ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL NYC SCHOOL

"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 things: 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 sick purpose system—testing—could quickly be destroyed."
JOHN TAYLOR GATTO FACTORY SCHOOLS

Teachers could be more effective simply by getting the students out of the school. Create Imagination Fairs; begin finding ways to derail the process from within, ways to break rules. Start neighborhood newspapers, student employment agencies, community service, mentors, field research, study business, start a public garden, or whatever. The road to self-development is raw experience. Do 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 dong 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, a 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?!

YNOT JOIN THE REVOLUTION?

When it comes to asking and answering those questions, should you join in the revolution? Ynot?

"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 in 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."
LEENA THORTON SLC, UT

Institutions have an assumption that some kids are hopeless, an indoctrinated belief that they never excel, and these kids are being denied an education.

"One of my first gigs as a sub was a Spanish class. In less than an hour I 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?"
9TH GRADE TEACHER

This is the kind of insane thinking teachers can be up against.

By the third decade of his teaching career, John realized, "just being in the school building was a death sentence." He 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 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."

WHO CREATED McSCHOOLING?

Where did our system of compulsory factory-farm-style McSchooling come from? ANSWER: The Prussians. 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 this, there were all kinds of very eclectic setups. In the 1840s there was an aggressive debate about public school 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 fortune industries...oil, railroads and pharmaceutical drugs--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 prepares them to accept a life as a working number of the lower ranks of society.

Is there any hope of changing this grand experiment in social engineering? If Gatto, the Entelechis Creative Team, and others are 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 kids 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 do?