Institutions Need Networks; Human Beings Need Communities
Dumbing Us Down: This new-world-order schooling would serve dinner, provide evening recreation, offer therapy, medical attention, among other services, and would convert the institution into a true synthetic family for children

Jonesreport | Jan. 8, 2008

John Taylor Gatto argues that 'We Need Less School, Not More':

"People who admire our school institution usually admire networking in general and have an easy time seeing its positive side, but they overlook its negative aspect: networks, even good ones, drain the vitality from communities and families. They provide mechanical ("by-the-numbers") solutions to human problems, when a slow, organic process of self-awareness, self-discovery, and cooperation is what is required if any solution is to stick."

"Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human; in that he differed from Plato. What is gained from consulting a specialist and surrendering all judgement is often more than outweighed by a permanent loss of one's own volition."

"This discovery accounts for the curious texture of real communication, where people argue with their doctors, lawyers and ministers... instead of accepting what they get... they frequently make their own food instead of buying it in a restaurant and perform many similar acts of participation. A real community is, of course, a collection of real families who themselves function in this participatory way."

"Networks, however, don't require the whole person, but only a narrow piece. If, on the other hand, you function in a network, it asks you to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part-- a highly unnatural act although one you can get used to. In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the pursuite of some limited aim. If you enter into too many of these devil's bargains, you will split yourself into many specialized pieces-- none of them completely human-- and no time is available to reintegrate them. This, ironically, is the destiny of many successful networkers (and doubtless generates much business for divorce courts and therapists of many varieties)."

"If we face the present school and community crisis squarely, with hopes of finding a better way, we need to accept that schools, as networks, create a large part of the agony of modern life. We don't need more schooling-- we need less."

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"Yet compulsory schooling in factory schools is a very recent, very Massachusetts/ New York development. Now, it is much harder to escape because another form of mass schooling-- television-- has spread all over the place to blot up any attention spared by school. Mass commercial entertainment, as addictive as any other hallucinogenic drug, has blocked the escape routes from mass schooling."

"Unlike communities, networks have a very narrow way of allocating people to associate... If the loss of true community entailed by masquerading in networks is not noticed in time, a condition arises in the victim's spirit much like the 'trout starvation' that used to strike wilderness explorers who ate only stream fish-- the eater gradually suffers for want of sufficient nutrients."

"Networks, like schools, are not communities, just as school training is not education. By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables, network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with their humanity intact, not kids, nt teachers, not administrators, and not parents."

"Networks divide people, first from themselves, and then from each other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being alive."

"Institutions, so say their political philosophers, are better at creating marching orders for the human race than families are; therefore they should no longer be expected to follow, but to lead. Institutional leaders have come to regard themselves as great synthetic fathers to millions of synthetic children, by which I mean all of us."

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"Large cities have great difficulty supporting healthy community life... mostly because of the constant competition of institutions and networks for the custody of children and old people. By isolating the young and old from the working life of places, and by isolating the working population from the young and old, institutions and networks have brought about a fundamental disconnection of the generations."

"Over ninety-percent of the U.S. population now lives inside fifty urban aggregations. Having been concentrated there as the end product of a fairly well-understood historical process, they are denied a reciprocal part in any continuous, well-articulated community. By redirecting the focus of our lives from families and communities to institutions and networks, we, in effect, anoint a machine our king."

"Nearly a century ago, a French sociologist wrote that every institution's unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally staked out for itself. Thus, the first goal of the postal service is not to deliver the mail, it is to provide protection for employment. The first goal of a permanent military organization is not to defend national security but to secure, in perpetuity, a fraction of the national wealth to distribute to its personnel."

"It was this philistine potential-- that teaching the young for pay would inevitably expand into an institution for the protection of teachers, not students-- that made Socrates condemn the Sophists so strongly long ago in ancient Greece."

"For 150 years, institutional education has seen fit to offer as its main purpose the preparation for economic success. Good education = good job, good money, good things. This has become the universal national banner, hoisted by Harvards as well as high schools. The absurdity of defining education as an economic good becomes clear if we ask ourselves what is gained by perceiving education as a way to enhance even further runaway consumption that threatens the earth, the air, and the water of our planet? Should we continue to teach people that they can buy happiness in the face of a tidal wave of evidence that they cannot?"

"What, after all this time is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing and arithmetic can't be the answer... It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as "low-class" material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff!"

"An important difference between communities and institutions is that communities have natural limits; they stop growing or they die. There's a good reason for this: in the best communities everyone is a special person who sooner or later impinges on everyone else's consciousness... However, networks, like schools, expand indefinitely, just as long as they can get away with it. "More" may not be "better," but "more" is always more profitable for the people who make a living out of networking."

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"The culture of schools only coheres in response to a web of material rewards and punishments. A's, F's, bathroom passes, gold stars, "good" classes, access to a photocopy machine. Everything we know about why people drive themselves to know things and do their best is contradicted inside these places."

"Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. What's gotten in the way is the theory that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up. That's an ancient Egyptian idea symbolized by the pyramid with an eye on top-- everyone is a stone defined by its position on the pyramid-- it signals a worldview of minds obsessed with the control of other minds, obsessed by dominance and strategies of intervention to maintain that dominance."

"The humming of the great hive society foreseen by Francis Bacon, and by H.G. Wells in The Sleeper Awakes, has never sounded louder than it does to us right now. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet, and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly."

"Individuality, family, and community, on the other hand, are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of "one-right-way." The schools we've allowed to develop can't work because the structure is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Official favor, grades, or other trinkets or subordination have no connection with education; they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not of freedom."

"Sixty-five years ago, Bertrand Russell said mass schooling was a scheme to artificially deliver national unity by eliminating human variation and by eliminating the forge that produces variation: the family-- a recognizably American student: anti-intellectual, superstitous, lacking self-confidence, less "inner-freedom"

"Schools, I hear it argued, would make better sense and be better value as nine-to-five operations or even nine-to-nine ones, working year-round. We're not a farming community anymore, I hear, that we need to give kids time off to tend the crops. This new-world-order schooling would serve dinner, provide evening recreation, offer therapy, medical attention, among other services, and would convert the institution into a true synthetic family for children-- better than the original one for many poor kids, it is said-- and this would level the playing field for the sons and daughters of weak families."

"Yet it appears to me that schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities. They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other's lives."

-- John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down