Underground History of American Education | Hacker News Reader

Underground History of American Education

johntaylorgatto.com

27 pointsramchip24 comments

I think Gatto's heart is in the right place, because he (a winner of the teacher of the year award in New York State more than a decade ago) wants children to avoid the worst effects of industrialized schooling. I'm more than a little put off by some of his sketchy, amateur historical research, which I think leaves him with too much credence for conspiracy theories. I have met Gatto in person something like eight times at various conferences on education reform (my field of occupation and research) and he is an interesting raconteur with more than a little ability to adapt his speeches to differing audiences. His central thesis on the bleak effects of industrialized schooling is worth a read for hackers who have never considered such issues before.

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them.

Since you are connected to teaching home schooling can you tell me why we don't teach like the above now? I read George Orwells Politics and the English Language and really enjoyed it. I don't see why I wasn't given that essay and a copy of Elements of Style then told to write. With enough practice I expect anyone would write well.

So, is there a reason school is not taught in the old way? [edit: That is, is there any reason to believe that any of the people who influence state curriculum just want "to produce docile factory workers"?]

I think the selection process for training teachers in teacher education colleges (formerly "normal schools") has gradually developed to select the dumbest college-bound students, and they get easily confused about how to teach reading in the elementary grades, because their own reading skills are sketchy.

See

http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html

(I see the link began having DNS problems just as I posted it; it should be live later.)

for more about better reading instruction, and see

"Pulled Away or Pushed Out? Explaining the Decline of Teacher Aptitude in the United States" (American Economic Review, 2004)

for negative selection for academic ability in United States teacher training.

Sorry, but the academic paper you linked to is complete garbage. To quote

"Lacking a direct measure of aptitude, we link people to the mean combined SAT scores of their college and then divide them into six groups: those from colleges with SAT scores in the top ﬁve percentiles, the next 10, the next 15, the next 20, the next 25, and the bottom 25 percentiles. The SAT cut-points are constant over time so that aptitude is deﬁned in absolute terms. The aptitude groups are ﬁner at the top of the distribution because previous research suggests that the top quartile accounts disproportionately for the decline in teacher aptitude."

Whoever wrote this should lose their tenure immediately.

Caroline Hoxby, who wrote that, voluntarily left her position at Harvard to gain her current position at Stanford. If you haven't heard of her before, you should read more National Bureau of Economic Research working papers.

But what specifically are you disagreeing with in the paragraph you kindly quoted?

I'm balking at the idea that the mean combined SAT of the college a teacher attended is predictive of their teaching quality, both currently and longitudinally.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, but basing an entire paper on this premise without any supporting evidence is completely ridiculous. So far as I've seen there is zero evidence that this is true.

After some Googling, it seems that this measure of teacher quality is attributed to:

http://ideas.repec.org/a/ilr/articl/v55y2002i4p686-699.html

I don't have access to the paper, but from the summary I see no evidence that this measure has any empirical support.

Do you know of anything that Gatto specifically gets wrong, or do you just that that Underground History would leave one with a less useful understanding of our educational system than, say, Equality and Achievement?

I notice that he is at odds with Kohn on whole language, and I would tend to agree with Kohn, but other than that Gatto seems factually accurate.

He says this on section 14: Until 1965 no one bothered to check Cattell’s famous experiment with the tachistoscope. When they did, it was found Cattell had been dead wrong. People read letters, not words.

I'm not sure why he claims people don't read whole words. We read groups of letters not the letters themselves.

Relatedly, I met a man who claimed to be a speed reader. When pressed he insisted it was true and that he read lines and paragraphs at a time with good retention and understanding. He went on saying he and a group of kids had been taught to speed read by their elementary school principal for his PHD thesis.

I've read a fair amount of the eye-tracking literature, and it's true that people read letters or (small) groups of letters if they are reading.

I haven't read any of the literature, but can't both claims be true? Experienced readers may mentally first become aware of whole words or blocks of words, but they could easily just not be aware of the finer-grained eye movements that are going into that perception.

Well, it looks like you're right. Which makes reading more complicated than I had thought. Please mod me down for being incorrect.

Thank you for the interesting information tokenadult.

I've read some Kohn over the years (I especially liked his article about homeschooling in Atlantic in 1987 or so), but there simply isn't an empirical defense to be made of "whole language." All the best readers I know started out with something like what would be called code-intensive, phonics-first reading instruction.

"All the best readers I know started out with something like what would be called code-intensive, phonics-first reading instruction."

That's exactly his point, that because less than 1% of schools adopted whole language instruction it is numerically impossible for whole language to be responsible for the decline in reading comprehension.

because less than 1% of schools adopted whole language instruction

How does he back up that claim? I encountered quite a few school districts that claimed to be providing "whole language" reading instruction (including my alma mater school district, then, where I had been taught to read with phonics three decades earlier) in the 1990s. I'm going to check what the current vogue is here, but I know it's not working well.

I don't remember offhand, but it comes from a chapter in his book The Schools Our Children Deserve. There is a whole chapter devoted to whole language, so the cite would be pretty easy to find.

I haven't done much research on teaching literacy, so I'm really just relaying his argument.

Not only is his heart in the right place, but I think he's diagnosed the problem with industrialized mass education extremely well.

And I don't think he's very wrong about the "conspiracy theories," either. Certainly the industrialists of the late 19th century were heavily invested in creating a new "mass man" that they could then employ more effectively for their own purposes, if the schooling were directed to dumbing everyone down to the same low level of un-independent thought and mindless compliance to authority.

(We figured out the same problem 20 years ago, and that's why we're educating our 8 kids at home through high school.)

But, like Neil Postman, another great societal critic, he doesn't really know what to do about the problem, other than "don't do that". It may be there's no real solution, other than to have parents much more involved in their kids' education, which is certainly the ideal.

But even if you posit a need for group schooling, one could do worse than returning to the "little red schoolhouse" approach of the pre-Horace Mann (Prussian-style mass education in Mass.) era, where parents band together and hire teachers/tutors for a smaller group of kids, and really keep their hands on the tiller.

(Yes, there are problems there, too, but certainly much less than the problems that Gatto identifies so well.)

If that comment was in response to tokenadult, you might want to contemplate using the reply link below his comment next time.

Sorry, it was both a response to tokenadult, and a general commentary on the link. I probably should have done what you said.

Gatto uncovers the underlying intention for public schools to produce docile factory workers. Once you make your goals clear and explicit, much of the argument over how to educate becomes moot or even silly.

Sudbury Valley School in Massachusets (and other offshoot Sudbury-model schools) are one answer to the "ok, what then?" that comes after reading Gatto. If you set a goal of producing thoughtful, self-directed citizens of a democracy, you end up with a school which is democratic and self-directed.

Once you make your goals clear and explicit, much of the argument over how to educate becomes moot or even silly.

It's interesting how many controversies evaporate if you stop assuming that the labels on things are accurate. For example, if instead of the "education" system we spoke of the "child processing system", the world might make more sense. And instead of "health care" we could talk about "disease management". And so on!

IIRC The version on the website is the text as of the first printing. The book is now on its third printing, and there have been substantial corrections, revisions, and additions to the text. It's really worth buying a copy of the third printing from either his site or else from Amazon.

Also on scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/10957390/John-Taylor-Gatto-Undergr...

Scribd (and the 'Easy PDF' spam links on each page of this PDF-ication of HTML) is subtracting value here.

If the canonical version of an author's work is already online as HTML, leave it be!

I love dissing Scribd for being lame as much as anybody, but this link lets me get a copy for my Kindle for little inconvenience. I like that.

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