Schooling verses Education. You might ask, “what is the difference?” At first, you might wonder: isn’t schooling and education the same thing? After reading Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto, I realized the two aren’t really the same thing.
Schooling is what happens when you enrol into an institution of learning. Education on the other hand can be obtained from anywhere. I have compiled some of my top quotes from John Taylor Gatto which will attempt to throw more light on the difference between these two:
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else’s script.
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.
Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it
In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.
I hope that provided some context on schooling and education. It is clear to me that our compulsory education system is mostly just schooling. But what’s the alternative to schooling? I will share my thoughts on that later. First, here’s an excerpt from the book.
Excerpts from Weapons of Mass Instruction
John Taylor Gatto
Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more
than they need to: addicts and children.
School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.
In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years already, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley was an intimate colleague of Dr. Inglis: both were in charge of textbook publishing divisions at Houghton Mifflin – Cubberley as chief of elementary school texts; Inglis of secondary school texts. Cubberley was dean of Stanford’s influential School of Education as well, a friendly correspondent of Conant at Harvard. He had written in his book Public School Administration (1922) that “Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned … ” And that it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair.
We drive SUV s and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when were upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say;” even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one, too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
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