[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third
contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families
regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses,
people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special
genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor.
Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less
visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is,
have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the
middle class.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to
teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the
professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that
belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself,
since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to
another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading,
writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical
procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the
national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the
future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence?
Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They
have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like
the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic,
dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to
distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by
schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development.
Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children
our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training
which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens.
No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other
tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development. Nobody
survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method
is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the
great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would
cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and
foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We
cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.
At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must
conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to
teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another.
Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look
for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of
the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that
the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is
the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good
equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's
schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure
because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important
appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation,
perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in
service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But
television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the
stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of
what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and
only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of
non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace
of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are.
School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum
truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]