I Can't Get No Education

My sister often amazes me with the depth of her knowledge. My parents are often quick to point out that this is in no small part due to the influence I have on her. She's the only 11 year-old I know who knows about the Ukrainian famine and the crimes of the Soviet Union. It took me years to even begin to grasp authoritarianism, which is what she is beginning to get. She has a maturity that simply astounds me (though she's still thankfully a kid at heart).

What I realized about this though is really how stifling the compulsory education system is. My sister picked up, from me, a love of reading and learning, and she's already now starting to see how much she can learn on her own. As we drove back from our grandmother's, she picked up my copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and I had her take a shot at pronouncing the title. She didn't do too bad with big words like that. She was very curious about it, and so I explained what the words meant. She picked up on that immediately. I told her about the guy who wrote it and she wanted to know why Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag. That's when it really hit me about the schooling bit.

If there weren't people to foster her love of learning, she would have either had to develop that fully on her own or just go through the motions at school. While my parents were supportive and taught me a lot, I had to get my love of learning on my own, and I think my heinous awkwardness and introversion pretty much drove me into that direction (two traits my sister lacks). Most people who have read the things I've written in the past are probably attuned to my thoughts on schooling, so when I say things like schooling teaches dumbness, most people who know me know that those beliefs are part of the package deal you get with me and my wacky radical beliefs. To others though, that's an amazing, and uncivic, notion to put forward.

"Schooling teaches dumbness."

My sister is not gifted. She is not a prodigy, as some may be wont to label her. She's a clever girl who catches on quickly because she lives in an environment that has always fostered independent thought. That's not a unique trait, and that's why I say schooling teaches dumbness. The vast majority of kids can be like my sister and learn like this. But when you have an institution with a rigid structure (even if some of our most creative teachers have been able to bend the structure within their own part of the structure, the structure itself still exists), with set times to learn set things in such a rote manner, you encourage dumbness and a lack of wonder. That system tells children that you learn this at this time, and once the bell rings or once that clock strikes that time, the learning of that is done and you learn this new thing. Schooling has had both benevolent and shady intentions, but that's simply intention. The results we have are simply depressing, and no amount of money being thrown at the problem and no amount of bureaucratic management is going to change that. I don't blame the teachers either. I've known both good and bad teachers, but in the end, they are at the merciless direction of superintendents and bureaucrats, which is a notion that, when I examine it, surprises and disturbs me how much it is tolerated and accepted.

The bit about dumbness has also been an idea that I have played around with a lot in the last four years. Being around highly intelligent and "gifted" students awoke me to a reality of intellectual elitism that is prevalent and even fostered in schools. The sense of superiority is just astounding (and it is something that I have fallen victim to in the past). The way some have talked revealed a deep seated prejudice and patronization towards intellectual "inferiors", and while part of these attitudes are in reaction to a school environment that cherishes jocks and popular people over others, they're still irresponsible attitudes to foster, and it encourages the notion that the dumb are hopeless. There are ignorant people out there, and ignorance is a staple of humanity since we all are struck by it at points in our lives, but our institution has created a class of people that need to be 'managed'. By stifling creativity, independent thought, ingenuity, and complete curiosity (an act which should be anathema to everything this country once stood for), we have taken children and made them a class of dependents, fostered a hierarchy that puts "gifted" students above a whole class who can easily be labeled stupid and dumb; the unwashed masses who can't be trusted (and as a cynic, I can say that while I have heard some very ignorant things come out of the mouths of these people, it often pales in comparison to some of the unbelievable ignorance of what comes out of the mouths and minds of intellectuals and intelligent people). I believe that the human mind is innately curious, but schooling and our culture seems to try to do everything it can to stifle it; it's what they call keeping you in your place.

There's a quote from John Taylor Gatto I have often quoted, and while I knew what he was saying before and agreed with it, it didn't really click with me until I noticed how quickly people can catch on if you encourage them to, or give them the opportunity to. My sister is no prodigy, but when I break down concepts for her and explain them as simply as I can, she gets it. I'm convinced that you can do this with the majority of people. Dumbness, for the most part, is taught, like Gatto said.

"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.

[...]

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

[...]

According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order."

Unfortunately, I don't know if there's really any hope for it all. I've often been insulted for being an idealist, but I know my beliefs will not come to fruition beyond the small sphere of influence I may have. Since I do not follow the path of revolutionaries who want to force change at the barrel of a gun or follow the path of bureaucrats and politicians who want to force their personal ideology and agenda through the force of law, all I can hope for is that my ideas, and the ideas of those who inspired me, catch on. I'm an idealist, but I'm not expecting anything. I've never shied away from being called a radical. The word radical is at its root, the Latin word for root. What I see is what I believe to be the root of major problems that we have. A diseased tree that has its branches pruned may look pretty with some work, but it's still a diseased tree. As long as people are content to try variations of the same, tired solution to an old problem, then the best I can do is point out that it's a bad idea. What is true, what you believe might be true, and what you want to be true are all very different things, and it seems like it's becoming so foggy that they're all starting to blur. The best intentions don't excuse the vilest results.

We're not going to get anywhere if we continue to close off discussion towards anything we don't want to hear, or to ideas we're not familiar with or refuse to even consider. The narrowing of what is acceptable thought is hurting us in the schools and in public discourse. What I believe is only going to seem wackier and wackier as this trend continues (though I think some people are starting to wake up) because it's not acceptable thought. It will be dismissed with a wave of the hand, as well as the opinions of others who have their own take on it that doesn't follow the official line. So, I hope my sister asks me questions about the things I believe, I hope that she continues to be open to hearing other opinions. I hope she listens to what other's have to say and learn from them. I hope her mind continues to be as open as it is.

It's just scary when I consider the institutions. H.L. Mencken once said "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"

Who would want to live in an institution? I'm only now just becoming aware of the serious damage institutionalized thinking has caused me. The last three years have been hell for me because I've had to further and further personally isolate myself to numb the pain and understand the damages inside. The cure was never socialization, as some people seem to think it is. Actually, Grace Llewellyn had a good quote for this:

"A healthy social life requires much more than indifferent daily acquaintanceship with three hundred people born the same year you were...[institutional] socialization means bringing an individual under the control of the group. School-style socialization makes a group of people obedient and easily manipulated by peer pressure or "authority"; it makes a nation of idiots who wish they were people on TV since they don't know who they themselves are...As for romance. Affection, intimacy, and passion really are not encouraged to take root in a linoleum room smelling of chalk-dust. A mystery-relationship belongs out in the big mystery-world."

It's been a strange road for me, having gone from being a rabble-rousing firebrand, to a meek and heinously awkward guy who hated himself, to being someone that I think has been humbled enough to principled and committed but not as zealous and more inclined to inquiry. What I realized though, is that through all I've been, the damage that institutionalized thinking caused me was always present.

I should probably clarify though what I mean by institutionalized thinking. I've been in school for as far as I can remember. I was raised to compartmentalize everything. I was raised to know a social order and to believe that only material pursuits or those that advance a career are the only worthwhile things to attain in life. I was taught to believe that this is the way things are, and that the ones who aren't in harmony with the machine are defective. Institutionalized thinking is thinking that causes you to think how do I properly live within an institution. It's the kind of thinking that causes you to believe that your education ends when school is out, that your spiritual life stops the moment you leave the church, that you are your career or that you are your labeled place. It's the kind of thinking that tells you not to think.

That's how damaging it is.

The people I've talked to about it around here, seem to be subconsciously aware of it. It's my own suspicions that our own human nature instinctively rejects it, but when you grow up with it, taught to believe it, accept it, maybe even love it, you start to think that's all there is.

I forgot about the world outside.

Those who caught me mostly in my pessimistic and cynical glory, may be surprised to know that there was a time that I did find a lot of beauty in the world. I had a wonder about things that lost for the last three years. I still had a lot of growing up to then, because I did think I knew everything, but I also had a purpose. I was fighting for something then, and fighting against the damages of my institutional thinking.

It's really astounding, when you sit down to think about it, how often people are proud to not know anything. There's nothing wrong with being a simple person and not being extensively book-learned, I have no problem with that, because I don't think that's ignorance. When I see ignorance, I see it in the person who proudly talks about how they don't like to think. I don't expect us to be a nation of philosophers--I don't even think I would want that--but I think a little more honest discourse is what we need. No one is talking anymore, or rather, people aren't talking about things that really matter, and I don't want to. Getting by with the minimalist effort. In the last part of his book A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto had some interesting things to say about rhetoric and conversations. He talked about the categories of conversation that fill up our daily lives, but how they're ultimately unfulfilling, especially for the younger generations. It was a very interesting point he made, and I think I need to reproduce in its entirety.

"Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, where rhetoric was discarded by the philosophy of the Reformation, many of the young look at this interminable future of elaborate social conversation networks that industrial societies find vital to "business culture" with disgust. There is some fundamental and radical difference between the important talk of youth that makes love, friendship, and significance reasonably easy to reach, and the social conversation of older people, in particular of self-important older people, that makes it apparent these life-and-death qualities are very difficult to obtain in later life.

I hope you'll reread that last idea. It will help you understand why attractive young people in the United States, almost exclusively the sons and daughters of the prosperous, kill themselves in record numbers these days. Teenage suicide, occurring as it does in the classes who have "made it", is mute and powerful testimony to how sterile and inhuman a destination "making it" really can be. When children prefer death to the life of the future as they see it being lived by their fathers, mothers, and family friends, it's time to find the problem not in them but in us."

It breaks my heart, and I do suspect that institutionalized thinking has a lot to blame for it. I need to disagree with Emerson who said that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"; I would have to say that it's complacency that's the hobgoblin of little minds. We're living in a culture that is quickly reaching a cultural singularity where less and less free thinking will be going on, or at least that seems to be to be what's going on. I'll never forget the first work I read by Kierkegaard, and the quote of his that just jumped out at me. "People often demand freedom of speech in place of the freedom of thought they seldom use."

There's nothing quite like the freedom you feel when you feel like you're shaking it off of your back. You begin to feel compassion again, that your senses are no longer dulled, that there's hope and love in the world, beyond the narrow views of what is love that are often presented to us. You start to feel again.

But in the end, who are you?

Who are you?

Gatto has an excellent essay in A Different Kind of Teacher entitled "What Really Matters?" There are truncated versions of it online, but they just lack the punch of the one that was placed in the book.

"Where do you start? First you have to find yourself. There isn't any other way. If you wait on that you'll be buried even deeper in the artificial programs of others. First you have to strip away decades of programming and overlays and discover your own outline beneath it all. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". Until you know that step there won't be any self to know, just a collection of relays and switches, sensors and twitches that can be manipulated by engineers you can't see. On the other hand, if you know what matters and are willing to fight and even die for it, nothing can colonize your mind and you will be truly a free spirit.

All bold emphasis is my own.

I don't know if I've ever known a generation who seems to be lost without an identity more than my own. An entire generation raised to be special and never knowing what makes them supposedly special; no wonder employer's are at a loss at how to handle employees from my generation, a generation raised without a sense of personal identity and raised completely with a sense of dependency. I've seen the excess of it all. When we didn't accept what the television said--I know it to be true because MTV tells me so--we wandered around like little children in the supermarket, all the way up into our teens and beyond. Waiting to be told to stop, waiting to be told when to go. Turn me on, turn me off, because I don't know how to take care of myself. I must know something because my diploma says I do, but why do I feel so lost? I think that about sums up too many people I have known, including myself. I wasn't surprised for a minute to read that my generation doesn't have an appreciation for the effects of violence or that it's the most materialistic and narcissistic generation yet; how could I be surprised when this was exactly how we were raised to be.

How many of us are acting based purely on impulse? What impressed me about that Gatto quote was what I bolded. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". The stakes are high, especially with being at the doorstep of transhumanism, which will only open up a whole new can of identity issues. If it hurts this much now to recapture yourself just for you, to be that person you are and be completely one and at peace with that, then how are we going to survive down the road, when we don't even seem to be sure who we are most of the time? What caught my attention in Gatto's essay was what he wrote about machines. He noted a couple of things, that we communicate and live through machines now, which denies us a large part of our identity. Part of the exhilaration I've felt from feeling like I had my life back again is that I'm starting to see people again, and I'm much more aware that I'm lost in a world of machines. Everything we do now is dependent on machines, and while I'm not a Luddite, we erred in letting them set up our identities for us. Our identity has become supplanted by the identity of the iPod, the identity of the personal computer, and, the worst culprit of all, the identity of the television. We've let things define who we are. Is it any wonder that there's so much desperation in the nation that has long been considered the capital of progress and prosperity? Is it any wonder that there is a malaise in this country with a psychic sense of decline when we don't feel like we even know who we are anymore, much less who are neighbors and loved ones are?

Who are you?

What has exacerbated the situation for my generation is that we don't know anything practical. I can't take care of myself right now, I lack the ability and knowledge. Our adolescence has become a kind of extended childhood, making us older and older dependents. I do not know the first thing about simply living, and so at the age of 20, nearing 21, I am scrambling to figure out how I can even manage to take care of myself. Oh yeah, I know a lot of things. I had facts and figures crammed into my head, ready to spit out like a living Pez dispenser, but what do I even really know? I forgot about the world outside, having been programmed, and pushed further and further into a box I simply existed in. No wonder Ireland seemed like such a liberating experience for me.

What's going to happen when we further lose our identity in machines? Gatto has some ideas:

"Machines can be stored anywhere, can function anywhere, and are indifferent to the machines they associate with, but men and women must build the meanings of their lives around finding a few, very few, people to touch and love and care for. If you fail in that it doesn't matter how well financed the school you went to was, how healthy the space program is, or how many machines you own--you'll be miserable. If this is so, and I confess it looks that way to me, you'll have to sabotage the global economy to survive as a human being, and you'll have to learn to think for yourself because schools and governments and machine-makers will lie to you about what matters every time."

Bold mine again.

I know my stakes in the matter, and I know what I'm fighting for. I have a better idea of who I am. I know what's right for me. And Gatto was right, it hurt a lot to get here. Friends would occasionally tell me that I would benefit from all of this, and I did. It hurt like hell, it hurt a lot. I was torn apart inside and driven to complete madness. Everytime I thought I was out, I was dragged back into the pit. In the end though, it gave me back who I was, and who I should have been. It had to be done to bring me here, otherwise I would have languished, emotionally crippled and devoid of anymore function in this world. Force of will, love, and compassion have brought me back though, and restored my identity to me. I smile from time to time now.