Those last two would make certain that no skills useful for independent existence were imparted by the state’s schools. What is learned hands-and-brain-together is retained for life. What is memorized in the mind only comes and goes.
That this reliably produces “good little Germans” is why Fichte remains known as the Ur-Vater (ancestral sire) of Naziism. You will recognize it as our progressive public education too, as our social democrats began importing the model from Prussia a century and a half ago and by a century ago had succeeded in making it overwhelmingly dominant here in the United States.
I’m doubting many of you want to raise your children to be good little Germans. So, what’s the alternative? It’s quite simple actually.
Well before I had children, I had two authors in the field of optimum-personality psychology whose research pointed to the fact that we are not judged on intellect, we are not judged on grades—we are judged on evident personal skills. Especially noteworthy are interpersonal skills and perhaps even more so gender-crossover skills; that is, when a woman is handy with tools or can show off sports prowess or a man can cook or comfort a distraught child—the top slots in society go to such “androgynous” folk with whom both genders can quickly feel rapport.
What are such skills? Almost anything you can think of. I was at a party once where the hostess, a corporate CEO, suddenly returned in her high school spirit-squad cowgirl costume with a lariat and proceeded to put on a dazzling three-minute show of jumping in and out of her spinning loops. It left no doubt she was impeccable in her approach to things and a person comfortable being in charge and the center of attention (not to mention announcing, “I’m the same size I was twenty years ago.”)
Donald Kennedy, when president of Stanford, was a regular customer at my store. Once, as he was making a purchase, a 4-year-old boy admiring the adjacent sunglass spinner rack went to remove a pair and, when the lanyard caught, pulled the entire display onto the floor at Kennedy’s feet. The mother, right behind, was frozen in mortification.
What did Kennedy do? Without missing a beat he squatted down to eye-level with the boy and calmly said, “Here, let me help you.” And they began busily to refill the display. “Let’s put it back up,” he gently suggested. “What do you think… did we get it right?” When the boy said, yes, he turned to me, “Do you think we did a good job?” “Anytime either of you want a job merchandising my store, you’re hired,” I responded. He gave the much-relieved mom a reassuring smile and was out the door.
In those microcosms, skills were on ample display that these were people who would impact the lives of others for the better. We notice all such competencies. Some, such as the ability to speak from the heart and say what needs to be said or to be able to listen attentively to another, are more cardinal, but the takeaway here is that the more such skills we have to contribute to the whole, the more the whole will value us.
I’m going to guess you’d prefer a goal of having your children be successful in the real world and esteemed by society rather than to become an obedient functionary of the state.
Me too. So imagine my delight when I came across a school for my three sons that had, going back to its founding in 1925, specifically rejected the whole Fichte-Mann-Dewey statist approach to schooling, preferring “to do the exact opposite in every instance.”
So here it is in all its simplicity: The travesty of our public schools is that they purport to prepare our children for the real world by keeping them hermetically sealed from it. If you want your children to succeed in the real world, put them in the real world.
You don’t even have to be artful about it. The real world takes care of everything and is the best of all teachers. Children who are the products of real-world trial and effort run circles around those who exit the bell jar of school. In the real world, children have the opportunity to self-actualize, to get on the road to mastery, to have their rough edges knocked off, to get grounded in how things really work.
Some general ideas.
PLAY! What is the most powerful force in all of society? The human imagination. And the crucible in which imagination forms? …play. This, by the way, is why our schools have continually limited play and kept it supervised, acting like there are better uses of students’ time. You want free play, not supervised play. And you want the full variety of play—climbing, for instance, teaches problem-solving in real time (great as a foundation for mathematics) and risk-assessment skills.
What Brian Sutton-Smith (another of my authors) called “galumphing” is the high hilarity of being totally immersed in a madcap moment. Strive to achieve it at least once a day as it floods the brain with endorphins and lays the foundation for outside-the-box thinking. Play is essential to a whole host of bodily coordination functions, some of which are critical to intellectual development.
Mastery—What turns your kids on? What do their own unique talents lead them to? As you detect them find your kids arenas to try them out. If your child heads off to college with 5000 or even 2000 hours toward mastery in whatever area, they already have an “unfair” advantage in life. Be more concerned about what your child is drawn to and wants to stick with than your adult evaluation of how lucrative or intellectual or esteemed the field is—there are lots of nuanced layers to sussing out mastery.
Mentors—The best arenas involve mentors who have those same skills. We’d send the boys off for six, eight, twelve weeks at a time to be mentored. We laid no ground rules or conditions; we wanted them to experience differing forms of adult authority. But mostly we wanted them getting deep experience from successful people in the area they seem to be headed to. “Micro” mentors and tutors for just an hour or three a week help too. This worked gangbusters for us.
Travel—By age twelve, we wanted the boys out in the world away from us for extended periods under the supervision of other adult mentors. By age 15, we wanted them in foreign countries. There’s no more real-world experience than having to adapt to new places, new household rules, new cultures, new languages.
Adventure—My business partner and I would take our sons, starting at age 12, deep into the Grand Canyon well beyond other hikers and with no contact with the outside world. The oldest got his skin-diving certification, the youngest sky-diving lessons. Such experiences build resourcefulness and are incredible confidence-builders.
And, in general, take every one of Fichte’s goals and shred it. Make their time their own. (Our oldest states with the young people he now mentors, “Education does not even start until you realize your time is your own.”) Never pass up a quality program or opportunity in sports, music, acting and improv, public speaking, intelligent conversation, caring for others, making things, doing things, letting hands and brain function together.
Do not micro-manage this process. Do not be a hover parent. Let them own it; that’s the only way it can work.
To answer the question, I have no idea why people default to saying the things they say. I do know it’s important to get your children real-world skills, and I do think the above ideas are part of the way to go about it. I also strongly suspect that keeping them out of schools these days is a great step in the right direction.
From a libertarian perspective, a pox on both their houses.
Our middle son wanted to attend high school in order to play baseball (his older brother had skipped high school in favor of real-world experiences). He went two years in San Mateo County, California, a heavily progressive area and two years in Denton County, Texas, a heavily conservative area.
What was the difference? On the surface, night and day. The personnel at the progressive school were surly and glum turf toadies busily protecting their personal interests, late to every appointment and acting put-upon to every request. At the conservative school, everything was handled pronto with alacrity and dispatch and a smile, your input was appreciated… or made to seem that way.
Below the surface, the schools could hardly be more similar… the same rules of comportment, the same dull classrooms, the same sameness day-in, day-out…
What is wrong with our American schools?
One, they purport to be preparing our children for lives in the real world while keeping them hermetically sealed from it.
Two, they do not even respect our children’s American rights much less teach them how to employ them.
In short, our schools are more geared to cranking out “good little Germans” than rowdy Americans.
Fortunately for my sons, we were able to get them an American education through 8th grade, at a school founded in 1925 modeled on the 19th-century American “little red schoolhouse” and on Quaker communitarian principles. In that tradition, we are all equally children of God with our opinions and decisions worthy of respect even if we are only in nursery school! If you’d rather stay in the sandbox than come in for the reading lesson, that is your business. You had your full arsenal of American rights, and they were respected. Your day, your education belong to you… no one else.
Did this lead to chaos? You betcha… 3rd- and 4th-grade classes could be Bedlam, but by 8th grade, you were looking at some marvelously prepossessing students who were not at all jaded like their public-school and prep-school counterparts. [If you are curious to know details, search Quora for: Charles Tips “Peninsula School”]
As my sons got older, they began mixing in sports activities with public-school kids, and I was alarmed. In an area where people were paying a million dollars and up for homes in order to get their kids into a highly-regarded school system, the kids I was seeing were unable to look me in the eye, were overly deferential, many of them with nervous tics. Ten-, twelve-, fourteen-years-old and already showing scars from their school experience. I was profoundly puzzled.
Then, when the oldest was in seventh-grade, education reformer John Taylor Gatto came for a lecture tour in the Bay Area, and he wanted to see Peninsula School first-hand. I quickly volunteered to be his guide and driver, which afforded me much opportunity to talk with him.
It turns out, according to Gatto, that our school system was imported from Prussia to serve the progressive purpose of “dealing with the immigrant problem.” It had been designed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte after the Prussian loss to Napoleon at the battle of Jena in 1806. He decided the problem was that the conscripted farmers and craftsmen who had simply walked off the battlefield back to their farms and shops were too independent of the state. He created the following innovations to the Volksschule system in order to produce
“workers who will not strike, citizens who will not revolt, soldiers who will not disobey orders”
- Grades, to show that your work is not your own and is to be performed for only subjective approval and not for any tangible reward.
- Bells, to mark class periods to enforce the sense that your time is not your own.
- Homework, to show that your private time may be imposed on by the state.
- Rows and columns of desks, to instill a sense of isolation within regimentation.
- A campus lacking privacy, with no place on the school grounds to escape scrutiny, a sense of personal privacy cannot form.
- Most importantly, a high-sounding curriculum, that avoids teaching any processes start to finish but requires instead the memorization of disjointed facts so that commercially useful skills that would impart independence are not acquired.
You will recognize that as the hallmarks of our progressive education system, unchanged in any important respect in two centuries. It is not a system designed to produce robustly sovereign citizens (as we are constitutionally guaranteed to be) but instead readily conforming and dutiful subjects.
This is not a system that will ever teach the liberal values of our heritage. It does not even teach progressive values. Rather, it conditions our children to be inert, some of them to the point of being whiny snowflakes highly in need of the structure and assurances only progressive institutions can provide. We’ve “progressed” to the point that minimum-wage laws are being used to eliminate the student-job experience, one of the last vestiges of American experience that could give youth an alternative productive outlook.
As we clamor for better schools, progressives respond by putting even more loyal progressives on the payroll. In my day, there was one admin for every ten teachers. Now there are eleven, with this result:
We want change; they double down on the statist result they want. Conservatives seem to think they can follow the same patterns and get a different result if only they are efficient and smiley. And our private prep schools tend to be the same sorry model, just on steroids.
Gatto suggested to me in one of our talks that we as a nation would be better off tomorrow if we closed down all the public schools today. At that time, I thought he’d jumped out the window on me. Today, I am prepared to say that if we want to stop the slow crawl to a bleak state-socialist future, we will get the public sector out of the education business as soon as we can.
The funny thing is, the United States adopted an approach to schooling that is anti-democratic and even anti-education.
The United States is founded on republicanism, the ultimate democratic approach in which we the people are conceived as full citizens endowed with significant rights enabling us to take highly active roles in the private and civil spheres but also in a public sphere limited to enumerated powers and dedicated to support of citizen involvement. Our “little red schoolhouse” system that served the needs of an agrarian nation through the 19th and, in some places, well into the 20th century we firmly rooted in civil society.
Since late in the 19th century, we in the US have been attempting to supplant that heritage with the progressive preference for the high modern state, state in the political science sense of sovereign rule with the people subjects, owing duties and hoping for privileges. A state does not welcome democratic processes that possess any true robustness, and so both education and health care are moved to the public sphere to allow greater political control.
Needless to say, this is quite a clash of worldviews with a large bearing on what education should be. We in the US are part-and-part, much more so than the social democracies of Europe who lack our foundation in individual freedom, and it is a hot question now where the tide is headed. What is our statist schooling like, and what would republican schooling be like?
Statist Schooling
The following information I got from lengthy discussions with John Taylor Gatto. Because corroborating accounts are near impossible to find, I confirmed it in a meeting with Nel Noddings.
In 1806, Napoleon trounced the Prussians at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt, setting off a lot of national soul-searching. Johann Gottlieb Fichte decided the problem was that the non-aristocratic classes were too independent (many farmers and craftsmen, impressed as soldiers, had simply walked off the battlefield and headed home). He determined to fix that with a major educational system revision, one with the goal, as he defined it, of
Workers who will not strike, citizens who will not revolt, soldiers who will not disobey orders.
Fichte's redesign for the Volksschule contained the following innovations, all geared to making students more deferential to authority. (Aristocratic youth would continue to attend the Realschule where they would learn horsemanship, sword fighting and so on.)
- Grades, to show that your work is not your own and is to be performed for only subjective approval and not for any tangible reward.
- Bells, to mark class periods to enforce the sense that your time is not your own.
- Homework, to show that your private time may be imposed on by the state.
- Rows and columns of desks, to instill a sense of isolation within regimentation.
- A campus lacking privacy, with no place on the school grounds to escape scrutiny, a sense of personal privacy cannot form.
- Most importantly, a high-sounding curriculum, that avoids teaching any processes start to finish but requires instead the memorization of disjointed facts so that commercially useful skills that would impart independence are not acquired.
Most Americans will recognize these features. It’s our American public school system. Horace Mann, secretary of education for Massachusetts, visited Berlin and adopted the Volksschule whole for his state. He then set about getting other states to adopt it and was roundly rejected. The existing “little red schoolhouse” system was happily geared toward creating cocky Americans. No one wanted a system meant to crank out good little Germans.
So, Mann took to pushing state legislatures on the Eastern seaboard to adopt his system as the solution to “the immigrant problem.” John Dewey added some assembly-line-like features to turn it into progressive education, and voilà ! our public schools, unchanged in any important respect since they opened in Berlin in 1814, two centuries ago.
The folly of this approach to education is that it purports to prepare our youth for the real world by providing them an utterly passive experience hermetically sealed from the real world. There is no way to claim that its goal differs in any important way from that of Fichte and Prussia.
Liberal Education
I happen to be steeped in liberal, or republican, education having not only sent my sons to a Quaker-founded school consciously modeled on our little red schoolhouse approach, I was so impressed by the superior results that I took a seat on the board for a few years.
The school, Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California, was founded in 1925 by Quaker activists and union leaders who sent off to John Dewey offering to hire one of his top graduates as director. Within two weeks, they paid the woman’s way back to Chicago and decided that they could not go far wrong if they simply did the opposite of the Dewey method in every respect.
My youngest son, now 28, summarized his experience at Peninsula and then a public high school this way in reply to an answer I gave here on Quora:
[My dad] is absolutely right about not sending your kids to conventional school. I went to a “hippy” school, really a transcendental Quaker school. There were no grades. You couldn’t tell how you fared with your classmates. And half of the day was recess. 3 hours to do whatever I wanted.
No grades? Yeah, no pressure of performance. Just a fantastic school environment that let you love learning.
3 HOURS? Yeah, 3 hours to figure out what to do with my own time. MY time. MY life.
I spent it — as with everyone else — pursuing other outlets for education. Whether it be in the art room, the weaving room, the clay room, the science room, the music room, the wood shop, or so much more.
I spent a lot of time in the wood shop and science room and clay room. That’s where I could create contraptions and potions and creatures. Starting in 5th grade, a group of friends and I would spend every Thursday afternoon in the library drinking tea, eating doughnut holes and playing anagrams with the librarian.
Every now and again, I enjoyed lazing around too.
But the point is I LOVED SCHOOL. In fact, I still love learning. That itch never went away.
I went to a public high school with grades and textbooks and homework and other students who have only spent their time in public schooling with underpaid teachers and it was incredibly dull and pointless and erroneous just like this sentence.
But I got good grades. Because I still liked learning. Even if I wasn’t the best student, I was still the teacher’s favorite, because I was engaged in class. I treated the teacher like the rest of my peers, not as an authority figure, which seems to be a rule taught in public schools.
I wish I had taken my dad’s advice and traveled the world instead of going to high school. It would have been a lot more impressive to colleges when I was applying.
(By the way, I never failed a class ever. Sorry, dad. But I did fail plenty of tests and assignments and refused to do homework I deemed a waste of time).
—Keaton Tips
The Essential Differences
So, how do we go about educating rowdy Americans instead of cranking out docile and obedient Germans? The keys are in Keaton’s comments.
In addition to doing the exact opposite of the Fichte-Dewey model in every respect…
Self-Actualization
The ability to steer one’s own life does not evolve from being directed by others. Starting in first grade, if you’d rather stay and play in the sandbox than go in for a reading lesson, your choice. This is your education, and you are expected to take ownership of it, or, as my oldest, Travis, presciently stated soon after graduating college, “Real education does not even begin until you realize that your time is your own.”
Meaningful Communication
In true Quaker tradition, even five-year-old nursery students are to be listened to with the same respect accorded the school’s director. All the way up, nursery through 8th, the class day begins and ends with a discussion. This discussion determines everything related to the class—what will be studied, plans for upcoming events, frictions resolved… Students learn to listen intently and speak from the heart as these discussions are always consequential.
The school lacks formal discipline systems. Everything is handled by discussion of the affected parties. By the upper grades, students are able to ground any issues that come up in an amazingly compressed amount of time, simply by “using their words.”
Mastery
Students who wanted to delve could delve all they wanted, and if the school’s array of craft classes, music and science labs, and so forth didn’t do the job, they’d figure out a way. The school was not much for computers, but one class had five students hot to work on computer animation, so funds were raised to build a lab. Those students often spent full days in that lab. At least two of them are now high up in the movie special-effects world.
One of those students was told by a leading film director that he had more and better special effects in his senior film on a $45K budget than he himself had had on his last movie project with a $28M special-effects budget.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfQYUEvIyms
Competence
Two of my favorite authors, Janet Spence and Bob Helmreich, held that we are not judged on IQ, we are not judged on our schooling, we are instead judged on our skills, particularly our interpersonal skills. There was far more emphasis in the Peninsula curriculum on practical know-how, doing projects start-to-finish, than on academics. There was also a high emphasis on risk-taking. Parents were told to expect a broken bone sometime in their child’s time at Peninsula. Look at the link, and you’ll see kids edging the “Big Building,” a 12-foot drop to the ground. Kids also eat their lunches atop “Flat Top,” a 60-foot sequoia that had been topped by lightning. These kids grow up knowing how to accomplish much and fear nothing.
Skepticism
What textbooks? Well, one class (4th grade as I recall) used one, one so bad that the students could punch holes in it, and took great delight in doing so. Lesson: Any kind of garbage can get published. Think for yourself and trust your instincts.
Constitutional Rights
One serious problem in our public schools is that not only are students not taught how to exercise their rights as citizens, courts have ruled that they may be denied their rights as they might conflict with the educational atmosphere. Bringing a gun to school was against state law, but all the other American rights were in full flourish.
You could go into a third-grade class and think the school was Bedlam itself, a complete course in anarchy given the riotous energy often in the room. And you would regularly see things go down unthinkable in a public-school setting: If you wanted to take a rare test with a friend, why not? Or once, my middle son and his friends, annoyed at a boy from the next class down, hog tied him and buried him under the big pillows in the loft where they held the class discussion. Discussion over, they went downstairs to class. The boy managed to untie himself, descend the stairs and shoot the finger at my son and each of his buds then storm out. As the kid seemed to feel he’d expressed himself fully, the teacher let it go without comment.
By 7th and 8th grade though, you were seeing real difference-makers, kids charged with purpose and with the know-how to back it up. In fact, one amusing aspect of the school was the visits from local high-school teachers to discover what was this school that produced such different students. I was present once when a Spanish teacher dropped in to learn about the place. As we approached the first class house (each class was in it’s own building), she noticed the impromptu bubblegum art decorating the doorway and broke out laughing.
What’s so funny? “This is a hippy school! I’d assumed it was a military school. My students from here are so polite and respectful… and engaged. They even sit erect in their desks. I really had just assumed it was some kind of military school.”
And that, to me, is how you go about producing rowdy, independent-minded Americans ready to speak their mind and roll up their sleeves and do the heavy lifting required to succeed at democratic process.
We have an education system functioning precisely as intended, which precludes imparting critical-thinking skills.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
When Napoleon routed the Prussians at Jena–Auerstedt in 1806, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, widely considered the ur-vater of Naziism, decided the problem was that the non-aristocratic classes were too independent of the state. Some, after all, had simply walked away from the battle and returned to their farms or shops. He determined to overhaul the volksschule system using this thinking:
If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will in any way other than what you wish him to will.
This was in order to create an educational system that would produce
Workers who will not strike, citizens who will not revolt, soldiers who will not disobey orders.
The methods Fichte conceived to achieve such a breaking of human spirit and independence from the state? These were his innovations
- Grades, to show that your work is not your own and is to be performed for only subjective approval and not for any tangible reward.
- Bells, to mark class periods to enforce the sense that your time is not your own.
- Homework, to show that your private time may be imposed on by the state.
- Rows and columns of desks, to instill a sense of isolation within regimentation.
- A campus lacking privacy, with no place on the school grounds to escape scrutiny, a sense of personal privacy cannot form.
- Most importantly, a high-sounding curriculum, that avoids teaching any processes start-to-finish but requires instead the memorization of disjointed facts so that commercially useful skills that would impart independence are not acquired.
That last one stands as particularly pernicious as process involves hands and brain working together—a mode of education that leads to lifelong learning of practical know-how… the kind of education that makes one independent.
The crowning absurdity here is that this method of education purports to teach its students how to function in the real world while hermetically sealing them off from it. There is no input to nor from the real world. Furthermore, failure is to be avoided at all costs. Where do we get critical-thinking skills? From trial and error in attempting to make things happen in the real world.
And so, when Horace Mann brought Fichte’s volksschule model back to his state of Massachusetts, where he was secretary of education, he was importing a scheme intended not to foster but to deny critical thinking, to deny practical knowledge, to deny self-actualization and key interpersonal skills. This was a system very much geared to producing “good little Germans,” that is, willing loyalists of the state. John Dewey later added some Tayloristic assembly-line features to streamline the process, and voilà ! our public school system, unchanged in any important respect for two full centuries.
Very simply, if you want your children to develop independence of mind and the ability to thrive by their own insights and abilities, do not put them in public school or in those private schools that are only our public schools on steroids. Do not rely solely on homeschooling. Put them in the real world. Finding them apprenticeships and mentorships will give them an unfair advantage over those who spend years butts-parked-in-desk.
If you read the write-ups of Dewey, he is a humanist and advocate of kids being kids. If you read Dewey direct (something I would not wish on anyone), he sounds more like he’s advocating kids being sorted out by the educational process to best serve society’s needs.
As for Fichte’s process, all Dewey basically did was streamline it.
They can't. That's the point.
In 1806, Napoleon trounced the Prussians at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt, setting off a lot of Teutonic soul-searching. Johann Gottlieb Fichte decided the problem was that the non-aristocratic classes were too independent. He determined to fix that with a major educational system revision, one with the goal, as he defined it, of
Workers who will not strike, citizens who will not revolt, soldiers who will not disobey orders.
Let's face it... sheep are easier to herd than self-confident and independent cats. And so Fichte's redesign for the Volksschule contained the following innovations, all geared to making students more deferential to authority. (Aristocratic youth would continue to attend the Realschule where they would learn horsemanship, sword fighting and so on.)
- Grades, to show that your work is not your own and is to be performed for only subjective approval and not for any tangible reward.
- Bells, to mark class periods to enforce the sense that your time is not your own.
- Homework, to show that your private time may be imposed on by the state.
- Rows and columns of desks, to instill a sense of isolation within regimentation.
- A campus lacking privacy, with no place on the school grounds to escape scrutiny, a sense of personal privacy cannot form.
- Most importantly, a high-sounding curriculum, that avoids teaching any processes start to finish but requires instead the memorization of disjointed facts so that commercially useful skills that would impart independence are not acquired.
Most Americans will recognize these features. It's our American public school system. Horace Mann, secretary of education for Massachusetts, visited Berlin and adopted the Volksschule whole for his state. He then set about getting other states to adopt it and was roundly rejected. The existing "little red schoolhouse" system was happily geared toward creating cocky Americans. No one wanted a system meant to crank out good little Germans.
So, Mann took to pushing state legislatures on the Eastern seaboard to adopt his system as the solution to "the immigrant problem." John Dewey added some assembly-line-like features to turn it into progressive education, and voilà ! our public schools, unchanged in any important respect since they opened in Berlin in 1814, two-hundred years ago.
Sticking with a pernicious system like that tells me that our state and federal governments prefer students leaving not only not self-confident but, more destructively, not self-actualized either. They must want subservience as an outcome. It also tells me that parents who subject their children to this system want at some level for them to learn to knuckle under.
It is past time to get rid of progressive education and get back to schools geared to familiarizing Americans with their rights (rather than alienating them from them) and happy to produce rowdy, robust, cocky and confident Americans.
[I should add that my source for this is a series of conversations with John Taylor Gatto and confirmed in a conversation with Nel Noddings. You won't find this elsewhere put this way; to educators both Mann and Dewey are heroes.]
Far harder than it needs to be, and we as a nation spend lots of money to make it so.
I'm one of those people who follow their own inner drumbeat. Long story short, after bopping around the world working freight ships off and on to put myself through college, I arrived back at dear alma mater at 23 in need of four classes to graduate, including one in social science. I didn't think much of "social science," especially at the freshman level. I found an upper-division psychology course on personality theory and talked the professor into letting me take it despite having no prerequisites.
That class was my first exposure to the idea of self-actualization and the ideas of Goldstein, Rogers and Maslow, the three biggees in the field. I was especially taken by Maslow's notion that a society that achieved eight percent self-actualizing at the top would become a self-actualizing society. I immediately recognized that as an echo of one of the most pernicious ideas in the history of mankind--The Elect of God (Unconditional election) or as I put it the conceit that God's grace is reflected in the social graces of the elite one in twelve or one in ten thereby marked as His Chosen. The rest of us are just hell-bound brutes to be endured while the Pearly Gates await our betters.
Trust me--all of this ties together. The next swing of the pendulum for me was a launch into my desired career in publishing. Two of my favorite authors were Janet Spence and Bob Helmreich, optimum personality theorists with up-to-date ideas on self-actualization. My takeaway from their gender studies, to keep this brief, was that we are not evaluated or rewarded based on intellect or education but on actual skills, especially social skills. Further, the highest slots in society go to the androgynous--people with enough cross-gender skills to relate well with and gain the respect of the opposite sex. The skills can be anything from calming an upset infant to entertaining a room with a guitar to listening well to others to being handy fixing things. We prize competency. Becoming competent is a big part of self-actualizing.
A few swings of the pendulum later, and my wife and I are raising three sons. We stumble onto Peninsula School, and soon I am realizing it is a very special place. I get myself elected to the board in large part to find out what the magic is. Peninsula had been founded in 1925 by writing to "Mr Public Education" John Dewey in Chicago seeking to hire one of his best disciples offering the director position and expenses paid to California. Within a few weeks, she had her way paid back to Chicago, and the consensus was that they couldn't go far wrong if they simply adopted the opposite of the Dewey method in every respect.
The school model that met that need was the old American little red schoolhouse, very much a product of our heritage in Enlightenment liberalism. If I had to characterize the Enlightenment, it was a reaction against the Calvinist notion of The Elect and against the idea that your sovereign lord was responsible for your soul even if he had to kill you to mend your wicked ways and get your soul to heaven. In short, we're all God's children, and that Quaker concept permeated the school--a nursery student deserves to be listened to with the same respect as the director.
The basic curriculum was play and free time, lots of crafts, a beginning-of-day and end-of-day class discussion for agenda-setting and conflict-resolution, fundamentals in the early grades and a bit of high-school prep in the upper grades, lots of class camping trips and all of it (except the camping trips) optional to the student, who is welcome to spend his/her entire day in the music room, the science room, building a fort or playing in a sandbox at their preference. In short, it's a nursery through 8th course in self-actualization. Typically, ten to thirty percent of each class of twenty or so go on to become National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists (the top 1% of PSAT takers) and they later carve out spectacular careers.
When my oldest was in 7th grade, John Taylor Gatto (Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling) came to visit the school and go on a lecture tour of the area. I volunteered to be his chauffeur. We discussed how the horrors of the French Revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon gave impetus to the Counter-Enlightenment, a return to some of the ideas of the Reformation but with religion increasingly squeezed out. A secular version of The Elect was very much part of Counter-Enlightenment thinking.
When Gatto told me we'd be better off tomorrow if we shut down all public schools today, I took him for a crank who'd just "jumped out the window" on me. He then explained that when Napoleon thumped the Prussians at Jena in 1806, it set off national soul-searching. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, later recognized as an early German Idealist (very much in the Counter-Enlightenment mold) philosopher, decided the problem was that non-aristocrat subjects were too independent of the state. A way was needed to produce, "citizens who will not revolt, workers who will not strike, soldiers who will not disobey orders."
And so he conceived the Volksschule for non-aristocratic children very much in the spirit of The Elect--it is wrong for these brutes to have agency and autonomy of their own; we need to bend them to serving the purposes of their betters. And so he conceived several innovations to do that. Grades would show that your work is for the subjective approval of your betters and undeserving of tangible reward. Bells would mark class time as a demonstration your time is not your own. Rows and columns of desks would enforce a sense of isolation within regimentation. Homework would prove the state may intrude on your private time. There should be no place on campus to escape scrutiny so that a sense of privacy cannot form. And, most importantly, lessons should consist of a high-sounding curriculum with no processes taught start-to-finish so that their heads are filled with memorized fragments without actual competency having a chance to develop. In short, stymie self-actualization.
Horace Mann, secretary of education for Massachusetts, reviewed the Volksschule in Berlin decades later and imported it for his state. So enthusiastic was he that he tried to sell educators in other states on it. They strongly preferred keeping the little red schoolhouse model, so he started peddling it to state legislators as the solution to the "immigrant problem," and it caught on in the East. John Dewey came along and pronounced it the way to go, tweaking it to make it more assembly-line like. And there you have it, our public school system with every feature designed to thwart self-actualization still intact.
If you don't teach children to self-actualize, don't be surprised if they find it difficult as adults. My wry prescription for raising self-actualized kids: Charles Tips' answer to What are good ways to prepare kids to become billionaires?
What we have now in the US is progressive education, virtually unchanged since Horace Mann brought the Prussian education system to Massachusetts in 1852, apart from some tweaking three generations later by John Dewey to make it more assembly-line like in keeping with the Taylorism (Scientific management) popular at the time. Progressives have been stalwart in guarding progressive education against precisely the types of reforms listed in the link in the question details as Progressive education. Either progressives have become schizophrenic or something is amiss here.
New York state adopted the Massachusetts system on a limited trial basis, but, much as he tried, Mann had little success in peddling his new educational methodology to other states as a replacement for their “little red schoolhouse” approach, a liberal orientation that did feature several of the elements listed in the link. Finally, Mann took to convincing state legislatures on the Atlantic seaboard that his new school system was the solution to “the immigrant problem,” and it steadily caught on.
But Mann had not imported the Prussian Realschule that taught the sons of aristocrats swordsmanship, horsemanship and other gentlemanly and military arts. He imported the Volksschule, or compulsory education for the non-aristocratic classes. And he imported the version as heavily modified by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, widely considered the Ur-Vater of Naziism.
Fichte had decided that the trouncing of the Prussian Army by Napoleon at Jena-Austerlitz in 1806 owed to the fact that many of the yeoman-class common troops simply disengaged and walked back to their farms or shops. He set out to change the Volksschule with the goal of producing, “citizens who would not revolt, workers who would not strike, soldiers who would not disobey orders.” When his version of the school opened in Berlin in 1814, it contained these education innovations.
- Grades would accustom students to the fact their work had no tangible worth and was to be performed on compulsion for the subjective, arbitrary even, judgment of their betters.
- Bells should mark periods of the day to enforce a sense that one’s time is not one’s own.
- Homework would demonstrate the ability of the state to intrude on personal time.
- Rows and columns of desks would enforce a sense of isolation within regimentation.
- Constant scrutiny in a campus designed prison-like with no place to avoid observation so that no sense of privacy could form.
Most important was a high-sounding curriculum that relied on memory alone with nothing taught heads-and-hands together and no processes taught start-to-finish so that competency could actually be acquired. And so generation after generation of German and then American youth were locked into an experience fully intended to make them stunted, docile and acquiescent.
I first got the details of this from personal conversations with John Taylor Gatto, very much a libertarian reformer. Because even I had a hard time believing the full extent of the anti-humanism reflected, I met with Nel Noddings, Stanford professor emeritus of the history of education. She readily confirmed Gatto to the hilt. It was every bit as pernicious as it sounds.
And you will recognize each of Fichte’s innovations as constants in American progressive education to this day, well more than a century and a half later. People look at the list of possible educational approaches marked in the link as “progressive education” and say, sure, why not? no brainer! And yet there is no change. And there will be no change for as long as parents are buying more house than they can afford just in order to get their kids into the “best” school systems.
We lucked into a private school for our sons—Welcome to Peninsula School that was not progressive but rather Quaker communitarian. The founders, in 1925 had written to Dewey in Chicago offering to pay the way out to California for a school director he was to select from among his top students. Within two weeks, they paid her way back to Chicago and decided that if they did the exact opposite of the Dewey method in every respect, they could not go far wrong. And so…
- There were no grades whatsoever. Instead student work was put on display in the “big building” leading to meaningful comments from the larger school community to the students.
- There were bells, hand-rung, but, even in first grade, if you preferred an alternative to joining the class, that was your business. Many people struggle to find what they like to do in life and what their passion is. Where does the problem lie? Is this a sign that our educational system has failed?
- There were homework assignments, for those who signed up to do them.
- No desks. Each class had its own table, built by students with adult help and replaced occasionally so that each student had a couple of chances to help design and build their classroom table.
- No scrutiny. There were all kinds of secret places around the campus and in the big building. You could build your own private “fort” if you wanted to.
- Academics were minimal—a bit of “highschool prep” in 7th and 8th grade. Everything was taught as a full process, head and hands together. Your time could be spent in wood shop, jewelry making, weaving, the clay room, the science room doing experiments, the music room, animation laboratory, drama creating your own plays all start-to-finish.
How did Peninsula compare with the educational desiderata listed under the Progressive Education link?
- Emphasis on learning by doing – hands-on projects, expeditionary learning, experiential learning
- Integrated curriculum focused on thematic units
- I watched the Spanish Armada complete with fire ships recreated in the “mud puddle,” the large shin-deep pond that formed on campus most every winter. I saw a 5-meter by 2-meter 3D map of California take shape from shoveled dirt and rope-marked gridlines. I saw an amazing foray into arithmetic in a third-grade class based on a stalk of brussel sprouts.
- Integration of entrepreneurship into education
- The class trips and other endeavors were financed by class money-making.
- Strong emphasis on problem solving and critical thinking
- Over by the nursery, five-year-old girls would be walking the boughs of live oaks twelve and fifteen feet off the ground as though they were sidewalks. It was common to see one or more students edging the two-inch rail around the big building. Students regularly ate their lunch atop “flat top,” the six-story tall sequoia that had been topped by lightning. Why? Climbing is problem-solving in real time. Nothing hones critical thinking like risk-taking. Parents were told there was an excellent chance their kids would get a cast during their time at Peninsula.
- Group work and development of social skills
- Each day began and ended with a class discussion about issues, next steps, what-ifs and so on—anything was open for discussion. Students learned to listen considerately and speak from the heart. What they decided in their own discussion was what happened—they determined their own reality.
- Understanding and action as the goals of learning as opposed to rote knowledge
- These kids had learned competencies, not rote knowledge.
- Collaborative and cooperative learning projects
- It was nothing but collaborative and cooperative. Students often collaborated on “tests,” even the whole class.
- Education for social responsibility and democracy
- These kids, unlike kids at progressive schools, enjoyed every one of the of their constitutional rights (except that bringing a gun to school would get you expelled).
- Highly personalized learning accounting for each individual's personal goals
- Integration of community service and service learning projects into the daily curriculum
- It was all about sense of community and adding to the community.
- Selection of subject content by looking forward to ask what skills will be needed in future society
- It wasn’t about guessing their future selves. It was “what works for us now.” Mastering that insures a self-actualized approach in the future.
- De-emphasis on textbooks in favor of varied learning resources
- Only one class used a textbook, and it was so atrocious and riddled with errors that the class tore it apart, which was the whole idea. Just because something is published doesn’t make it accurate.
- Emphasis on lifelong learning and social skills
- Assessment by evaluation of child's projects and productions
- Only by the community at large through meaningful conversations. Student art projects—scarves and shawls, pottery, carvings, paintings, would sell at the school’s annual auction for fantastic sums, and by the later grades, they were worth it!
How did it all turn out? Here’s my youngest son Keaton’s take (in reply to my answer What are good ways to prepare kids to become billionaires?):
Hello everyone,
One of the sons of the man who answered this question here.
I'd like to add a new perspective from the view of someone raised on the teachings laid out in the answer.
While I'm not a billionaire, there is definitely merit to what was said. My dad did indeed raise us in the way he describes.
First off, I'd like to state that I have no intention of becoming a billionaire. Screw that. That's a life sentence headache right there. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone.
But that's not to say I do not wish to be wealthy and successful. Personally, I'd like to live a life of comfort with the family I hope to one day support. That's most people's dream I think.
But the main lesson I learned from my father barely hinted at above is "shit happens."
What my goals are and what manifests in reality are two different things. Some of my ventures will fail. And I'm okay with that. They may all fail. Fine.
Invest in the process. I enjoy the pursuit. And so far, things have gone pretty well as a result.
My brother was a two-time Emmy award winning cinematographer before he was 30 as a result of loving what he does.
He is absolutely right about not sending your kids to conventional school. I went to a "hippy" school; really a transcendental Quaker school. There were no grades. You couldn't tell how you fared with your classmates. And half of the day was recess. 3 hours to do whatever I wanted.
No grades? Yeah, no pressure of performance. Just a fantastic school environment that let you love learning.
3 HOURS? Yeah, 3 hours to figure out what to do with my own time. MY time. MY life.
I spent it -- as with everyone else -- pursuing other outlets for education. Whether it be in the art room, the weaving room, the clay room, the science room, the music room, the wood shop, or so much more.
I spent a lot of time in the wood shop and science room and clay room. That's where I could create contraptions and potions and creatures. Starting in 5th grade, a group of friends and I would spend every Thursday afternoon in the library drinking tea, eating doughnut holes and playing anagrams with the librarian.
Every now and again, I enjoyed lazing around too.
But the point is I LOVED SCHOOL. In fact, I still love learning. That itch never went away.
I went to a public high school with grades and textbooks and homework and other students who have only spent their time in public schooling with underpaid teachers and it was incredibly dull and pointless and erroneous just like this sentence.
But I got good grades. Because I still liked learning. Even if I wasn't the best student, I was still the teachers favorite, because I was engaged in class. I treated the teacher like the rest of my piers, not as an authority figure, which seems to be a rule taught in public schools.
I wish I had taken my dad's advice and traveled the world instead of going to high school. It would have been a lot more impressive to colleges when I was applying.
(By the way, I never failed a class ever. Sorry dad. But I did fail plenty of tests and assignments and refused to do homework I deemed a waste of time).
There are some negative effects of this method.
Growing up I've been fascinated by so many things. I've seen myself down so many paths.
I've struggled for so long trying to focus on one skill, trade or career.
I still haven't. When I come across something new and exciting, I try my hand at it until I can consider myself decent at it.
But I'm okay with that. Sometimes those small quirks help out in the long run. Sometimes in the short.
And lastly, let it be known that there is not a single set of parents out there I would rather have than the ones I got. You can't pick your parents and my brothers and I hit the jackpot.
While my parents let us learn most things on our own, they let us make plenty of mistakes (they had a really tough time to get me to make any), they didn't try to structure our lives, they didn't force ideals or expectations upon us, and they encouraged our every interest. And they did so because they trusted us.
Oh, and we weren't a wealthy family. My dad came really close a few times. And to be honest, I'm glad we never were. I'm glad I grew up without that net. I'm afraid to think of who I may have been.
So not only is this great advice to raise a successful child, it is great advice to nurture a healthy family, rich or poor.
Love you dad, and to the readers, I hope this gave a little more insight. And I apologize if this came off as pompous. I'm just. . . passionate.
But one thing is clear to me—I’m open to evidence to the contrary—the list of educational directives is liberal, in the true sense of the word. It is what we had before progressive education and what we need to get back to. There is a reason progressives have kept progressive education from enjoying such reforms for fifteen decades and counting, and that reason is not the least bit commendable.
Conservatives differ. Some who incorporate their religion into their daily lives do not want to send their children into a secular world hostile to expressions of faith. Some simply object that conservative values are not taught in public schools. Others prize the public school experience and would prefer it even more regimented and strict.
The simple way to get at the heart of this issue is to forget political leanings and simply ask what you want for your children.
- You want them as adults to be able to competently chart their own course in the real world.
- You want them to be accomplished and on their way to mastery of a worthwhile discipline.
- You want them to be able to have noble traits--compassion, moral courage, patience, love of fellow man, ambition.
- You want them to boldly live their values.
- You want them to fit in, to be comfortable in social roles and to have the acumen to work their way into professional fields of their choosing.
Is that about it?
If that seems about right to you, whatever your politics, our public schools should be the last place you want your children. Why?
Number 1, in today's psychological jargon, would be a reference to self-actualizing. Our public schools are based on the Volkschule model that Horace Mann imported to Massachusetts from Berlin. It was designed specifically to prevent the non-aristocratic classes from becoming independent of the state. Bells would prevent students from developing a sense of control of their own time. Grades would teach students that their work was not for tangible reward but for the subjective approval of their betters. Homework would demonstrate that the state can intrude on personal time. Rows and columns of desks would impart a sense of isolation within regimentation. A campus designed with no place to avoid scrutiny would prevent a sense of privacy from forming. Most importantly, a high-sounding curriculum that avoided teaching any process from start to finish would fill young heads with disconnected mush while preventing actual competence from forming.
Rather than teach real-world skills, the point is to keep them hermetically sealed from the real world until after their personalities have formed.
Number 2, accomplishment and mastery, require an environment in which young people can dabble to discover what they like. Then they need to be able to devote their time to it. Our schools are not designed to accommodate this.
Number 3, get serious. Our schools foster low-profile knuckling under over standing up or reaching out. You engage in no meaningful conversations in school with anything on the line. You do not learn to speak from the heart nor to listen respectfully as others speak. You are not allowed to have impact and so there is no real point to communications at all. You engage only in trained-monkey exchanges prompted by the teacher.
Number 4, values? The only values offered are statist ones. You want to be bold? Go to the principal's office!
Number 5, nothing teaches socialization skills like abundant free play, and nothing is squelched in our schools like abundant free play. Professional skills come from learning processes start-to-finish. Most require hands and head together. Skills learned that way stay with you for life. Skills learned head-only don't stay with you nearly as well. How much hands-on do you get in our public schools?
You want your kids to succeed in the real world? Avoid our artificial indoctrination camps and put them in the real world.
We were fortunate to stumble on to Welcome to Peninsula School for our sons, founded on the old American little-red-schoolhouse method, the way rowdy Americans were educated through the 19th century and here and there until the 1930s or so. It is the student-driven anti-Volkschule method.
So, for us, it was just a matter of getting our three sons through public high school. The oldest announced he was having no part of it and started commuting to San Francisco to work at a company in Media Gulch. He apprenticed annually to a filmmaker in Austin. He traveled for many months with a woman writing a book on the Maya. He spent two winters in Luzern captaining a dive boat on a project to map 19th-century mining boat wrecks. And he traveled with an American high school class to Cuba to make a documentary film of their experience.
He had no trouble getting into college.
The middle son lived baseball, and so he needed to attend public high school. (His first two years were spent in an indigo blue high school on the San Francisco Peninsula, and the next two were spent in a crimson red one in Denton County, Texas. This allowed us to see that, much as the trappings differed between an ultra-progressive environment and an ultra-conservative one, the underlying methods were identical.) He actually finagled his way into high school in Tokyo the fall semester of his sophomore year so that he could play baseball in Japan, quite the real-world experience.
The youngest stayed behind for a school year after we moved to Texas rather than lose a semester's credit, as the two school calendars were way out of phase. Arriving in Texas for his sophomore year, he considered going the route of his oldest brother but discovered that the school system offered the top computer-animation program in the nation. He would have to attend to be able to participate, but he felt it worth it.
The two younger sons had few problems with public high school. For one thing, they'd had abundant free play at Peninsula and were well-socialized. For another, they had perspective on what they were getting into as Peninsula would actually teach its 7th- and 8th-graders hacks for succeeding in public school. Also, their summers were spent pursuing their passions just as their oldest brother had done year-round.
I could not endorse more strongly, if you want your children to thrive in the real world, put them in the real world. Find mentors. Find experiences that will allow them to learn, grow, gain confidence. That may seem like an impossibility, but once you start thinking of their education in that way, you'll discover no end of opportunities for them.
The #1 cause of sharp, mannered children underachieving is our public schools, and that is by design (you can also include those private schools that are just our public schools on steroids intended for extra-smart, extra-well-behaved children).
How is it by design? When Napoleon thumped the mighty Prussians at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806, it caused a lot of Teutonic soul searching. Johann Gottlieb Fichtedecided the problem was a non-aristocratic class that was too independent of the state, and he set about to design a school system that would put an end to that.
Horace Mann, secretary of education for Massachusetts viewed the resulting Volkschule first hand and made it the model for Massachusetts school children. He eventually peddled it to legislatures along the Eastern seaboard as the solution to "the immigrant problem." Decades later, John Dewey added some assembly-line-like features, and there is the American public school system.
How does it cause promising students to underachieve? Fichte's design was intended to prevent children from self-actualizing, from developing any sense of agency at all.
Bells would mark all periods to instill in each child the sense that his time is not his own.
Grades would teach a child that his work was for the subjective and arbitrary approval of his superiors and not worthy of material reward.
Rows and columns of desks would enforce a sense of isolation within regimentation.
A design that provided easy scrutiny of the whole campus would prevent an expectation of privacy from forming.
Play and free time were to be discouraged to prevent any spark of independence from forming. (My wife yesterday told me about a new principal at a school in Fort Worth who raised the number of daily recesses from one to four resulting in an immediate and noticeable improvement in student mood and decorum.)
Homework would demonstrate that the state could make demands on family time.
A high-sounding curriculum in which no processes were taught start-to-finish would require memorization of disjointed information and prevent critical skills from forming.
The basic idea is not to train our kids for the real world but instead to keep them not only hermetically sealed from it but to avoid conferring any useful skills so that when they arrive in the real world they will be doubtful and tentative and ready to plug into whatever slot seems to offer some security.
We sent our sons instead to an N-8 school that had been founded on the earlier American "little red schoolhouse" model that had not one of these listed features (well, bells to mark class-time, but students were free to ignore them). Indeed, the school day was geared, not to academics, not to discipline, but to self-actualization. Students decided for themselves what was to be studied. Students were free to play or go to any of the workshops (clay, weaving, jewelry, wood shop, music, computer animation--processes taught start-to-finish, which, by the way, is where you get the neurons to have an intellect) instead of class. The one teacher who used a standard textbook used a conspicuously bad one precisely so that students would learn to be critical of what they read!
It made all the difference. Thanks to social media, I've been able to follow the boys' classmates as well as their public school friends. The difference by and large is that the public-school friends have found slots in the business world they've plugged into. Their classmates have created their own careers or have plugged into high-level slots.
With education, we seek to make a straight-cut ditch of what should be a meandering brook.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
With education, we pull our kids aside to cram them with knowledge of the world thereby preventing them from developing competence and agency in the world.
--Me
When should kids start preschool for their own optimum development? I've seen different studies, none of which persuaded me that anything was driving the conclusion other than the pre-conceived preferences of the authors. I've been most persuaded by studies (some out of Scandinavia) that indicate children do best when they do not start school before age seven, but then, that's my pre-conceived preference.
In fact, I'm a fan of neither schools or homeschooling. When I read the flowing, expressive letters of my forebears, I think we may have fallen a long way in "educating" our children since the 19th century. The model then was to start to school (in a "little red schoolhouse") at seven or eight and attend for three years to learn reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic, the three R's--basically third, forth and fifth grades. By age 12, the child was apprenticed out into a trade.
The humanities and social graces were taught at home in the parlor each evening--discussion, singing, playing instruments, poetry recital, reading, letter writing--and in-community activity.
Now, that model, as it existed going back more than a century (though my own mother was raised on that model in rural Mississippi in the 20s and 30s), would not serve today, without revision at least. But the difference between it and today's educational model was that the little red schoolhouse model was real-world. Now we isolate kids from the real world from 4 to 18 or 22, then kick them into it and wonder why they flail for a while.
My wife and I chose that older model for our kids, only we had a very rare resource (that actually helped us come to understand the model): Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California. It had been founded explicitly on the little-red-schoolhouse model and was and is a real-world, child-centered, learning community. We happily put our boys in a age 4 all the way through grade 8 because they did not spend their days butt-parked-in-desk but in vivid, imaginative activity.
That experience we supplemented starting at age 12 with summer apprenticeships out-of-state and by 14 overseas. The oldest chose to skip high school and intern instead, which worked out quite well for him.
But if you don't have a Peninsula School handy, and only a handful of communities do, the real issue is what meets the parents' needs? Balancing work and parenting is crazy-making enough without adhering to an educational ideal (unless it's that important to you). Instead, compensate with plenty of rowdy time at home and opportunities to make butts of themselves to leaven the soulless institutional atmosphere. Give them practical skills and real-world experience on the side. And be prepared to stand up to their teachers who start reciting the dreary litany of institutional expectations. As much as possible, let your kids be kids.
https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-make-the-most-out-of-the-broken-education-system-in-the-United-States/answer/Charles-Tips
"We will be better off starting tomorrow if we shut down all the public schools today."
When John Taylor Gatto said that to me personally, I thought he had detached from reality. But as we discussed it further over a few days, I began to realize he was absolutely correct.
What would happen? Why, the sharpest, most passionate teachers would open their own doors or find places to meet. School would be about who wants to, not who has to. Other people could teach... programmers... artists... mathematicians... engineers... designers... teaching would cease to be the exclusive domain of "educrats." Even just dropping kids off at lightly-supervised playgrounds would offer a superior experience.
Kids would no longer be required to spend their days with their butts passively parked at a desk, hermetically sealed from the real world. They would no longer be learning these paramount lessons of public education:
- Your time is not your own; be where you belong when the bell rings
- Your time is not your own; assignments can eat into your home time
- Your work is not your own; do it when told as told
- Your work is not your own; it is done for the subjective approval of your betters
- Your life is not your own; show up where and when required
- Your life is not your own; what you want to learn is not up to you
- Your privacy, hah! You cannot escape scrutiny
- Your rights, hah! You are a child with no rights we are bound to respect
In order to self-actualize as a person, to become all you can be, you must avoid swallowing those pills. Few know this, but the Volkschule that our public schooling was modeled on was designed 201 years ago by a Prussian gentlemen precisely to prevent young commoners from self-actualizing, from becoming independent, functioning human adults. Instead, he wanted "good little Germans" who would become "citizens who will not revolt, workers who will not strike, soldiers who will not disobey orders."
But... but... how do I prepare my children for higher education then? How do I get them into a good college? That gets us to far and away the most insidious aspect of public schooling... it was designed to actually prevent students from learning anything useful. All of us have heard that you never forget how to ride a bike. But think of other things you learned hands-and-mind-together... making cupcakes... building a circuit board... throwing pottery... weaving... even after a lapse of years, you can quickly recover your former know-how.
We human beings retain processes we learn head and hands in concert. Herr Fichte, the evil genius (he is considered in Germany the Ur-Vater of National Socialism) behind the Volkschule thought his crowning concept in making sure commoners stayed common was a high-sounding curriculum taught purely via rote memorization and with no processes taught start-to-finish... just disjointed information that defies being usefully integrated.
Add to that the dreary sameness of decorum, with nothing even approaching the madcap play and high hilarity that yields genius on the one extreme and no formal behavior required that would equip young people for life's highest stations... nothing ever on the line with risk and challenge... nothing with trial and error and recovering from mistakes... nothing to channel passion... no inputs into real-world processes or decisions... not even a chance really to make decisions, good or bad... Pretty soon it becomes remarkable that we have not produced generation after generation of absolute dullards. But don't worry, the mentality behind public schooling (and, make no mistake, the same mentality prevails in most private schools, just on steroids) would love to exercise more control over parents, employers, clergy and others with positive inputs into young lives.
I had the opportunity to converse at length with Mr Gatto because I volunteered to chauffer him to his lecture series on the San Francisco Peninsula going back almost two decades to when my oldest was in 7th grade in a private school that rejected all the Fichte-Dewey approach to "education." At a reception after one lecture, I found myself standing between someone in admissions at Harvard and someone in the registrar's office at Stanford. They agreed that everyone they saw was valedictorian, captain of the debate team, et cetera, et cetera. But what really stood out was someone who, say, lived in the Amazon Basin and speaks an Indian language. Armed with that, our oldest never went to high school. We sent him out into the world instead. The highest rungs in society are closed to those who do not know how to function in the real world.
But... but... how can you advocate getting rid of public schools? How can most families afford private schools? Education in the US started and flourished in private and civil settings. People gladly donate to education. I even have a plan for a secondary school that pays its students and sets aside scholarship funds for each. When you put things in the private and civil sectors, that's when you get innovation and real options, something we've never seen meaningfully in our public schools and are unlikely ever to see.
When did schools start implementing homework as a regular activity in education?
Two hundred years ago last year, or 1814, in Berlin. And you can blame this guy:
After Napoleon kicked Prussian ass at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, that Germanic nation engaged in serious soul-searching. Johann Gottlieb Fichte decided the problem was that the non-aristocratic yeoman class was too independent. They could simply tire of soldiering and return to their farms or trades and go about their business with no thought of sacrifice on behalf of the state. He decided that situation needed to be fixed.
He conceived the Volkschule. The sons of aristocrats would continue to attend the Realschule to acquire such skills as horsemanship, swordsmanship and other gentlemanly arts. The children of non-aristocrats, on the other hand, would be required to attend the Volkschule in order to learn to become dependent on the state.
Homework was just one of Fichte's innovations. It's purpose was to demonstrate that the state was able to impose on personal/family time. It also limited the amount of time parents could spend imparting useful skills to their offspring.
Among his other innovations:
Grades would demonstrate that one's work is worthy only of the subjective evaluation of one's betters and not to expect tangible reward.
Bells would mark periods of the day and enforce the sense that one's activity is constantly governed by those in authority and that one's time is not one's own.
Rows and columns of desks would lend a sense of isolation within regimentation.
Scrutiny--school grounds and buildings would be designed with no place to avoid being viewed by staff so that an expectation of personal privacy cannot develop.
A high-sounding curriculum with no processes taught start-to-finish is key to keeping student minds preoccupied under pressure without actually learning any useful skills.
Horace Mann, as secretary of education for Massachusetts had started the Common school, the first (?) public schools in the US (previously, education had been private or civil). In 1843, he traveled to Prussia to review the school system there, and brought back the methodology of the Volkschule to his home state.
He attempted to interest educators in other states in his new approach to schooling, but they weren't having it, preferring instead the quintessentially American "little red schoolhouse" system. Eventually, he began enticing state legislatures to adopt his methods as the solution to "the immigrant problem." Half a century later, John Dewey added some assembly-line-like features, and we had our American public school system, unchanged in any important respect for more than a century, well, two centuries if you go back to the school that first started cranking out "good little Germans," or, as Fichte himself stated his goal:
Workers who will not strike, citizens who will not revolt, soldiers who will not disobey orders.
Other writings:
Why is it that with so much evidence to the contrary, the media continue to report that public schools are failing?
How is play important for child development?
What best prepares you for future life, private schools or public schools?
How can America build its education system to become one of the best in the world?
Why do many people default to saying that certain life skills (e.g. cooking, household budgeting) should be taught in school when children are ultimately the responsibility of their parents/guardians?
What subjects should schools teach? Are the subjects currently taught the best use of our children's time?
What would your ideal education system look like?
How has the modern US educational system failed to prepare students for the "real world"?
Should U.S. education policy & standards be managed at the federal, state, or local level?
How can we solve the problems with public education in America?
Why has there been a breakdown of education and critical thinking in the U.S.?
Who is most responsible for the American educational system over the last 30 years? Liberals or conservatives?
Why do so many conservatives think schools are teaching kids liberal values?
How should the US education system best prepare students to engage in the democratic process?
How can people be genuinely self-confident if their entire lives they're conditioned to obey authority, whether it be parents, professors, or workplace superiors?
What factors prevent progressive educational ideas from becoming the new norm?
What should fiscally Conservative parents teach and say to their kids to counter the effects of U.S. education?
What causes smart, well-behaved children to underachieve?
What is the best age for kids to go to preschool?
How do you make the most out of the broken "education" system in the United States?
When did schools start implementing homework as a regular activity in education?
I'm looking for schools similar to Peninsula School (Menlo Park, CA) in Los Angeles. Would something like Play Mountain Place be similar to the experience? What are similar schools in LA?
Do homeschooled children lack social skills and emotional intelligence?
How would a pure libertarian government sustain a civil society? How would segments such as health care, education, & criminal justice function?
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