An interesting parallel to John Gatto's work

I have written quite a bit about the work of John Taylor Gatto, the former Teacher of the Year who discovered, upon finding that his "Teacher of the Year" award was his ticket to being pushed out of the New York City schools, that a great part of the model for American public (or "government") schools is the schools of old Prussia.  Instead of (or perhaps in addition to?) generating the greatest soldiers known, our schools aimed to produce the consumers and factory workers needed by the "robber barons" of the late 19th century. 

Judging by the state of our garages and storage spaces, it seems they succeeded at least in creating great consumers, if not factory workers.

An interesting, and unexpected, parallel to Gatto's work is The Transformation of Corporate Control, by Neil Fligstein.  A textbook of my brother's when at this second rate school, I picked it up yesterday hoping to get some hints and "feel" for how companies think, and boy, did I ever.

Fligstein's thesis, more or less, is that federal railroad, canal, and other subsidies and protections created the great industrialists of the late 1800s as a product not of business acumen, but rather of political patronage.  As a result, they did well at accumulating capital (look at any 1800s era railroad station for proof), but struggled mightily to actually run a business profitably.  The history of big business management, then, is explained by Fligstein as the responses of big business to the implementation of regulations like the Sherman Antitrust Act--overt monopolies giving way to secret trusts giving way to strategies of holding companies, vertical and horizontal integration, conglomerates, and the management trends of leadership by production, leadership by sales and marketing, and leadership by finance.  As any reader of "Dilbert" would guess, the dominant trend today is leadership by the finance and accounting guys.  Fligstein uses Alfred Sloan as a picture of the sales and marketing leader, and Henry Ford as an archetype of the manufacturing leader.

The implications?  Central to Fligstein's thesis is the idea that there are precious few leaders who can unite manufacturing, marketing and sales, and finance, and that government action--specifically Sherman and other antitrust laws--has often been the prime mover to shift the mode of leadership.

Implications for the guy who will never attain the big corner office and company paid BMW 7 series?   Well, if you really want to change the world, Fligstein notes that you'll generally do well to avoid the big companies that are run by the finance guys.   Accounting schemes that require instant response don't do well with that. 

More importantly, if you've got a good idea and have a good basic grasp of sales, accounting, and product, you might be in for a fun ride if you go into business for yourself.  Fligstein's writing is not easy, but it is worthwhile.

A name I should have known

Mr. Dilettante posts on something very interesting to a quality engineer like myself; the apparent fact, according to Michael Barone, that union policies are largely designed to mitigate the work of one Frederick W. Taylor, who (along the lines of the Prussian schools so decried by John Taylor Gatto) worked to make production lines as "idiot proof" as possible, all while organizing the workplace around the assumption that workers are more or less dumb animals--incapable of initiative and inefficient unless driven.

In other words, apart from the fact that they can quit when they want to, Taylor's model seems to give the worker about the same respect as, or at times somewhat less than, a typical antebellum slave-owner might grant.  It's no wonder that the history of the labor movement is filled with strife with that kind of thinking!

But of course, we've come a long way since those dark days, and we obviously would never make such mistakes again, right?

OK, then, let's consider what most teachers are taught about classroom management, then, and let's ask whether most schools risk actually teaching students not just what to think, but rather how to think.  No, I'm not talking about "critical thinking" (which all too often simply means "doubt what the bad guys are saying"), but rather, "logic."

Given that very few schools actually teach either informal or formal logic, it would seem that they're really being run along Taylor's model even today.  We then ought to expect fully that a large portion of adults would then be functioning not in a thinking way, but struggling to overcome basic, Pavlovian conditioned responses.

By design, and note that the teachers unions are asking us to pay for the privilege of having our children treated like Taylor's factory drones.

A gem from John Taylor Gatto

...in which he demonstrates exactly why I don't like "revised" versions of literature (including many modern translations of Scripture), and also exactly how "whole language" reading instruction originated, and if you live near a school district that uses it, you will probably want to educate your children at home.

Come to think of it, reading other works by Gatto (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/) will probably convince you of that as well.

Thoughts on a valedictory

I was never personally in much danger of giving a valedictory speech, but this struck me; more or less, a young lady used her position on the podium to more or less make John Taylor Gatto's argument; that schooling is not the same thing as education, and modern "schooling" really serves more to make compliant subjects than anything else.  It certainly does not work to make thinking citizens, by and large.

There are any number of things which can be said.  First of all, kudos to school administrators for not pulling the plug on a fairly confrontational valedictory, and kudos as well to Miss Goldson for presenting it.  Both decisions had to take some guts.  I hope that, apart from those who already are convinced by Gatto, it receives the hearing that it deserves.

That said, there are questions as well.  What do we make of a valedictory speech that more or less mocks the very concept of a school?  Is it too incendiary, or is it speaking truth to power?  Moreover, do we know.....how well Miss Goldson thought this it?  It looks very good, but....

.....but never mind.  If Miss Goldson's speech is not an original gem, as it appears to be, she's still made the case that 13 years of schooling is not capable of generating an original valedictory.  Which brings me to my real one and only complaint about Gatto's work; he tells us admirably what is wrong with American education, but does not really give us a chance to fix it. 

To do that, I highly recommend Dorothy Sayers' essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning." 

On a similar note, one thing I learned about German culture (way back in the 1980s) was that the educated classes lamented the American pattern being implemented; teach, test, forget.  The word for it is "Verschuling," and the concept refers to taking academic (university) coursework and treating it as if it were a trade school.

In other words, the Germans, from whence we derived our Prussian style school system in part, recognize the inherent problems in it.  We should take a hint.

H/T Breathing Grace, SayAnything, others.

A classic from John Taylor Gatto

....his 1990 acceptance speech from the New York City Teacher of the Year Award. He had a bit of chutzpah in pointing out to the educational establishment his belief that the schools exist to do anything but educate.

And, I think he's right. As I work to train my children in character, I warn them that the quickest way to become a slave is to develop laziness and covetousness, the precise things that the government schools relentlessly inculcate in children.

More reasons to homeschool

Beyond the fact that homeschoolers are free to actually teach theology, logic, and a host of other things not currently taught in the government schools, of course.

Here's a story about a 30 year old school principal who has been caught sending a, um, "risque" picture of herself to a student she met while playing online video games. Beyond the criminal activity, there is the issue of her age.

You see, the "principal" was once the (per J.T. Gatto) "principal teacher," responsible more for mentoring teachers than for administering the school. Today, we've turned this around, and all that's needed is a master's degree in school administration (or doctorate) and proper political connections. So with a 30 year old principal, the school district was clearly cheating its teachers and students out of what a real principal is supposed to be.

And a funny one (unless you're from Beer City); a Milwaukee area school bus driver has been fired after being caught using plastic bags to avoid going to the restroom. So if school buses gross you out, well, you're not working without evidence. Hopefully a helpful homeschooler can meet this bus driver sometime and let them know that if they want to be more regular, it helps to have some fiber in their diet.

Finally, smart people may want to watch out for Twin Cities area teachers, as a Ramsey County teachress has just been convicted of emulating Mike Tyson in his infamous bout against Evander Holyfield. If you hear them coming, watch out, or else you might not next time.

Believe it or not,

I agree with the NEA on something. If you watch school politics much, you'll see teachers complaining that standardized testing takes away too much valuable classroom time. Now, I might doubt how valuable classroom time is for kids in many schools, but certainly most standardized tests use an amazing amount of time--really up to a week. The NEA has a legitimate point here.

Does it really take this much time to verify one's ability to read, write, and cipher? Well, no; my children were evaluated using a "Peabody" evaluation in less than two hours apiece. This kind of test is a standard evaluation used when it's impractical to use longer evaluations, and it correlates very well to them.

Which ought to be expected; again, how long does it really take to verify that a child is reading at grade level? You hand him a book and set him at it, right? And then you place some arithmetic before him and have him do it, right? And you'd be done in a few hours at most, not a few days, right?

We have here a bitter irony. The industrial (see Gatto) mindset that pervades the school system gave us a one size fits all mindset in the name of "efficiency," and it turns out that the tests necessary to administer this "efficient" system take ten times longer to take than the "inefficient" method of putting a book before a child and asking him to read.

So kudos to the NEA for getting this one right. Maybe someday they'll realize that the inefficiency of "administratium" is a necessary result of applying their factory model to education.

Accuse me of dreaming. It's fair.

Executive bonuses, and the "cost" of homeschooling

I've often noted that a traditional practice of money-losing companies is to pay large retention bonuses to managers to prevent the loss of "key executive talent." Somewhat odd if you ask me; doesn't the fact that the company is losing money mean that this "key executive talent" isn't pulling its weight in the first place? That maybe the company ought to be considering getting some new talent instead of paying the old talent more to stay?

Or would that violate a secret fraternity pledge? I'm always amazed at how there appears to be little accountability for those who get corner offices, to put it mildly.

Also, a fun thought on the "costs" of homeschooling, apropos at this time due to "back to school sales." The cost, according to the HSLDA, runs about $600 annually per homeschooled child for books and such. Then again, public school fees for books are...well...about that much in many places. Note also that homeschoolers do not buy the school lunch, and have no need to purchase the latest fashions to avoid the mockery of classmates.

Which is to note that homeschooling may actually be cheaper than government education even before the costs of substandard instruction and moral degradation are accounted for. And those costs can be big--ask any single parent, college student paying for remedial courses, prisoner, or compulsive spender. Yes, compulsive spender; our government schools were designed to create demand for industrial products and workers to make them. (see John Taylor Gatto's website for details)

Literature and food for liberty

One of the most striking things about life today is the prevalence of fake food and fake books. Going out to eat, one finds processed breads, foods fried in hydrogenated oils, pop sweetened with fake sugar, and the like. Or in the grocery store, try reading most labels on canned or otherwise processed food without a degree in chemistry. Good luck; the flavors that God gave these things are mostly gone.

Going to the bookstore, I find predominantly fake books. That is, books "edited" by someone or other, volumes with one part poetry and 100 parts commentary, and books about real books. The real books--classics written by eminent authors--are regrettably few and far between. Even at a recent homeschooling conference I attended, the new and used book sales had a disturbingly high proportion of "fake books".

One possible reason why, courtesy in part from John Gatto, is that those who rule today don't want us to find out how to get our own food and learn different ideas. We might get uppity then.

It extends even to which translation of those books that remain might be used. Even in the church, everything from Oswald Chambers to the Bible, "must" be read in a modern translation. But is it that hard to read Elizabethan English? If so, we dispense with Shakespeare, Bunyan, and most good hymns--not to mention most of the documents written by the Founding Fathers.

And thus I wonder if a key part of liberty is to eat real food and read real books. To become familiar on one hand with the physical evidence of God's creation, and on the other to get to know the mind of His image--thus to be better nourished in body and spirit.

Plus, real food and books are often pretty cheap, since most people don't know what to do with them. Yet.

Want a big raise?

I'm talking about 50%, or even a doubling of your wages. Want to know what to do?

John Taylor Gatto's work suggests a powerful method; get rid of your manager. No, not by hiring someone from the Mob. No, no, no!

Rather, Gatto (again, no, not Gotti!) reminds us that 13% of wage-earners in the USA were managers a few years back--and that includes millions of small businesses having no manager at all. Contrast that with about 4% in Japan, and add in HR, PR, Benefits, and other "helper" organizations, and you'll find that "overhead" costs take a disproportionate share (I'm guessing 30% or more in most companies) of resources available to "the help." Put simply, managing people is a difficult enterprise, and takes a lot of work.

So how do you give yourself that raise? Work in such a way that your manager doesn't have a lot to do, or find a way to ply your trade as an entrepreneur.

Some more on liberty

....take a look at the work of John Taylor Gatto, a former New York state teacher of the year. He deals predominantly with educational issues....but then he doesn't, but rather traces the decline in education observed in the past century and a half in terms of the desire to control other people. In other words, large, government-run schools are an infringement on liberty of no small order.