I was reminded of the essay from which this is excerpted:
It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for “basic skills” practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I’ve just taught you.
We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.
“School” is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. “School” is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
I read it years ago, perhaps when it came out, perhaps later, but all that came through then was what seemed to a bitter cynicism about institutional education. But now I see something different, after the Six Rules are laid out.
I see a different present, one in which my sitting in a Swedish bentwood chair typing these words into an electronic device to be published on a global information network would be an unlikely outcome. When I first re-encountered this, I thought of a world without the increased conformity and social control he mentions, and I thought of a less advanced, less developed world, not industrialized. But then I realized that without the industrialization that brought us the manned moon landing and the internet, we might also have missed out on two world wars, the cold war, mutually assured destruction, global warming . . . .
Hmm. Tough call. Does the diverse bounty of the internets outweigh industrialized warfare and it’s by-products? I realize some industrialization would have happened. I know the old agrarian dreams are just that, but would the restless fingers of the machine age have made their way into our lives as far as they have?