After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, 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.
John Taylor Gatto
In a previous article, I talked about the difference between schooling and education, and how it is evident that compulsory schooling – our education system might not be helping much to produce educated, independent critical thinkers.
What is the solution to the schooling dilemma? John Taylor Gatto provides some ideas which I believe every parent or guardian should consider.
The Solution to Schooling
From Weapons of Mass Instruction
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid.
School trains children to be employees and consumers;
Teach your own to be leaders and adventurers.
School trains children to obey reflexively;
Teach your own to think critically and independently.
Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid.
Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.
Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone;
they seek constant companionship through the TV; the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned.
Your children should have a more important life, and they can.
First, though, wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.
Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), theres no telling what your own kids could do.
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, 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.
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