Have a strong sense of self. That’s really all my parents ever taught me. It was enough. By the time I reached kindergarten I picked up things really quick. I was reading on a 3rd grade level in no time. The admins didn’t want me to move ahead though because of “potential social maladjustments.” I painstakingly tolerated cartoon stories about little engines and big red dogs for another year.
Seeing the infomercial the other day for “Your Baby Can Read” reminded me of that story, as well as the fact that schooling in and of itself is useless. 12 years of grade levels, tracking and categorizing do nothing except ensure that billions are wasted by an ineffective system.
International exams show the US is currently scoring just around average on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) exam, far behind China, Korea and Singapore. In the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam the results are even worse as more participating countries push the US below average. Here Finland is leading the way with those same Asian countries.
We are not doing much better in reading either. We placed 15th on the last PISA exam. Once again Finland and Korea were on top. Of course this was back in 2003. In 2006 the scores on the US PISA reading exam weren’t counted because of a mistake in the printing of the tests. The next year, the US had quietly backed out of any further TIMSS exams. Maybe one of those babies can teach a class full of American teen illiterates.
The numbers can only infer one conclusion. Schools don’t educate. Curriculums are dumbed-down and critical thinking is suppressed. There is at best a “see-do” mimicry that does nothing to lead the child to a greater sense of self, instead forcing mindless conformity.
Leonardo da Vinci said “One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” Thomas Edison, Richard Branson, Robert De Niro, Duke Ellington and the Wright Brothers were all high-school dropouts. They mastered their craft through the ability to understand their innate gifts and how to nurture them. This is education. Schooling had nothing to do with this.
George Carlin (also a high-school dropout) said “Leave your kids the [expletive] alone! There’s way too much structure!” – poignantly stated as a proponent of inquiry based learning. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were self-educated, between the both of them having practically no school at all.
Madam C.J. Walker, the daughter of slaves became the first female millionaire. Andrew Carnegie who began working at 13 also had no formal schooling. With JP Morgan, he created US Steel attaining a net worth of what would be $298.3B today. That’s more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined!
“We used to make steel, now we make bubbles.” -John Taylor Gatto
JTG famously worked for 30 years in the NYC public school system winning the title NYS Teacher of the Year along the way. After decades of frustration, he quit to write the best seller “Dumbing Us Down”. In his latest work he writes:
“If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisoned by their own self-policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations.”
There are many American teachers that are true educators. Each day they accompany children individually on a journey of self-knowledge through inquiry based learning conjoined with critical thinking. I am blessed to have some of them in my life, personal heroes whose friendships I hold close to my heart. But not enough of these people exist. The system gets in the way.
Albert Einstein struggled in high school later writing that “the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning.” He formulated E=mc2 while daydreaming at his job as a Swiss patent clerk.
I’ve got a new equation: E≠S
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John Taylor Gatto was one of my teachers in middle school. Perhaps that is why I dropped out of two high schools and a college, all before I was 17. Gatto is one of most prescient yet unknown education theorists and commentators around. Forty years ago he took school out of the classroom and into the streets and buildings of New York City, long before the idea of “City as School” became momentarily popular.
This is a good article, I enjoyed to read it and agree with it 100%….real talk man, real talk
nice blog, keep doing what you do.
peace