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Wee Frill

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about things outside my ken; rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.

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With Bells On

To answer Jeff’s question, I haven’t read the entire book, but I get the impression that Mr Gatto does offer some suggestions as to how to improve schooling. However, he emphasizes how difficult it will be because it has become part of the economic structure now, and making the drastic changes necessary will be met with a lot of resistance by very influental people.

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.

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Class Room

Just as a point of context, I gather from the text that John Gatto mostly taught 7th grade students.

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.

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Lousy Smarch Weather

The weekend before last was, for me, the first garage sale of the year. Hooray! It’s like the swallows returning to Capistrano. I bought a handy little lamp. Some girl at some house on some street was having some garage sale and there were 6 Lovecraft books, and a bunch of other stuff that I wanted, but none of which I actually needed, and since I still have to watch my wallet pending some overdue payments from publishers, I didn’t end up buying anything. I think the girl must have been a friend of Kier-La’s because there was a bunch of Cinemuerte stuff.

On Friday I had another miniature painting potluck which was much more successful than the previous one. Only Marlo & Nathan came to that one (and we ended up playing Talisman). This time we had Gibbons, Bev, Kelly & Paul, Marlo and Stewie, and I painted a bunch of little guys. Marlo brought a lot of expensive cheeses which I slightly melted when I put them on top of the stove to get them out of the way (I was baking candied yams inside the stove at the time). Kelly brought some delicious chocolate mousse.

On Saturday I helped Taylor move into his new place. It took less than 3 hours from start to finish and I got a free breakfast at Bon’s out of the deal, and I got to ride in the back of a rented van with Marlo. We hit some garage sales with the van and Marlo got a chair and Stewie got a filing cabinet.

Saturday night we (Stewie, Marlo, Stephane, Sheri & I) went to see The Animation Show at the Ridge and it was fantastic. My favourite was Ward 13. I loved the way that there was a lot of action, but the hero didn’t actually spend much time in fisticuffs, it was all hilarious accidental acrobatics and jedi-like cane fights. And a cthulhoid like monster to boot! It had everything going for it. Check out the front page image of http://www.ward13.com.au/ for an idea, and you can download the trailer from there too.

On Sunday we played D&D and we got the details down for all the new monstrous bodies that the characters have had their minds swapped with (1000 years in the past). They’re in a vast library right now that holds the spirit of a semi-dead god of knowledge, and they’re boning up on their skills. The barbarian is even trying to learn how to read. They met a new jovial little cyclops named Gorlock who will be travelling with them to make sure all the cool magic items they’re borrowing from the library are safely returned after their quest.

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A+

Despite doing reasonably well in school (I never gave it my best, but came out with a B average) I hated it. I hated the structure, the antiseptic, impersonal approach of it, and the social environment. If I’m quoted for anything after I die, I hope it’s “the environment least suited for learning is public school.” What I learned in school is that individuality is punished by both authority and peers.

At work we have big cages, into which books that are to be destroyed are thrown. We destroy an alarming amount of Harry Potter and Lonely Planet books. Those books have their covers torn off. Other miscellaneous returns retain their cover. I don’t know why they destroy books. It seems a waste. Every day I make a point of rescuing as many books as I can carry home. Yesterday one of the books I grabbed was “Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.” It’s written by a fellow who was a schoolteacher for 30 years, and who won awards for it in New York City. When I got home from Marlo’s this morning I sat down on the couch with Kodos and started to read it, since it was right in front of me. I have to stop now to get some work done, but I want to share this with you, because I think it’s important.

Reprinted without permission:

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.