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Self-Determined, Free Agents: How Would the Modern Schooling System Handle the Spirit of Early America?
Old-thinker news | Dec. 8, 2007
By Daniel Taylor
"Students were to learn to
think of themselves as employees competing for management. Not
as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as
self-determined, free agents." -- John Taylor Gatto,
The
Underground History of American Education
John Taylor Gatto's
"The Underground History of American Education" is an
incredible journey from the early beginnings of modern schooling to
its present day form which now threatens to squelch the fiery
passion, zeal and self determined nature that made America strong.
Having only read the first two chapters, the incredible amount of
insight found within its pages has already resonated with me as I
feel compelled to write this commentary. John's piercing commentary and observations can be readily
and intuitively recognized by anyone who has gone through the public education
system as being spot on. The manufacturing of "incomplete people"
who do not threaten established order is the game.
Free thinking and
independent individuals are the arch enemy of mechanized systems of
oppression. Easily managed, predictable "cookie cutter" people are the ideal
human resource, which happens to be the way the architects of modern
schooling view the majority of humanity; as human resources.
"Self-Determined,
free agents", as Mr. Gatto calls them, - I'll call them
renegades - were free to do as they
wished in a society in early America that had very little managerial
control over such individuals. Thomas Edison, George Washington, and
Benjamin Franklin are a few of the widely known historical
characters that have so impacted our country. They disobediently ran away from
apprenticeships, destroyed train cars in the process of conducting
scientific experiments, and had very little if any official
"schooling". But yet, they ended up to be some of the most well
known, most admired and most influential people in American history.
John Taylor Gatto
speaks of this self determined drive found in Thomas Edison,
"When I was a schoolboy in
Monongahela, I learned how Thomas Edison left school early
because the school thought him feeble-minded. He spent his early
years peddling newspapers. Just before the age of twelve he
talked his mother into letting him work on trains as a
train-boy, a permission she gave which would put her in jail
right now. A train-boy was apprentice of all work. Shortly
afterwards a printer gave Edison some old type he was about to
discard and the boy, successfully begging a corner for himself
in the baggage car to set type, began printing a four-page
newspaper the size of a handkerchief about the lives of the
passengers on the train and the things that could be seen from
its window.
Several months later, twelve-year-old Edison had five hundred
subscribers, earning a net profit monthly about 25 percent more
than an average schoolteacher of the day made. When the Civil
War broke out, the newspaper became a goldmine. Railroads had
telegraph facilities so war news was available to Edison as
quickly as to professional journalists, but he could move it
into print sooner than they could. He sold the war to crowds at
the various stops. "The Grand Trunk Herald" sold as many as a
thousand extra copies after a battle at prices per issue from a
dime to a quarter, amassing for Edison a handsome stake.
Unfortunately, at the same time he had been experimenting with
phosphorus in the baggage car. One thing led to another and
Edison set the train on fire; otherwise there might never have
been a light bulb." [1]
George Washington, the first
President of the United States, who had all but two years of
official schooling, is described by Gatto,
"George Washington was no
genius; we know that from too many of his contemporaries to
quibble. John Adams called him "too illiterate, too unlearned,
too unread for his station and reputation." Jefferson, his
fellow Virginian, declared he liked to spend time "chiefly in
action, reading little." It was an age when everyone in Boston,
even shoeblacks, knew how to read and count; it was a time when
a working-class boy in a family of thirteen like Franklin
couldn’t remember when he didn’t know how to read.
As a teenager, Washington
loved two things: dancing and horseback riding. He pursued both
with a passion that paid off handsomely when he became
president. Large in physical stature, his appearance might have
stigmatized him as awkward. Instead, by developing the agile
strength of a dancer and an equestrian, he was able to
communicate grace through his commanding presence, élan that
counterpoised his large build at any gathering.
Washington had no schooling
until he was eleven, no classroom confinement, no blackboards.
He arrived at school already knowing how to read, write, and
calculate about as well as the average college student today.
Following George to school at
eleven to see what the schoolmaster had in store would reveal a
skimpy menu of studies, yet one with a curious gravity:
geometry, trigonometry, and surveying. You might regard that as
impossible or consider it was only a dumbed-down version of
those things, some kid’s game akin to the many simulations one
finds today in schools for prosperous children—simulated
city-building, simulated court trials, simulated
businesses—virtual realities to bridge the gap between adult
society and the immaturity of the young. But if George didn’t
get the real thing, how do you account for his first job as
official surveyor for Culpepper County, Virginia, only two
thousand days after he first hefted a surveyor’s transit in
school?
For the next three years,
Washington earned the equivalent of about $100,000 a year in
today’s purchasing power."
[2]
Gatto also writes of the dramatic
life of Benjamin Franklin, who began school at third grade age and
quit when he would have been in the fifth grade. "As a writer,
politician, scientist, and businessman, Franklin had few equals
among the educated of his day - though he left school at ten,"
writes Gatto. [3]
"At twelve he was bound
apprentice to brother James, a printer. Aftera few years of
that, and disliking his brother's authority, he ran away first
to New York and soon after to Philadelphia where he arrived
broke at the age of seventeen.
...
"Young Ben was yanked from
grammar school and sent to another type less ritzy and more nuts
and bolts in colonial times: the "writing and arithmetic"
school. There under the tutelage of Mr. Brownell, an advocate of
"mild, encouraging methods," Franklin failed in arithmetic:
'At ten years old I was
taken home to assist my father in his business....
Accordingly I was employed in cutting wick for candles,
filling the dipping mold and the molds for cast candles.
Attending the shop, going on errands, etc. I disliked the
trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my
father declared against it.'
There are other less
flattering accounts why Franklin left both these schools and
struck out on his own at the age of ten—elsewhere he admits to
being a leader of mischief, some of it mildly criminal, and to
being "corrected" by his father—but causation is not our
concern, only bare facts. Benjamin Franklin commenced school at
third-grade age and exited when he would have been in the fifth
to become a tallow chandler’s apprentice.
[4]
Franklin would go on to be a
leader in multiple fields and an outrageously successful
entrepreneur. Certainly the way
it used to be and the way it is are two drastically
different things.
Ask yourself: How
would the modern system of schooling in America handle the likes of
George Washington, Thomas Edison, or Benjamin Franklin? Would they
be medicated out of their minds and tamed into a safe and easily
managed manner as a young energetic colt is broken into becoming a
domesticated animal? Perhaps labels like Attention Deficit Disorder
would be bestowed upon them? Would they be festooned with labels
marking them for future remediation?
How could these men
have achieved their exploits as "un-schooled" individuals? Well
schooled individuals are the successful ones, we are told. The
un-schooled are assigned to hard labor and menial tasks.
Perhaps the path to
understanding, prosperity, and an educated mind, as John Taylor Gatto believes,
is found purely through self-directed study, observation, and exploration.
The problem is, modern schooling doesn't allow for this. We all sit
in the same classroom every day, follow the same manufactured
curriculum, and are given little chance to take on tasks of great
responsibility to test ourselves and gain insight into our own soul.
Is that what the target of modern schooling is, the free human
spirit? I say we take it back.
------
The Underground
History of American Education is available for free online at:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
------
Citation:
[1] Gatto, John Taylor "The
Underground History of American Education" Oxford Village
Press, New York, 2006. p.
24.
[2] lbid p. 30-31
[3] lbid p. 26
[4] lbid p. 25-27
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