Read also:  Liberals are Also Upset 

By Paul Moreno
October 2000

Parents who remove their children from public schools are not trying to just get a better education for them.

They are rebelling against a tyrannical and oppressive central power that began in Massachusetts.

That's how a New York City and New York State "Teacher of the Year," John Taylor Gatto, says in explaining how Massachusetts, the cradle of the American Revolution, led the way in the "Second American Revolution," that undermined democracy via compulsory schooling.

America had achieved near-universal literacy by 1850 without any compulsory schooling. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the American elite turned to European models - to Prussia especially - to create a docile and homogenized population, he claims.

Gatto tells the story in The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling.

Gatto quit his job while he was New York's Teacher of the Year in 1991 and since then has been leading a crusade to break up the government monopoly in schools.

He explains how this happened in what he calls "not a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history." It is an enormous work, nearly four hundred textbook-size pages that must amount to a quarter of a million words.

Seeking Social Control
He quotes theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer, who died in a concentration camp for resisting the Nazis, that "the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling."

American schools are not meant to "educate" at all, Gatto says. He believes they were created as institutions of social control.

It would be dangerous to the American elite to have too many people who can think for themselves.

The American school system was promoted by the titans of capitalism: John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. These monopolists did not want competition among schools any more than they wanted it in the oil, steel, automobile and banking industries.

They wanted to re-create the class system of England in America and they rejected the idea that ordinary people could govern themselves.

What they wanted was a docile work force and a population that would only be interested in consuming industrial "goods."

"If we educated better, we could not sustain the corporate utopia we have made," Gatto argues. "Schools build national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality and family life. It's a trade-off."

"Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency," Gatto says. "The net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck."

This was not a conspiracy, Gatto sys. "The real conspirators were ourselves when we sold our liberty for the promise of security."

Parents Lose Control
"Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart," Gatto says, "but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness."

Massachusetts was the first state to adopt a "compulsory schooling" law, in 1852. This provoked intense opposition from the start. Many towns, like Barnstable, complained that "the great defect of our day is the absence of governing or controlling power on the part of parents and the consequent insubordination of children. Our schools are rendered inefficient by the apathy of parents."

But, under the leadership of Horace Mann, the state continued to enlarge its school system. The state replaced male with female teachers, paying women more than men to shame the men out of the profession, says Gatto.

In part, the Massachusetts effort was a nativist attempt to obstruct recent Irish Catholic immigrants from being able to support their parochial schools. Over time, public schools adopted a secular faith of their own and became hostile to any religious influence.

Over the years, ordinary American parents lost control of their schools. While there were 41,000 elected school boards in 1960, there are only 15,000 today (with a population that is over fifty percent greater).

Progressive Failures
Along with centralized control came varieties of "progressive" pedagogical policies that have dumbed down the population, he says. The world's first "look-say" (or "whole language") primer came from a Prussian schoolmaster named Friedrich Gedike in 1791. Horace Mann praised the Prussian school system and its whole-language policy in particular, in his 1844 report as school commissioner.

Mann also led the effort by the state's Board of Education to establish a "normal school" that would train public school teachers. This took place despite the fact that a legislative committee warned that the Board (which was dominated by Unitarians) "really wanted to install a Prussian system of education in Massachusetts, to put 'a monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary in every respect to the true spirit of our democratical institutions.'"

These "normal schools" have become the "teacher colleges" that have produced the woefully unprepared teachers of today.

In the 1960s, it became impossible to impose any discipline on students as the civil rights movement made its way into the schools. Gatto saw this happen very suddenly in 1965. It amounted to "a mysterious new deal" that "turned the entire edifice of public schooling upside-down in 100 days." It was "the starting gun for a time of unbridled madness."

Schools inflict untold psychic harm on our children, as well as physical harm (there are about thirty-three murders each year in public schools).

The enormous bureaucracies of the education establishment have become "pathological," Gatto says, and are incapable of reform. ... "All alleged reforms have left schooling exactly in the shape they found it, except bigger, richer, politically stronger. ... The only reliable defense against this is to keep institutions weak and dispersed, even if that means sacrificing efficiency and holding them on a very short leash."

'Free Market' Is Needed
"What is needed is the kind of wildly-swinging free market that we had at the beginning of our national history," Gatto says.

This is an idea that appeals to both conservatives and liberals. Gatto points approvingly to the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, one of the experimental "free schools" that cropped up in the 1960s. Sudbury Valley never gives tests or homework assignments, but turns out students with impressive academic achievements. The school has seen its enrollments rise as parents flee the public schools, which are now obsessed with standardized exams required under the state's 1993 reform law.

He points to Sweden (usually the beau ideal of liberals), which has a nine-year school track. "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 of where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbor with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science?"

Minorities, too, are beginning to reject the public school monopoly. The Boston Globe recently featured the decision of the Shaw family to educate their three sons at home, reporting that "more African-Americans and other minorities are deciding that when it comes to school, there's no place like home." 

The Shaws say that public schools fail to educate African-American children, and point to a report by the Home School Legal Defense Association that shows less of a disparity in achievement tests between whites and blacks who are home-schooled.

And home-schooled students outperformed public-school and private-school students on the American College Test (ACT), with a 22.8 average against a 21 average for all who took the test.

All these alternatives would serve Gatto's purpose. "The school machine must be shattered into a hundred thousand parts before the pledges made in the founding documents of this country have a chance to be honored again."

The most hopeful sign that Gatto sees is in the rise of a computerized economy. "A century ago, mass production stifled the individualism which was the real American Dream. Now computers seem to be shifting the balance of power back from collective entities like corporations back to people."

Compulsory schooling was designed to serve a mass production economy, so a new kind of system will rise to suit the competitive enterprise economy seen in Silicon Valley. "It can only be a matter of time before America rides on the back of the computer age into a new form of educational schooling once called for by Adam Smith."
 

Liberals are Also Upset
The hue and cry against the public school system does not just come from conservatives, though those who expose the system's failings are often labeled as such.

Another recent book on the American school system has been published by Diane Ravitch. In Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, she describes the recurring waves of "progressive" nostrums and why they succeed only in making a dysfunctional system more entrenched.

A reviewer for the New York Times notes that Ravitch, usually labeled a conservative, "strikes me as a very old-fashioned liberal, of a pre-1968 Arthur Schlesinger bent.

"She has described herself as both a Democrat and an Independent.... She has come out for higher teacher salaries, instead of merit pay, which must have annoyed some of her colleagues on the right, and earlier this year she publicly quit as a consultant to George W. Bush's presidential campaign when he refused to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans."