As I mentioned in a previous post, I have started reading the work of the late John Taylor Gatto. Gatto was a school teacher in New York for 30 years and won both the New York State Teacher of the Year award and the New York City Teacher of the Year award. He announced to the world that he was quitting his teaching career in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
“I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples.”
Gatto refers to these aspects of schooling as the hidden curriculum in his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. The book is a series of speeches that he presented and essays that he wrote. Chapter 1, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” is a speech on the seven lessons that he believes are taught in every public school. The message that he presents across all chapters in the book is that schools are dumbing down society by not providing the education necessary to be fully developed individuals. Instead, they are molding children to take up a function as part of the collective society.
Gatto was an English teacher and he starts the speech presented in Chapter 1 by stating, “I don't teach English, I teach school.” The lessons taught to children in school, which have nothing to do with content, according to Gatto, are as follows:
Confusion: “What 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.”
Class position: “I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong.”
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.” [...] “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.”
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.”
Intellectual dependency: “Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.”
Provisional self-esteem: “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.”
One can't hide: “There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time.”
By spelling out his observations of the so-called “hidden curriculum” of schooling, he is highlighting what he sees as the purpose of schooling, public schools in particular. He may have been correct in his observation of what schools actually teach, but his cynicism may have been lower if he understood at the outset that the purpose of public schools has never really been to educate children for the sake of getting an education. As I wrote in an article for Discourse Magazine, the purpose of public schools has been for social mobility (to prepare students to compete for higher social positions), social efficiency (to train workers), democratic equality (to mold citizens), and, most recently, social justice (to achieve equality).
Gatto asserts that an education should be grounded in philosophy, which encourages the young to locate “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.”
Schools don't serve as the best venue or environment to receive this sort of education. Cornel West and Jeremy Tate described this failure of schools to educate people in response to Howard University abolishing its classics department: “This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in ‘schooling,’ which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.”
A frustration with schools, from kindergarten through university, seems to be a problem of truth in advertising. Schools promote themselves as places to be educated, but if to receive an education one must investigate the big questions of life, as a philosophical approach to schooling would require, schools don't serve this function.
But it's inaccurate to argue that because schools do not provide this sort of education that they are “dumbing down” kids, rather the argument that schools are holding kids back from reaching their potential seems more accurate. As I have described elsewhere, they do this by striving to achieve equal academic outcomes across student populations. Schools, however, can dumb down a curriculum, and the recent social justice approach as a purpose of school seems to be doing just that.
For example, the San Diego School District voted to overhaul its grading system to provide more leniency for accepting late assignments, among other goals. The San Francisco school board voted to do away with Lowell High School’s merit-based admissions policy, which has been a policy move in other districts. And, a math curriculum that instructs teachers to not expect students to show their work or reach the correct answer has been promoted in states like Oregon.
These policy changes are all grounded in concerns with race and racism, and are in line with Ibram X. Kendi's approach to anti-racism. Kendi states in his book How to Be an Anti-Racist: “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity.” “Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing,” and “a racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequities.” As such, if decision-makers for schools are following the reasoning of Kendi, any policy or program that is not producing equal outcomes across racial groups is a racist policy.
But this approach seems more interested in overturning policies and dismantling practices than investigating what might be at the root of the problem, which isn't always racism or white supremacy. In the name of helping kids that are struggling to succeed in school, the social justice approach to education is instead lowering expectations for the very students they are claiming to help. The phrase the soft bigotry of low expectations has been deemed white supremacy, but I, like others, think that it is appropriate to describe the unintended consequences of the social justice approach.
Case in point: The anti-racist math curriculum described above was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. If teachers implement this curriculum with fidelity in their classrooms, and students are indeed not expected to achieve the correct answer, will they be able to get a job working for Bill Gates' company, Microsoft? I suspect not.
The purpose of schools may not be to educate the young for the sake of education, and they may not be the best place to be educated, but attending them is compulsory. Of course, parents can choose to homeschool their children, but most parents don't. As such, schools should have high, attainable expectations for the children in their care so that they can leave school prepared with the knowledge and skills necessary to live a good life. Anything less is edugenic harm. Telling children “you can’t get ahead” is simply unacceptable.
Note: Two corrections have been made to this article: 1. The original version misspelled Cornel West’s name. 2. The original version stated that Brown University abolished its classics department, but it was Howard University that made this move.
From the Web
“What Should Schools Teach?” by Alka Sehgal and Alex Standish
“In What Should Schools Teach?: Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert and Alex Standish argue that schools exist to help students acquire knowledge of the social and physical worlds through the study of formal academic subjects, and that such knowledge is intrinsically valuable, independent of any social or economic benefits it might bring. Together with a team of contributors, they present a methodical and well informed case for resurrecting the substance and spirit of liberal learning in K–12 education, with a focus on secondary schools.”
The Subject Principle in Critical Social Justice Thought
“No current intellectual or social movement in the west enjoys the momentum of Critical Social Justice (CSJ). One reason for this is that people don’t understand CSJ well, and if we are to challenge it, we clearly first need to know what it is.”
“There is a school of thought in education, which I will refer to as the Critical School of Education, and its proponents seek to use education as a vehicle for spreading their political ideology and worldview. Those who endorse the Critical School of Education do not think the goal of education is to teach children to read, write and do math while helping to prepare them for life in the world, but rather see education as a ‘site of political struggle’ and a vehicle for radical social change. To put it bluntly, these thinkers believe the role of the teacher is not primarily to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but instead to teach students Critical Social Justice. The theory of teaching they use to justify this is called ‘Critical Pedagogy’. I realize this sounds like a conspiracy […]”
Ethnic Studies in California: An Unsteady Jump from College Campuses to K-12 Classrooms
“By an overwhelming margin, the state legislature approved a bill in its 2020 session that would have added one semester of ethnic studies to the requirements for a high-school diploma, ensuring that students study the history and experiences of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the measure. The veto was not due to objections to the mandate per se, but to concerns over the unfinished draft ethnic studies curriculum that will serve as a template for school districts as they create their own versions of the class. A K–12 ethnic studies bill is likely to end up on the governor’s desk again in 2021, and in all probability, the outcome this time will be different.”
Biden Administration Cites 1619 Project as Inspiration in History Grant Proposal
“The Biden administration wants a grant program for history and civics education to prioritize instruction that accounts for bias, discriminatory policies in America, and the value of diverse student perspectives.”