The six things public schools teach

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:

The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.

In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.

The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!

In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.

Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.

I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.

The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.

We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.

Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.

None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no "international competition" that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.

How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.

Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.

Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.

With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.

"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.

Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.

At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.

After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.

Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

Claim: Christians sin by putting kids in public school

by CHELSEA SCHILLING

Christian parents, do you wish to obey God and reclaim America from a godless culture?

Then remove your children from the nation’s public schools.

That’s the plea from E. Ray Moore, who has been taking his message public during his campaign for lieutenant governor in South Carolina.

“If the evangelical community would step up and obey God in educating their own children, we could collapse the state model,” Moore told WND. “We’re feeding the monster by keeping our children there.”

Moore, who has served as a pastor, an Army chaplain and director of a Christian ministry for more than 35 years, co-founded Frontline Ministries Inc., a Christian ministry, and currently serves as president of the board. He also founded Exodus Mandate, a ministry to encourage and assist Christian families in leaving government school systems.

Moore is also executive producer of the award-winning film, “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America.”

“When I see a family in public schools or a pastor in public schools, I know there’s a great blindness or an area of disobedience in their lives in that particular area,” he said. “I think Christians are ignorantly doing this. There’s no Bible verse that gives you permission – as a Christian family – to put your children under false doctrine and in harm’s way.”

Ready to take a hard look at the true state of public education? Then don’t miss this unflinching and totally captivating documentary, “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America.”

The public school system has become the domain of the Democratic left, Moore argues, and it has fundamentally changed American culture because it successfully indoctrinated five or six generations of U.S. children.

“We estimate 70-80 percent of evangelical Christian children who are in public school for their entire educational career are abandoning the church and the Christian faith in their early adult years,” he said. “About 20 percent return after they get married and start having their own kids.

“It’s a holocaust going on in our churches, and we’re trying to fight a culture war while our resources are being depleted.”

Moore said children in public schools “do not hold a traditional view on family issues,” especially with regard to the sanctity of marriage. He also said students aren’t being taught the originalist view of the U.S. Constitution, and public schools are indoctrinating children with a “Marxist view of American history,” environmentalism, evolution and other “bizarre radical agendas.”

As evidence of a major cultural shift, he pointed to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center indicating a full 70 percent of Millennials (born in 1981 or later) support same-sex marriage. By contrast, 49 percent of those in Generation X, 38 percent of Baby Boomers and just 21 percent from the Silent Generation support homosexual marriage.

“It’s incredible,” Moore said of the cultural shift. “We’re losing the culture right in our homes and in our churches, and it’s because of government education.”

Another Pew Research Center analysis in 2011 showed mothers now spend an average of 13.5 hours a week with their children and fathers only 7.3 hours per week. Moore said if a family attends church, children may spend one to two hours a week there.

Meanwhile, U.S. public schools have their children for about 35 hours a week.

“Families don’t have family worship anymore,” he said. “Parents don’t instruct their children in the Christian faith much anymore at home. So we’re just losing the culture because we’re losing the youth.”

Anti-Christian trends in education

In January, a California-based legal organization reported a spike in hostility toward Christian students in public schools.

Attorney Bob Tyler of Advocates for Faith and Freedom told Christian News Network, “We have seen a dramatic increase of phone calls nationwide as it pertains to kids in public schools who are facing hostility because of their faith.”

According to the report, Tyler said the reports aren’t a result of student bullying.

“[The reports all surround] hostility from teachers and school administrators who are curtailing the students’ free speech rights simply because they’re Christians and they might express a Christian worldview,” he said.

In recent years, WND has reported the following attacks on Christians in the public school systems:

• “School scorched for having kids bow to ‘sun god’”
• “Christians ordered to teach Wiccan, pagan rites”
• “School targets Jesus Tattoo”
• “School: ‘Gay’ is OK, but pro-lifers must go”
• “Battleground schools fighting over sex, evolution, Bible”
• “School claims right to censor pro-life 6^th-grader”
• “Where do public school teachers send own kids?”
• “Are kids in Christian classes coming out less Christian?”
• “Persecution of Christians on the rise”
• “Judge orders ‘gay’ agenda taught to Christian children”

Escaping the public school system

Churches have failed their congregations on this issue, according to Moore, who says they should be focused on forming Christian alternatives to public schools.

But he said pastors address the public versus Christian education issue.

“I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret of the evangelical pastors,” he said. “I’ve been in the ministry for 40 years, and I can tell you this is true because they tell me this when we talk privately. They are afraid to tackle this because they have so many public school addicts in their churches. If they address it strongly, they’ll lose their jobs.”

Moore added, “They’d rather hold onto their jobs, thinking they can do some good and win people to Christ, and not tackle the big gorilla in the room, which is public education. We think it’s the responsibility of the churches to meet this need.”

The ideal model, according to Moore, would be if churches would provide financial assistance to their tithing families who couldn’t otherwise afford the cost of a private education. Families who could afford the tuition would pay for it themselves.

“In South Carolina, it costs $11,500 to educate child in public schools,” he said. “If the system operated on the free market, if it were all private, just based on the cost of private education, we could do it at half the cost.”

But Moore admits that convincing churches to accommodate families’ educational needs is a major task.

“Getting them to do that is the tough part because they’re not even taking care of their affluent members right now,” he said. “Part of our problem is we’ve got to sell this to the churches and pastors.

“We would take charge of our children’s education, and in doing that, we would take charge of the country and our culture. This would be a reformation or a revolution.”

E. Ray Moore and former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

Left’s reaction to Ray Moore’s challenge

Moore has faced some criticism from the left over his view of public education. At an April 12 rally, he addressed a crowd in Charleston, telling the gathering:

“It is our hope and prayer that a fresh obedience by Christian families in educating their children according to biblical commands will prove to be a key for the revival of our families, our churches and our nation. We cannot win this war we’re in as long as we keep handing our children over to the enemy to educate. All of the symptoms and the things that we’re fighting and complaining about today have been caused because the culture has changed. The culture has turned against God, against our Constitution and against traditional values. Why is that happening? It’s fundamentally and largely [because] of the public school system. We’ve had six or seven generations where most of us have put our children in the godless, pagan school systems. It cannot be fixed. It’s a socialistic model, and we need to abandon that. As conservatives and Christians, if you think you’re going to win this war you’re in, and leave your children in those schools, it will not happen.”

Reacting to Moore’s speech, Huffington Post senior political reporter Jon Ward said, “This guy is of an age when protestant Christians were the moral majority. So he’s talking about these issues in a very outdated, outmoded, out-of-touch way.”

While Ward affirmed parents’ rights to provide religious education for their children, he added, “I don’t think most people think about it the way this guy does. Most people are much more, I think, reasonable in their approach and much less martial.”

But Moore says he’s “getting a very positive response from Christians and conservatives” across the country.

He recalled a speech he gave in 1999 while serving on a panel for the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Moore said many of the leftists on the panel expected him to say his group was planning to take over the public schools, run the school boards and fight to teach creationism once again.

“But I shocked them,” he said. “I came in, I threw my hands up and I said, ‘We give up! You all can have the schools. I’m taking the Christians and the churches out. We’re going to the promised land of Christian schooling and homeschooling. We’re going to take charge of our own education.’”

Moore said there was real concern in the crowd because the leftists didn’t like his idea.

“They were trying to tell me I couldn’t do that and I shouldn’t do that,” he said.

After the meeting ended, Moore said he began talking with a National Education Agency union leader from Tennessee in the lobby.

“She said to me, ‘Please don’t do that. That is a terrible idea. We need Christians in public schools. You bring so much to public education. Please don’t do that,’” Moore said.

But he added, “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this must really be a good idea!’”

Moore isn’t concerned about preserving the public model, and he believes leftists and Americans with different belief systems should form their own private schools.

“Let them have their own schools,” he said. “Let the homosexuals have schools for their children. Let the atheists have schools for their children. They’re free to do it. Let the evolutionists have schools for their children.

“But stop indoctrinating our children and taxing us – it’s an obscene and coercive tax. Let them voluntarily pay for their schools, and we’ll have our schools. Don’t use the coercion of the state to coerce the population.”

South Carolina lieutenant governor race

Moore has taken a leave of absence from his position as executive director of Exodus Mandate so he could enter the race for the office of lieutenant governor in South Carolina. His slogan is, “What once was can be again.”

“Now why I’m running for lieutenant governor is, I had this ministry and I was unhappy with the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the churches and how slowly they are moving toward an education freedom model – or some people sometimes say school choice,” he said. “It’s moving so gradually. We’ve got to hurry that process up because our time is getting short where we can save the children because the culture is descending into the moral abyss very rapidly now because of public education.

“I saw a chance to run and elevate the debate in my state.”

E. Ray Moore

In January, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell said he won’t seek re-election. Instead, he’ll serve as president of the College of Charleston.

The date of the primary is June 10. Other GOP candidates seeking the Republican nomination in the primary include retired developer Pat McKinney, business consultant Mike Campbell and former South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. Campbell, the son of former Gov. Caroll Campbell, served as state chairman for Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign in the state. McKinney is a member of Gov. Nikki Haley’s re-election finance team.

The Democrat candidate, running unopposed in his party, is former state House Rep. Bakari Sellers a former member of the South Carolina steering committee of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

If Haley is re-elected this year, she will face term limits and cannot run again in 2018, a situation that may position the next lieutenant governor to seek the governorship in four years.

While Moore said the office of lieutenant governor in South Carolina is primarily tasked with presiding over the state Senate and managing the Office of Aging and Disability, he said, “All the lieutenant governors have their projects that they work on.”

“I’m going to concern myself and my special projects with the reforming of our family lives, cultural development and moral and spiritual renewal,” he said. “One way that I would do that is to be a strong advocate for marriage and for private, Christian and home education. I think we can renew our culture. That would be one of my projects.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/claim-christians-sin-by-putting-kids-in-public-school/#0JvupxKqLprWhrFE.99