The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

My wife and I are homeschooling our children for sure...

"What makes the organization addictive is the promise it makes to every employee about the future, which takes them out of the here and now." These promises involve power, money, influence, and social acceptance, the same as the promises of pop culture made-for-TV society.

Having a self-important and grandiose mission statement can make an organization addictive, even if it has little or nothing to do with the actual work being done. "The very fact of having goals can be enough to con employees into believing that everything is all right in the organization."

"One of the ways employees react to this addictive process is by changing their perceptions and thinking, therefore deluding themselves. They try to make themselves believe that the stated mission of the organization is really what is happening, even if what they are seeing and feeling as they work is quite different. When organizations function as the addictive substance, it is in their interest to keep promoting the vision of the mission, because as long as the employees are hooked by it, they are unlikely to turn their awareness to the present discrepancies. They choose to stay numb in order to stay in the organization. The mission is a powerful source of identification for workers. It is a type of philosophical orientation that appeals to their values. Through the mission they find a link between themselves and the organization."

BTW, the sociologists refer to these hidden agendas as the "latent functions" of the organization, in case you ever want to search through the academic papers about this.

A really interesting exploration of those sorts of ideas is reading Huxley's Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and Island as a trilogy. I've read Gato's book that this essay is taken from, and he does a good job of stating the problem, but doesn't step far enough into it to look at how you restructure society to live in a freer way. Brave New World sets up a completely systemized dystopia, Island a communal utopia and BNW Revisited (collection of essays) puts down in more explicit terms much of what he thinks is the core of modern societies.

Gatto's book makes a pretty good argument that this is the case, although mostly accidently as opposed to the result of any secret conspiracy. Gatto does dig up some pretty telling quotes though. For example,

"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, Jan. 9th, 1909

I actually went to the New York public library a couple of years ago and found a copy of the speech in the collection of Woodrow Wilson's papers. Here is the full quote in context:

"I do not wonder at it. I think it is hardly just to blame those who have brought this situation about, because this change in modern life has come upon us suddenly. It has confused us. We are in an age so changeful, so transitional, I do not wonder that this confusion has come into our education, and I do not blame anybody. I do not see how it could have been avoided, how we could have avoided trying our hands at a score of things hitherto unattempted to determine at least if they were possible or not. Therefore this is not a subject for cynical comment, this is not a subject for criticism. It is a subject for self-recognition. The present need is that we should examine ourselves and see whether this be true or not; and, if it is true, ask ourselves whether the air has cleared enough, and whether our experiment has gone far enough, to make a definite program, to make a radical change, in the things we have attempted. This is the moment for counsel. The thing that is imperative upon our conscience is that we should ask ourselves whether it be possible to do it differently and better." [...]

"Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. 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, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. You cannot train them for both in the time that you have at your disposal. They must make a selection, and you must make a selection. I do not mean to say that in the manual training there must not be an element of liberal training; neither am I hostile to the idea that in the liberal education there should be an element of the manual training. But what I am intent upon is that we should not confuse ourselves with regard to what we are trying to make of the pupils under our instruction. We are either trying to make liberally-educated persons out of them, or we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines, or else we do not know what we are trying to do."

I sympathize. It seems to me that part of the block comes from defining the problem monolithically: how can we take the standard system we have and make a better standard system out of it? Nobody seems to have a good answer to that. Maybe we should stop asking it and instead go through a period of decentralization and even destandardization. Let all sorts of experiments be tried. There's a study I read about that showed that when great schools or great teachers achieve amazing things, attempts to reproduce what they do almost always fail. The problem seems to be in the systematizing impulse itself. Can there even be a bureaucracy that sustains life, joy, creativity?

Here's an example of what I mean (I may have even got this from Gatto). In the traditional one-room farm schoolhouse, there weren't enough children to segregate by age, so by necessity they would work side by side on different things. This has interesting effects. You no longer have the problem that not all kids are at the same level; each is working at his/her level anyway. So, no reason why a bright 9-year-old can't study math with the 15-year-olds (but play with kids their own age at recess). Another example is that because one teacher simply can't address all the different subjects at once, older kids end up teaching and mentoring younger ones. Think of the organizational contortions required to set up things like this in most schools. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone should go to a one-room farm school. My point is that we need a great deal more diversity and that maybe policy should support this instead of trying to fix everything the same way (or even at all).

People will cry out about the risks of destandardization but really, if you stop to think about it, kids want to learn. Passionately. They're hard-wired to do it. What we should be asking is not how we can get them to learn but how we ever manage to program the desire out of them. Personal anecdote: when my daughter was in the third grade (and had a teacher she loved), she would get up in the morning and literally jump for joy that she was going to school. I don't mean little bunny hops... I mean she would jump up and down bigtime and sing "I'm going to schooooool!" Just a short time later (after the teacher she loved was fired and not even allowed to say goodbye to the class... different story) a pallor that I can only call depression came over her about everything associated with school. It took years for signs of intellectual excitement to return.

It can be, and was for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the practice of the assembly line was forced on education that the breakdown began. The justification, though obfuscated, was something like this: "We can't have thinkers in a world in which we need lever pullers. Well educated people (in a classical sense) won't ever be content working on an assembly line (or other modern equivalents), so we must make them functionally literate, and not actually literate. Then they can be happy pulling levers and pushing buttons, and society can flourish." It's no wonder that the school day is 'assembled', so similar to the factory that we even have bells moving people in shifts governed by a bell.