I'm sympathetic to Gatto's arguments and also intrigued by alternative schooling models, but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe? Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility?
> Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility?
I don't, but I like it that way. I get to judge the man and the merits of his essays and arguments on their own. In that light, he makes very compelling cases. He certainly writes like a man who knows what he is talking about. My favorite is his essay that describes the whole premise of the school system was to raise factory workers that were not too dumb, not too smart to think for themselves -- echoed by George Carlin in many of his stand up routines
As the product of alternative methods of schooling I've thought about this a lot. I think the answer is that it is hard to scale individualized approaches.
You get economies of scale of everything is regimented and largely similar. It's easier to measure outcomes even if those outcomes are arbitrary, when everything is standardized.
What’s keeping it fringe is partly that schools do childcare, domestication and ranking well and that’s way over 90% of what the average person wants out of them. If education was a large part of what people wanted out of school we’d see a lot more experimentation and variety. As it is we don’t even have skill or competency grouped classes. If there is a country in the world where grade skipping is common I have not heard of it. Maybe age based grouping is the best thing for most children most of the time but there isn’t a government education system that doesn’t use it. That isn’t a system maximising for learning.
Basic literacy and numeracy are obviously great but the way instruction is structured is ludicrously inefficient in terms of using children’s time. You can teach a nine year old to read in 50 hours. The graduates of democratic schools like Sudbury or Summerhill don’t even have classes and they do fine in life.
School looks like an institution designed to get people used to sitting down, shutting up and doing as they’re told.
> [...] but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe?
A lot of people are employed by the school system. Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse.
> Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility?
John Gatto was most active in the 90's and 2000's (Wikipedia says Gatto had two strokes in 2011). He seemed to start his protest against school in the latter years of John Holt's rebellion:
In the traditional one room school house, once the student was beyond the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, teachers did very little teaching as we know it.
If you think about it, that is completely obvious. How could one person prepare lessons in all topics when the students range all over the ages 7 to 15? The answer: they did not even try. In fact, you can look at older text books and see they were designed around the idea of a lot of self-teaching, perhaps with only a few pointers here and there (and if you were very bright and dedicated, you did not even need pointers).
The teachers primary job was to assess. The children were assigned lessons and expected to read that lesson several times until the teacher could get around to quizzing them. Good students the teacher might deign to allow to ask questions afterwards. If the student did poorly but was clearly trying hard, the teacher might offer corrections and advice. Otherwise the teacher had a free hand to beat the student for the crime of being stupid or lazy or both.
In the 19th century, there was nothing weird about so-so students dropping out at the 4th or 5th grade level. Even the dedicated were done at age 14 or 15, unless they intended to be a teacher, doctor, lawyer, etc. The normal means of learning was through formal or informal apprenticeships: you were supposed to either educate yourself, or ingratiate yourself to a highly competent adult and learn at their elbow.
It is a modern fad to obsess over the teachers. In the old days of the one room school house, the teachers had to only meet a rather low bar of competence, and then the onus for learning was put on the student.
> Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse.
This is an uninformed generalization that I see around here quite a bit.
Gatto's ideas are actually not particularly fringe. There are certainly many teachers who are resistant to change for various reasons [1]. But there are also are many smart, dedicated people working hard to improve our schools, inside them and outside of them. I know several who have given the larger part of their careers, and given up much more lucrative opportunities, to create new models of schools. So why do our schools seem to be stuck?
The comment above implicitly makes the "Scott Walker" hypothesis: that schools are staffed by unmotivated, low-quality humans.
I'd like to offer a few other possibilities. [2] argues that schools are pinned between three competing goals: "democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions)." What looks like an intractable mess is really just the current political equilibrium of these goals.
[3] chronicles how schools became dominated by the values and structures of business over the 20th century--Taylorism, not the qualities of business celebrated on HN. The same forces that sometimes cause huge companies to become lumbering uncompetitive behemoths were imported into schools, most recently with the centralized technocratic accountability movement. It is hard to make change from within such an organizational structure.
The reason I took the time to write this, after a full day of work in a teacher preparation program, is that all this is intimately connected to tech. If you buy "Scott Walker," the prevalent anti-labor ideology that teaching is a routine low-skill job, you might also believe in disruption, that systemic change in education will come from technological solutions. Silicon Valley has no shortage of wealthy fools trying to automate education. (Ask where they send their kids to school.) [4] documents the lousy track record of educational technologies promising disruptive change; anyone working in ed-tech ought to have a story for why it's different this time. I'm more hopeful for design-based research and design-based implementation research approaches, but that's for another post.
Anyway, teaching and software development have a lot of similarities: they're deeply collaborative, creative activities which require balancing priorities on many axes and scales. The complexity of the work is often invisible to outsiders. It takes a long time to get good at it, there's a fair amount of personal style involved, and skill is hard to measure. I get that they're in pretty different socioeconomic positions at present, but I wish there were more thoughtful and supportive discourse between the two.
[1] Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study.
[2] Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American educational research journal, 34(1), 39-81.
[3] Callahan, R. E. (1964). Education and the cult of efficiency. University of Chicago Press.
[4] Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Harvard University Press.
Exactly -- imagine how hard it is for a single software developer to change the direction of a large corporation. Teachers trying to change the school system face a problem orders of magnitude harder than that.
If a private company fails over and over again it goes bankrupt and is dissolved. If a government department or organisation completely fails at their goal they’ll generally be given more money and resources. See many, many school districts in America, the CIA (failed to predict the fall of the USSR and 9/11), the Pentagon (Iraq and Afghanistan), the State Department (Let’s destroy Libya and Syria!)
Organisations very rarely reform or change. Usually they die and other successful ones take over their market niche. Where this doesn’t happen or happens very rarely things change very slowly.
Any competitor with the public school system has to compete with free at the point of access. Absent transferable budget per child local school systems have a huge advantage.
Thanks for the references. I have looked at some of them on google books.
The problem is not with the teachers, but with the system itself, which seems to resist change because of inertia. I read Gatto's and Holt's books maybe 15 years ago. They were a refreshing explanation for why I had found "school" to be such a miserable experience: no freedom, teach to the test, bullying (students pick on each other when they're miserable), the training to 'not care' about anything (ringing of the bells), etc.
I frequently meet people that were traumatized by their age-segregated school experiences. Gatto and Holt both advocated that children be 'educated' with experiences in the real world.
Nails that stick out get hammered down. What do you have to say about Gatto's criticisms in this 27-year old essay?
I feel like he's right on. No denying that growing up in US schools is a bad experience for a lot of people. After teaching for six years and developing ed-tech for two, I thought the most effective path would be doing a PhD, which is where I'm now.
A few quick terms and ideas for how these are being pursued today in the world of education... I'd love to hear other folks' thoughts on this too. We have such a deep tradition of idealistic, socially-engaged computer scientists imagining new technical and social futures.
1. "Stay in the class where you belong." [1] persuasively makes the case that there's not a pedagogical justification for tracking and offers strategies for enacting change. But it's a political issue; we're still in the aftermath of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which contributed to white flight and setting up separately-funded school districts. Integration through busing, etc. led to schools which were integrated on paper, but were segregated internally with tracking. There are a couple of pretty powerful This American Life episodes on the issue [2].
2, 3, and 4: ("Turn on and off like a light switch," "surrender your will to a predestined chain of command," "I determine what curriculum you will study") feel related. There are awesome school models focused on connected learning [2], project-based learning, constructionism. I don't know of a successful strategy for scaling these in the US, though Ole Iverson [3] leads some really exciting work integrating design into the curriculum at all levels in Denmark. The Summit schools seem to have decided to focus more on scaling than on answering the critiques in 2, 3, 4; they're partnered with Facebook to develop an online school platform. We'll see.
5, 6: ("your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth," "I teach children that they are being watched.") also go together.
I've suggested [4] here before; it's a Foucault-inspired analysis of how states exert power by insisting on legibility. For schools, this means centralized accountability. There's a new spin on this with learning analytics; [5] is an ethnography of the quantified self, exploring how things like fitness trackers become authoritative inner voices shaping our phenomenological experiences. Definitely a design consideration to keep in mind. I think there are strategic opportunities in the move to make CS a core part of the primary and secondary curriculum. One strand of this is developing critical computational literacies--undertanding the ways tech mediates our everyday experiences, imagining and enacting alternatives. Everything that's been said about (textual) literacy as a foundation for a participatory civic society increasingly applies to computation as well.
[1] Burris, C. C., & Garrity, D. T. (2008). Detracking for excellence and equity. ASCD.
[2] Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., ... & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. BookBaby.
[3] http://www.engagingexperience.dk/
[4] Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.
[5] Dudhwala, F. (2017). Doing the self: an ethnographic analysis of the quantified self (Doctoral dissertation).
Thanks for your comments here. Re: Brown vs Board of Education: Malcolm Gladwell's podcast has an interesting take about how the schools could have been much more effectively integrated:
> Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon
Made me think of Calvin and Hobbes - but there's conflicting evidence if this was the main inspiration behind the names [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down