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The Kossor Education Newsletter contains timely, useful information
for parents and others who are concerned about public education in
America and can be sent to you for one year for $15. Steven Kossor
is a Licensed Psychologist and Certified School Psychologist who is
in private practice in Pennsylvania. He has debated William Spady
and other top promoters of education "reform" and is available as a
speaker nationally. He can be reached at (610) 383-1432 anytime. A
bound collection of the first three volumes of The Kossor Education
Newsletter (200+ pps of analysis and evidence) is available for $35.
Volume 4 (spanning 1996) is available in a bound collection for $20.
THE KOSSOR EDUCATION NEWSLETTER Volume 4 Number 11
Copyright 1996 S.A. Kossor All Rights Reserved
12+ issues annually NSP Box 105 Exton, PA 19341
Annual Subscription $15
The contents of The Kossor Education Newsletter are not to be
construed as offering legal advice. Readers seeking legal advice
should contact an attorney.
Volume 4 Number 11: John Gatto on the history of Education
in America
I would like to thank my friend, John Gatto, New York State
Teacher of the Year in 1991, for giving me permission to reproduce
the following marvelous essay which is without question the most
thorough, succinct statement of justification for the complete
elimination of government control over education that has ever
been written. Thank you, John.
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The Public School Nightmare:
Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?
by John Taylor Gatto
I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are
spending far too much money on schooling, not too little. I want
you to consider that we have too many people employed in
interfering with the way children grow up--and that all this
money and all these people, all the time we take out of
children's lives and away from their homes and families and
neighbourhoods and private explorations--gets in the way of
education.
That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society
it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend
on it that buys value. And yet last year in St. Louis, I heard a
vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to
redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion
this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through
any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable
with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic
strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the
right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right
now instead of leading the world in this literacy. Now think about
Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country
with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it
produces. It makes sense to think their schools must have something
to do with that.
Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to school in
Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental
Swedes have wiped out what would be first and seconds grades here
is that they don't want to pay the large social bill that quickly
comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best
teachers at home too early.
It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for
teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who
can't be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish
school sequence isn't 12 years, either--it's nine. Less schooling,
not more. The direct savings of such a step in the US would be
$75-100 billion, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of
time freed up with which to seek an education.
Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead
of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion,
instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school
sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided
you should know about Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbour
with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in
math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from
you?
One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that
we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly,
guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state.
Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it
does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such
performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. That's
because school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a
guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member
is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise
or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the
advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is
severely sanctioned--as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large
number of once-brilliant teachers found out.
The guild reality cannot be broken without returning primary
decision-making to parents, letting them buy what they want to buy
in schooling, and encouraging the entrepreneurial reality that
existed until 1852. That is why I urge any business to think twice
before entering a cooperative relationship with the schools we
currently have. Cooperating with these places will only make them
worse.
The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in
1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional
soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is
selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost
immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered
his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the
most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the
Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have
to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling
in which everyone would learn to take orders.
So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet
for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling
started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized
schools could deliver:
Obedient soldiers to the army; Obedient workers to the mines; Well
subordinated civil servants to government; Well subordinated clerks
to industry Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters
that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and
the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the
German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.
Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in
warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high.
Twenty-six years after this form of schooling began, the King of
Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary
between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that
fateful invention of the central school institution, as the behest
of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the
style of Prussian schooling as our own.
You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school
institution Prussian purpose--which was to create a form of state
socialism--gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which
in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.
In Prussia the purpose of the Volksshule, which educated 92 percent
of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but
socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to
the Real Schulen, in which 8 percent of the kids participated. But
for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with
managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles.
Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to
ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design.
Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school
subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods
punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be
muted by ceaseless interruptions.
There were many more techniques of training, but all were built
around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and
fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers,
would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly
respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to
interfere with policy makers because, while they could still
complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought.
Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue
effectively.
One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling
turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history.
Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic "All Quiet on the Wester
Front" tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks
of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable
product of good schooling.
It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that
literally, not metaphorically--schooling after the Prussian fashion
removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches
people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what
they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the
moral will as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes
well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many
opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged
because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and
undeveloped. We got from the United States to Prussia and back
because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders
visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, and fell in
love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system and
relentlessly proselytized for a translation of Prussian vision onto
these shores.
If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our
major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of
immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern
European cultural model. To do that children would have to be
removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural
influence. In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that
had been around at least since Plato's "Republic", a bad idea that
New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was
finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It
was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed
this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous
secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of
the Star Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple sentence,
"I know nothing"--hence the popular label attached to the secret
society's political arm, "The American Party." Over the next 50
years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and
ceding the field to a new government monopoly.
There was one powerful exception to this--the children who could
afford to be privately educated. It's important to note that the
underlying premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is
the true parent of children--the State is sovereign over the
family. At the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that
biological parents are really the enemies of their own children,
not to be trusted. How did a Prussian system of dumbing children
down take hold in American schools?
Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American
families journeyed to Prussia and other parts of Germany during the
19th century and brought home the Ph. D. degree to a nation in
which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top
positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in
government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to
those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct
disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G.
Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins. Virtually every single one of the
founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany,
and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the
Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous "7th Report" of 1844, still
available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of
these.
By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for
harvest. It that year the US Commissioner of Education, William
Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that
American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent
"over-education" from happening. The average American would be
content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner,
because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My
guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any
other role. In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University
of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a
counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the
future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by
their associations--not by their own individual accomplishments.
It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous
because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and
know how to find out what they don't know by themselves, without
consulting experts. Dewey said the great mistake of traditional
pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of
early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching
reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not
because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less
efficient) but because independent thinkers were produced by hard
books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By
socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives
administered by the best social thinkers in government.
This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form
pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically disconnected
with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams. Dewey's
former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at
about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little
attention should be paid to reading." Hall was one of the three men
most responsible for building a gigantic administrative
infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure
really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York
State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all
of the European Economic Community nations combined.
Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are
about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It
means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will
not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being
scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better
is beside the point. Bertrand Russell once observed that American
schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history,
that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of
critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you
begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them
responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and
solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of
significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to
teach them to think.
There is no evidence that this has been a State purpose since the
start of compulsion schooling. When Frederich Froebel, the inventor
of kindergarten in 19th century Germany, fashioned his idea he did
not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of
teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten
was created to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their
children. I note with interest the growth of daycare in the US and
the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include
4-year-olds.
The movement toward state socialism is not some historical
curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It
is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through
vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it
has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over
children's lives, and even more money to pay for the extended
school day and year that this control requires.
A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and
community as government-system schooling has been might be expected
to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an
increasingly aggressive shake down of the taxpayer, but this has
not happened. The explanation is largely found in the
transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and
towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.
While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on
people and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the
single largest employer in the United States, and the largest
grantor of contracts next to the Defence Department. Both of these
low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful
political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies.
This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure
ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long.
School people are in a position to outlast any storm and to keep
short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.
An overview of the short history of this institution reveals a
pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by
enlargement of the monopoly in every case.
After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools,
some considered good, some bad, I feel certain that management
cannot clean its own house. It relentlessly marginalizes all
significant change. There are no incentives for the "owners" of the
structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside
competition.
What is needed for several decades is the kind of
wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national
history. It cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists
to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is
of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut
ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real
market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so
favourable, so dominant through most of our history, that the
margin of error afforded has been vast.
But the future is not so clear. Violence, narcotic addictions,
divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible
measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the
institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood, can be called
to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be
experts, but only the people.
Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare
will vanish in a generation.
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Again, thank you, John, for your insights and dedication to
exposing the truth about where the modern American Education
System came from, so that we can know where we are heading
unless we turn away from the path that has been so carefully
prepared for us.
Sincerely,
Steven Kossor
The Kossor Education Newsletter contains timely, useful information
for parents and others who are concerned about public education in
America and can be sent to you for one year for $15. Steven Kossor
is a Licensed Psychologist and Certified School Psychologist who is
in private practice in Pennsylvania. He has debated William Spady
and other top promoters of education "reform" and is available as a
speaker nationally. He can be reached at (610) 383-1432 anytime. A
bound collection of the first three volumes of The Kossor Education
Newsletter (200+ pps of analysis and evidence) is available for $35.
Volume 4 (spanning 1996) is available in a bound collection for $20.
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