Schooling: Liberation Or Mind Control?

[Guest guest]

Schooling:

Liberation or Mind Control?

 

By Richard Heinberg

 

If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning

institution, " childhood " would go out of production. The youth of

rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor

nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich.

If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to

become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an

adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment

which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.

- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1970)

 

I hated school. I remember feeling that I was being indoctrinated,

that the adults who were in charge of the institution were

deliberately trying to make me stupid and servile. School was prison.

 

I recall being given an IQ test in the fifth grade. One of the first

of the multiple-choice questions was: " Is a tomato a (a) fruit, (b)

vegetable, or © neither of the above? " By that time in my school

career I was well accustomed to providing expected answers instead of

thinking for myself. But this question appeared deliberately

confusing. I asked the teacher if I should give the true answer or

the answer that best matched what I thought I was " supposed " to

think. She said: " You mustn't ask questions during the test. " I

concluded that I should give conventional responses; consequently I

succeeded in achieving an " average " IQ score.

 

After two years of college, spent mostly in an informal study of the

neurological effects of cannabis sativa, I abandoned school for good.

A few years later, after I'd gotten education out of my system, I

began to read and learn.

 

I have few positive things to say about the schooling I received in

the 1950s and '60s. There were good teachers, to be sure; but the

system in which both teachers and students struggled to come to terms

with one another was utterly deadening. Still, when I see the

obstacles to self-discovery the children of today face, I think my

generation had it easy by comparison. Television, dual-income

families, the evaporation of opportunities for unstructured play, and

generally grim prospects for the world's future must weigh heavily on

young people's spirits these days.

 

Fortunately, there are a few compassionate souls who still care

enough about the young to unmask, and find alternatives to,

government factory-schools.

 

Nature and Nurture: Aboriginal Child-Rearing in North-Central Arnhem

Land, by Annette Hamilton. (Australian Institute of Aboriginal

Studies, 1981),

paperback.

 

Annette Hamilton is an anthropologist rather than an educator, and

her book has almost nothing to do with Western schooling. But it is a

good starting point for our discussion, because what she does is to

examine carefully the patterns of parenting and learning among a

group of people who until recently lived as gatherer-hunters. It's

really unfortunate that this book is unavailable in the United

States, because it provides an enlightening - and devastating -

mirror for our civilized pedagogical practices.

 

After presenting the details of her research findings, Hamilton draws

conclusions. She notes that while, for Europeans, the needs of the

child are determined by " experts, " in Aboriginal society " the role of

the caretaker is to pay attention to the overt demands of the

infant.... The infant cries, the caretaker feeds. When it is old

enough, it grabs the breast or the food for itself. If it does not

grab for it, it does not want it.... The Aboriginal model trusts the

child's knowledge of its own states, both physical and emotional.

When a three-year-old is tired someone will carry it. No one

says `Three-year-olds are old enough to walk.' In fact, no one makes

generalizations about children at all. Each child is treated solely

on the merits of its actual concrete situation at that moment. " This

sort of treatment tends to produce confident, secure, self-motivated

adults. In contrast, according to Hamilton,

 

A sense of helplessness seems to be a feature characterising much of

the modern world's literature and life. The emphasis on the material

realm has created conditions whereby control over much of

the `natural' world has become second nature to humans, while those

same material conditions have meant that infants, biologically much

the same as infants 50,000 years ago, have increasingly been handled

in less and less `natural' ways, and as adults have come to feel less

and less powerful in themselves....

 

At the very end of Nature and Nurture, Hamilton sadly concludes:

 

Present material conditions preclude any possibility of a

completely `natural' method of child-rearing since the methods are

adapted to hunting and gathering conditions and if applied

wholeheartedly to infants and children in modern urban environments

would represent a danger to their survival, both for physical reasons

and because most parents today have neither the time, the energy, nor

the emotional resources to permit their children to exist in such an

autonomous fashion.

 

Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto (New Society, 1992), $9.95,

paperback; " Origins & History of American Compulsory Schooling, "

interview of John Gatto by Jim Martin, in Flatland #11 (1994).

 

The fact that John Taylor Gatto was the 1991 recipient of the New

York State Teacher of the Year Award is remarkable, since what he has

to say can be of little comfort to the educational bureaucracy. " It

is time, " he said in his speech at the award presentation, " that we

squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is

destructive to children. " The essence of Gatto's message is well

summarized in the following excerpt from his book:

 

I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human

quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that

notion - far from it - my own training in two elite universities

taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves

economically over a bell curve.... the trouble was that the

unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many

of the hallmarks of human excellence - insight, wisdom, justice,

resourcefulness, courage, originality - that I became confused. They

didn't do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it

often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was

possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down.

Was it possible that I had been hired not to enlarge children's

power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but

slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the

crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the

constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of

schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent

children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into

addiction and dependent behavior.

 

Bit by bit I began to devise guerrilla exercises to allow the kids I

taught - as many as I was able - the raw material people have always

used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from

surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human

associations as my limited power and resources could manage. In

simpler terms, I tried to maneuver them into positions where they

would have a chance to be their own teachers and to make themselves

the major text of their own education.

 

If compulsory schooling is such a lousy idea, why did it catch on?

Gatto notes that " Modern schooling as we now know it is a by-product

of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among

our own industrial poor. " Actually, the system was pioneered in

Prussia in the early nineteenth century, then exported. In his

interview in Flatland, Gatto traces how the American economic elite

(led by men like Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan) systematically

promulgated the U.S. compulsory school system as a way of controlling

the population so that it would present a minimal threat to the

owners of the means of production, and instead form a docile,

dependent work force. In 1776, 85% of Americans had independent

livelihoods; by 1840 the number was still 70%. Today, of course, the

idea that everyone should have a " job " (that is, that they should be

employed by someone else) is considered self-evidently humanitarian.

But only people whose self-will has been sufficiently domesticated

can fit into the social-economic machine. It is our schools' purpose

to make sure not only that young people are fitted for employment,

but that they regard the status of being employed as necessary and as

an ideal to strive for.

 

In order to accomplish their goal, Carnegie et al. realized that they

would first have to do away with the one-room school. " The one-room

school had a mixture of six or seven ages simultaneously, " says Gatto

in his Flatland interview. " Everybody got the same work but the

teacher didn't teach. The teacher only taught a few kids, who taught

a few kids, who taught a few kids. There was this tremendous powerful

interdependence, where terrific confidence of talking to people older

than you was developed in the course of the school day. There was

concern for people younger than you. There was responsibility. It was

almost a cost-free institution, and it worked splendidly, but it had

to be eliminated because it doesn't subordinate the professional

staff. There are no principals, or superintendents, or assistant

superintendents. "

 

As of 1910, the one-room school was mostly a thing of the past and

teacher accreditation programs (underwritten by the Carnegie,

Rockefeller, Whitney, and Peabody families) had been established

nationwide. By 1990, the number of school boards in the county had

dropped from 140,000 to about 15,000; meanwhile, funds available to

schools had exploded. Today, " Foundation agents are wandering the

halls of state legislatures, key businesses, key teacher colleges,

writing a tight script to seal the loopholes that have prevented

Andrew Carnegie's dream [of governmental control through universal

education and licensure, which he set forth in 1890 in a group of

essays collectively titled " The gospel of Wealth " ] from being

realized. "

 

What about the future of institutionalized schooling? Gatto

sees " Goals 2000, " President Clinton's plan for educational reform,

as just a refinement of the existing system. Likewise the school

voucher program, which is appearing increasingly on state

initiatives: " It's inevitable. From the institution's perspective the

voucher system is much more desirable than the tax credit system. You

can spend your voucher in any school that's been certified by the

state legislature as okay, and right there you have the catch-22. It

will be a looser form of control and maybe because of that much more

effective. That's the diabolical part of voluntary national testing. "

 

In Their Own Way, by Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D. (Tarcher, 1987), $8.95,

paperback

 

Thomas Armstrong is a former learning disabilities specialist who no

longer believes in learning disabilities. " After teaching for several

years in public and parochial special education classes... I realized

I was going nowhere with a concept that labeled children from the

outset as handicapped learners. I also began to see how this notion

of learning disabilities was handicapping all of our children by

placing the blame for a child's learning failure on mysterious

neurological deficiencies in the brain instead of... our systems of

education. "

 

In his book In Their Own Way, Armstrong dissects the idea that some

children are " learning disabled, " tracing the history of the concept

back to the early 1960s. He turns the label on its head, showing that

many children pigeonholed as dyslexic, hyperactive, or underachieving

are in reality merely the possessors of talents our schools fail to

recognize. For example, " dyslexic " students often excel in three-

dimensional spatial visualization, and special education children

referred for learning and emotional problems often show high levels

of imagination. " In my own classes for the `learning handicapped,' "

notes Armstrong, " I had an amazing group of children: a boy who held

the national freestyle swim record in his age group, a girl who was a

model for a national department store chain, gifted artists and

writers, a psychic child, expert storytellers, superior math

students, and many other talented human beings. "

 

In other cultures, children with such abilities would be valued and

encouraged every step of the way. Unfortunately, however, our

educational system favors only one learning style, and insists that

it be developed in the classroom setting (desks in neat rows,

instruction via lecture) and that it be measureable by standardized

tests (which place unique individuals along a hypothetical " bell

curve " ). When a child entering school fails to meet the system's

expectations, teachers and parents soon begin to focus nearly all

their attention on the child's " disability " ; meanwhile, the child

becomes " defective merchandise sent back to the shop for repairs, "

and may remain stuck in a cycle of learning failure for the rest of

her school days, concentrating her energy on the perceived deficiency

rather than on the development of existing talents.

 

If it were only an indictment of the " learning disabilities

industry, " Armstrong's book would be an invaluable contribution. But

his analysis of the problem merely sets the stage for nine chapters

filled with solutions - specific ways to engage each child's unique

learning style. Basing his proposals on Harvard psychologist Howard

Gardner's discovery that there are at least seven different kinds of

human intelligence, Armstrong offers practical advice for recognizing

and cultivating the child's linguistic, logical-mathematical,

spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and

intrapersonal abilities. He outlines seven ways to motivate the child

(gauged to her or his learning style), and " seven different ways to

teach anything. " Most of his comments are directed to parents (what

to do if your child is " diagnosed " as " learning disabled " ), but there

is a gold mine of information here for teachers as well (for example,

how to teach to a different intelligence each day).

 

One chapter offers ways to " make learning physical, " engaging the

entire body in the educational process and eliminating bodily

stresses during study periods. Another deals with cultivating the

imagination in learning, showing how imagination need not wither with

the passing of childhood. Armstrong urges teachers to " teach with

feeling " by finding ways to express and transform feelings through

art. He also tells how to create a " learning network, " or support

system, for the child's academic life. He counsels patience and

positive beliefs, and gives specific advice on how to create and

maintain these attitudes. Armstrong also addresses the roles of diet,

atmosphere, time, and (lack of) noise in learning.

 

Awakening You Child's Natural Genius, by Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.

(Tarcher, 1991), $12.95, paperback

 

This book is, in many respects, an extension of In Their Own Way. It

is a reference manual, handbook, and guide for parents who want to

help their children realize their full potential as natural learners.

The goal of the book is not to turn each child into a little prodigy

by force-feeding abstract knowledge, but to support " the intrinsic

drive for mastery that is every child's birthright. " Each child, says

the author, is a born learner, open to new experience and eager to

explore and create. We are all " born to be brilliant. "

 

Armstrong begins by tracing the barriers to natural learning -

competition, testing, grades, stress, shame, boredom, dull textbooks,

bland teachers, student labeling, and educational tracking. Part of

the process of awakening the child's natural genius consists of

removing these externally imposed obstacles. In a chapter titled " The

School: Bridge or Barricade to Life? " , the author contrasts real-life

learning with school learning (in real life, learning " takes place

directly through interaction with experiences and objects in their

natural context, " while in school " learning takes place indirectly

through talking, thinking, reading, and writing about experiences and

objects " ). Unfortunately, while the public is aware that there is

something dreadfully wrong with our schools, reforms usually take the

direction of bigger course loads, longer school days, and tougher

graduation requirements. According to Armstrong, " the American

educational system is in danger not because the school day is too

short or there is not enough mathematics in the curriculum, but

because our classrooms have become emotional wastelands. " The author

advises parents how to evaluate their children's school and how to

work for change in the school system.

 

However, fixing what's wrong with our schools is not the focus of the

book. Armstrong's main concern is to help parents understand how

children learn naturally so that they can nurture the process.

 

The book is divided into five sections. The first explores " The

Learning Triad: Child, Home, and School. " In it, we come to

understand " the developmental stages of genius in learning, " and how

families and schools help or hinder the learning process.

 

Section Two is a guide to innovative approaches for helping the child

develop an interest in reading, math, science, and history. In the

chapter on reading, for example, the author downplays the usefulness

of phonic drills ( " such a disconnected approach to reading threatens

to turn our kids into paper-pushing bureaucrats and assembly-line

robots instead of clear-thinking readers " ) and suggests instead

that " the child emerges into literacy by actively speaking, reading,

and writing in the context of real life. " He advocates a " whole-

language " approach to literacy, in which reading, writing, spelling,

handwriting, and grammar are taught as " one seamless process of

communication, " and in which " children spend their time, not hunched

over worksheets, but actively involved in reading and writing about

things that passionately concern them. "

 

The third section stresses the vital role of free, unstructured play

in children's emotional, social, and mental development. " Play, " says

Armstrong, " is nature's way of forging fresh evolutionary

possibilities. " Sadly, unstructured play is on the decline in our

culture as our children find their leisure time increasingly

regimented. Television and computer-based games are, of course, part

of the problem; another is the substitution of organized, competitive

sports for made-up games in which children use their own imaginations

and spontaneously investigate social roles. Armstrong offers

constructive advice for " what parents can do with toys, " and how to

encourage free play. He also devotes chapters in this section to

nurturing the child's musical and artistic expression and includes a

cautious guide to the use of television and computers as learning

tools.

 

Section Four addresses the challenges faced by children who don't fit

into the system. The material here follows closely on that in In

Their Own Way - outlining Howard Gardner's seven kinds of

intelligence, suggesting alternatives to standardized testing, and

offering guidance for circumventing the " learning disabilities " trap.

Readers of Armstrong's earlier book will not, however, find this

section entirely redundant, as it is updated and differently

organized.

 

In the fifth section, the author explores " educational systems that

work " - Waldorf and Montessori schools, as well as Superlearning and

peer teaching. After describing each of these systems, Armstrong

offers advice on how to use at home the basic principles on which it

is based. I would have appreciated more discussion of home schooling

here, but there are other resources available, such as the magazine

Growing Without Schooling (2269 Mass. Ave., Cambridge MA 02140), and

John Holt's book Instead of Education.

 

The Radiant Child, by Thomas Armstrong (Quest Books, 1985), $7.95,

paperback

 

At the age of nine, the great Lakota prophet Black Elk had a vision

of the healing of his people. It would guide him throughout the rest

of his life, and would later be recorded by ethnologist Joseph

Niehardt and commented upon at length by mythologist Joseph Campbell.

 

Other children have spiritual experiences too, though usually not as

dramatic as Black Elk's. Are these experiences the result of

hallucinations and infantile obsessions? Or are children capable of

genuine spirituality? This is no small question: it is one that has

exercised the greatest poets, philosophers, and psychologists. And it

is the hub on which the discussion in The Radiant Child turns.

 

Jesus said that " whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a

child will never come to it " ; Lao Tze observed that " one who is

weighty in virtue resembles an infant child. " In his famous

poem " Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early

Childhood, " Wordsworth wrote:

 

....trailing clouds of Glory do we come

 

From God, who is our home:

 

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

 

William Blake felt similarly; like Wordsworth, he saw childhood as a

time when perception is clear and fresh, full of wonder and

amazement, and the infant as the bearer of otherworldly grace.

 

Freud, on the other hand, viewed infants as masses of primitive

instincts. Later, the behaviorists would regard the newborn as

a " blank slate " on which culture and experience inscribe their

influences. And the cognitive psychologists (including Piaget) would

theorize that the infant possesses only a bundle of undeveloped

sensorimotor structures that by adolescence will mature into abstract

thinking. " So who is right, " asks Armstrong, " the behaviorists or

Wordsworth? Freud or Christ? "

 

The Freudian/behaviorist/developmentalist side of the debate is well

represented in the contemporary psychological and educational

literature, but these days there are few who speak for the child as a

spiritual being. Armstrong is one: " Emotional expressiveness,

spontaneity, and imagination, " he says, " are well-known

characteristics of childhood. However, what I am pointing to... goes

beyond these qualities. I am suggesting that children have access to

experiences which are not merely the product of fantasy, that

children are capable of levels of perception into what Abraham Maslow

called `the farther reaches of human nature.' "

 

The author makes it clear that he is not proposing that babies are

bundles of undiluted spirituality. He proposes two ways of looking at

children - as spirit coming down into flesh, and as bodies developing

expressive and cognitive abilities - and insists that both views are

right.

 

Armstrong goes to some length to explain and take issue with

transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber's " pre-trans fallacy " as

applied to childhood development. Wilber has claimed that many

theorists make the mistake either of reducing adult transpersonal

experiences to infantile origins (as did Freud, who regarded all

religious experiences as fantasies), or of exalting infantile

experiences of pre-personal unity to transpersonal status (as, in

Wilber's view, did Wordsworth, Bergson, Jung, and others who regard

the child as capable of spiritual insight). Wilber agrees with

Maslow, who believed that " The child is innocent because he is

ignorant. " However, Armstrong points out that if the infant is

incarnating from spiritual realms (as he believes is the case), then

some recollection of that transpersonal reality may persist, allowing

the child access to genuine and occasionally profound religious

experiences for which no groundwork could have been laid in the

present life. This is what the poets see in childhood - and what the

developmental psychologists miss. Armstrong argues that the child

comes into the world " with the acquired experience of many lifetimes

of existence within its psyche. "

 

Fortunately, the author is careful not to sentimentalize. He

recognizes that " radiant " children can also be exuberantly physical,

selfish, impetuous, and headstrong. " Belonging to both heaven and

earth, the radiant child dances into our lives as a bridge between

dark and light, body and spirit, ego and Self, the individual and

God. The radiant child spans and sings this wholeness in every fiber.

We would all be wise to listen. Even better to sing and dance along! "

 

The Everyday Genius: Restoring Children's Natural Joy of Learning -

And Yours Too, by Peter Kline (Great Ocean, 1988), $12.95, paperback

 

Peter Kline is a pioneer in the development of the ideas of Bulgarian

educator Georgi Lozanov. The Lozanov method is known in this country

by several names, including Superlearning, Optimalearning, whole

brain learning, and holistic learning. Kline prefers to call it

integrative learning. It is based on recent investigations into the

human growth process and the functioning of the brain, and there is

abundant evidence that it helps both children and adults learn more

and faster, and that it helps make learning fun.

 

As Kline underlines at the outset, learning is inherently an

absorbing activity. People who are involved in learning about

something they are passionately interested in don't have to be

coaxed; typically, they are so pleasurably involved in what they are

doing that they lose track of time.

 

In his experiments in the early 1970s, Lozanov discovered that

teaching (in the usual sense) insults the mind. We are accustomed to

teaching by telling people what to do and how to do it; but this only

deadens curiosity and creates confusion. Why not instead find out

what the person wants to learn, give an overview of the scope of

information available, and then begin filling in details? Kline gives

the example of how an innovative teacher helped a group of miners

learn to read. First, the teacher asked the miners about themselves,

tape recorded their stories, transcribed them, and asked each miner

to read his own words. " The man would labor over the first few words

before recognizing them. Then he would usually exclaim, `Well, now,

these are my words.' After that, the words would begin to flow from

his mouth and take on some of the cadence of a man speaking, not just

an awkward reading. " The next step was to find out what the miners

wanted to read - which turned out to be instruction manuals for their

equipment. Instruction manuals are not easy reading, but the miners

were motivated and learned to read them remarkably quickly. One

wonders whether they would have done as well with Dick and Jane.

 

Kline believes that every person's potential for learning is

virtually limitless, and that - given an educational program whose

top priority is producing natural learners rather than obedient

factory workers - it is possible for an entire society to blossom

with creativity. " In our time, " he writes, " excellence is not a

priority. Because we have been primarily interested in the futile

search for security, we have spent our private funds on the

accumulation of property and wealth as opposed to experience and

education, while public funds have maintained the economy and defense

industry. They might instead be used to develop the highest possible

level of cultural excellence. " In most contexts, this might come

across as a utopian fantasy. But here - given that Kline is laying

before us proven ways to ignite anyone's passion for learning - we

are in fact being presented with a thoroughly realizable, practical

alternative to civilization as we now conceive it. It is truly

sickening to think how much human potential is currently being

wasted, how many lives are being spoiled, by our schools' systematic

suppression of the spontaneous joy of learning. As I read The

Everyday Genius, I found myself longing for the kind of society that

would result if only the natural genius of every child were respected

and nurtured. Kline shows that we can have such a society, if only we

will alter our priorities and open ourselves to the joy of self-

discovery.

 

Related resources: Motherwork magazine, PO Box 23071, Winnipeg MB R3T

2B0, Canada; Unschooling Ourselves newsletter, PO Box 1014, Eugene OR

97440, USA.

 

Richard Heinberg is the author of Memories and Visions of Paradise:

Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Quest Books:

1995), Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth's Seasonal Rhythms

Through Festival and Ceremony (Quest Books: 1994), and A New Covenant

With Nature. He also publishes MuseLetter, an excellent monthly

newsletter exploring issues in cultural renewal. For further details,

visit www.museletter.com.

 

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 39, November-December 1996

 

http://newdawnmagazine.com.au/Article/

Schooling_Liberation_or_Mind_Control.html