saturn return to sender

Why Schools Don’t Educate by John Taylor Gatto. Its mission statement is sufficiently vague that I can’t tell, but the website hosting this essay might be oriented towards promoting homeschooling. If so I’d hazard the opinion that homeschooling is not the right answer for most people, and economically unworkable anyway, but whatever. I’m certainly on Gatto’s side with, for example, the idea that “self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.”

Everywhere in [archaic ruling-class European systems of education], at every age, you will find arrangements to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.

I don’t know about jumping horses, but certainly I find the idea of strict top-down universally prescribed requirements rather antithetical to what education should be about. But then No Child Left Behind is arguably not about education to begin with:

With reasonable guidelines and adequate funding, [the No Child Left Behind requirements and] timetable might have been a prudent course of education reform. But as the first sanctions are just now begininng to kick in, people across the country are belatedly discovering that NCLB is being structured and implemented as a punitive assault on public education, designed to throw the system into turmoil and open the door to privatization.

Ah. Privatization, of course. The administration’s essential imperative: re-distribute wealth to those who already have it. And in the meantime, schools become even more socialization devices than they already were, mechanically extruding mindless numb factory workers? Nice.

I’m not really so cynical as to believe it’s a conspiracy of this sort, but there was an interesting thing I read recently, in a paper called The Role of Non-Instrumental Adaptive Networks in the Evolution of a Sustainable World Community (pdf) … (breathe) … I have not actually read the whole paper, and it’s probably beyond me anyway, but on page 5, author Elaine Hartley says

Piecemeal ’solutions’ to issues such as global warming and urban sprawl have been found to be ineffectual as they are subverted by the self-sustaining dynamics of a system which has crystallized around growth in population, resources, and production. According to Hierarchy Theory, reality is ‘lumpy’: some holons maintain their integrity in the midst of flux and constrain what happens at other levels (Ahl and Allen, 1996).

Now that’s fascinating. It’s kind of obvious, too. Systems themselves, such as societies, economies, and the complex interrelations among them, once set up and stabilized, will tend to resist change to maintain their structure. It works at other levels without sentience; why shouldn’t it happen to a system composed of sentient people? So how do you define accountability when the system itself is tending towards certain behaviors? And this isn’t a matter of determinism; it doesn’t free us from individual responsibility. It just articulates the difficulty of swimming upstream to effect change.

So even if you can’t blame Bush et al for “mechanically extruding mindless numb factory workers,” that kind of social program is the radical extreme of a certain capitalistic tendency and one that seems to be “downstream” in our current state of relative conservatism. The system is not resisting movements in that direction as much as it could or should. If I knew more about economic or systems theory maybe I’d have something more useful to say, regrets.

Anyway, back to education. Seems to me that what we need first of all is not a lot of thought and argument driving towards top-down reform of our system, but first a legion of men and women like Gatto who are intelligent, passionate, and compassionate, in some system. The intellect at the top can’t possibly model the entire system in its complexity, so the bottom-up hope is that the system can just work itself out. I don’t know how to accomplish this, but re-distributing our wealth towards education and away from building bombs would be a good start. While Gatto points out how none of his ideas cost anything, getting more Gattos in there to begin with probably will. This is where the top-down influence can come in. Not in dictating change, but enabling change and then getting out of the way. Isn’t that supposedly a right-wing value, anyway?

If nothing else, as I always rant, our values here in terms of where our money goes are severely deranged.

The boobs in the title are metaphorical of course: you know, like the teats of education or something. I’ve got bottoms in this post, too. And urban sprawl. And holons. Wow, what a rambling rant.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 11:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.