The Most Dangerous Weapon in School
Welcome back to school, Teacher-Friends! I think most people look forward to school as a community, to reconnecting with friends, and for many students it’s a place to have a warm meal. However, as an institution of learning…teachers and students alike seem to begrudge the idea. I felt this way, too, when I was teaching full-time, and even while subbing, but I could never quite articulate why I loved and hated school simultaneously.
I recently listened to Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto. And let me say, as much as I personally love school and had a wonderful experience, listening to this book confirmed a lot of things I have been thinking for years. Gatto pulls no punches in this scathing analysis of compulsory schooling in the United States, and he articulates things I feel every time I walk into a school, but haven’t been able to put my finger on exactly.
Gatto’s primary arguments are that compulsory institutional schooling artificially and unnaturally extends childhood, creating a culture of childish people whose goals are only to consume and not to produce or add value to the community. He peppers his narrative with plenty of statistical data, personal anecdotes from his thirty years in the classroom, and historical accounts of those who added loads of value to the world because they were not hindered by institutional schooling.
Gatto argues that the children of history who did not participate in institutional schooling were more capable. They were out in the real world learning things that had real meaning and real economic impact, instead of preparing for standardized tests and grades that literally have no significance once we graduate into the working world. In its current version, institutional schooling only serves to manage the population, not grow the characters of our youth.
I see this regularly when I sub. I remember one high school in particular that served a mostly Hispanic population. The school felt like a prison, and the students were treated like prisoners, not like the almost-adults they were. I remember ranting to my mom on the phone one day about the tardy policy. If students were late, they couldn’t just go to class and start from there. They first had to go to the office and get a tardy slip, which often took an extra ten minutes…of missed class. What the what?! The school was enforcing and demanding artificial responsibility. A student cannot take true responsibility for their learning when learning is forced.
True responsibility would be staying home and caring for a sibling or showing up consistently for a shift at McDonalds and serving customers or building on online video game business. Or just allowing students to find a peer to collect what they missed in class.
Gatto actually allowed his eighth grade students to skip class and go on walkabouts around the five Burroughs in New York City. The students would come back to class physically refreshed from the walking, but also enlightened by all the people and activity they observed and experienced. He also had a student who often missed class because he was working for his five aunts and uncles who had all started businesses by the time they were 21 and he wanted to follow in their footsteps. Gatto began marking this student present, even when he wasn’t, because Gatto knew he was learning better in that setting away from school.
I immediately resonated with this. One of my favorite and most exhilarating experiences from my middle school years was a summer camp trip before my eighth grade year. Note: This was in 1998, before most teens had cell phones. We drove to California’s Bay Area to Marine World Theme Park and Great America. Each day we were set loose in the park with instructions to stay in groups of four. But we did not have specific assigned groups or specific adults looking after us directly. It was awesome. We learned what was okay and not okay from our peers, the park staff, and our own personal feedback loop.
Let me pause here, and state clearly that I do not think teachers are the problem. Teachers are doing a great service. Teachers love their students, and often love their subject matters, and strive to create a healthy community, both emotionally and intellectually. But teachers are working within really broken constraints. And it’s those constraints that Gatto condemns in his book. Teachers are hired to keep a lid on learning, because that leads to boredom, and boredom leads to consumption, a plus for the economy.
Gatto defines the word pedagogy as derived from the Roman word pedagogue: a certain type of slave. When we captivate our children in school all day, we are depriving them of the most productive hours of the day, and consigning them to be a player in someone else’s script instead of writing their own.
He also addresses classroom interruptions. We all know that interrupted sleep does not bring rest. But, did you know that interrupted wake time is just as detrimental to doing effective work? I think we know that as it applies to the workplace, but we forget that it applies to classrooms, too. Announcements, student messengers, and phone calls interrupt classes All. The. Time. And distract both the teacher and the students and it’s really hard to get back on track.
Finally, Gatto claims that compulsory institutional schooling disconnects students from the larger story of their families, cultures, and even disconnects students from themselves. He writes that this is in direct contrast to Socrates’ and Plato’s assertion that to Know Thyself is to understand what it means to be human. And we look ridiculous when we try to understand obscure things before we Know Thyself.
When I finished the book, I realized I had found my people. I immediately Googled John Taylor Gatto in the hopes of connecting with him somehow, and was completely bummed to discover he passed away just his past October. Well, in his honor, his fight has not fallen on deaf ears and the battle against the current iteration of compulsory schooling will continue.
And this schoolteacher who regularly claims she will NEVER homeschool her children, will be over here seriously reconsidering. Because it’s becoming pretty clear to me that the most dangerous weapon our students face in learning is actually the current classroom.
My next series of Monday night posts will include some possible solutions to the classroom barrier to learning, so I welcome you to the discussion.
