Going to the moon didn’t really matter, it turned
out. I say that from the vantage point of my six decades living on
Planet Earth, but also because of something I once saw. It was at Booker
T. Washington High School where I watched an official astronaut – a
handsome, well-built man in his prime, dressed in a silver space suit
with an air of authentic command – try to get the attention of an
auditorium full of Harlem teenagers. It was the Board of Education’s
perfect template for dramatic success – a distinguished black man
leading ignorant black kids to wisdom. He came with every tricky device
and visual aid NASA could muster, yet the young audience ignored him
completely. I heard some teachers say, “What do you expect from ghetto
kids?” but I don’t think that explained his failure at all. The kids
instinctively perceived this astronaut had less control over his rocket
vehicle than a bus driver has over his bus. I think they had also
wordlessly deduced that any experiments he performed were someone else’s
idea. The space agency’s hype was lost on them.
This man, for all his excellence, was only some
other man’s agent. The kids sensed that his talk, too, had been written
by someone else – that he was part of what the Protestant theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr called the “non-thought of received ideas.” It was
irrelevant whether this astronaut understood the significance of his
experiments or not. He was only an agent, not a principal – in the same
way many school teachers are only agents retailing someone else’s
orders. This astronaut wasn’t walking his own talk but someone else’s. A
machine can do that.
It seems likely that my Harlem kids considered
going to the moon a dumb game; obviously I didn’t verify their feelings
scientifically but I knew a lot of them didn’t have fathers or much
dignity in their lives, and about half had never eaten off a tablecloth.
What was going to the moon supposed to mean to them? If you asked me
that question, I couldn’t answer it with confidence and I had a father
once upon a time...and a tablecloth, too.
If the truth were told, in my 30 years teaching
in New York City, sometimes teaching prosperous white kids instead of
Harlem kids, sometimes a mixed bag of middle class kids, I never heard a
single student – white or black – speak spontaneously of the U.S. space
program. When the Challenger space shuttle blew up, there was a
momentary flicker of curiosity but even that passed in an instant. Going
to the moon didn’t matter, it turned out, though the government threw
100 billion dollars into the effort.
A lot of things don’t matter that are supposed
to; one of them is well-funded government schools. Saying that may be
considered irresponsible by people who don’t know the difference between
schooling and education, but over 100 academic studies have tried to
show a compelling connection between money and learning and not one has
succeeded. Right from the beginning, those who ran schools told us that
money would buy results and we all believed it. So, between 1960 and
1992 the U.S. tripled the number of constant dollars given to schools.
Yet after 12,000 hours of government schooling, one out of five
Americans can’t read the directions on a medicine bottle.
After 12,000 hours of compulsory training at the
hands of nearly 100 government-certified men and women, many high school
graduates have no skills to trade for an income or even any skills with
which to talk to each other. They can’t change a flat, read a book,
repair a faucet, install a light, follow directions for the use of a
computer, build a wall, make change reliably, be alone with themselves
or keep their marriages together. The situation is considerably worse
than journalists have discerned. I know, because I lived in it for 30
years as a teacher.
I once gave a workshop in what the basic skills
of a good life are as I understand them. Toward the end of it a young
man rose in back and shouted at me: “I’m 25 years old, I’ve lived a
quarter of a century and I don’t know how to do anything except pass
tests. If the fan belt on my car broke on a lonely road in a snowstorm
I’d freeze to death. Why have you done this to me?”
He was right. I was the one who did it just as
much as any other teacher who takes up the time young people need to
find out what really matters. I did it innocently and desperately,
trying to make a living and keep my dignity, but nevertheless I did it
by being an agent of a system whose purpose has little to do with what
kids need to grow up right. My critic had two college degrees, it turned
out, and his two degrees were shrieking at me that going to school
doesn’t matter very much even if it gets you a good job.
Does going to school matter if it uses up all the
time you need to learn to build a house? If a 15-year-old kid was
allowed to go to the Shelter Institute in Maine, he would be taught to
build a beautiful post-and-beam Cape Cod home in three weeks, with all
the math and calculations that entails; if he stayed another three weeks
he’d learn how to install a sewer system, water, heat and electric. If
any American dream is universal, owning a home is it – but few
government schools bother teaching you how to build one. Why is that?
Everyone thinks a home matters.
Does going to school matter if it uses up the time you need to start a
business, to learn to grow vegetables, to explore the world or make a
dress? Or if it takes away time to love your family? What matters in a
good life?
It surprises me how many graduates leave college
assuming they know what matters because they got straight “A”s. If we
can believe advertisements, what matters to these people most is the
personal ownership of machinery: blending machines, cooking machines,
driving machines, picture machines, sound machines, tooth-brushing
machines, computing machines, machines to kill insects, deliver
intimacy, send messages through wires or the naked air, entertainment
machines, shooting machines and many more mechanical extensions of our
physical self. Indirect control over even more ambitious machines seems
to matter a lot, too: flying machines, bombing machines, heart and lung
machines, voting machines and a great variety of other mechanical
creations.
All these devices are meant to defeat what
otherwise would occur naturally if they didn’t exist. They are all
machines to beat human destiny and confer on human beings magical powers
and the reach and longevity of gods.
Here we are, well-machined yet lost in a tunnel
of loneliness, cut off from each other, disliking ourselves, envying
those with superior machines, looking for self-respect and significance.
We have fewer and worse human ties than seems possible if machines
justified all the time and money spent on them.
I include, of course, the social machinery of
school in this critique. From age five to age 21 there are exactly
140,160 hours. We spend 46,720 of them in sleep and of the remaining
93,000 odd hours, 42 percent are spent watching TV from a chair or
sitting in a school seat. Something is wrong here. What is going on? How
much do these seemingly essential machines matter? What are they
essential for? Each one taken separately can easily be justified, but
taken altogether: What are they doing to us? What really matters?
John
Taylor Gatto was New York State Teacher of the Year prior to resigning
from teaching because he didn’t want to do any more harm to children. He
is the author of the best-selling books Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum
of Compulsory Schooling, The Underground History of American Education,
and Weapons of Mass Instruction. This essay is part of a longer
piece published in Natural Life Magazine in 1994, shortly after it
was presented by Gatto as a commencement address.
