What Public School Does to a Free-Thinking Mind

The lens of public school warps a person's mind more than you may think.  Warning!  The following may cause you to re-evaluate everything you have become due to the influence of 12 years of compulsory schooling.

4) The fourth lesson schools teach is indifference. By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically. If nothing is worth finishing, nothing is worth starting. Don’t you see how one follows the other? Love of learning can’t survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors and ceremonial grades which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real power and potential that is inherent in self-discovery. Schools alienate the winners as well as the losers.

5) The fifth lesson schools teach is emotional dependency. By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It’s like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known to animal trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth-century Leipzig and incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth century in America. Half a century later, by 1968, it had infected every school system in the United States, so all-pervasive at century’s end that few people can imagine a different way to go about management. And indeed, there isn’t a better one if the goal of managed lives in a managed economy and a managed social order is what you’re after.

Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for granted.

6) The sixth lesson schools teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Good people do it the way the teacher wants it done. Good teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or textbook to tell them what to do. Principals are evaluated according to an ability to make these groups conform to expectations; superintendents upon their ability to make principals conform; state education departments on their ability to efficiently direct and control the thinking of superintendents according to instructions which originate with foundations, universities, and politicians sensitive to the quietly expressed wishes of powerful corporations, and other interests.

For all its clumsy execution, school is a textbook illustration of how the bureaucratic chain of command is supposed to work. Once the thing is running, virtually nobody can alter its direction who doesn’t understand the complex code for making it work, a code that never stops trying to complicate itself further in order to make human control impossible. The sixth lesson of schooling teaches that experts make all important choices, but it is useless to remonstrate with the expert nearest you because he is as helpless as you are to change the system.

7) The seventh lesson schools teach is provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in children must be made contingent on the certification of experts through rituals of number magic. It must not be self-generated as it was for Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford. The role of grades, report cards, standardized tests, prizes, scholarships, and other awards in effecting this process is too obvious to belabor, but it’s the daily encounter with hundreds of verbal and nonverbal cues sent by teachers that shapes the quality of self-doubt most effectively.

8) The last lesson school teaches I’ll call the glass house effect: It teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you should be watched even more closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it that there is no private time, no private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols.

The most sensitive children I had each year knew on some level what was really going on. But we choked the treacherous breath out of them until they acknowledged they depended on us for their futures. Hard-core cases were remanded to adjustment agencies where they converted themselves into manageable cynics......

In the economy we have allowed to evolve, the real political dilemma everywhere is keeping people occupied. Jobs have to be invented by government agencies and corporations. Both employ millions and millions of people for which they have no real use. It’s an inside secret among top-echelon management that should you need to cause a rise in stock value, this can be engineered by eliminating thousands of "useless" jobs; that is done regularly and, I would presume, cynically.

Young men and women during their brightest, most energetic years are kept from working or from being a part of the general society. This is done to keep them from aggravating this delicate work situation, either by working too eagerly, as kids are prone to do, or by inventing their own work, which could cause shocks throughout the economy. This violation of the injunction to work, which Western spirituality imposed, has backed us into a corner from which no authority has any idea how to extricate us. We cannot afford to let too many children really learn to work, as Amish children do, for fear they will discover its great secret: work isn’t a curse, but a salvation....

Everyone has known the experience of having had a surfeit of candy, company, or even money, so that no individual purchase involves real choice because real choice always closes the door on other choices. I know that we would all like to have endless amounts of money, but the truth is, too much money wipes out our pleasure in choosing since we can now choose everything. That’s what Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius discovered for himself in his reflections about what really matters—the Meditations, one of the great classics in Western history. He discovered none of the important things are for sale. If you don’t believe an emperor would feel this way, read the Meditations.

Too much time, like too much money, can hang heavily on our hands as well. Look at the millions of bored schoolchildren. They know what I mean. The corrective for this boredom is a full spiritual awareness that time is finite. As you spend time on one thing, you lose forever the chance to spend it on something else. Time is always a big deal.

Science can’t help with time. In fact, living scientifically so as not to waste time, becoming one of those poor souls who never goes anywhere without a list, is the best guarantee your life will be eaten up by errands and that none of those errands will ever become the big deal you desperately need to finally love yourself. The list of things to do will go ever onward and onward. The best lives are full of contemplation, full of solitude, full of self-examination, full of private, personal attempts to engage the metaphysical mystery of existence, to create an inner life.

We make the best of our limited time by alternating effort with reflection, and I mean reflection completely free of the get-something motive. Whenever I see a kid daydreaming in school, I’m careful never to shock the reverie out of existence.

Buddha is reputed to have said, "Do nothing. Time is too precious to waste." If that advice seems impossible in the world described on the evening news, reflect on the awesome fact that in spite of hype, you still live on a planet where 67 percent of the world’s entire population has never made or received a single phone call and where the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County live prosperous lives virtually free of crime, of divorce, or of children who go beyond the eighth grade in school. Yet not a single one has a college degree, a tractor to plow with, a telephone in the house, or is on welfare.

If I seem to have stepped away from original sin with these facts, it is not so. Until you acknowledge that the factual contents of your mind upon which you base decisions have been inserted there by others whose motives you cannot fully understand, you will never come to appreciate the neglected genius of Western spirituality which teaches that you are the center of the universe. And that the most important things worth knowing are innate in you already. They cannot be learned through schooling. They are self-taught through the burdens of having to work, having to sort out right from wrong, having to check your appetites, and having to age and die.

The effect of this formula on world history has been titanic. It brought every citizen in the West a mandate to be sovereign, a concept which we still have not learned to use wisely, but which offers the potential for such wisdom. Western spirituality granted every single individual a purpose for being alive, a purpose independent of mass behavioral prescriptions, money, experts, schools, and governments. It conferred significance on every aspect of relationship and community. It carried inside its ideas the seeds of a self-activating curriculum which gives meaning to time, and imposes the duty of compassion, even for enemies, on believers.

In Western spirituality, everyone counts. It offers a basic, matter-of-fact set of practical guidelines, street lamps for the village of your life. Nobody has to wander aimlessly in the universe of Western spirituality. What constitutes a meaningful life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility, acceptance of aging and loss, preparation for death. In this neglected genius of the West, no teacher or guru does the work for you. You do it for yourself. It’s time to teach these things to our children once again.

This is an excerpt from the groundbreaking book by teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto. You can purchase this book from the link below.

The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling