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Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

New 10th Anniversary Edition

by John Taylor Gatto

Excerpt reprinted with permission.

About the Author (excerpt)

I’m
here to talk to you about ideas, but I think a purpose might be served
in telling a little bit about myself so I become a person like you
rather than just another talking head from the television set. I know
that sometimes when I hear a news report from TV I wonder, Who are You?
and, Why are you telling me these things? So let me offer you some of
the ground out of which these ideas grew.

I’ve
worked as a New York City schoolteacher for the past thirty years,
teaching for some of that time elite children from Manhattan’s
Upper West Side between Lincoln Center, where the opera is, and
Columbia University, where the defense contracts are: and teaching, in
most recent years, children from Harlem and Spanish Harlem whose lives
are shaped by the dangerous undercurrents of the industrial city in
decay.

My own perspective on things, however, was shaped
a long way from New York City, in the river town of Monongahela,
Pennsylvania, forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. In those days,
Monongahela was a place of steel mills and coal mines, of paddle -wheel
river steamers churning the emerald green water chemical orange, of
respect for hard work and family life. Monongahela was a place with
muted class distinctions since everyone was more or less poor, although
very few, I suspect, knew they were poor. It was a place where
independence, toughness, and self-reliance were honored, a place where
pride in ethnic and local culture was very intense. It was an
altogether wonderful place to grow up, even to grow up poor. People
talked to each other, minding each other’s business instead of
the abstract business of “the world.” Indeed, the larger world hardly
extended beyond Pittsburgh, a wonderful dark steel city worth a trip to
see once or twice a year. Nobody in my memory felt confined by
Monongahela or dwelled, within my earshot, on the possibility they were
missing something important by not being elsewhere.

My
grandfather was the town printer and had been for a time the publisher
of the town newspaper, The Daily Republican – a name that
attracted some attention because the town was a stronghold of the
Democratic Party. From my grandfather and his independent German ways I
learned a great deal that I might have missed if I had grown up in a
time, like today, when old people are put away in a home or kept out of
sight.

Living in Manhattan has been for me in many ways
like living on the moon. Even though I’ve been here for
thirty-five years, my heart and habit are still in Monongahela.
Nevertheless, the shock of Manhattan’s very different society and
values sharpened my sense of difference and made me an anthropologist
as well as a schoolteacher. Over the past thirty years, I’ve used
my classes as a laboratory where I could learn a broader range of what
human possibility is – the whole catalogue of hopes and fears
– and also as a place where I could study what releases and what
inhibits human power.

During that time, I’ve come
to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably
natural to most of us. I didn’t want to accept that notion
– far from it; my own training in two elite universities taught
me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically
over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those
mathematical, seemingly irrefutable scientific facts, was as rigorously
determined as John Calvin contended.
The trouble was that the
unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of
the hallmarks of human excellence – insight, wisdom, justice,
resourcefulness, courage, originality – that I became confused.
They didn’t do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but
they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether
it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them
down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s
power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but
slowly I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy
sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant
surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling
were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children
from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and
dependent

behavior.

Bit by bit I began to
devise guerrilla exercises to allow as many of the kids I taught as
possible the raw material people have always used to educate
themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad a
range of situations and human associations as my limited power and
resources could manage. In simpler terms, I tried to maneuver them into
positions where they would have a chance to be their own teachers and
to make themselves the major text of their own education.

In
theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this
one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the
addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced,
but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of
material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It
is a crucial distinction.
In other words, I dropped the idea that I
was an expert whose job it was to fill the little heads with my
expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that
prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself. I no
longer felt comfortable defining my work as bestowing wisdom on a
struggling classroom audience. Although I continue to this day in those
futile assays because of the nature of institutional teaching, wherever
possible I have broken with teaching tradition and sent kids down their
separate paths to their own private truths.

The
sociology of government monopoly schools has evolved in such a way that
a premise like mine jeopardizes the total institution if it spreads.
Kept contained, the occasional teacher who makes a discovery like mine
is at worst an annoyance to the chain of command (which has evolved
automatic defenses to isolate such bacilli and then to neutralize or
destroy them). But once loose, the idea could imperil the central
assumptions which allow the institutional school to sustain itself,
such as the false assumption that it is difficult to learn to read, or
that kids resist learning, and many more. Indeed, the very stability of
our economy is threatened by any form of education that might change
the nature of the human product schools now turn out: the economy
schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not
survive a generation of young people trained, for example, to think
critically.

Over the years of wrestling with the
obstacles that stand between child and education I have come to believe
that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable. They
cannot function if their central myths are exposed and abandoned. Over
the years I have come to see that whatever I thought I was doing as a
teacher, most of what I actually was doing was teaching an invisible
curriculum that reinforced the myths of the school institution and
those of an economy based on caste. When I was trying to decide what to
say to you that might make my experience as a schoolteacher useful, it
occurred to me that I could best serve by telling you what I do that is
wrong, rather than what I do that is right. What I do that is right is
simple to understand: I get out of kids’ way, I give them space
and time and respect. What I do that is wrong, however, is strange,
complex, and frightening. Let me begin to show you what that is.

Chapter One (excerpt)

The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher

This speech was given on the occasion of the author being named “New York State Teacher of the Year” for 1991.

Call
me Mr. Gatto, please. Thirty years ago, having nothing better to do
with myself at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license
I have 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
presentations. 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, a host 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 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
data into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and
the school obsession with facts and theories, the age old human search
for meaning 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 between “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; the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; the ancient
procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; or the preparation of
a Thanksgiving feast. All of the parts are in perfect harmony with each
other, each action justifying itself and illuminating 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 the, 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 of 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 students how to accept
confusion as their 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, that’s not my business. My job is to make them like
being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or
at 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 that
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 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 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 in indifference. I teach children not to care too much
about anything, 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 they
drop whatever it is we have been doing 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 class I know of.
Students never have a complete experience except on the installment
plan.

Indeed, the lesson of 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 school time;
their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering
every interval the same as any other, 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 predestinated 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 and 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 in which individuality 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 pockets of children
angry, depressed, or happy about things outside my ken; right 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 in intellectual dependency. Good students wait for
a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson
them all; 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 my kids 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
assign 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. Actually, though, this 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 tested
procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult,
naturally, if the kids have respectable parents who come to their aid,
but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of
schools. No middle-class parents I have every met actually believe that
their kid’s school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent
in many 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 might fall apart if children weren’t
trained to be dependent: the social services 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, the
prepared food industry, 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, as well as the clothing business and schoolteaching,
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 into line kids whose parents have convinced them to
believe they’ll be loved 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 a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion.
My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.

A monthly
report, impressive in its provision, is sent into a student’s
home to elicit approval or mark exactly, down to a single percentage
point, how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be. The ecology
of “good” schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just 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 these
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 students
that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance
by me and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children;
there is no private time. Class change lasts exactly 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 reports about their own
child’s waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself
isn’t likely to conceal and dangerous secrets.

I
assign a type of extended schooling called “homework”, so that the
effect of surveillance, if not the 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,
The City of God, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, New
Atlantis, Leviathan, and a host of other places. All the 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 band.

II

It is the
great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass schooling that
among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even 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 and measuring every aspect of 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 after 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, of whom twenty percent 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 come 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, and
cruelty, as well as the hardening of class into caste in the United
States, products of the dehumanization of our lives, of the lessening
of individual, family, and community importance – a diminishment
that proceeds from central control. Inevitably, large compulsory
institutions 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 model 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 that makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable.
even though 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 Ademantus extort 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
it hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national
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.

Dumbing
Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New 10th
Anniversary Edition by John Taylor Gatto; New Society Publishers,
Copyright 2002.; $11.95 (U.S.A.) Visit John Taylor Gatto’s web
site: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com