John Taylor Gatto, a renouned teacher who taught in the New York School District has released this book on his research into the American school system. While I'm only halfway through the first chapter, I'm finding this a very good read, as well as fitting in with my experience in public education, and further what I see in public higher education as well...and much of private unversities as well. No longer is an education seen as a means to learn of themselves and the world, instead it is now a means to train people for their future profession as lovely little peons. I saw teachers that were trying otherwise to encourage students to think, and the majority of the students (including the *bright and gifted* ones) conforming to whatever standards and unable to think for themselves, within this frame my own experience is confirmed by much of what Gatto has written: I learned despite being in school, not because I was in school.
I thought this would be a good piece fitting for Hatrack to look at. Satyagraha
Posted by TMedina (Member # 6649) on :
Not having read the book, I concur with the basic idea.
People don't go to school to learn - they go to get an expensive piece of paper that allows them to command higher salaries.
Or they go to learn a trade - be it lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc.
And if that trade requires them to think, well - ok, if we just gotta.
Hence the old joke about Liberal Arts degrees - "Want fries with that?"
-Trevor
Posted by Insanity Plea (Member # 2053) on :
:: snort :: I've always loved that joke.
Not because of how true it is, but because how inaccurate it is, though. My school, Beloit College, -an internationally renouned liberal arts college that is always listed among the top 100 schools in America- (if you've heard of the "Mindset list" that comes from one of our professors) has alumni including VPs from Ford and Nike.
At least for me, unlike in high school, in college I'm finding myself able to say that I am "proud of my education." Satyagraha
Posted by TMedina (Member # 6649) on :
Depending on where you land, it may be more true than most people want it to be.
-Trevor
Posted by HRE (Member # 6263) on :
quote: No longer is an education seen as a means to learn of themselves and the world, instead it is now a means to train people for their future profession as lovely little peons. I saw teachers that were trying otherwise to encourage students to think, and the majority of the students (including the *bright and gifted* ones) conforming to whatever standards and unable to think for themselves
I have the miserable thought in my head that maybe one or two students in my school other than myself recognize that.
When asked why they want to go to college, too many reply with either "Because it is expected" or "To train for my career"
Disgusting.
Posted by Insanity Plea (Member # 2053) on :
I suppose, though when it comes to a college education, if a person doesn't get the sort of education that they want, I am very quick to put the blame on the student. First point, they should have done research on their schools to choose a place they would want to go for their education not a place where all their friends are going, where they could actually get the type of education they want, however they can't be entirely blamed for this...public education --secondary school in particular-- has brainwashed kids towards GRADES GRADES GRADES and STANDARDIZED TESTS CHOICE A, B, OR C (personally I think it's a wonder some of my classmates are able to think at all, but I digress). Second is financial aid, everybody says that they are unable to go to the really nice colleges because they cost so much. I'm sorry but I have to just snort at them...either your education is worth it, or it isn't. Need and merit based aid is very plentiful. case in point: I'm paying for the majority of my education myself, for me tuition, room/board, fees totals to almost $31,000 if anyone wants to say their family doesn't have money for it, I doubt that they're family has less money than mine, my father is in more than 100,000 in debt, without a positive income, my mother is rich but full of empty promises. No in my eyes, if someone doesn't like their college, it's their own fault.
However, post-college jobs are another thing entirely, and that's a completely different can of worms which would blow this thread so far off topic it'd sail clean through the Bermuda Triangle. Satyagraha
Posted by Insanity Plea (Member # 2053) on :
quote: When asked why they want to go to college, too many reply with either "Because it is expected" or "To train for my career"
Disgusting.
Aye, in some way...I long for the days of the Rennaisance and the beginning of the University of Paris with the left bank and the right bank. How I would love to study in the classrooms of the left bank in classes of rhetoric and discourse. Satyagraha
Posted by HollowEarth (Member # 2586) on :
Hold on, why is wanting to get training for a future career that bad? Would it make you feel better if these people went to vo-tech or a technical college?
What higher education once was and is today are not the same, nor is the meaning of a college degree the same. Reference the number of college grads given tests at job interviews.
This could be seen as the failing of the student to get the education. Another choice is the change in the type of job held by college grads.
Look at the number of students forced into engineering, America values the pragmatist. Rhetoric and respect of the ivory tower doesn't put food on the table, as much as we might wish it to.
I would also like to think that all college students want to learn more than just their major. But until higher education isn't a big business, that won't be true.
(We'll ignore those that want to go because its expected, since they have other issues.)
Posted by HollowEarth (Member # 2586) on :
quote: However, post-college jobs are another thing entirely, and that's a completely different can of worms which would blow this thread so far off topic it'd sail clean through the Bermuda Triangle.
Sorry, you hadn't posted this when I composed my post.
Posted by HRE (Member # 6263) on :
Oh, to be able to study and learn the trivium...does anyone know of any universities that allow that?
Posted by Mabus (Member # 6320) on :
I am reading this book with great interest. Some of it seems self-evident; other parts seem odd or wrong -headed.
But the most disturbing thing about this book is that I first saw these ideas in a right-wing screed titled The Rebirth of America or some such. When I call the book/pamphlet a "right-wing screed" I don't mean I disagree with it--a great deal of it was agreeable to me, at least in theory. But it was a purely ideological document; it did not deal in facts, except rare tidbits to occasionally support ideas its readers might not already agree with.
The question in my mind is how did these two disparate--not inherently incompatible, but having no clear link--sets of concepts come together, and will one drag the other down?
Posted by Mabus (Member # 6320) on :
It only gets weirder...
Gatto opposes the idea of free will to the idea of the blank slate. Not that I can't see where he's coming from, but I first learned of the tabula rasa concept precisely from my faith, from authors who believed it made free will possible. To them, the opposing concept of the blank slate was determinism, predestinarian or otherwise; the "empty mind" meant you weren't forced by fate or God into some destiny whatever you wanted, but given the freedom to make your own. (As in, "There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." ) It just seems really odd to look at it the other way, and I wonder if it comes from Gatto's status as a lapsed Catholic.
Also, the link to the book/pamphlet I mentioned no longer seems odd--he's clearly supporting the same ideas, at least in part.
Posted by Insanity Plea (Member # 2053) on :
Hollow, I pose this question to you: What worth is the food on the table when you aren't happy? A person isn't supposed to live to eat, a person is supposed to eat to live. To put it plainly, what worth is an unhappy, unfullfilling life? I'm of the thought that says you should be happy and enjoy what you do,. Satyagraha
[ July 29, 2004, 10:52 AM: Message edited by: Insanity Plea ]
Posted by PSI Teleport (Member # 5545) on :
Well, it keeps you alive until you CAN be happy.
Unhappy lives are usually chocked full of happy moments.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Asimov's got an interesting short story about this. [edit]I'm going to spoil it, so, if you want to read it before I do, click on porter's (thanks porter) link below before continuing.[/edit] I forget the exact name, but it's something to do with the Olympics. In the future he constructed, education was done by imprinting useful knowledge on people's brains. Each person's brain was analyzed to see what profession best fit them, and then the knowledge necessary to carry out this profession was mechanically read off a tape and their brain pretty much instantaneously engraved with it.
The protagonist is someone whose brain didn't work the right way for imprinting. While his cohorts became registered Metalugists or Computer Programmers or whatever, he was denied any tapes at all. He was sent to The House for the Feebleminded, where all he could do was sit around and read archaic books and attend classes. The kicker, of course, is that he, and people like him, are actually the most valuable members of that society. The taped-knowledge people are unable to learn anything new or especially to create anything new. At the end of the story, the hero learns that he's actually in the House for Active Thinkers or something like that, and they are the ones who come up with all the new stuff.
There's a divide in education between acquiring specific knowledge for its usefullness and the traditional liberal arts goal of learning how to learn and think. Both are necessary. Without the base and rigor of actual knowledge, active thinking will be at best stunted and will often be unconstrained by anything resembling reality. Without training in active thinking and valuing it, the use of knowledge become stagnant and can fall prey to prejudice and laziness. To slight one in favor of the other is to do a disservice to education.
[ July 29, 2004, 01:41 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Do you recall the name of that story?
edit: I found it. I's called Profession, and you can read it here.
[ July 29, 2004, 01:20 PM: Message edited by: mr_porteiro_head ]
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
While perhaps American schools are not all they could be, I have to say that Gatto strikes me as a bit of an ideologue. Consider his stance on the Seven Liberal Arts :
quote:In practice, however, few forms of later schooling would be the intense intellectual centers these were. The Seven Liberal Arts made up the main curriculum; lower studies were composed of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Grammar was an introduction to literature, rhetoric an introduction to law and history, dialectic the path to philosophical and metaphysical disputation. Higher studies included arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Arithmetic was well beyond simple calculation, entering into descriptive and analytical capacities of numbers and their prophetic use (which became modern statistics); geometry embraced geography and surveying; music covered a broad course in theory; astronomy prepared entry into physics and advanced mathematics.
Come, now. Medieval cathedral schools as "intense intellectual centers?" Numerology as the precursor to statistics? What advanced mathematics? And Galileo invented modern physics; the Aristotelian stuff taught in those schools was a perfect example of the sort of rote learning Gatto affects to despise. This is stretching facts totally out of shape in order that they conform to theory.
Posted by Elizabeth (Member # 5218) on :
"What worth is the food on the table when you aren't happy?"
What if you have both happiness AND food on the table? Sorry to have to be the one to say it, but there are many people who make a whole boatload of money who are as happy as clams.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
Wow. Am I ever a bad person.
Posted by Insanity Plea (Member # 2053) on :
I have no problem with people making money, I have problems with people going for money and completely forgetting there is more to life than money . *ahemmymotherahem* Satyagraha
Posted by Elizabeth (Member # 5218) on :
Icarus, Sorry, I am missing your cryptic message. What are you referring to, something in my post, or wanting to be educated to train for a career makes you a "bad person?"
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
Neither. I was referring to myself as part of this sinister system that exists only to teach kids how to be good little cogs.
Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
I Love John Taylor Gatto. I used his book Dumbing Us Down in my term paper comparing current educational practices with the influences of Rousseau's Emile.
I shall comment further when I get some more time Posted by Elizabeth (Member # 5218) on :
Icarus, sorry!
I am a bad person as well. Darn me.
Posted by Jenny Gardener (Member # 903) on :
So is this why I'm having such trouble getting a job?
Posted by TMedina (Member # 6649) on :
Snicker. My world and welcome to it.
I'm backed into a corner and everything hits the fan next month.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
) It just seems really odd to look at it the other way, and I wonder if it comes from Gatto's status as a lapsed Catholic.![[Smile]](smile.gif)