“As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is much as it was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test-driven, bell-driven, pedagogue-dominated, and thoroughly dumbed down.”

Let me give you an excerpt from a boys’ manual of instructions on how to build things, published in 1937. It was sold on newsstands as The Amateur Craftsman’s Cyclopedia of Things to Make and was expressly intended, as it states in print, for ten to twelve year old boys.

I’ve selected the project on building a model racing schooner because I don’t want to shock you with the pages which teach boys how to “cut a new entrance into a frame home” or build “a small portable arc furnace” out of clay and bricks. So the modest schooner project will have to make my point by itself.

Let’s begin with glue to hold the ship together. Our ten-year-old will make that himself by melting toothbrush handles in acetone. Got that? Then, after he cuts and planes hull and mainmast, casts the keel in molten lead, masters diction like “jib-stay” and “peak halyard,” and uses his sewing skills to sew the foresail, he tackles the main assembly narrative:

“Spring the sides apart and slip the lower ribs in place at their proper stations. Set the ribs in so the bevel begins at edge of the side. Drive an escutcheon pin into each rib from each side. Make the inside keel from ¼- inch square wood. Fit it inside the inside stem in the notches of the lower ribs, and spring it over to, and inside of, the stern, as shown.”

There’s more, but you’ve heard enough, I think.

Efficient Marketing = Stupid Customers

That was 1937. Such instructions for little people were commonplace from Ben Franklin’s day until the end of WWII, but suddenly a new standard seemed to appear after that war was over. In classrooms in every big city at first, and soon everywhere, it looked like this:

a) Students were confined to chairs in quality-ranked classrooms, for six hours a day, 185 days a year.
b) Each day they were set to copying notes off blackboards to memorize and listening to lectures.
c) They were given regular paper/pencil tests to measure their obedience in memorizing, and publicly humiliated if they fell short.
d) Casting ship keels in molten lead was forbidden.
e) They were sharply enjoined to remain silent.
f)  Many other procedures, similar in spirit, were imposed.

Pedagogy had arrived, big-time.

This wasn’t how education happened (or happens), of course, and everybody seemed to know that. The solution to the mystery of why it was done and continues to be done belongs to philosophy and economics, and to dark secrets of human nature – secrets which used to be actively studied in schools in the days before Literature, History, and Economics gave way to Language Arts and Social Studies. Now, young people began to emerge from classrooms into adulthood as ignorant of these things as forest savages.

But they were pushovers for modern marketing techniques. They lived to buy stuff; having grown older in school, but never having grown up . . .

 . . .

. . . You’ve heard a few of the philosophical rationales to defend what happened, but now it’s time to hear some hard-nosed economic ones. The most obvious one is easy to understand: This novel institution offered a rich new field of personal opportunity. As one of the largest hiring agencies in history – and one which could bestow lucrative contracts – it was a quietly spectacular economic engine from the start, a jobs project with no civilian parallel.

And school performed subtler services as well. By offering a break from motherhood, it allowed millions of women to be drawn into the labor pool – an immense windfall for management because it cut the value of a labor unit in half. In conjunction with a new requirement for state-issued pedagogical licenses, it created a wholly new sub-industry called “teacher- training,” and in many other ways, feathered collegiate nests.

From the outset, this economic aspect of institutional schooling became the tail that wagged the dog. It guaranteed that school training of the young would be forever political. Nobody who benefits materially from politicized education, whether left, right, or center, would be crazy enough to allow schools to be de-politicized. The tidal flow of money through school corridors – in good times and in bad – is in the last analysis much more important than philosophy as an ultimate determinant of school affairs.

Other economic reasons to push forced schooling exist, but they are remote from general understanding. By a sort of gentleman’s agreement, they aren’t discussed in places where the public is likely to be listening. For example, institutional schooling provides a partial remedy for two deadly diseases corporate capitalism is prone to contract: overproduction and hyperdemocracy. . .

John Taylor Gatto was New York State Teacher of the Year prior to resigning from teaching because he didn’t want to do any more harm to children. He is the author of the best-selling Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, The Underground History of American Education and Weapons of Mass Instruction. He is also a popular speaker at homeschooling conferences around the world.