Paper instructions:
, you should examine your own educational past in order to make a larger argument about what you see to be the root problem (or problems) of our educational crises. In pondering your
educational past, you should obviously think about your formal education (schooling). Your purpose in this essay is to convince readers of your view by showing them how the experience(s)
affected you and led you to form a specific view of or opinion about education, and/or an opinion about why, in general, Americans remain happily undereducated or happily poorly educated.
You need to incorporate information from at least two of the sources we’ve read this semester to make your argument (document it, of course), but you will also need to develop evidence by
drawing upon your own experiences, observations, and critical thinking. Unless you get permission from me, you are to use only the assigned texts for your sources, no additional sources. Your
essay should be no shorter than four full, double-spaced pages, excluding the Works Cited page.
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best,
and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world,
and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they alwa ys gave the same
answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it.
They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers
didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clear ly weren’t interested in learning
more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a
teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the w hining, the dispirited attitudes, to be
found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you
might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in
grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve- year
compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel
they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children.
Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to
him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that
term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s. The
obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know
that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode
cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the
lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge
the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the
classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this
trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with
disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having
been granted the leav e had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and
that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I
was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold.
In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally
retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools – with their long – term,
cell – block- style, forced confinement of both students and teachers – as virtual factories of
childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience
had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to
themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the
old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling.
We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the
capacity for surprising insi ght – simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by
introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or
she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don’t do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the
“problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no
“problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the
face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are
doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that
George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child
behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really
grows up?
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day,
five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine r eally
necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a
rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to
rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well – known Americans never went
through the twelve – year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone
taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school sy stem, and not one of them
was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids
generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut;
inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like
Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty
recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel
Durant, who co- wrote an enormo us, and very good, multivolume history of the world with
her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel
Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, sc hooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous
with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an
intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way
to educat e themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all
too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a
system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between
1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of
the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and
cultural traditi ons was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one
form or another as a d ecent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools
actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact
that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of
compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who
wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing
could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as
possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down
dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere
else.
Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as
a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own
educational system back to the now vanis hed, though never to be forgotten, military state of
Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war
with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious
here. Our educationa l system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you
know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes
Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was
publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace
Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is
essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought
here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early
association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washi ngton’s aide during the
Revolutionary War, and so many German- speaking people had settled here by 1795 that
Congress considered publishing a German- language edition of the federal laws. But what
shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian
culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to
hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile
and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace “manageable.”
It was from James Bryant Conant – president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison- gas
specialist, WWII executive on the atomic – bomb project, high commissioner of the American
zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one o f the most influential figures of the twentieth
century – that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant,
we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy
today, nor would we be bl essed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000
students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I
retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book – length essay, The Child the Parent and
the State , and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern
schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered between 1905 and 1930. A
revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninf ormed to
Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which “one saw this
revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.”
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that
compulsory schoolin g on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia
in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give
the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized,
compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of
these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age- grading, by constant rankings on tests,
and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ign orant mass of mankind,
separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose – the actual purpose – of modem schooling into six basic
functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent e nough to believe the
three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to
authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much
destroys the id ea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test
for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and
boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformit y function,” because its
intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and
this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is m eant to determine each student’s proper
social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative
records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has bee n “diagnosed,” children are to
be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and
not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of
natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help
things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are m eant to
tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough
that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive
sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from fi rst grade onward were intended
to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite
group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to
manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately
dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and
corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose o f mandatory public education in this country. And lest
you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational
enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant
himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an
American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who
funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the
Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force
but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans
came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd
via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
There you have it. Now you know. We don’t need Karl Marx’s conception of a grand
warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic
or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and
to discard them if they don’t conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow
Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City
School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal
education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in
every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform
specific difficult manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring
about these ends need not be class – based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the
by now familiar belief that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty,
laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and
organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But
mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most
Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need.
Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any
direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it
encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great
invention of the modem e ra – marketing.
Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who
can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School
has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular
job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to
Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children,
stripped of responsibility and indep endence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing
emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.
In the 1934 edition of his once well – known book Public Education in the United States,
Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school
enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that
point still quite new. This same Cubberley – who was dean of Stanford’s School of Education,
a textbook ed itor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard –
had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our
schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned..
. . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid
down.”
It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by
now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed
the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fi scal self- control;
easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have
removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender
our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that
would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the
television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy
$150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and w hen they fall apart too soon we buy
another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance,
even when we’re upside – down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari
Fleischer tells us to “be careful what y ou say,” even if we remember having been told
somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too.
Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schoolin g, its tricks
and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers;
teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively;
teach your own to think critically and independently. Well – schooled kids have a low
threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.
Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown – up material, in history, literature,
philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough
to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own
company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well – schooled people are conditioned to dread being
alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone,
and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children
should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of
experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate
society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to
turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have th eir childhoods extended, not even for a
day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if
Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could
apprentice himself to a printer at the sam e age (then put himself through a course of study
that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a
long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as
common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to
manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and
glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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