The Fourth Purpose
by John Taylor Gatto
Address presented on Thursday April 8th at HEC’99
- Home Education Conference -
Friends House, Euston Road, London.
The secret of modern institutional schooling is that it is indifferent to the way children learn best and hostile to their private hopes and dreams. It was constituted quite deliberately almost from the beginning as it is today, to serve the economy of mass production and to stabilize the social order which exists, whatever its lack of justice. This is why modern institutional schooling was made compulsory.
My great grandmother Isabelle Waddington, a trouble-maker from Yorkshire, was the family spirit I summoned to help me prepare this talk, so if you find yourself incensed at what I say, then blame it on Granny Waddington.
In preparing to speak before the inventors of the language I’ve been using for almost 65 years, I began to read British newspapers some months ago, mostly broadsheet ones like the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, the Observer and the Independent. In doing this I was struck by their literacy and thoughtful qualities, characteristics which would be uncommon in American journals, but I was also taken by their sly love of the drôle, the bizarre, and the grotesque, an appetite usually associated with the tabloid press in both our countries, yet running beneath the surface even in your responsible papers. Both this thoughtful quality and this sharp eye for anomaly emboldened me to speak honestly to you this morning.
To illustrate let me take an account from the Times entitled “Boy Who Lived Like A Chicken.” It was about a form of homeschooling, for the boy lived from birth locked in a hen-house by his stepfather and learned “to crow like a rooster, cluck like a hen and pick up food with his mouth as if it were a beak.” According to social work authorities, he “scrambled round his coop, flapping his wings as if trying to fly.”
From the Observer I learned that Newton’s second law of thermodynamics proved long ago the folly of human aspiration. We are stuck, said the writer, in a gently decaying cosmos in which all systems are gradually moving towards the condition of heat, which is energy in its most disorganized form. The universe has no purpose, it will not conclude significantly, but only peter out, and the destiny of everyone is to become "inanimate slurry." That attitude is more important than it sounds, so try to keep it in mind as the text proceeds.
From the Independent I learned that a burglar in Hong Kong, Chau Chao-Ping, has been jailed for a year for a break-in in which he boiled and ate the victim's pet turtle. Finding three turtles in the flat he was robbing, Chau Chao-Ping "picked the biggest one to eat, leaving the shell with his fingerprints on it in a wash basin when he left." - I think this illustrates how easily human beings can be swerved from their true purpose.
From the Telegraph I learned that the buildings of the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright are deteriorating rapidly because they were badly built. I learned that his famous flat roofs leak, a fact any illiterate peasant would have told him had he asked, and that his structure "Fallingwater", voted in 1991 the "best all-time work of American architecture" by the American Institute of Architects was in danger of falling into the water because Wright perversely refused to reinforce the concrete properly.
In concert with the Y2K thing - another expert slip - slated to withdraw a trillion dollars from the world economy (enough to end all poverty on earth) this surely gave readers pause to consider the modern tropism to specialist decision-making in general which has largely replaced the notion of citizen management.
The most interesting news item I encountered was a story by Christine Purkis, who was once a teaching colleague of Chris Woodhead, the British educational authority. If I read correctly, Miss Purkis contends that back in 1975 Woodhead had an affair with one of his sixth formers, an affair which was the talk of the faculty and students alike. Purkis says she was summoned into Woodhead's presence and warned to say nothing. And she didn't, at least not until 23 years later when Woodhead's former wife made the same charge. Woodhead has acknowledged the affair, but denied it happened on school time, the press has shown little interest in the matter, school authorities none. Miss Purkis, plainly beside herself that justice is not being served, plaintively asked in her newspaper piece:
… does it matter that someone with the most influential and powerful position on education today had an affair 23 years ago (with one of his students), subsequently lied about it and used his power and position to bully and intimidate people into resentful silence?
It's a measure, I think, how little we are aware of the imperatives of modern schooling, that she can ask such a question. No, it does not matter to the logic of schooling. What that logic is is the beast we shall track today. Somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century, schooling in the four great coal powers of the planet - Germany, England, France, and the United States - abandoned its three great historical purposes: to find a path of transcendence, to make good citizens, and to develop personal genius, and lent its energies to schooling for a Fourth Purpose. Actually Germany had taken this path in her northern states nearly a century before and it was the perceived need, commercially, industrially, and financially, to compete with Germany which provided the excuse for the other three political states. No public announcement was made, but abundant surviving documentation allows us to conclude it was a deliberate project… call it Fourth Purpose Schooling to separate it from what has gone before.
Fourth Purpose Schooling arose from the Hindu caste system which the British had thoroughly studied after their corporate conquest of India. It was grounded in the teachings of Georg Hegel about controlling history, in the teachings of Malthus, Darwin, and his first cousin Galton about inferior people and inferior germ plasm, in the financial insight of Lord Rothschild and J.P.Morgan that central control of money power was the key to efficient political dominance and social discipline, in the experience of great American industrials like Carnegie and Rockefeller, in the progressive philosophy of the Frenchman, Comte, and in the dazzling accomplishments of the British adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, which illustrated dramatically what titanic effects the concentrated efforts of a tiny handful of determined men really could produce.
Whatever the final tally may be on the list of architects of modern schooling, one thing is certain: none of the great pedagogical names like Horace Mann, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Edgerton Ryerson, or John Dewey et al. Had much of importance to do with the shape of modern schooling, (although they are often used as unwitting front men for Fourth Purpose Schooling).
This will seem a less radical proposition to consider if you keep in mind that each of the traditional purposes of schooling, as well as the new version, is undergirded by particular attitudes toward the meaning and uses of life, out of attitudes toward people and about the nature of human nature and the reality of moral rules. It isn't hard to see that a belief we are all destined to be inanimate slurry would provide a solid justification for British school authorities to be indifferent to whether Mr. Woodhead was employing one of his students for private amusement or not. It is irrelevant.
The London Times for 6th December, 1998, provides us with some data to make coming to grips with the Fourth Purpose easier, and suggests why it is making us all sick. In an article entitled, "Richer Britain Gets Depressed," the latest results of something called "The World Happiness Survey" are given. This study purports to record the level of happiness in 54 nations once income is taken into account.
Britons get less enjoyment and happiness from their money than 31 out of the 54 nations surveyed do. Britons have twice as much to spend in real terms as in 1959 but better lives haven’t followed suit. The people of Bangladesh, we are told, get far more happiness from their small incomes than the British do with their relatively larger ones. Professor Worcester of the London School of Economics (who co-wrote the study) says, "People in Britain are generally less happy than they were 10 years ago."
Most Britons still believe that money brings happiness. This message is steadily communicated by competitive, class-based schooling from kindergarten through college. All rich countries, the study concludes, suffer from advanced emotional poverty caused by the destruction of communities and by an obsession to buy and discard things, the purchases losing most of their satisfaction soon after being made because they weren't necessary or even really wanted in the first place.
The weight of the research discloses that the high valuation placed on wealth is actually contradicted by human behavior - happiness is universally dependent upon at least three conditions unconnected with wealth:
1: Close personal relationships
2: Good mental and physical health
3: Satisfying work.
None of the rich English-speaking nations are happy, although poor nations as diverse as India, Ghana, Venezuela, and Mexico are. And if Britain is poorly placed in this ranking as 32nd, think of the greater gloom in clean and rich Canada which ranks 43rd of 54 countries, or in super-rich and super-powerful America which comes in 46th, near the bottom.
We needn't place inordinate value on as obviously political instrument like a World Happiness Survey to arrive at the same conclusion it did. Many common-sense indicators show that something is going wrong in wealthy nations, those which bend schooling to the impersonal project of national wealth-building. Think only of the stupendous rise in prison inmates which has quintupled the incarcerated population on the U.S. in the past 50 years, and doubled the British number in the last five. Think of the staggering fraction of human time spent in a vegetative state, not in living but in virtual life before television or computer screens, think on the substantial portion of personal income expended on alcohol, narcotic drugs, hypocondriacal medical care, sports spectaculars in which a few score individuals actively exercise and thousands or even millions sit passively watching. These and many other indicators tell us that the World Happiness Survey is tracking something real.
Our personal importance, the source of true happiness and human satisfaction, have been massively trivialized across the 20th century. It isn't paranoid to suspect that the principal forced training institution of youth has had something to do with this. Let no-one say we lack sufficient data upon which to base analysis. There is a universe hidden just under our noses in which it doesn't matter in the least to the managers of the system whether Mr. Woodhead turned his student into his dolly or not. Long ago I discovered this universe by accident. How that happened I'll turn to next.
I confess I didn't enter teaching nearly 40 years ago out of any irresistible need to be near children or from a semi-religious calling, but simply because I was bored with my first real job out of college as an advertising copywriter. There is a limit to how many times a sane person can sit through meetings debating the lure of a particular adjective, or what false promises you can get away with according to the legal staff.
This confluence of circumstance, together with the any-warm-body-will-do hiring policy of New York City, propelled me into schoolteaching during the Cuba missile Crisis of 1962. When the smoke settled I began to investigate the reality of government schooling in a modern metropolis and it began to investigate me.
My first attention was drawn away from the bureaucracy I had become a part of to the strangeness of the children I confronted because their evident purpose, it seemed, was to drive me insane.
It was no regard for children but only a matter of personal survival which motivated me sufficiently to try to discover why these kids - to whom I mean no harm - seemed so intent on making my life miserable. In worrying that question I hit on a hypothesis whose testing was to serve me in good stead ever after. It seemed that in the short time I had left middle school myself, and in the short 400 miles between Pittsburgh and New York, a vast shift had taken place in the nature of the school experience. Whereas in my own place and time school had been regarded as useful, but only as one of the paths to a good life, in New York City it had evolved from an important but not vitally essential institution like a monster, feared as the monopoly gatekeeper over the future of children.
What I perceived as a New York problem was, of course, becoming the universal standard around the U.S., thanks to the strategic interventions on the part of the Federal Education Department, key private corporate foundations like those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, and behind-the-scenes assistance from influential American business interests and government agencies like the Labor Department and the Defence Department.
But meanwhile back in my classroom, though I knew nothing of this then, I could see that one result of this transformation had been to strip away almost entirely a base of primary experience from children. My kids were starved of experience, the rich ones almost as much as the poor. Experience had been replaced by a non-stop diet of low-level abstraction, continuing exhortation, and frequent pencil and paper testing of the type called "standardized."
Standardized testing. The language we use to talk about education determines how we think about it. There are no neutral words. We have been grossly misled to believe that the metaphor of standards has anything inevitable to do with quality, it is taken from assembly lines. Meeting standards is not about high level attainment, it is about standardisation.
So standardized testing which assigns half of all children a label as sub-standard doesn't mean the better half have achieved anything that correlates with real world achievement, only that they've met the degree of standardisation assigned by the unseen test designers. No significant study has ever proven otherwise. |The fact this was and is widely known should have ended the career of these expensive bogus "instruments" long ago. but these phoney challenges steadily increase in importance, pronouncing huge numbers of children sub-standard every year. That should give you a real clue to the purpose of official schooling.
One cause of my classroom grief, I decided, was that my kids had been stripped of significant experience and subjected to a relentless course of standardized exercises employing fear and humiliation as prods, and the threat that a poor school record would shut them away from future work and status. This seemed amazingly cruel in light of significant historical experience that school and life accomplishment are two different things, and that the various mechanisms of standardisation employed have been calibrated in advance to guarantee the failure of most of the students. Some other goal was afoot than bringing each child to his or her own maximum excellence.
The second cause of my grief as a classroom teacher was, I concluded, that the subjects of study I had encountered as a boy in Scotch-Irish western Pennsylvania had been radically simplified - 'dumbed down' in the street jargon I used as the title of my first book. By some lucky accident I had gone to third grade at a Jesuit boarding-school during which time, without any serious strain on our young spirits, my classes had been exposed to an intellectual curriculum whose intensity I was never again to encounter, even at college. This gave me a benchmark of the possible. I learned something else, too, of immense value to me as a schoolteacher and as a man - the difference between active and passive literacy.
Active literacy involves ease in public speaking and facility with written prose as well as the ability to read and evaluate the best thinking available, active literacy enables its possessor to reach out to other people, giving instruction to them as well as taking it from others. Passive literacy on the other hand teaches the ability to read simple instructions from the boss, deliver information about oneself on official forms to social managers, and perhaps to read and understand basic propaganda appeals or respond to advertisements.
According to the Jesuits, those eternally political soldiers of Christ, the British empire and other historical oppressors had gone to great lengths to prevent the spread of active literacy among its subject peoples, which included its own industrial proletariat. As early as the 1820's, British schools known as "Bell Schools" in some circles, were organized systematically to prevent active literacy from occurring; a counterpart of the Bell School known as the Lancaster School performed this task in early to mid-19th century America. The effectiveness of both was improved by hybridising the form with insights drawn from their Prussian counterparts - also intended to curtail the spread of active literacy.
Armed with an awareness how potent a power active literacy could be in combating the powerlessness generally associated with being young, and dimly aware that the reason the kids persecuted me was that they unconsciously perceived I was stealing their minds and robbing them of the right to test themselves in the world - and further encouraged by my own lack of interest in schoolteaching as a lifetime career (thus spared any fear of losing my job), I experimented freely, recklessly, and often illegally, always without permission, to make curriculum, space, time, text and sequence so fully flexible that classroom matters under my direction approached a condition where each kid had a privately tailored school experience and as often as resourcefulness and circumstances allowed, the run of New York City.
I could hardly know in those days that this novel approach was terrain homeschoolers had pioneered long before me.
One other thing Jesuit training enable me to do was feel confident about challenging kids' minds just as far and as honestly as my own could take them - without fear they would be bored or despairing about their own inability to respond. And once I had moved these two themes of free-ranging experience and intense intellectual training into daily practice most of my discipline problems ceased. Even when the balance of the school building was in chaos, I could look forward to getting to school each morning to find out what I would learn that day from the children while I was getting paid for it!
As the years passed and my satisfying work proved too interesting to leave, I came to see the specific pathological effects which government schooling seemed to cause. During this time I had sufficient exposure to children of wealth, middle-class children, and poor children alike to conclude that not only was the Galtonian bell curve which purports to describe distribution of intellect largely false, but also that the negative psychological conditions I'm about to describe are common to rich and poor alike. The unifying thread is long exposure in the confinement we call government education.
I'll offer eight characteristics commonly found in school populations that I think will be familiar to most of you who've thought about these things or who've had experience with schoolchildren. To think these conditions are common characteristics of youth would be a gross error as even a cursory look at say, Amish children, or Chinese children, or children of Mondragon Co-operative in the Basque region of Spain would amply demonstrate.
Large numbers of children I taught over the years displayed these disturbing behaviors:
1) An indifference and hostility to the adult world and contempt for its announced standards.
2) An absence of both any curiosity that could be sustained, and of any ability to concentrate for very long.
3) A difficulty connecting present time with future opportunity.
4) A difficulty in connecting both the present and the future to events in the past.
5) A taste for cruelty very near the surface, a numbness to moral questions beyond superficial lip service.
6) A genuine unease with intimacy, a readiness to be disloyal to both family and friends.
7) A quality of obsessive materialism, which produced a steady state of both envy and boredom, even when catered to by adults.
8) A timidity to face new ideas or new situations, grading into passivity, fear, and even rage if the novelty persisted.
Obviously you can find such situations outside of school. What I’m suggesting is that their prevalence and intensity among schoolchildren occurs as a natural by-product of the structure of institutional schooling.
Let me offer just a few of the processes I believe produce these results, all firmly embedded in the architecture of schooling. Virtually nothing selected by schools as basic really is basic – although it sometimes happens quite arbitrarily – virtually no school sequence is logically defensible. Sane people, including children, seek meaning, not disconnected facts. Schools teach the unrelating of everything.
Schools teach class position bordering on caste. They teach that children must stay in the class to which they have been assigned, no matter how humiliating or inappropriate that is. It is an Egyptian view of life strongly contradicting the natural genius of children, and in the United States, at least, radically violating its historical covenants.
By bells, by commands, and by other means schools teach that nothing is worth finishing. Is it any surprise then that after this kind of drill repeated over and over that many children conclude that nothing is worth starting either.
By a skilful use of rewards and punishments schools become vast laboratories of behavioral psychology, teaching that free will, even in matters as basic as urination, must be subordinated to the whim of an authority figure.
In school, children learn that teachers tell you what to think about, how long to think about it,
What sequence is proper for such thought, and what relative values should be placed on various ideas and various forms of idea management.
By breaking children away from their families, cultures, religions, and neighborhoods – in fact, from all private sources of strength – schools teach children to betray themselves, to wait for teachers to tell them what to do and for a teacher’s approval whether a course of action is good or bad. The U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 – 1906, William Torrey Harris, went on record with a recommendation that schools deliberately teach self-alienation as a necessary road to pedagogical success.
Schools teach that no-one can hide from the oversight of the State and its agents. Each action produces a numerically coded report, and the accumulation of these numbers and other anecdotal histories results in a profile which will always tell others who the student really is.
Is there a logic which might justify these things, a way to look at life which might elevate the procedures of schools from a Bed of Procrustes into something defensible – into places where the unfortunate sacrifice of human rights and potentials is warranted by some greater good for the human race? The answer to that question from a scientific management perspective is YES: if wealth can actually buy happiness and justice, then schooling in this fashion is the best way to achieve wealth.
As I said earlier, from the standpoint of Western tradition only three legitimate reasons exist for schools at all. The oldest is the religious purpose. School is to make good human beings. Each great religious tradition establishes boundaries of the good person, both positive and negative ones. Honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Things like that.
Until two centuries ago, the religious purpose of schooling dominated. It’s still quite prominent today even though we don’t talk about it. A large number of elite private boarding schools in the U.S. maintain strong ties to the religious purpose of schooling, even if it’s no longer an exclusive aim in most cases there is still a formidable religious purpose behind much elite schooling.
A second purpose comes straight down to us out of the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome. In the Roman republican ideal it was called civilis – the notion that a good citizen is actively useful on behalf of the common good. This ideal reached a crescendo in early America to the discomfort of the British Anglican order. It produced our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights. Call this the public purpose of schooling, to make citizens who actively participate in building a decent civil society. And an important component of this purpose, one easily and conveniently overlooked, is that good citizens participate as players, not as spectators, sometimes following as volunteers, but sometimes leading too. The concept of good citizen wasn’t conceived to describe timid souls who never got out of line and always followed orders – that was the demeanor of a servant. Yet the good citizen enthusiastically imposed duties on himself and herself, duties to the common good. The citizen was an independent agent who worked with the well-being of the community in mind.
In the land of citizens like Jacksonian America, citizens didn’t view themselves as the subjects of expert direction, instead they viewed experts a subjects of expert direction. In a land of citizens, managed consensus or top-down military efficiency is held in contempt, and so schools for citizenry are ordered to develop well-furnished independent minds with a good command of economics, politics, history, philosophy and literature as well as scientific, numerical and engineering concepts. And since vigorous argument is the lifeblood of citizenship these minds must be trained in the active literacies of public speaking and persuasive writing.
As the industrial revolution proceeded a third purpose for schooling emerged. Call this one the private purpose. This was schooling to bestow personal advantage on the individual seeker, to provide him or her with satisfying work, the keys to health and good relationships.
Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” was an early example of the success literature which soon became a flood. If you polled the world today, this would emerge as the popular choice, I’m sure.
Naturally a great many people tried to follow all three roads at once, and even those who specialized were aware of the legitimate arguments of the competition. But somewhere around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a more secretive purpose began to express itself through the new institution of government forced schooling, a purpose best expressed by a man I consider the most important American school figure by far, Stanford University’s Dean of Education for 30 years, Ellwood Cubberly. Writing in 1905, Cubberly put the fourth purpose this way:
Children are to be shaped and fashioned into finished products, manufactured like nails, and the specifications will come from government and industry.
Slowly at first and then with bolder and bolder forays into the domain of children’s minds and hearts the leadership of big business and big government, hardened by the implacable logic of Charles Darwin and the implacable statistical bell-curves of Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, began to regard children as something other than sovereign spirits as they were held to be by the religious tradition of Christianity and Judaism.
Now they were to be seen scientifically as human resources and as a workforce – concepts borrowed from the north German states. The public remained largely unaware this was happening at the time. It remains still unaware for the most part. In the fourth purpose schooling, school is seen as a booster engine to drive the political order, the social order, and the economic order into even more efficient versions of what already is. This fourth purpose has overwhelmed the religious, public and private purposes of schooling, pushing them to the margins of the enterprise, driving us all steadily into the net of an autonomous technological system intended to be people-proof. Indeed it can be seen as an end of history, the kind of end John Calvin or Pythagoras might have wished, clean, orderly, and mathematically perfect.
Some time ago I promised you a rational justification for the kind of schooling that you and I recoil from in distaste and now is the time to deliver on that promise. The explanation lies in the particular kind of customer and the particular kind of labor that a highly centralized mass production economy requires. The great disease that affects such system is a peculiar one, sometimes called “over-production”, sometimes called “over-capacity”, but always describing a situation where capital is destroyed because too few customers exist to repay the investment in productive equipment, personnel, infrastructure, advertising, packaging, distribution costs, and so on necessary to keep a gigantic centralized enterprise going. Put another way, overproduction describes what happens when too many goods are created to sustain a profitable price.
After a rough consensus was reached during the 19th century that a small farm, small craft, small company economy was to be put to death in the interest of larger, more efficient enterprises, a way had to be found to convert hundreds of thousands of small producers used to charting the direction of their own lives into employees and consumers. Britain and Germany had pioneered in this transformation by the beginning of the 19th century, but trouble loomed from the younger colossus of America, which had committed itself early in its history to a tradition of independent livelihoods for all and which lacked the strong social class mechanisms of the old world to bend its population in the direction upperclass leadership determined. And yet the whole outlook on independent livelihoods had to be changed if the incredible empire of business made theoretically possible by advances in coal and steel technology was to be fully recognized.
Local loyalties, local traditions, local leadership, and independent livelihoods stood in the way of progress. Something had to be done. The first completely unambiguous description I've been able to find for the central goal of fourth purpose schooling - which is to turn potential producers into enthusiastic consumers - is in a book called "Corporations and the Public Welfare" written in 1900 for a business and academic readership. The great challenge facing corporate capital, it says, is getting rid of traditions of self-employment and entrepreneurship. Part of the answer was to weave dense nets of legislation and regulation around the productive enterprise, this would cause the entrepreneur to doubt his ability to compete; part lay in displacing decision-making to a place remote from popular oversight, part lay in drilling children centrally in habits of obedience, beneficient ignorance of the big picture, and an awareness of their almost inevitable social destiny.
Andrew Carnegie laid down the law in 1902 in his book, "The Empire of Business", declaring that education as traditionally practised was economically and socially useless, transmitting bad attitudes which turned students against the ripening scheme of centralized management. He castigated "those teachings which serve to imbue (children) with false ideas" - false ideas of infinite possibility and personal sovereignity which had been discovered by Darwin.
Carnegie's empire of business found a new narrative to follow: morality had to give way to managerial pragmatism, the habits of Christian superstition had to be schooled out of children so they couldn't stand in the way of progress. Progress meant the centrality of economic motives reflected in social affairs, economic motives were the driving engine and balance wheel of society. Making profits, then spending those profits to further the general efficiency of biological evolution was what life was about.
A year after Carnegie wrote, the legendary sociologist Frank Lester Ward announced that teachers no longer worked for mom and dad, now they worked for the political state. What parents desire is irrelevant, said Ward, "the result desired by the State is wholly different." In 1906 John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board, a force more powerful in American education for 30 odd years than the federal government issued a mission statement which read in part:
In our dreams... people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions (intellectual and character education) fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk....the task is simple. We will organize children and teach then in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
The tracks of what 20th century forced schooling was meant to be are right near the surface under our noses but we avoid seeing what's there, perhaps because the reality is so bewildering from an ordinary Hobbit perspective. School is busy organizing your children, locking them into social classes, linking them inextricably to their places assigned in the current and prospective economy - exactly as if the unhappy way we live together in society today is the end of history and the best we can do.
I could spend hours with you producing evidence from the mouths of the architects of modern schooling that it has nothing to do with what you want for your children or what your children want for themselves, but we don't have the luxury so let me give one of the last words on this to a principal architect of the modern system, Alexander Inglis, for whom a yearly lecture on education at Harvard University was named. In his 1918 book, "Principles of Secondary Education", Inglis, one of the brain trust of the great transformation of traditional schooling to fourth purpose schooling, spells out exactly what the functions of the new institution are to be:
First is what he calls the "adjustive function." Your children are to be adjusted to the existing social environment, but also trained to be readjusted as circumstances demand.
Second is the sorting function. Children are to be trained according to their likely destination in the social machine.
Third is the conformity function. Students are to be drilled in like-mindedness, in conformity of thought, habits, ideals, and standards. This is necessary to homogenize the population so its purchasing habits and reactions become predictable.
Fourth is what Inglis called "the propaedutic function" by which he means the early granting of privileges to those who will own the leadership rôle in the future. This group is gradually to learn what is really going on, so bit by bit for them the veils are dropped.
Fifth is the hygienic function. Government schooling must assist in the Darwinian process of natural selection, it must effectively label the unfit for elimination just as it must differentially train the evolutionary superior to manage their inheritance later on.
Sixth is the diagnostic and directive function. School must test and diagnose the pupil so he or she can most efficiently directed to accept the social rôle assigned.
All I've said so far is by way of congratulating you on your decision to homeschool and urging you to stiffen your resolve through the difficult times. Fourth purpose schooling is another dismal human nightmare like binding women's feet in China or hanging Quakers in Boston. It, too, shall pass someday, perhaps sooner than we imagine thanks to the millions of homeschoolers who recognize that the threats of the school establishment are illusions - with only as much reality as we allow them.
Nearly a century has passed since the wheels of fourth purpose schooling began to grind and the outcome has been a recreation at large of the King Midas fable: fabulous wealth for a few and growing anxiety and low-level misery for many. In July of 1998 the important American publisher Mortimer Zuckerman boasted in America's most influential journal, "Foreign Affairs", that America's superior prosperity depended on certain characteristics of the American worker, the American workplace, and of American emotional hunger. I think you'll be interested to hear what those are:
First, he says, the American worker is a pushover with little to say about what happens in his work: second, in America decisions are made by statistical rules which eliminate human sentimentality and guesswork; our economy, he boasts, is controlled by "an impersonal monetized market and a belief in scientific management. Third, workers in America live in constant dread of being cast off, they know corporations owe them nothing. Fear then is the secret supercharger, it gives management the flexibility it needs.
And I've saved the best for last. Americans are addicted to buying things as a way of finding emotional sustenance. Our endless desire to consume is driven by an addiction to novelty which can never be satiated. Elsewhere in hard times business dries up, but in America we shop till we drop, mortgaging our futures to keep the flow of goods and services by which we define the value of our lives coming.
The American economy depends upon school teaching us that status is purchased, that others run our lives, that the sources of pride and self-respect are all outside ourselves. It depends upon schooling cutting our ability to concentrate to a few minutes duration, creating a life-long craving for relief from boredom through outside stimulation. In conjunction with television and computer games which employ the same teaching methodology, these lessons are permanently inscribed.
School turns out characters that can be shaped according to the market logic of the moment. In exchange the market promises riches and it keeps that promise, though not for everyone, at most for 20% and even the fortunate pay a high price in relationships, in health, and in satisfying work. The price of the deal for all, even for the winners, has been to surrender a big chunk of our minds and characters. And the mass of humanity needed to support this colossal pyramid can only be created by long immersion in laboratories of behavioral modification we call schools.
We can do better than this, I know, and none of us are alone any longer in figuring out what that better way might look like. Millions of homeschoolers have gone before you now and written a record of quiet success full of so much imagination and good-natured trial and error that ideas and experiments abound should your own resourcefulness need a rest from time to time.
Talk about satisfying work and good relationships as a key to happiness and you realize that nothing could be more satisfying and friendly than spending time with the children you bore. Kids need their families, their families need their kids as partners in the great journey of being alive; once everyone knew this, but now we need to remind ourselves once again that giving our children to strangers is a reckless waste of the best resource we have with which to find satisfying work and profound relationships.
Children need their families to learn about nature and love and what being a family means, and older people need children in this fresh open-ended relation in order to become fully mature. We need each other as co-producers, not as the producer of learning and one as the consumer.
But why am I telling you all these things? You know them far better than I ever did, that's why you've taken back responsibility for your own kids. My hat's off to you all, have a wonderful get-together!
© 1999 John Taylor Gatto
copied with kind permission of John Taylor Gatto.
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Question and Answer session with J T Gatto
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