Schooling: The Hidden Agenda
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This is from a speech by Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael_. It's long
for this forum, but you can access it here:
http://ishmael.org/Education/Writings/unschooling.shtml
~Kelly
Kelly Lovejoy
Conference Coordinator
Live and Learn Unschooling Conference
http://www.LiveandLearnConference.org
Schooling: The Hidden Agenda
I suspect that not everyone in this audience knows who I am or why I've
been invited to speak to you to day. After all, I've never written a
book or even an article about home schooling or unschooling. I've been
called a number of things: a futurist, a planetary philosopher, an
anthropologist from Mars. Recently I was introduced to an audience as a
cultural critic, and I think this probably says it best. As you'll see,
in my talk to you today, I will be trying to place schooling and
unschooling in the larger context of our cultural history and that of
our species as well.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with my work, I should begin by
explaining what I mean by "our culture." Rather than burden you with a
definition, I'll give you a simple test that you can use wherever you
go in the world. If the food in that part of the world is under lock
and key, and the people who live there have to work to get it, then
you're among people of our culture. If you happen to be in a jungle in
the interior of Brazil or New Guinea, however, you'll find that the
food is not under lock and key. It's simply out there for the taking,
and anyone who wants some can just go and get it. The people who live
in these areas, often called aboriginals, stone-age peoples, or tribal
peoples clearly belong to a culture radically different from our own.
I first began to focus my attention on the peculiarities of our own
culture in the early 1960s, when I went to work for what was then a
cutting-edge publisher of educational materials, Science Research
Associates. I was in my mid-twenties and as thoroughly acculturated as
any senator, bus-driver, movie star, or medical doctor. My fundamental
acceptances about the universe and humanity's place in it were
rock-solid and thoroughly conventional.
But it was a stressful time to be alive, in some ways even more
stressful than the present. Many people nowadays realize that human
life may well be in jeopardy, but this jeopardy exists in some vaguely
defined future, twenty or fifty or a hundred years hence. But in those
coldest days of the Cold War everyone lived with the realization that a
nuclear holocaust could occur literally at any second, without warning.
It was very realistically the touch of a button away.
Human life would not be entirely snuffed out in a holocaust of this
kind. In a way, it would be even worse than that. In a matter of hours,
we would be thrown back not just to the Stone Age but to a level of
almost total helplessness. In the Stone Age, after all, people lived
perfectly well without supermarkets, shopping malls, hardware stores,
and all the elaborate systems that keep these places stocked with the
things we need. Within hours our cities would disintegrate into chaos
and anarchy, and the necessities of life would vanish from store
shelves, never to be replaced. Within days famine would be widespread.
Skills that are taken for granted among Stone Age peoples would be
unknown to the survivors--the ability to differentiate between edible
and inedible foods growing in their own environment, the ability to
stalk, kill, dress, and preserve game animals, and most important the
ability to make tools from available materials. How many of you know
how to cure a hide? How to make a rope from scratch? How to flake a
stone tool? Much less how to smelt metal from raw ore. Commonplace
skills of the paleolithic, developed over thousands of years, would be
lost arts.
All this was freely acknowledged by people who didn't doubt for a
moment that we were living the way humans were meant to live from the
beginning of time, who didn't doubt for a moment that the things our
children were learning in school were exactly the things they should be
learning.
I'd been hired at SRA to work on a major new mathematics program that
had been under development for several years in Cleveland. In my first
year, we were going to publish the kindergarten and first-grade
programs. In the second year, we'd publish the second-grade program, in
the third year, the third-grade program, and so on. Working on the
kindergarten and first-grade programs, I observed something that I
thought was truly remarkable. In these grades, children spend most of
their time learning things that no one growing up in our culture could
possibly avoid learning. For example, they learn the names of the
primary colors. Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they
were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what
color the sky is. They learn to tell time, to count, and to add and
subtract, as if anyone could possibly fail to learn these things in
this culture. And of course they make the beginnings of learning how to
read. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest an experiment. Two classes
of 30 kids, taught identically and given the identical text materials
throughout their school experience, but one class is given no
instruction in reading at all and the other is given the usual
instruction. Call it the Quinn Conjecture: both classes will test the
same on reading skills at the end of twelve years. I feel safe in
making this conjecture because ultimately kids learn to read the same
way they learn to speak, by hanging around people who read and by
wanting to be able to do what these people do.
It occurred to me at this time to ask this question: Instead of
spending two or three years teaching children things they will
inevitably learn anyway, why not teach them some things they will not
inevitably learn and that they would actually enjoy learning at this
age? How to navigate by the stars, for example. How to tan a hide. How
to distinguish edible foods from inedible foods. How to build a shelter
from scratch. How to make tools from scratch. How to make a canoe. How
to track animals--all the forgotten but still valuable skills that our
civilization is actually built on.
Of course I didn't have to vocalize this idea to anyone to know how it
would be received. Being thoroughly acculturated, I could myself
explain why it was totally inane. The way we live is the way humans
were meant to live from the beginning of time, and our children were
being prepared to enter that life. Those who came before us were
savages, little more than brutes. Those who continue to live the way
our ancestors lived are savages, little more than brutes. The world is
well rid of them, and we're well rid of every vestige of them,
including their ludicrously primitive skills.
Our children were being prepared in school to step boldly into the only
fully human life that had ever existed on this planet. The skills they
were acquiring in school would bring them not only success but deep
personal fulfillment on every level. What did it matter if they never
did more than work in some mind-numbing factory job? They could parse a
sentence! They could explain to you the difference between a Petrarchan
sonnet and a Shakespearean sonnet! They could extract a square root!
They could show you why the square of the two sides of a right triangle
were equal to the square of the hypotenuse! They could analyze a poem!
They could explain to you how a bill passes congress! They could very
possibly trace for you the economic causes of the Civil War. They had
read Melville and Shakespeare, so why would they not now read
Dostoevsky and Racine, Joyce and Beckett, Faulkner and O'Neill? But
above all else, of course, the citizen's education--grades K to
twelve--prepared children to be fully-functioning participants in this
great civilization of ours. The day after their graduation exercises,
they were ready to stride confidently toward any goal they might set
themselves.
Of course, then, as now, everyone knew that the citizen's education was
doing no such thing. It was perceived then--as now--that there was
something strangely wrong with the schools. They were failing--and
failing miserably--at delivering on these enticing promises. Ah well,
teachers weren't being paid enough, so what could you expect? We raised
teachers' salaries--again and again and again--and still the schools
failed. Well, what could you expect? The schools were physically
decrepit, lightless, and uninspiring. We built new ones--tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands of them--and still the schools failed.
Well, what could you expect? The curriculum was antiquated and
irrelevant. We modernized the curriculum, did our damnedest to make it
relevant--and still the schools failed. Every week--then as now--you
could read about some bright new idea that would surely "fix" whatever
was wrong with our schools: the open classroom, team teaching, back to
basics, more homework, less homework, no homework--I couldn't begin to
enumerate them all. Hundreds of these bright ideas were
implemented--thousands of them were implemented--and still the schools
failed.
Within our cultural matrix, every medium tells us that the schools
exist to prepare children for a successful and fulfilling life in our
civilization (and are therefore failing). This is beyond argument,
beyond doubt, beyond question. In Ishmael I said that the voice of
Mother Culture speaks to us from every newspaper and magazine article,
every movie, every sermon, every book, every parent, every teacher,
every school administrator, and what she has to say about the schools
is that they exist to prepare children for a successful and fulfilling
life in our civilization (and are therefore failing). Once we step
outside our cultural matrix, this voice no longer fills our ears and
we're free to ask some new questions. Suppose the schools aren't
failing? Suppose they're doing exactly what we really want them to
do--but don't wish to examine and acknowledge?
Granted that the schools do a poor job of preparing children for a
successful and fulfilling life in our civilization, but what things do
they do excellently well? Well, to begin with, they do a superb job of
keeping young people out of the job market. Instead of becoming
wage-earners at age twelve or fourteen, they remain consumers only--and
they consume billions of dollars worth of merchandise, using money that
their parents earn. Just imagine what would happen to our economy if
overnight the high schools closed their doors. Instead of having fifty
million active consumers out there, we would suddenly have fifty
million unemployed youth. It would be nothing short of an economic
catastrophe.
Of course the situation was very different two hundred years ago, when
we were still a primarily agrarian society. Youngsters were expected
and needed to become workers at age ten, eleven, and twelve. For the
masses, a fourth, fifth, or sixth-grade education was deemed perfectly
adequate. But as the character of our society changed, fewer youngsters
were needed for farm work, and the enactment of child-labor laws soon
made it impossible to put ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds to work
in factories. It was necessary to keep them off the streets--and where
better than in schools? Naturally, new material had to be inserted into
the curriculum to fill up the time. It didn't much matter what it was.
Have them memorize the capitals of every state. Have them memorize the
principle products of every state. Have them learn the steps a bill
takes in passing Congress. No one wondered or cared if these were
things kids wanted to know or needed to know--or would ever need to
know. No one wondered or ever troubled to find out if the material
being added to the curriculum was retained. The educators didn't want
to know, and, really, what difference would it make? It didn't matter
that, once learned, they were immediately forgotten. It filled up some
time. The law decreed that an eighth-grade education was essential for
every citizen, and so curriculum writers provided material needed for
an eighth-grade education.
During the Great Depression it became urgently important to keep young
people off the job market for as long as possible, and so it came to be
understood that a twelfth-grade education was essential for every
citizen. As before, it didn't much matter what was added to fill up the
time, so long as it was marginally plausible. Let's have them learn how
to analyze a poem, even if they never read another one in their whole
adult life. Let's have them read a great classic novel, even if they
never read another one in their whole adult life. Let's have them study
world history, even if it all just goes in one ear and out the other.
Let's have them study Euclidean geometry, even if two years later they
couldn't prove a single theorem to save their lives. All these things
and many, many more were of course justified on the basis that they
would contribute to the success and rich fulfilment that these children
would experience as adults. Except, of course, that it didn't. But no
one wanted to know about that. No one would have dreamed of testing
young people five years after graduation to find out how much of it
they'd retained. No one would have dreamed of asking them how useful it
had been to them in realistic terms or how much it had contributed to
their success and fulfilment as humans. What would be the point of
asking them to evaluate their education? What did they know about it,
after all? They were just high-school graduates, not professional
educators.
At the end of the Second World War, no one knew what the economic
future was going to be like. With the disappearance of the war
industries, would the country fall back into the pre-war depression
slump? The word began to go out that the citizen's education should
really include four years of college. Everyone should go to college. As
the economy continued to grow, however, this injunction began to be
softened. Four years of college would sure be good for you, but it
wasn't part of the citizen's education, which ultimately remained a
twelfth-grade education.
It was in the good years following the war, when there were often more
jobs than workers to fill them, that our schools began to be perceived
as failing. With ready workers in demand, it was apparent that kids
were coming out of school without knowing much more than the
sixth-grade graduates of a century ago. They'd "gone through" all the
material that had been added to fill up the time--analyzed poetry,
diagramed sentences, proved theorems, solved for x, plowed through
thousands of pages of history and literature, written bushels of
themes, but for the most part they retained almost none of it--and of
how much use would it be to them if they had? From a business point of
view, these high-school graduates were barely employable.
But of course by then the curriculum had achieved the status of
scripture, and it was too late to acknowledge that the program had
never been designed to be useful. The educators' response to the
business community was, "We just have to give the kids more of the
same--more poems to analyze, more sentences to diagram, more theorems
to prove, more equations to solve, more pages of history and literature
to read, more themes to write, and so on." No one was about to
acknowledge that the program had been set up to keep young people off
the job market--and that it had done a damn fine job of that at least.
But keeping young people off the job market is only half of what the
schools do superbly well. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, children
in aboriginal societies--tribal societies--have completed what we, from
our point of view, would call their "education." They're ready to
"graduate" and become adults. In these societies, what this means is
that their survival value is 100%. All their elders could disappear
overnight, and there wouldn't be chaos, anarchy, and famine among these
new adults. They would be able to carry on without a hitch. None of the
skills and technologies practiced by their parents would be lost. If
they wanted to, they could live quite independently of the tribal
structure in which they were reared.
But the last thing we want our children to be able to do is to live
independently of our society. We don't want our graduates to have a
survival value of 100%, because this would make them free to opt out of
our carefully constructed economic system and do whatever they please.
We don't want them to do whatever they please, we want them to have
exactly two choices (assuming they're not independently wealthy). Get a
job or go to college. Either choice is good for us, because we need a
constant supply of entry-level workers and we also need doctors,
lawyers, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, geologists,
biologists, school teachers, and so on. The citizen's education
accomplishes this almost without fail. Ninety-nine point nine percent
of our high school graduates make one of these two choices.
And it should be noted that our high-school graduates are reliably
entry-level workers. We want them to have to grab the lowest rung on
the ladder. What sense would it make to give them skills that would
make it possible for them to grab the second rung or the third rung?
Those are the rungs their older brothers and sisters are reaching for.
And if this year's graduates were reaching for the second or third
rungs, who would be doing the work at the bottom? The business people
who do the hiring constantly complain that graduates know absolutely
nothing, have virtually no useful skills at all. But in truth how could
it be otherwise?
So you see that our schools are not failing, they're just succeeding in
ways we prefer not to see. Turning out graduates with no skills, with
no survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not
flaws of the system, they are features of the system. These are the
things the system must do to keep things going on as they are.
The need for schooling is bolstered by two well-entrenched pieces of
cultural mythology. The first and most pernicious of these is that
children will not learn unless they're compelled to--in school. It is
part of the mythology of childhood itself that children hate learning
and will avoid it at all costs. Of course, anyone who has had a child
knows what an absurd lie this is. From infancy onward, children are the
most fantastic learners in the world. If they grow up in a family in
which four languages are spoken, they will be speaking four languages
by the time they're three or four years old--without a day of
schooling, just by hanging around the members of their family, because
they desperately want to be able to do the things they do. Anyone who
has had a child knows that they are tirelessly curious. As soon as
they're able to ask questions, they ask questions incessantly, often
driving their parents to distraction. Their curiosity extends to
everything they can reach, which is why every parent soon learns to put
anything breakable, anything dangerous, anything untouchable up
high--and if possible behind lock and key. We all know the truth of the
joke about those childproof bottle caps: those are the kind that only
children can open.
People who imagine that children are resistant to learning have a
nonexistent understanding of how human culture developed in the first
place. Culture is no more and no less than the totality of learned
behavior and information that is passed from one generation to the
next. The desire to eat is not transmitted by culture, but knowledge
about how edible foods are found, collected, and processed is
transmitted by culture. Before the invention of writing, whatever was
not passed on from one generation to the next was simply lost, no
matter what it was--a technique, a song, a detail of history. Among
aboriginal peoples--those we haven't destroyed--the transmission
between generations is remarkably complete, but of course not 100%
complete. There will always be trivial details of personal history that
the older generation takes to its grave. But the vital material is
never lost.
This comes about because the desire to learn is hardwired into the
human child just the way that the desire to reproduce is hardwired into
the human adult. It's genetic. If there was ever a strain of humans
whose children were not driven to learn, they're long gone, because
they could not be culture-bearers.
Children don't have to be motivated to learn everything they can about
the world they inhabit, they're absolutely driven to learn it. By the
onset of puberty, children in aboriginal societies have unfailingly
learned everything they need to function as adults.
Think of it this way. In the most general terms, the human biological
clock is set for two alarms. When the first alarm goes off, at birth,
the clock chimes learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. When the second
alarm goes off, at the onset of puberty, the clock chimes mate, mate,
mate, mate, mate. The chime that goes learn, learn, learn never
disappears entirely, but it becomes relatively faint at the onset of
puberty. At that point, children cease to want to follow their parents
around in the learning dance. Instead, they want to follow each other
around in the mating dance.
We, of course, in our greater wisdom have decreed that the biological
clock regulated by our genes must be ignored.
What sells most people on the idea of school is the fact that the
unschooled child learns what it wants to learn when it wants to learn
it. This is intolerable to them, because they're convinced that
children don't want to learn anything at all--and they point to school
children to prove it. What they fail to recognize is that the learning
curve of preschool children swoops upward like a mountain--but quickly
levels off when they enter school. By the third or fourth grade it's
completely flat for most kids. Learning, such as it is, has become a
boring, painful experience they'd love to be able to avoid if they
could. But there's another reason why people abhor the idea of children
learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it. They won't
all learn the same things! Some of them will never learn to analyze a
poem! Some of them will never learn to parse a sentence or write a
theme! Some of them will never read Julius Caesar! Some will never
learn geometry! Some will never dissect a frog! Some will never learn
how a bill passes Congress! Well, of course, this is too horrible to
imagine. It doesn't matter that 90% of these students will never read
another poem or another play by Shakespeare in their lives. It doesn't
matter that 90% of them will never have occasion to parse another
sentence or write another theme in their lives. It doesn't matter that
90% retain no functional knowledge of the geometry or algebra they
studied. It doesn't matter that 90% never have any use for whatever
knowledge they were supposed to gain from dissecting a frog. It doesn't
matter that 90% graduate without having the vaguest idea how a bill
passes Congress. All that matters is that they've gone through it!
The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they
want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very
elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age)
remember the things that are important to them--the things they need to
know--and forget the rest. I am a living witness to this fact. I went
to one of the best prep schools in the country and graduated fourth in
my class, and I doubt very much if I could now get a passing grade in
more than two or three of the dozens of courses I took. I studied
classical Greek for two solid years, and now would be unable to read
aloud a single sentence.
One final argument people advance to support the idea that children
need all the schooling we give them is that there is vastly more
material to be learned today than there was in prehistoric times or
even a century ago. Well, there is of course vastly more material that
can be learned, but we all know perfectly well that it isn't being
taught in grades K to twelve. Whole vast new fields of knowledge exist
today--things no one even heard of a century ago: astrophysics,
biochemistry, paleobiology, aeronautics, particle physics, ethology,
cytopathology, neurophysiology--I could list them for hours. But are
these the things that we have jammed into the K-12 curriculum because
everyone needs to know them? Certainly not. The idea is absurd. The
idea that children need to be schooled for a long time because there is
so much that can be learned is absurd. If the citizen's education were
to be extended to include everything that can be learned, it wouldn't
run to grade twelve, it would run to grade twelve thousand, and no one
would be able to graduate in a single lifetime.
I know of course that there is no one in this audience who needs to be
sold on the virtues of home schooling or unschooling. I hope, however,
that I may have been able to add some philosophical, historical,
anthropological, and biological foundation for your conviction that
school ain't all it's cracked up to be.
________________________________________________________________________
More new features than ever. Check out the new AOL Mail ! -
http://webmail.aol.com
for this forum, but you can access it here:
http://ishmael.org/Education/Writings/unschooling.shtml
~Kelly
Kelly Lovejoy
Conference Coordinator
Live and Learn Unschooling Conference
http://www.LiveandLearnConference.org
Schooling: The Hidden Agenda
I suspect that not everyone in this audience knows who I am or why I've
been invited to speak to you to day. After all, I've never written a
book or even an article about home schooling or unschooling. I've been
called a number of things: a futurist, a planetary philosopher, an
anthropologist from Mars. Recently I was introduced to an audience as a
cultural critic, and I think this probably says it best. As you'll see,
in my talk to you today, I will be trying to place schooling and
unschooling in the larger context of our cultural history and that of
our species as well.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with my work, I should begin by
explaining what I mean by "our culture." Rather than burden you with a
definition, I'll give you a simple test that you can use wherever you
go in the world. If the food in that part of the world is under lock
and key, and the people who live there have to work to get it, then
you're among people of our culture. If you happen to be in a jungle in
the interior of Brazil or New Guinea, however, you'll find that the
food is not under lock and key. It's simply out there for the taking,
and anyone who wants some can just go and get it. The people who live
in these areas, often called aboriginals, stone-age peoples, or tribal
peoples clearly belong to a culture radically different from our own.
I first began to focus my attention on the peculiarities of our own
culture in the early 1960s, when I went to work for what was then a
cutting-edge publisher of educational materials, Science Research
Associates. I was in my mid-twenties and as thoroughly acculturated as
any senator, bus-driver, movie star, or medical doctor. My fundamental
acceptances about the universe and humanity's place in it were
rock-solid and thoroughly conventional.
But it was a stressful time to be alive, in some ways even more
stressful than the present. Many people nowadays realize that human
life may well be in jeopardy, but this jeopardy exists in some vaguely
defined future, twenty or fifty or a hundred years hence. But in those
coldest days of the Cold War everyone lived with the realization that a
nuclear holocaust could occur literally at any second, without warning.
It was very realistically the touch of a button away.
Human life would not be entirely snuffed out in a holocaust of this
kind. In a way, it would be even worse than that. In a matter of hours,
we would be thrown back not just to the Stone Age but to a level of
almost total helplessness. In the Stone Age, after all, people lived
perfectly well without supermarkets, shopping malls, hardware stores,
and all the elaborate systems that keep these places stocked with the
things we need. Within hours our cities would disintegrate into chaos
and anarchy, and the necessities of life would vanish from store
shelves, never to be replaced. Within days famine would be widespread.
Skills that are taken for granted among Stone Age peoples would be
unknown to the survivors--the ability to differentiate between edible
and inedible foods growing in their own environment, the ability to
stalk, kill, dress, and preserve game animals, and most important the
ability to make tools from available materials. How many of you know
how to cure a hide? How to make a rope from scratch? How to flake a
stone tool? Much less how to smelt metal from raw ore. Commonplace
skills of the paleolithic, developed over thousands of years, would be
lost arts.
All this was freely acknowledged by people who didn't doubt for a
moment that we were living the way humans were meant to live from the
beginning of time, who didn't doubt for a moment that the things our
children were learning in school were exactly the things they should be
learning.
I'd been hired at SRA to work on a major new mathematics program that
had been under development for several years in Cleveland. In my first
year, we were going to publish the kindergarten and first-grade
programs. In the second year, we'd publish the second-grade program, in
the third year, the third-grade program, and so on. Working on the
kindergarten and first-grade programs, I observed something that I
thought was truly remarkable. In these grades, children spend most of
their time learning things that no one growing up in our culture could
possibly avoid learning. For example, they learn the names of the
primary colors. Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they
were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what
color the sky is. They learn to tell time, to count, and to add and
subtract, as if anyone could possibly fail to learn these things in
this culture. And of course they make the beginnings of learning how to
read. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest an experiment. Two classes
of 30 kids, taught identically and given the identical text materials
throughout their school experience, but one class is given no
instruction in reading at all and the other is given the usual
instruction. Call it the Quinn Conjecture: both classes will test the
same on reading skills at the end of twelve years. I feel safe in
making this conjecture because ultimately kids learn to read the same
way they learn to speak, by hanging around people who read and by
wanting to be able to do what these people do.
It occurred to me at this time to ask this question: Instead of
spending two or three years teaching children things they will
inevitably learn anyway, why not teach them some things they will not
inevitably learn and that they would actually enjoy learning at this
age? How to navigate by the stars, for example. How to tan a hide. How
to distinguish edible foods from inedible foods. How to build a shelter
from scratch. How to make tools from scratch. How to make a canoe. How
to track animals--all the forgotten but still valuable skills that our
civilization is actually built on.
Of course I didn't have to vocalize this idea to anyone to know how it
would be received. Being thoroughly acculturated, I could myself
explain why it was totally inane. The way we live is the way humans
were meant to live from the beginning of time, and our children were
being prepared to enter that life. Those who came before us were
savages, little more than brutes. Those who continue to live the way
our ancestors lived are savages, little more than brutes. The world is
well rid of them, and we're well rid of every vestige of them,
including their ludicrously primitive skills.
Our children were being prepared in school to step boldly into the only
fully human life that had ever existed on this planet. The skills they
were acquiring in school would bring them not only success but deep
personal fulfillment on every level. What did it matter if they never
did more than work in some mind-numbing factory job? They could parse a
sentence! They could explain to you the difference between a Petrarchan
sonnet and a Shakespearean sonnet! They could extract a square root!
They could show you why the square of the two sides of a right triangle
were equal to the square of the hypotenuse! They could analyze a poem!
They could explain to you how a bill passes congress! They could very
possibly trace for you the economic causes of the Civil War. They had
read Melville and Shakespeare, so why would they not now read
Dostoevsky and Racine, Joyce and Beckett, Faulkner and O'Neill? But
above all else, of course, the citizen's education--grades K to
twelve--prepared children to be fully-functioning participants in this
great civilization of ours. The day after their graduation exercises,
they were ready to stride confidently toward any goal they might set
themselves.
Of course, then, as now, everyone knew that the citizen's education was
doing no such thing. It was perceived then--as now--that there was
something strangely wrong with the schools. They were failing--and
failing miserably--at delivering on these enticing promises. Ah well,
teachers weren't being paid enough, so what could you expect? We raised
teachers' salaries--again and again and again--and still the schools
failed. Well, what could you expect? The schools were physically
decrepit, lightless, and uninspiring. We built new ones--tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands of them--and still the schools failed.
Well, what could you expect? The curriculum was antiquated and
irrelevant. We modernized the curriculum, did our damnedest to make it
relevant--and still the schools failed. Every week--then as now--you
could read about some bright new idea that would surely "fix" whatever
was wrong with our schools: the open classroom, team teaching, back to
basics, more homework, less homework, no homework--I couldn't begin to
enumerate them all. Hundreds of these bright ideas were
implemented--thousands of them were implemented--and still the schools
failed.
Within our cultural matrix, every medium tells us that the schools
exist to prepare children for a successful and fulfilling life in our
civilization (and are therefore failing). This is beyond argument,
beyond doubt, beyond question. In Ishmael I said that the voice of
Mother Culture speaks to us from every newspaper and magazine article,
every movie, every sermon, every book, every parent, every teacher,
every school administrator, and what she has to say about the schools
is that they exist to prepare children for a successful and fulfilling
life in our civilization (and are therefore failing). Once we step
outside our cultural matrix, this voice no longer fills our ears and
we're free to ask some new questions. Suppose the schools aren't
failing? Suppose they're doing exactly what we really want them to
do--but don't wish to examine and acknowledge?
Granted that the schools do a poor job of preparing children for a
successful and fulfilling life in our civilization, but what things do
they do excellently well? Well, to begin with, they do a superb job of
keeping young people out of the job market. Instead of becoming
wage-earners at age twelve or fourteen, they remain consumers only--and
they consume billions of dollars worth of merchandise, using money that
their parents earn. Just imagine what would happen to our economy if
overnight the high schools closed their doors. Instead of having fifty
million active consumers out there, we would suddenly have fifty
million unemployed youth. It would be nothing short of an economic
catastrophe.
Of course the situation was very different two hundred years ago, when
we were still a primarily agrarian society. Youngsters were expected
and needed to become workers at age ten, eleven, and twelve. For the
masses, a fourth, fifth, or sixth-grade education was deemed perfectly
adequate. But as the character of our society changed, fewer youngsters
were needed for farm work, and the enactment of child-labor laws soon
made it impossible to put ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds to work
in factories. It was necessary to keep them off the streets--and where
better than in schools? Naturally, new material had to be inserted into
the curriculum to fill up the time. It didn't much matter what it was.
Have them memorize the capitals of every state. Have them memorize the
principle products of every state. Have them learn the steps a bill
takes in passing Congress. No one wondered or cared if these were
things kids wanted to know or needed to know--or would ever need to
know. No one wondered or ever troubled to find out if the material
being added to the curriculum was retained. The educators didn't want
to know, and, really, what difference would it make? It didn't matter
that, once learned, they were immediately forgotten. It filled up some
time. The law decreed that an eighth-grade education was essential for
every citizen, and so curriculum writers provided material needed for
an eighth-grade education.
During the Great Depression it became urgently important to keep young
people off the job market for as long as possible, and so it came to be
understood that a twelfth-grade education was essential for every
citizen. As before, it didn't much matter what was added to fill up the
time, so long as it was marginally plausible. Let's have them learn how
to analyze a poem, even if they never read another one in their whole
adult life. Let's have them read a great classic novel, even if they
never read another one in their whole adult life. Let's have them study
world history, even if it all just goes in one ear and out the other.
Let's have them study Euclidean geometry, even if two years later they
couldn't prove a single theorem to save their lives. All these things
and many, many more were of course justified on the basis that they
would contribute to the success and rich fulfilment that these children
would experience as adults. Except, of course, that it didn't. But no
one wanted to know about that. No one would have dreamed of testing
young people five years after graduation to find out how much of it
they'd retained. No one would have dreamed of asking them how useful it
had been to them in realistic terms or how much it had contributed to
their success and fulfilment as humans. What would be the point of
asking them to evaluate their education? What did they know about it,
after all? They were just high-school graduates, not professional
educators.
At the end of the Second World War, no one knew what the economic
future was going to be like. With the disappearance of the war
industries, would the country fall back into the pre-war depression
slump? The word began to go out that the citizen's education should
really include four years of college. Everyone should go to college. As
the economy continued to grow, however, this injunction began to be
softened. Four years of college would sure be good for you, but it
wasn't part of the citizen's education, which ultimately remained a
twelfth-grade education.
It was in the good years following the war, when there were often more
jobs than workers to fill them, that our schools began to be perceived
as failing. With ready workers in demand, it was apparent that kids
were coming out of school without knowing much more than the
sixth-grade graduates of a century ago. They'd "gone through" all the
material that had been added to fill up the time--analyzed poetry,
diagramed sentences, proved theorems, solved for x, plowed through
thousands of pages of history and literature, written bushels of
themes, but for the most part they retained almost none of it--and of
how much use would it be to them if they had? From a business point of
view, these high-school graduates were barely employable.
But of course by then the curriculum had achieved the status of
scripture, and it was too late to acknowledge that the program had
never been designed to be useful. The educators' response to the
business community was, "We just have to give the kids more of the
same--more poems to analyze, more sentences to diagram, more theorems
to prove, more equations to solve, more pages of history and literature
to read, more themes to write, and so on." No one was about to
acknowledge that the program had been set up to keep young people off
the job market--and that it had done a damn fine job of that at least.
But keeping young people off the job market is only half of what the
schools do superbly well. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, children
in aboriginal societies--tribal societies--have completed what we, from
our point of view, would call their "education." They're ready to
"graduate" and become adults. In these societies, what this means is
that their survival value is 100%. All their elders could disappear
overnight, and there wouldn't be chaos, anarchy, and famine among these
new adults. They would be able to carry on without a hitch. None of the
skills and technologies practiced by their parents would be lost. If
they wanted to, they could live quite independently of the tribal
structure in which they were reared.
But the last thing we want our children to be able to do is to live
independently of our society. We don't want our graduates to have a
survival value of 100%, because this would make them free to opt out of
our carefully constructed economic system and do whatever they please.
We don't want them to do whatever they please, we want them to have
exactly two choices (assuming they're not independently wealthy). Get a
job or go to college. Either choice is good for us, because we need a
constant supply of entry-level workers and we also need doctors,
lawyers, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, geologists,
biologists, school teachers, and so on. The citizen's education
accomplishes this almost without fail. Ninety-nine point nine percent
of our high school graduates make one of these two choices.
And it should be noted that our high-school graduates are reliably
entry-level workers. We want them to have to grab the lowest rung on
the ladder. What sense would it make to give them skills that would
make it possible for them to grab the second rung or the third rung?
Those are the rungs their older brothers and sisters are reaching for.
And if this year's graduates were reaching for the second or third
rungs, who would be doing the work at the bottom? The business people
who do the hiring constantly complain that graduates know absolutely
nothing, have virtually no useful skills at all. But in truth how could
it be otherwise?
So you see that our schools are not failing, they're just succeeding in
ways we prefer not to see. Turning out graduates with no skills, with
no survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not
flaws of the system, they are features of the system. These are the
things the system must do to keep things going on as they are.
The need for schooling is bolstered by two well-entrenched pieces of
cultural mythology. The first and most pernicious of these is that
children will not learn unless they're compelled to--in school. It is
part of the mythology of childhood itself that children hate learning
and will avoid it at all costs. Of course, anyone who has had a child
knows what an absurd lie this is. From infancy onward, children are the
most fantastic learners in the world. If they grow up in a family in
which four languages are spoken, they will be speaking four languages
by the time they're three or four years old--without a day of
schooling, just by hanging around the members of their family, because
they desperately want to be able to do the things they do. Anyone who
has had a child knows that they are tirelessly curious. As soon as
they're able to ask questions, they ask questions incessantly, often
driving their parents to distraction. Their curiosity extends to
everything they can reach, which is why every parent soon learns to put
anything breakable, anything dangerous, anything untouchable up
high--and if possible behind lock and key. We all know the truth of the
joke about those childproof bottle caps: those are the kind that only
children can open.
People who imagine that children are resistant to learning have a
nonexistent understanding of how human culture developed in the first
place. Culture is no more and no less than the totality of learned
behavior and information that is passed from one generation to the
next. The desire to eat is not transmitted by culture, but knowledge
about how edible foods are found, collected, and processed is
transmitted by culture. Before the invention of writing, whatever was
not passed on from one generation to the next was simply lost, no
matter what it was--a technique, a song, a detail of history. Among
aboriginal peoples--those we haven't destroyed--the transmission
between generations is remarkably complete, but of course not 100%
complete. There will always be trivial details of personal history that
the older generation takes to its grave. But the vital material is
never lost.
This comes about because the desire to learn is hardwired into the
human child just the way that the desire to reproduce is hardwired into
the human adult. It's genetic. If there was ever a strain of humans
whose children were not driven to learn, they're long gone, because
they could not be culture-bearers.
Children don't have to be motivated to learn everything they can about
the world they inhabit, they're absolutely driven to learn it. By the
onset of puberty, children in aboriginal societies have unfailingly
learned everything they need to function as adults.
Think of it this way. In the most general terms, the human biological
clock is set for two alarms. When the first alarm goes off, at birth,
the clock chimes learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. When the second
alarm goes off, at the onset of puberty, the clock chimes mate, mate,
mate, mate, mate. The chime that goes learn, learn, learn never
disappears entirely, but it becomes relatively faint at the onset of
puberty. At that point, children cease to want to follow their parents
around in the learning dance. Instead, they want to follow each other
around in the mating dance.
We, of course, in our greater wisdom have decreed that the biological
clock regulated by our genes must be ignored.
What sells most people on the idea of school is the fact that the
unschooled child learns what it wants to learn when it wants to learn
it. This is intolerable to them, because they're convinced that
children don't want to learn anything at all--and they point to school
children to prove it. What they fail to recognize is that the learning
curve of preschool children swoops upward like a mountain--but quickly
levels off when they enter school. By the third or fourth grade it's
completely flat for most kids. Learning, such as it is, has become a
boring, painful experience they'd love to be able to avoid if they
could. But there's another reason why people abhor the idea of children
learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it. They won't
all learn the same things! Some of them will never learn to analyze a
poem! Some of them will never learn to parse a sentence or write a
theme! Some of them will never read Julius Caesar! Some will never
learn geometry! Some will never dissect a frog! Some will never learn
how a bill passes Congress! Well, of course, this is too horrible to
imagine. It doesn't matter that 90% of these students will never read
another poem or another play by Shakespeare in their lives. It doesn't
matter that 90% of them will never have occasion to parse another
sentence or write another theme in their lives. It doesn't matter that
90% retain no functional knowledge of the geometry or algebra they
studied. It doesn't matter that 90% never have any use for whatever
knowledge they were supposed to gain from dissecting a frog. It doesn't
matter that 90% graduate without having the vaguest idea how a bill
passes Congress. All that matters is that they've gone through it!
The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they
want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very
elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age)
remember the things that are important to them--the things they need to
know--and forget the rest. I am a living witness to this fact. I went
to one of the best prep schools in the country and graduated fourth in
my class, and I doubt very much if I could now get a passing grade in
more than two or three of the dozens of courses I took. I studied
classical Greek for two solid years, and now would be unable to read
aloud a single sentence.
One final argument people advance to support the idea that children
need all the schooling we give them is that there is vastly more
material to be learned today than there was in prehistoric times or
even a century ago. Well, there is of course vastly more material that
can be learned, but we all know perfectly well that it isn't being
taught in grades K to twelve. Whole vast new fields of knowledge exist
today--things no one even heard of a century ago: astrophysics,
biochemistry, paleobiology, aeronautics, particle physics, ethology,
cytopathology, neurophysiology--I could list them for hours. But are
these the things that we have jammed into the K-12 curriculum because
everyone needs to know them? Certainly not. The idea is absurd. The
idea that children need to be schooled for a long time because there is
so much that can be learned is absurd. If the citizen's education were
to be extended to include everything that can be learned, it wouldn't
run to grade twelve, it would run to grade twelve thousand, and no one
would be able to graduate in a single lifetime.
I know of course that there is no one in this audience who needs to be
sold on the virtues of home schooling or unschooling. I hope, however,
that I may have been able to add some philosophical, historical,
anthropological, and biological foundation for your conviction that
school ain't all it's cracked up to be.
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