Nexus - 0404 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Why Schools Don't Educate Why Schools Don't Educate As teacher John Gatto pleads, the inherent problems with ‘schooling’ could be solved with methods that help children develop self-knowledge and self-reliance, and which encourage family involvement. When John Taylor Gatto was named New York City's Teacher of the Year (for the sec - ond year in a row) in 1990, his acceptance speech was not a quiet thank-you, but a loud-and-clear challenge to the conventional wisdom surrounding the role of educa - tion, family, individual and community today. Not just about New York City schools and children, his remarks address concerns that educators and parents feel, more or less deeply, no matter where they reside. The challenges we face in the education and engagement of our children are serious and complex, and they are not simply the responsibility of our schools. Yet schools can provide much of the context necessary for making our society and our world the kind of place in which we all want to live. So we take pleasure in publishing the impassioned remarks of one of the most vocal and artic - ulate champions of educational reform. — Jon Wilson, Editor & Publisher, HOPE magazine accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honourable ones: men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and rede- fine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A "Teacher of the Year" is not the best teacher around—those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered—but a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the ser- vice of children. This is their award as well as mine. We live in a time of great social cr Our children rank at the bottom of 19 industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of this commodity. If we didn't buy so many powdered dreams, the business would collapse—and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world—and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan, 70 per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world without precedent; nobody talks to them anymore. Without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past; only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way, a school is a major actor in this tragedy; just as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging, and who sleep on the streets. I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching— that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes any more that scientists are trained in science classes, or politicians in civics classes, or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience. It rings a bell, and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he learns that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor. Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around A Speech by John Taylor Gatto 235 W. 76th Street New York, NY 10023, USA Originally published in HOPE magazine Vol. 1, No. 4, Sept/Oct 1996 POB160, Naskeag Rd, Brooklin, ME 04616 Telephone: +1 (207) 359 4651 Fax: +1 (207) 359 8920 235 W. 76th Street New York, NY 10023, USA JUNE - JULY 1997 NEXUS - 13