My
mother takes in stray animals. Mostly homeless dogs and cats,
but if a hurt bird's wing needs repair, birds also. If a turtle is
crossing the road too slowly, she makes my father stop the car so she can get
out and carry it to the other side of the road. When Dad objected to how many
animals our household was supporting, mother took to setting large dishes of
Nabisco dog food in our backyard for the wanderers, an act of generosity that
made our house look like a kennel and drove my father frantic, not least
because he was the manager of the local National Biscuit Company.
The other day I was reading Proverbs, a collection
of advice set down by Solomon 3,000 years ago, when I came across these words:
“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves.” Suddenly I realized what
my mother had done all those years when I thought she was just feeding animals.
She was speaking for those who couldn't speak for themselves. And reading
further into Proverbs I found this: “Happy are they who are generous to the
poor.” Reading those words I realized I had part of the secret that made my
mother happy, for she was happy most of the time I was growing up in spite of a
full share of her own troubles. She was unfailingly generous to the poor - not
just to outcast creatures, but to anyone who came to
our door for a handout, to any neighbourhood person
fallen on hard times and needing help. I had a little lawn mowing business in
those days, and I remember in particular the widow with young children whose
lawn I mowed for free because my mother asked me to.
While randomly turning the pages of Proverbs I found
this judgment, and by implication this warning, too: “There is joy for those
who seek the common good.” And I remembered my mother's beautiful Christmas
trees that took days of hard effort to create, effort in the family's common
service. I remembered her collecting of kitchen grease and metal scrap for the
war effort in the long gone days of World War II, and her fierce defense of
equity as head of the PTA, and her founding a Cub Scout Troop when none of the
local men could be persuaded to do it. I remembered the joy she brought to so
many undertakings of my boyhood.
The London Economist announced recently that 70
percent of all the lawyers in the world are in the
What could the meaning of this be? Seventy percent of all the world's lawyers? Before he died,
Joseph Campbell took note of this enormous legal fraternity and called it the
way Americans talk to each other, the way employees talk to bosses and brothers
to sisters. Lawsuits are the way we get the other guy's attention because we
have lost the normal interest in each other, lost the concern for human
face-to-face justice, lost the taste for plain
speaking that marks a healthy people.
Looking at the great tradition of English common
law, there are only two reasons to bring a case at all. First, that someone
hasn't kept a promise...has not done what they said they would do. That gives
rise to contract law. And second, that someone has encroached on another
person's rights and done harm. That gives rise to tort and criminal law.
So if you are looking for a new way to mark the
crisis in American society, if you are wary of hearing about teenage suicide,
divorce, crime, violence, alienated brothers and sisters, murder, drugs, etc.
even one more time, then think on the barometer of crisis represented by 70
percent of the world's lawyers collecting under the American eagle's wing.
There must be a tremendous of people breaking promises, and a tremendous number
of people encroaching on rights to support such a battalion of barristers.
We are forgetting, I think, how to live together in
families and communities; forgetting the necessary personal duties that make
families and communities in the first place in a rush to get out from under
personal responsibility. To escape. How often do you
hear the cry, “Let them do it! They get paid for it!” Them
can mean police or street sweepers or social workers or any of a number of
other occupational titles that have come to identify our transition from a
world of human beings who live together and care about each other to a world of
institutions and hired hands.
What does it mean when we break our promises so often?
What does it mean when we encroach so often on each
other's rights? When we abandon personal responsibility for the common good so
completely to people we hire, so that the air is full of our angry refusals and
stony silences, all eyes rigidly turned away from duty, all mouths full of an
angry “NO!” Let them do it. They get paid for it.
What does it mean for your future and mine when a
price tag has been set on simple services that, through the long history of
humanity, were freely exchanged and even freely given? Like sitting with the
sick, caring for the old, or even caring for one's own
children? Like mowing a poor widow's lawn.
If it means something frightening, what can we do
about it?
At the turn of the 20 century, a profound social
thinker in
Even though that was written over 90 years ago, it
still has a shocking and almost crazy ring to it. But Simmel
was quite serious and generations of blue ribbon readership have found enough
disturbing truth in his words to keep them available generation after
generation. Simmel continued: “Whenever genuine
personal values have to be offered for money, one finds that a loosening, a
loss of quality in individual life takes place.” For instance, in prostitution
– a kind of temporary marriage for money – the monetization of sex leads to “a
terrible degradation of personal value”. Both prostitute and client are worse
for the experience, not better. The sale of compassion, the
sale of concern, even the sale of a helping hand in many instances, lead
to the same destination. At some point, pricing eats away the intangible
quality of service and the central value of what is offered will be destroyed.
It's a complicated idea, but one well worth musing upon.
Now think again about the meaning of all those
American lawsuits. Think of all the broken promises they represent, the
counterfeit “services” rendered. Is it just barely possible that the shift
after WW II to what is called a “service” economy is part of the reason for our
visible unhappiness as a nation? Is it just barely possible that when most of
us don't accept the obligation of service to each other, performed freely, as
part of the social contract, but instead assign the job to hired hands, the
payoff might be misery rather than the joy Solomon promised?
Well, I don't know the answer to that, but I do have
an interesting bit of recent evidence in support of Simmel's
theory. In 1971, the National Book Award for non-fiction went to a title called
The Gift Relationship, a book which undertook to explore whether valuable
things given freely – like services rendered voluntarily – were more or less
valuable than the same services as part of a commercial system.
The commodity the author took for his test was human
blood. He made an imaginative, cross-national comparison of the quality and
availability of human blood in countries that charge for it, like the
The book's conclusions aren't the slightest bit
ambiguous. Where blood is sold, the quality is terrible, prices sky-high,
shortages common. And where blood is sold, there is also frequently danger to
the purchaser, even in the best of hospitals. But there is an additional,
intangible cost. Where blood is bought and sold, the community loses the
tradition of giving freely to neighbours and strangers,
and where that tradition is lost, the donors lose the
joy gained from service in the common good. In other words, a social and
ethical corrosion ensues from the market in blood. Communities which provide
their own blood needs without cost are apparently healthy in many other ways
too; people seemed happier in such communities.
Transforming blood into the stuff of commerce is
inefficient in economic terms, in supply terms, and in quality terms. The
social cost is high too. The
The lesson of my mother, of biblical Solomon, of Simmel, and of blood, I mean to be a lesson for our schools
too. When schools consume the youth of the nation in confinement, and all the
products of their labours become paper to be thrown
away, there is no joy possible in the seeking of such goods. The pricing of
time through grade points establishes an irrational currency by which something
precious - time - is corrupted in the service of arbitrary and nonsensical
urgencies.
Experts who are the sellers of school services to
the government have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined
the problem of schooling. The school problem is not that children don't learn
to read, write and do arithmetic very well – those deficiencies are direct
byproducts of our errors of definition – the problem is that kids hardly learn
at all the ways schools insist on teaching.
Schools desperately need a vision of their own
purpose, because the vision they angrily promulgate now is a dishonest one. It
was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic
primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not
really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few
who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching. Colonial
For many decades, an artificially induced hysteria
about basic skills has been the masquerade used to intimidate us into
abandoning children to a form of confinement-schooling that simply doesn't
work. Behind this mask, valuable lessons of service to a vibrant community of
real human beings have been denied the young – and all of us have been denied
the reciprocities healthy adults need with children across the full spectrum of
ages.
Give and take; take and
give.
Children desperately need the lessons that volunteer service, apprenticeships
and work/study teach but instead they are kept in holding pens with others of
their own age and social class. They are priced and valued according to their
ability to adjust to this unhealthy regimen, to remain passive, to take orders,
to maintain a cheerful demeanor while their time is wasted. They give nothing
but are rewarded for becoming quiet parasites. This has been the formula
producing extended childishness and the outlines of a caste system in this
country, however well it has served the economic institution of mass-schooling.
After struggling at the bars of the cage for a few years, most kids just give
up and settle into the low-grade vocational activities of the school. The
relentless rationalization of the educational experience to one flavour – confinement schooling – has left the modern
student a prisoner in a disenchanted world without meaning.
Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children
who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to
restore meaning and purpose to modern life. There is no point in reading if it
seems to lead nowhere. We have progressively stripped children of the primary
experience base they need to grow up sound and whole by pricing abstract study
higher. The great irony has been that while we devalued service and life
experience, abstraction has followed the path Simmel
predicted. It, too, matters less and less.
The dynamics of the process are subtle. To begin
with, the natural sequence in which hands-on experience – primary data to give
it any academic title – must always come first. Only after a long
apprenticeship in rich and profound contact with the world, the home, the neighbourhood, does the thin gas of abstraction mean much
to most people. After 26 years of classroom teaching, I came to see what
Benjamin Franklin must
have realized as a teenager. Only a few of us are fashioned in
such a peculiar way as to thrive on an exclusive diet of blackboard work and
workbook work and bookwork work and talkwork work of
all sorts.
When we fail to take into account how most children,
rich or poor, really learn – by involvement, by doing, by independent
risk-taking, by shouldering responsibility, by intermingling intimately into
the real world of adults in all its manifestations – when we set up a
laboratory universe in which all are confined with anonymous strangers, then we
have created in advance a world of failing families, wrecked cities, and
blasted individuals. Then we have created the mise en
scene where a mathematical bell curve seems to describe a human condition in
which only a few children have any real talent.
This is a cynical act. It is only prolonged, in the
fact of its deadly effects, because school factories and all the forces which
service them have become an integral part of the money economy. The lie of our
own unexamined premises has given us the horrible children we complain of as a
nation. Indifferent children, cowardly children, dishonest
children, selfish children, children who disrespect parents and adults in
general, who hurt each other, who trample each other's rights for worthless
prizes like blue ribbons or school grades. Eventually, these are
children who grow up to become clients for a nation of lawyers, children who
will one day break contracts and encroach on the weak if the opportunity
arises.
And why not? That is the example school
sets. The logic of confinement schooling in the middle of a democracy is a
contradiction of the original national charter. It breaks the contract of the
Bill of Rights, using as its justification the excuse that kids can't learn any
other way, that they can't be trusted with
responsibility. The truth is exactly the
opposite. Unless they are trusted with responsibility they cannot learn much,
and under the thumb of central compulsion the lessons they do learn are bad
ones. School encroaches on the right of each new life to test itself
against the needs of the real world.
Schools are a training ground for irresponsibility
because that is nearly the only thing they are set up to teach.
Schools desperately need a vision of their own
purpose. At present they are government jobs for children...and the worst kind
of government jobs – the make-work kind, not really jobs at all.
There is nothing or very little to do in school. Our
elite high school texts are on the level of fifth grade readers from 160 years
ago, in the time before we got compulsion schooling. And dumbing
down the work isn't some sinister conspiracy; it has become more and more a
necessity as generations of well schooled children succeed themselves and
become parents.
So the damage is cumulative, and it is fast becoming
insupportable. Look around you at our society. We have created a whirlpool of
addictions much more sophisticated than drug addictions, which children and
grown children use to avoid confronting themselves with their own uselessness.
We are reluctant to face the truth because it acts as a mirror, revealing more
than we can face about the real source of our difficulties. We have forced children to be irresponsible
for 12 years. It is no wonder they hate themselves and us, and
no wonder they cannot recover.
Cut a man's legs off as a boy and they will not grow back when he is a man.
With the growing public alarm over the effects of
science and technology on societies all over the world, we are soon going to
have a chance to rethink the basic questions of education, questions that have
little to do with reading, writing and arithmetic, but much to do with the
fundamental queries of human existence: In what curriculum is a good life found?
How shall we all live? What shall we do with our children?
My own suspicion is that systematic, government
compulsion schooling is doomed, that there is no way to tinker with it to make
it work much better, that soon the monopoly will have to be surrendered because
it doesn't work, it hurts people, and it is far too expensive. If well schooled
children are the goal, they can be turned out for a fraction of the cost of
government schooled children.
In fact, I don't think the world can afford well schooled
children at all, whether they come from factories of government, church or
private industry. We need a different kind of man and woman to tackle the
future – the kind of young people who accept the obligations of living in
society joyfully. To get to this new place, we need a vision of what an
education is and what a school can be; only out of a clearly spoken vision can
come the mutual hope we need to find ways to get there.
Curriculum is only the Latin word for a race course,
the path by which the racehorse gets to its destination. We haven't even begun
to agree as a nation on a destination for education that is an honest one.
“Beating” other countries, scoring well on tests, “getting a good job” – all
these are low evasions of what the human spirit needs, all are ways to duck the
truth that we have failed, thus far, to pay the price in argument, debate,
agony and love that a strong vision will cost.
Without a vision all the talk about reforming
“curriculum” will lead nowhere. Unless we can convince ourselves, our children
included, that the new course is worth following it will not work any better
than the old one did. Why should it?
It must be something all of us can share, a destiny
far beyond “winning” and “money” and taking more than our share of material
things. For the question will always re-emerge, “To what end?“
”Why are we doing these things?”
Messy and unpleasant as it will be for a practical
people like Americans, the sequence must start with clear goals. In a democracy
worth the name, the goals come from the bottom up, not the other way around. It
will be messy if done right because hundreds and thousands of separate agendas
will be set in conflict by any attempt to change what is, and we will learn,
finally, that we need multiple visions, many different curricula.
If I guess right, we don't have a choice; the
present course is almost over. The whole food supply is in jeopardy for one
thing. Breeding stocks of fish along the
If my guess is right, we need to construct a new
vision of what education is, and we need new race courses on which to run the
vision. The government can't do it for us, that's been
tried for 140 years in the monopoly schools, but they just get worse and worse
– more the creators of our problems than the solution. If my guess is right we
don't even have a choice. The old system where every child was locked away and
set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly
prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could
have been fixed by now. Good riddance.
There is no correlation between the play money of
grades and the play money we buy things with, except that dishonest correlation
forced on the job market by rigging it with arbitrary laws and policies. For
example, you can establish by law or policy that the only people who get into
medical school are the people with lofty grade point averages, but that will
not guarantee that the best people become doctors; the same unpleasant reality
holds true for lawyers, businessmen, engineers or school teachers.
We have yet another warning that forcing the
collective time of our young people into a contest for symbols – whether money
or grades or similar prizes – is a mistaken course. We do not trust each other,
we do not like each other, we do not care for each other, we are unable to keep
ourselves from encroaching on each other, and we cannot keep our promises. That
is a recipe for social disaster, not one for the good life.
The new vision of North American education is going
to have to find a currency beyond money with which to pay its children to
learn. My own experience after 15 years of sponsoring service learning projects
for my students is that a curriculum that seeks the common good will be an
important part of that real currency, which doesn't inflate, as grade do. It
holds its value.
My own experience has been that every single
academic question that can be asked can be asked around a base of genuine service
to the community and can ride easily around an orbit of service. My own kids
always did one full day of community service a week. They generally worked
alone in order to escape the culture of school children. They took on full
adult responsibilities and a full adult work day even at the age of 12 or 13.
And in almost every case they discharged their duties splendidly.
Even in the first year I experimented with such a
program it worked. Indeed, it worked better for the selfish, spoiled,
indifferent children of prosperous families than it did for the lost children
of the poor and non-college bound. But the differences were small. It worked
for everyone, including the communities, which allowed themselves
to be served. It transformed people spiritually, morally and academically too.
In Western society over the past several thousand
years, we have had, at various times, great social visions: the pagan vision of
Stoics like Marcus Aurelius, the aristocratic vision of Charlemagne and the Plantagenets, the Christian vision of
All the transforming visions we have human record of
asked a question beyond money: What do I owe?
And these visions promise that if we will only speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, if we will only be generous to the poor, if we will only seek the common good, that our lives will be filled with meaning. It worked for Solomon; it worked for my mother; it will work for the rest of us too.
John Taylor Gatto won
Teacher of the Year awards for