A few more choice quotes

Following on yesterday's post, I wanted to share some more observations from the leading educators who shaped our current school system. I also want to add that I am not saying teachers and principals in today's schools have this sort of oppressive view of schooling; they clearly do not. But they operate in an institution set up by men who said things like this:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

That was said by William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education. Harris admired the Prussians, and German philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, and was quite the trendy fascist. He also wrote, for instance:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

And this:

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.

On this excellent page of education quotes, you can find John Dewey quoted as follows:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

. . .

The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent.

Many of these beliefs about education sound rather communist. Karl Marx also wanted the State to rear children, first in nurseries and then in schools. The Communist Party would talk about molding children like wax into "real, good Communists," just as John D. Rockefeller said, on the subject of American public education: "In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands."

I suppose you could sum up the early 20th century in the industrialized world as a period of the centralization of power and wealth, and a belief on the part of the robber barons that a gross inequality between elites and "the masses" could be maintained through scientific management, without fear of revolution. An enormous pillar of such management of the populace has been the public school system, which has gone on in its heavily centralized, overly managed, overly administrated form, ever since the days of eugenics and behaviorism. Every round of reform just seems to add one more hassle for teachers to deal with-- suddenly math or reading has to be taught in a totally new way, or there is yet another topic which must be addressed, yet another "competency" for children to attain, yet another test to be prepared for. No Child Left Behind is straight out of the 1920s, and that's about the worst insult I can give.

It came as a shock to me, after my eyes were opened by John Gatto, that there have been people all along who understood what compulsory mass schooling was really about. First of all, parents didn't yield their children willingly. Even Ellwood Cubberley, one of the key founders of our school system, admitted as much in his Public Education in the United States, as quoted by Gatto:

The history of compulsory-attendance legislation in the states has been much the same everywhere, and everywhere laws have been enacted only after overcoming strenuous opposition.

. . .

At first the laws were optional...later the law was made state-wide but the compulsory period was short (ten to twelve weeks) and the age limits low, nine to twelve years. After this, struggle came to extend the time, often little by little...to extend the age limits downward to eight and seven and upwards to fourteen, fifteen or sixteen; to make the law apply to children attending private and parochial schools, and to require cooperation from such schools for the proper handling of cases; to institute state supervision of local enforcement....

Doesn't exactly sound like parents were grateful to the state, and couldn't wait to send their kids to school. Sounds like 13 years of compulsory schooling was fought for tooth and nail by those in power.

Secondly, there were notable social commentators who pointed out the nature of the public schools, though somehow I failed to come across these until recently. H L Mencken had this to say:

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

Benjamin Disraeli noted (somewhat earlier, in 1874):

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

There has to be a better way.