Compulsory Education System through the Lens of
John Taylor Gatto
So accurate John Taylor Gatto sounds when he says that schooling becomes possible when the element of free will is taken away from the education.
Dumbing Us Down, one of the names of the books of John Taylor Gatto, as a metonymy, does complete justice by disclosing some of the unresolved and major wrongdoings of the modern compulsory education system.
Indeed, the compulsory education deprives the children of their family and community life. If a human being has never had an experience of active participation in community life, he cannot claim to have lived a healthy and wholesome life.
Gatto shows unflinching courage when he takes the stand to speak up for the well-being of humanity in a true sense, echoing his pioneering predecessors such as John Holt, Jonathon Kozol, James Herndon, and many others.
After spending 30 years of life as a New York School Teacher, Gatto tells us that he used his classes as laboratories that made him learn the truth that, “Genius is exceedingly common human quality” and also natural to all of us.
Though the factor of reluctance was involved in accepting this fact, being the product of two elite universities (compulsory schooling) where he learnt that things like intelligence and talents are not bestowed naturally upon all human beings, he accepted it.
He recognized widespread signs of excellence in the children that made him question himself, “Whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them (children) down. Was it possible that I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it?”
Common is the impression that acquiring education in schools would brighten future of humanity. We are just the pawns in the big game played against humanity.
The Argentine Revolutionary and Author, Che Guevara says, “Educate your enemy, don’t kill him, for he is worth more to you alive than dead.”
Gatto has been just and fair when he criticizes the modern education system. On receiving the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, he delivered a speech, The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, where he dauntlessly brings out to light the seven common and all-pervasive lessons that every teacher and every school teach, no matter where they belong to. He said that the teachers make everything seem unrelated and senseless to children, generating inside them the feeling that nothing is worthwhile completing and that humans can be classified and graded like products. The teachers make them intellectually and emotionally dependent to such an extent that they crave outward appreciation, which leaves no room for self-motivation, self-esteem, self-confidence and self-assessment (to which I would add self-control and self-introspection, the two qualities that are indispensable for eternal success of the human beings). Taught to the children are their right places that would enable them later to serve the pyramid. And lastly, they are continuously being judged and kept busy with several sorts of aimless school work or drills. No doubt, the teachers are made to do it laboriously and unknowingly.
Teaching, as John Holt says, stops learning.
The generations that formal schooling has brought up lack natural curiosity, a sense of values, knowledge of the rich past, consciousness of the present and future makes hardly any sense to them. Formal schooling keeps the children away from the real world experiences and human connections. As and when they enter real and practical life (at the end of school years) where they have to shoulder tiring responsibilities, they fail at even managing intimate human relations. Thus emerges the population of materialistic, dependent, malleable, docile and compliant human beings who have, by now, been moulded successfully from their natural form or nature.
“We are making the future, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is”. (The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells)
Formal schooling creates for economic growth, such human products that are well trained and obedient but not critical thinkers whatsoever. We are still being divided, conquered and at stake is our free will.
There is lots of education happening around the globe, yet it turns us into a narcissistic civilization incapable of growing or maturing and managing our lives and the lives of those around us. Without any doubt, formal and compulsory schooling has not left any stone unturned to make us so.
Mustafa Tayyab
Certified Child Psychologist,
Counsellor & Parent Educator,
Founder & Director,
Zaytuna Academy