My friend, Mike Meegan, boasting on Facebook that he failed grade 3, whose teacher claimed he had “difficulty putting thoughts into words” (Mike is a poet, no doubt in my mind) made me
decide to put my thoughts about the school system, into words.
I was reminded of when my nephew got his report card. “Patrick often sits by himself, thinking, and has to be encouraged to interact with the other children,” his teacher wrote. When I was first at school, in the Dark Ages of the 50’s, independent thinkers were sent to the library to sit it out – on the Thinking Chair.
What have we got against thinking? Perhaps we believe it is so dangerous it will lead to people thinking for themselves, one of the main skills necessary for survival. James Thurber, the American humorist, said sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness. Our solution? Send our kids to school.
“Just because your kids are being schooled doesn’t mean they’re being educated,” wrote John Taylor Gatto. “I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy,
indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.” Gatto’s infamous response to winning the New York State Teacher of the Year Award was to quit. He didn’t want to “hurt kids” anymore.
“There’s a genius in every child,” he declares, “but it hardly ever regrows once it’s stomped out. Schools turn out incomplete people, people that have to be connected to some other source of meaning because they can’t generate meaning from the inside.”
Schools do the opposite of what they set out to do. They discourage thinking and can destroy a child’s love of learning. What is learned in public school, Gatto says, is not worth the ways in which the process can cripple your child.
“The mass of kids learn, quite deliberately, to be bored. There’s a reason for that. The truth is that bored people detach from their minds and connect with their appetites. They’re desperately searching for something to put in their mouths, or to kiss, or throw rocks at, or to kill. Bored people aren’t serious competition. They don’t gather together and form organizations to overthrow Donald Trump. They’re seeking some kind of solace and relief from their boredom, so they become the most dependable customers of all.”
Thomas Edison, one famous school dropout, noted that “somewhere between the ages of 11 and 15, the average child begins to suffer from atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble I should judge to lie with the schools.”
Teenagers are not wrong to rebel against school where they are warehoused in cell-block-style classrooms five days a week for twelve years, force-fed a standardized diet of what someone else determines they need to learn, reinforced with gold stars, tests and grades. They learn to shut their books and move along when the bell rings. School controls the way they spend their time, how they behave, what they read, and, to a large extent, what they think. When they are made to obey a cruel and unreasonable teacher, he steals their desire to learn from the kind and reasonable one.
The book I recommend to anyone who thinks the present system is failing their kids is Grace Llewellyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and an Education. This former educator offers hopeful practical advice, urging kids to think of it as “rising up” out of high school, not “dropping out.” She doesn’t blame the schooling crisis on teachers, either; the majority of teachers, she says, are intelligent, generous and talented human beings whose energy is being drained by their constant task of telling people what to do.
Learning is a natural process that happens to anyone who is busy doing something for its own sake; by calling school “learning”, schools make it sound like an excruciatingly boring way to waste a day. The normal North American adult thinks it’s almost impossible to teach yourself something, that if you want to learn you have to find a teacher first. Yet the most difficult thing we ever learn to do is talk, and most of us learn how to talk on our own.
The secret to learning, LLewellyn says, is simple: forget about it. Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it. One day you will glance up at your collection of Japanese literature, or trip over the solar oven you built, and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself.
