A Reminder...

The School Board has 9 members. Each of them alone has no power, but together they set a course for the district. They elect a chair to create agendas and run meetings. That chair has no super-powers beyond those roles.

Board members can meet with individuals and groups between meetings of the full board, but their opinions carry NO weight except in the context of the larger group. Since the chair is no more than one of nine, he or she can serve as a center of communication between meetings, but no more.

The superintendent is an administrator, employed at the pleasure of the board and delegated to carry out the board's bidding. He or she carries no super powers beyond the direction set by the board. The superintendent is delegated to represent the board, not to pursue goals independent of the board's stated wishes.

The board stands between the communities, the state, and the schools, representing the interests of all three, yet is entrusted to stand against any of those interests if the welfare of the children is at stake. Its paramount duty is to stand as guardians of the welfare of ALL the children served by the district's schools. As such, members of the board must both represent and resist each of the above constituancies.

The strength of the board lies in it's diversity, not in it's unity of purpose, thus any attempt to bully or circumvent the board is a direct threat to the children of the district, and should be considered no less.

The One-A-Month Club

Being just a rural dweeb, I only now realized the wicked-grand movement I started in early 2004---You're Welcome!---by sending a piece published in my local paper and then forgetting about it---never took off. Like walking back to the garden for the first time in August and not being able to locate the radishes.

In Nov 06, by my calculations, I should have had the entire population of earth on board, and be marching by now shoulder-to-...whatever...with all sentient beings in the known universe. No Bush 2nd term, war eliminated, energy independence, global warming reversed, single payer health care, shared wealth, the Stock Exchange converted to a community greenhouse, suits in exile. Guess a few other charter members forgot too.

Back to the original 2004 scheme, contents updated to vers. 2.010 ...a veritable progressive Ponzi...Mary Kay for the soul...a Bernie M. for social justice:

* * *

Some of us don't belong. We don't play well with others.

We aren't Democrats or Republicans. We aren't rich. We are not connected. We don't belong to any Sierra Club. We don't dress cool. We still bend for pennies on the pavement. We are not powerful or pretty. We snack while watching TV and don't work it off later. We leave early, get home late, and get bone-tired. Vacation means home from work a week. Travel means driving so far we have to buy gas. Eating out is sitting instead of taking it home in a bag. Nobody would mistake us for Wall Street.

But there are a lot of us, and when we're all together we're big and scary. (Shit, some are scary by themselves.) We don't come together often since we don't belong, but we're beginning to feel our oats. We have not quite figured out why we're so pissed, though, so sometimes we switch sides mid-sentence and mis-spell stuff on posters.

We know we've been had ... and not just the last 10 years, but ever since we can remember. This isn't about politics anymore, but about class, wealth and greed. We don't belong, but we're not stupid.

So what do we do? Get out and organize? Yeah, right. Got some corporate campaign donors for us?

There's one kind of organizing that has real appeal where we live, though, and that's the pyramid scheme. Come to think of it, even the rich and savvy know you never lose with this one. Remember that lady who sent a dollar each to the top 5 in that letter and got a million back the next month? Remember the pension funds that....Need I say more?

How about this: Find one person this month. Get that person to find one more next month. The letters and undies parties we did before were just for practice. You know how to do it...now let's go for a big prize, like the right to go on living in civilized society.

Introducing The One-a-Month Club! Ta Da! We talk, and we convince one person a month that she or he can make a difference. We ask our recruit to find one other person a month. That's just about it, except we agree to do one extra task each month to make the world a better place. It can be anything: call a senator's office with an opinion, write a letter to the paper, drive a shut-in friend to vote, stand up and spout off in a meeting, send twenty bucks to Haiti, call back old One-a-Month recruits to see if they're still members. One thing, that's all.

For those who were sneaking a peek at the TV or going for a snack, let's recap those membership rules: 1. Find one person a month to join; 2. Take one action a month to make a better world: nothing snarky, evil, dishonest, disingenuous, underhanded, stupid, or otherwise Foxy-Newsy Tea Palin-ish allowed. If you can do that, welcome to the One-a-Month Club.

You won't get a newsletter or freebies -- no membership bumper sticker, jacket, or pink Caddy -- but you don't have to send money and you'll get your country back.

Of course, we're too dumb to understand anything like exponential growth. We can't figure out that one-a-month reaches 16 million people in 2 years, then 2 billion by the 2012 election. (Whoa, 2 billion? That's more than vote in India, Dude!)

* * *

The fatal flaw? In the glare of hindsight, it's painfully clear. It was just too much to ask.

How about 1-by-2? Talk to someone within two months and do six good deeds a year. In 5 years we could have one billion members. I could post a printable membership card to pass out...make it green so it could go in your wallet with all the one dollar bills and blend.

Nah, sorry, still asking too much. Let's just feel righteous and complain while washing Tupperware in Amway soap.

The Logical Tragedy of Benson, Vermont, from Gatto's Underground History

In 1995, just about one hundred years after the inception of modern institutional schooling in America, the little town of Benson in western Vermont set a national record by voting down its proposed school budget for the twelfth time. Charlie Usher, assistant superintendent in Benson, declared his bewilderment at the town’s irresponsibility. Mr. Usher suggested the task was to get "at the root of why people would be willing to let their schools fall apart..." I think Mr. Usher is right, so let’s see what we can turn up by using common sense. But first, to show how united in outrage Benson school officials were, Education Week, the bible of the teaching business, quoted Theresa Mulholland, principal at the Benson school (more on this shortly) as saying nobody in town had a good explanation for what they were doing: "I think they just want to say ‘No,’ " she said, as if those townspeople were ornery kids or retarded children. Benson just didn’t get it. Schools need lots of money, or, as Usher suggested, they fall apart.

The Education Week piece in which I read these things covered every single inch of a two-page tabloid spread, yet nowhere could I find a single word indicating the problem might just be that its taxpayers and voters didn’t regard the Benson system as their own. Nor is there even a hint Benson may have abandoned its belief that what goes on in school is an essential enterprise worth a substantial part of its income to promote.

So I read this newspaper account of a little town in Vermont and its defiance of the state school institution pretty carefully because I sensed some important message buried there. On the third run-through I discovered what I was looking for. Let’s start with Assistant Superintendent Usher. His title implies that hidden somewhere out of sight there is a Superintendent somebody, too. If you don’t find that odd it’s because I haven’t told you that the entire school district of Benson has exactly one school with 137 kids in it. A brand-new school with a principal, too. Apparently you can’t have a principal without an assistant superintendent giving orders to that lowly functionary and a superintendent giving orders to the assistant superintendent. Three high-ranking pedagogues whose collective cost for services is about $250,000—nearly $2,000 a kid. That’s nice work if you can get it.

The new Benson school itself is worth a closer look. Its construction caused property taxes to go up 40 percent in one year, quite a shock to local homeowners just hanging on by their fingernails. This school would have been rejected outright by local taxpayers, who had (they thought) a perfectly good school already, but the state condemned the old school for not having wheelchair ramps and other features nobody ever considered an essential part of education before. Costs of reaching code compliance in the old structure were so close to the cost of a new school that taxpayers surrendered. The bond issue was finally voted. Even so, it passed only narrowly. What happened next will be no surprise. Benson School turned out to cost a lot more than voters expected. I am skeptical that it cost more than the State of Vermont expected, though.

I have some personal experience with Vermont’s condemnation of sound school structures from the little town of Walden, hardly more than a speck on the map northeast of Benson in the most beautiful hill country you can imagine. A few years ago, four pretty one-room schools dating from the nineteenth century, schools still serving 120 kids with just four teachers and no administrators, were condemned by the same crew from Montpelier that gave Benson its current tax headache. I was asked by a citizen group in Walden to drive up and speak at a rally to save these remarkable community schools, beloved by their clientele. If I tell you when I woke in the morning in Walden a moose was rooting vegetables from the garden of my hostess’ home you’ll be able to imagine them better.

The group I came to speak for, "The Road Rats" as it called itself, had already defeated school consolidation the previous year. Montpelier’s goal was to close the little schools and bus kids to a new central location miles from home. Now Montpelier took off the gloves. If persuasion and seduction wouldn’t work, coercion would. Let’s call what happened "The Benson Maneuver," passing building code provisions with no connection to normal reality. This accomplished, Vermont condemned the one-room schools for violation of these provisions. All official estimates to reach new code standards were very close to the price of consolidating the little schools into a big new one.

Road Rat resistance would be unlikely to mobilize a voting majority a second time; the publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new. Our only hope lay in getting a construction bid low enough that voters could see they had been flim-flammed. It seemed worth a try. The Walden group had been unable to find a contractor willing to publicly oppose the will of Montpelier, but by a lucky accident I knew a Vermont master architect. I called his home in Montpelier. Two hours later he was in Walden touring the condemned buildings.

Vital to understanding why the state wanted these places closed so badly was that everything in such places worked against professionalization and standardization: parents were too close to the classroom to allow smooth "professional" governance to sneak by unnoticed. It wasn’t possible in such schools to float a scientifically prepared curriculum initiative without having it come under close and critical scrutiny. That was intolerable to Montpelier, or rather to the larger octopus the Montpelier tentacle wiggled for.

After inspection, my architect pronounced the official estimates to reach code compliance cynical and dishonest. They were three times higher than the work would cost allowing for a normal profit. My architect knew the principals in the politically well-connected construction firms which had submitted the inflated bids. He knew the game they were playing, too. "The purpose of this is to kill one-room schools," he said. "All these guys will be paid off one way or another with state work for forwarding the agenda whether they get this state job or not." I asked if he would give us a counter-estimate we might use to wake up voters. "No," he said. "If I did I wouldn’t get another building job in Vermont."

Let’s get back to Benson, a classic illustration how the political state and its licensed allies feed like parasites on working men and women. Where Education Week saw deep mystery over citizen disaffection, the facts put a different spin on things. In a jurisdiction serving only 137 children, a number which would have been handled in the old and successful Walden schools with four teachers—and no supervisors other than the town’s traditions and the willing oversight loving parents would provide because the students were, after all, their own kids—taxpayers were being forced to sustain the expense of:

A nonteaching superintendent
A nonteaching assistant superintendent
A nonteaching principal
A nonteaching assistant principal
A full time nurse
A full time guidance counselor
A full time librarian
Eleven full time schoolteachers
An unknown number of accessory personnel
Space, desks, supplies, technology for all of these
One hundred thirty-seven schoolchildren? Is there a soul who believes Benson’s kids are better served in their new school with this mercenary army than Walden’s 120 were in four rooms with four teachers? If so, the customary ways we measure educational success don’t reflect this superiority. What happened at Benson—the use of forced schooling to impose career ladders of unnecessary work on a poor community—has happened all over North America. School is a jobs project for a large class of people it would be difficult to find employment for otherwise in a frightening job market, one in which the majority of all employment in the nation is either temporary or part-time.

Forcible redistribution of the income of others to provide work for pedagogues and for a support staff larger than the actual teaching corps is a pyramid scheme run at the expense of children. The more "make-work" which has to be found for school employees, the worse for kids because their own enterprise is stifled by constant professional tinkering in order to justify this employment. Suppose we eliminated the first seven positions from the list of functionaries paid in Benson: the superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, nurse, guidance counselor, and librarian, plus three of the eleven teachers and all those accessory personnel. We’d have the work those folks do absorbed by the remaining eight teachers and whatever community volunteer assistance we could recruit. This would still allow a class size of only seventeen kids per teacher, a ratio big-city teachers would kill to get, and hardly more than half the load one-room Walden teachers carried. Yet it would save this little community over half a million dollars yearly.

In our hypothetical example, we left Benson with eight teachers, twice the number Walden enjoyed in its two hundred-year experience with one-room schooling. Only a calculating machine could consider a large, consolidated school to which children must commute long distances as a real advance in human affairs. An advance in wasting time certainly. Consider this angle now: who in your judgment has a moral right to decide what size weight can be fastened on the backs of the working citizens of Benson? Whose decision should that be?

From a chart included in the Education Week article, I saw that Vermont school bureaucrats extracted $6,500 in 1995 for each student who sat in their spanking new schools. That computes at $162 a week per kid. Is it fair to ask how private schools provided satisfactory service for a national average of only $3,000 a kid, about $58 a week, the same year? Or how parochial schools did it for $2,300, $44 a week? Or homeschools for a mere $500 or $1,000, or about $10 or $20 a week? Do you believe public school kids were better served for the additional money spent?

Those other places could do it because they didn’t support an anthill of political jobs, political purchases, and political routines. These other types of schooling understood—some through tradition, some through analysis, some through trusting inner voices—that transferring educational responsibility from children, parents, and communities to certified agents of the state erodes the value base of human life which is forever grounded in local and personal sovereignty.


Footnote 5: Shortly after this twelfth defeat at the hands of local citizens, the state stepped in to override the judgment of the voters. In January 1996, the Vermont State Senate passed a bill to forcibly "lend" the Benson School District the full amount of its twelve-time citizen-rejected budget. Benson voters would now pay the full amount demanded by the school district plus interest!

Four Kinds of Classroom, from Gatto's Underground History

Jean Anyon, a professor at Rutgers, recently examined four major types of covert career preparation going on simultaneously in the school world, all traveling together under the label "public education." All use state-certified schoolteachers, all share roughly common budgets, all lead to intensely political outcomes.

In the first type of classroom, students are prepared for future wage labor that is mechanical and routine. Of course neither students nor parents are told this, and almost certainly teachers are not consciously aware of it themselves. The training regimen is this: all work is done in sequential fashion starting with simple tasks, working very slowly and progressing gradually to more difficult ones (but never to very difficult work). There is little decision-making or choice on the part of students, much rote behavior is practiced. Teachers hardly ever explain why any particular work is assigned or how one piece of work connects to other assignments. When explanations are undertaken they are shallow and platitudinous. "You’ll need this later in life." Teachers spend most of their day at school controlling the time and space of children, and giving commands.

In the second type of classroom, students are prepared for low-level bureaucratic work, work with little creative element to it, work which does not reward critical appraisals of management. Directions are followed just as in the first type of classroom, but those directions often call for some deductive thinking, offer some selection, and leave a bit of room for student decision-making.

The third type of classroom finds students being trained for work that requires them to be producers of artistic, intellectual, scientific, and other kinds of productive enterprise. Often children work creatively and independently here. Through this experience, children learn how to interpret and evaluate reality, how to become their own best critics and supporters. They are trained to be alone with themselves without a need for constant authority intervention and approval. The teacher controls this class through endless negotiation. Anyon concludes: "In their schooling these children are acquiring symbolic capital, they are given opportunity to develop skills of linguistic, artistic, and scientific expression and creative elaboration of ideas in concrete form."

The fourth type of public school classroom trains students for ownership, leadership, and control. Every hot social issue is discussed, students are urged to look at a point from all sides. A leader, after all, has to understand every possible shade of human nature in order to effectively mobilize, organize, or defeat any possible opponent. In this kind of schoolroom bells are not used to begin and end periods. This classroom offers something none of the others do: "knowledge of and practice in manipulating socially legitimated tools of systems analysis."

It strikes me as curious how far Anyon’s "elite" public school classroom number four still falls far short of the goals of elite private boarding schools, almost as if the very best government schools are willing to offer is only a weak approximation of the leadership style of St. Paul’s or Groton. What fascinates me most is the cold-blooded quality of this shortfall because Groton’s expectations cost almost nothing to meet on a different playing field—say a homeschool setting or even in John Gatto’s classroom—while the therapeutic community of psychologized public schooling is extremely expensive to maintain. Virtually everyone could be educated the Groton way for less money than the average public school costs.

The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher

- By John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991


Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

1. CONFUSION

A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana the other day:
"What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn't idiosyncratic -- that there is some system to it all and it's not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That's the task, to understand, to make coherent."
Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer languages, parents' nights, staff-development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world....What do any of these things have to do with each other?

Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.

Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and theories, the age-old human search lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple relationship of "let's do this" and "let's do that" is just assumed to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned how little substance is behind the play and pretense.

Think of the great natural sequences like learning to walk and learning to talk; following the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; witnessing the ancient procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; watching your mother prepare a Thanksgiving feast -- all of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifies itself and illuminates the past and the future. School sequences aren't like that, not inside a single class and not among the total menu of daily classes. School sequences are crazy. There is no particular reason for any of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized since everything must be accepted. School subjects are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the catechism or memorize the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism.

I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making a scheme of order. In a world where home is only a ghost, because both parents work, or because too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny. That's the first lesson I teach.

2. CLASS POSITION

The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. I don't know who decides my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of numbers they carry. Numbering children is a big and very profitable undertaking, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would, without a fight, allow it to be done to their kids.

In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least to endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I've shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

In spite of the overall class blueprint, which assumes that ninety-nine percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless make a public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test success, hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a reward. I frequently insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though my own experience is that employers are rightly indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and schoolteaching are, at bottom, incompatible just as Socrates said they were thousands of years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and that there is no way out of your class except by number magic. Failing that, you must stay where you are put.

3. INDIFFERENCE

The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It's heartwarming when they do that; it impresses everyone, even me. When I'm at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we've been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

4. EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY

The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because rights do not exist inside a school -- not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled -- unless school authorities say they do. As a schoolteacher, I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. Individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children and teenagers, so my judgments come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels, or they steal a private instant in the hallway on the grounds they need water. I know they don't, but I allow them to deceive me because this conditions them to depend on my favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or happy about things outside my ken; rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.

5. INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I'm told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

Successful children do the thinking I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kid has respectable parents who come to his aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. No middle-class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid's school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent in twenty-six years of teaching. That's amazing and probably the best testimony to what happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons.

Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained to be dependent: the social-service businesses could hardly survive; they would vanish, I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, prepared-food and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically down-sized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, the clothing business and schoolteaching as well, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.

Don't be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do. It's one of the biggest lessons I teach.

6. PROVISIONAL SELF-ESTEEM

The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. If you've ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have convinced him to believe they'll love him in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn't survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that your self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.

A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into students' homes to signal approval or to mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. The ecology of "good" schooling depends upon perpetuating dissatisfaction just as much as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematical records, the cumulative weight of the objective-seeming documents establishes a profile that compels children to arrive at certain decisions about themselves and their futures based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

7. ONE CAN'T HIDE

The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn't likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.

I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework," so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.

The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed marching band.

II

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. "The kids have to know how to read and write, don't they?" "They have to know how to add and subtract, don't they?" "They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job."

Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and feel. We were something special, as individuals, as Americans.

But we've had a society essentially under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War, and such a society requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling, to maintain itself. Before this development schooling wasn't very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, twenty percent of whom were slaves, and fifty percent indentured servants.

Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the seven lessons I've just described to you.

The society that has become increasingly under central control since just before the Civil War shows itself in the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast, all of which are the products of this control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the United States products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual, family, and community importance, a diminishment that proceeds from central control. The character of large compulsory institutions is inevitable; they want more and more until there isn't any more to give. School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life -- in fact it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts -- and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are near a school or an old people's reservation if you wish a demonstration.

School as it was built is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. School is an artifice which makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable, although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution. From colonial days through the period of the Republic we had no schools to speak of -- read Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography for an example of a man who had no time to waste in school -- and yet the promise of Democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient pharaonic dream of Egypt: compulsory subordination for all. That was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in The Republic when Glaucon and Adeimantus exhorted from Socrates the plan for total state control of human life, a plan necessary to maintain a society where some people take more than their share. "I will show you," says Socrates, "how to bring about such a feverish city, but you will not like what I am going to say." And so the blueprint of the seven-lesson school was first sketched.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national school hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

III

None of this is inevitable. None of it is impossible to overthrow. We do have choices in how we bring up young people; there is no one right way. If we broke through the power of the pyramidical illusion we would see that. There is no life-and-death international competition threatening our national existence, difficult as that idea is even to think about, let alone believe, in the face of a continual media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient, including in energy. I realize that idea runs counter to the most fashionable thinking of political economists, but the "profound transformation" of our economy these people talk about is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found -- in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built -- then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material "sufficiency" which our global "experts" are so insistent we be concerned about.

How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But "modern schooling" as we know it is a by-product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line American families were appauled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance towards the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called school must have been the consternation with which these same "Americans" regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.

Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.

Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.

With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking the schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that powerful interests cannot afford to let it happen. You must understand that first and foremost the business I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting contracts. We cannot afford to save money by reducing the scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to help children grow up right. That is the iron law of institutional schooling -- it is a business, subject neither to normal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition.

Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I'm trying to describe a free market in schooling just exactly like the one the country had until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education; it didn't hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see. These options exist now in miniature, wonderful survivals of a strong and vigorous past, but they are available only to the resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. The near impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the shattered families of the poor or for the bewildered host camped on the fringes of the urban middle class suggests that the disaster of seven-lesson schools is going to grow unless we do something bold and decisive with the mess of government monopoly schooling.

After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love -- and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.

Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

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From Herbert Kohl's "I won't learn from you"...(p144, New Press edition, 1994)

"The ability to break patterns and pose new questions is as important as the ability to answer questions other people set for you. This is as true for teachers who care about their students as it is for the students themselves. It requires the courage to create a bold disruption of routines of thought and practice and implies a healthy love of turning the world upside down-which is very difficult in an academic situation driven by grades.

"A central teaching skill consists of detecting and analyzing dysfunctional patterns of obedience and learning, and developing strategies to negate them. It means that teachers have to become sophisticated pattern detectives and sleuth out ways in which the practices they have been taught-or have inherited-inhibit learning.

"Unfortunately, the momentum of educational research and the attempt to turn education into a single, predictable, and controllable system with national standards and national tests pulls in the opposite direction. Teaching well is a militant activity that requires a belief in children's strengths and intelligence no matter how poorly they may function under the regimens imposed upon them. It requires understanding student failure as system failure, especially when it encompasses the majority of students in a class, school, or school system. It also means stepping back and seeing oneself as a part of a dysfunctional system and developing the courage to maladjust rather than adjust oneself to much of current educational practice. This means seeing oneself as a worker in a large system run amok and giving up the need to defend the system to yourself or in public. And, in the service of one's students, it might even involve risking one's job and career. There are limits to creative maladjustment within the system, and they sometimes drive one to act, in the service of public education, from outside the system. But it is possible to defend public education without having to defend the public schools as they currently exist."

Later (p149):

"Title IV programs, and other programs that tie money to student failure, do not have a mechanism to deal with success. Programs such as this should be tied to equity issues and centered around the maintenance of quality education rather than the temporary remediation of deficiencies. A creative, though maladjusted, response to such programs should be the writing of enabling legislation and the political mobilization of teachers and communities in support of continued good education rather than remedial programs.

"The strategy of stigmatizing children as a cover for educational incompetency is not, however, limited to children of the poor. The primary victims of this syndrome are middle-class children who can perform academically but refuse to do so when they are not challenged. The category was invented as an extension of the idea that as educators we do not need to examine our practice and change it when it fails. Recently a new category of stigma has been constructed: Attention Deficit Disorder. Students designated as ADD often refuse to sit still and listen silently when a teacher or another person in authority is talking; they resist following instructions blindly; they refuse to do boring worksheets and other assignments if they feel they already know the material. Interestingly enough, these conditions are positive qualifications for future participatory citizenship, and an argument can be made that ADD is one way that public school authorities are suppressing the spirit of democracy.

"In his well-documented book on the educationally handicapped (EH), The Learning Mystique, the neurologist Gerald Coles establishes that there is no physiological or medical condition common to all EH children. His remarks hold true for ADD as well. According to Coles, EH is not a condition of brain pathology.

"Once designated EH, children are removed from their usual classrooms for the whole or part of the day; some of them are drugged with ritalin; most of them are subjected to simplified versions of the learning material that they had already failed to master in their original classrooms. The special classes they are sometimes sent to are smaller than regular classes, and funded through special laws and regulations providing for special education: The teachers are EH specialists, which means that they took special classes in college on the education of "the EH child" and have certificates, or even master's degrees, in the field-and those college classes are usually taught by professors who have themselves specialized in EH education. However, the substance of what is taught in classes on the education of the EH child is not much different than what is taught in ordinary teacher-education classes.

"Thus the EH child is surrounded by an entire social system entailing laws, regulations, funding, college classes, degrees, and certification. The inability of regular classrooms to educate all children (and in particular minority and working-class and poor children) has led to the creation of a profession that depends on children being pushed out of "normal" classrooms and made pathological. Programs that depend on the stigmatization of children (including those at universities that certify teachers to certify children as deficient) must be opposed by creatively maladjusted educators. Teacher education institutions are very sensitive to what they refer to as "pressure from the profession," and speaking out at professional meetings and writings letters of complaint to schools of education about the institutionalization of stigmatization can be very effective. So can the refusal of a classroom teacher to refer any student to special education.

"The existence of the EH social subsystem in the schools has not led to a wide-scale increase in the levels of performance of children designated EH. In fact, once the idea is established that school failure is always the fault of the child and that one can get away with blaming the victims of failed practice, the way is open for the constant creation of new categories of pathological behavior as well as for a proliferation of new professions. When school failure reaches massive proportions, the climate is created for going beyond the creation of individual systems of pathology. Categories of social stigmatization are then developed, which turns societal prejudices into pseudoscientific systems of behavior control. We are now at that point. The category of "at risk," though applied to individual children, is a form of social stigmatization that is often difficult to distinguish from racism and class bias.

"It is hard to find a clear definition of "at risk" or of "at risk behavior." The clearest definition I've seen appears in the book At-Risk, Low-Achieving Students in the Classroom, by Judy Brown Lehr and Hazel Wiggins Harris. The authors admit at the very beginning of Chapter One that "a review of the literature does not indicate a published definition of the at-risk, low-achieving student." Then they go on to give a list of possible labels for the "at-risk, low-achieving student." Here are some of the labels they come up with:

disadvantaged, culturally deprived, underachiever, non achiever, low ability, slow learner, less able, low socioeconomic status, language-impaired, dropout-prone, alienated, marginal, disenfranchised, impoverished, underprivileged, low-performing and remedial. [Judy Brown Lehr and Hazel Wiggins Harris, At-Risk, Low-Achieving Students in the Classroom (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1990), p. 9.]

The authors then go on to list characteristics that can be used to identify students at risk (all of which need not be present, they tell us, in order to identify an at-risk student):

. . . academic difficulties, lack of structure (disorganized), inattentiveness, distractibility, short attention span, low self-esteem, health problems, excessive absenteeism, dependence, discipline problem, narrow range of interest, lack of social skills, inability to face pressure, fear of failure (feels threatened by learning), and lack of motivation. [Ibid., p. 11]

"The whole question of identifying at-risk students is itself risky business. To identify children as "at risk" is to pick them out for special treatment not for what they have done but for what they might do. A child who is merely doing poorly in school is not necessarily at risk. Nor is a child who has a strong will and a sense of cultural pride and self-respect that she or he feels is violated by the circumstances of schooling.

"What makes a child at risk? What is the hidden agenda of the people who have manufactured the "at-risk" category? What are at-risk children at risk of doing? In plain language, at-risk children are at risk of turning the poverty and prejudice they experience against society rather than learning how to conform and take their "proper" place. The children are maladjusting, and it is their teachers' role to make that maladjustment functional and creative rather than to suppress it.

"One powerful way for educators to creatively maladjust is to repudiate all categories and assume responsibility for changing their practice until it works for the children they have previously been unable to serve. Another is to advocate genuine educational choice within the public schools and to demand that teachers, parents, and other groups of educators should have the right to create small schools within the context of large public school systems, with the freedom and resources to operate effectively.

"There are risks in becoming creatively maladjusted. You might get fired or find projects you have nurtured into existence destroyed by a threatened bureaucracy or conservative school board. You might find yourself under pressure at school and at home to stop making trouble and feel like giving in to the temptation to re-adjust and become silent. The choice of when, where, how, and whether to maladjust is both moral and strategic, and though it has social and educational consequences, it is fundamentally personal and private.

"For those of us who choose to remake the schools and reaffirm the need for equity, decency, creativity, and openness within public education, walking the line between survival and moral action is a constant and often unnerving challenge. We have to think about being part of an opposition within the system and be articulate and explicit in that role. We have to reach out and develop allies and not be afraid to encounter and confront school boards, administrators, and our own unions with clear positions on educational issues backed by first-rate practice. And we must remember and affirm what we often tell our students: that we can become the people we would like to be, that it is necessary to live with hope, and that it is possible to create a decent life and a decent world."