Today, I randomly stumbled across this enlightening essay, called Against School and written by John Taylor Gatto. Basically, this guy taught in public schools in New York City for thirty years, and as the result of his experiences, is now strongly against the way public schools are taught. Not just in the United States, but in the whole world. For a minute, I identified with his loathing of current teaching methods since that’s basically the subject of this whole blog. But as I read, I realized that our viewpoints are quite different.
This guy’s a radical. Of course, I’m a conservative, so a whole lot of viewpoints will seem really liberal or radical to me. And neither do I claim to have complete understanding of which viewpoints should be classified under which label. But basically, this guy thinks that public schooling is just wrong by principle. He thinks it’s unnecessary, and that all it does is prepare children to be servants to the government by making them dumb, conforming, and childish. At least, this was the gist of the essay as I interpreted it.
As I read the essay, I understood and appreciated the writer’s point of view until I reached one part. This part is describing the six goals of public education as Alexander Inglis (author of Principles of Secondary Education) and Gatto see them. They include the adjustive function, or accustoming children to respond to authority; integrating, to force them into conformity; diagnostic and directive, to direct them into their proper social roles; differentiating, training them only as much as required for that role; and propaedeutic, ensuring that a few kids are taught how to carry this on. But the one that really stopped me was the “selective” function. This is just ridiculous. To show how ridiculous it is, I will now quote that part of the essay:
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
So basically, one of the functions of public schooling is to embarass the dumber kids so that the rest of us will not want to mate with them? Something seems out of whack here. Has it ever occured to the people who believe this that punishment in school is intended to show the child that they have done wrong? Besides which, I don’t see dumb people having any trouble reproducing. Personally, they often seem to have less trouble. As a matter of fact, the repressed burnouts in high school who are constantly being embarassed by their teachers seem more likely to go out and have underage sex, or to drop out of school altogether.
But that’s just my two cents.
