After last week's post , I was confronted with the usual, and understandable, challenge to John Gatto's plea to abolish all schools:
"But that would mean chaos!"
Gatto doesn't believe that there wouldn't be chaos, for a while, but unlike the majority, he doesn't have the 'original sin' view of humanity. As he put it:
"Let them manage themselves".
History has shown us that, whether in politics, religion, or education, most people believe that we are incapable of behaving in a good, positive way unless we are told what to do - by a tiny minority, who claim to have all the answers. Unless we are guided and commanded by our 'leaders', we would be lost souls. So goes the evil concept of 'original sin', the biggest con trick in human history. I say 'evil', because of the immense damage such a view can inflict.
In the film 'Life of Brian', the character of Brian sums up the mistake of being led when he says to the crowd:
"You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody!".
Although large numbers of people still consider the film immoral, Brian's statement of reality is deeply moral, and at the heart of the story.
The same applies to school. Most believe that the only place we can learn is in school, and be taught only by professional teachers. Well, most learning takes place outside the classroom, and every single person in the world is a teacher - of whatever skills and knowledge they possess.
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ReplyDeleteIn 1972, in a Leicester Post Office, a middle-aged Irishman asked me to write a few words on a postcard to his family in Ireland “because he had never learned to read or write”. I was keen to oblige him. I had taken these skills, learned at school, almost for granted. School may leave a lot to be desired, but, as I said at the end of a longer comment on the blog of 11th Oct:
ReplyDelete"…for every child who hates school, there’s another child longing to get into one…"
It would be ridiculous to assert that no one benefits from school, however imperfect and in need of improvement it is. I dare say a large number of parents have neither the will nor the ability to cope with anything radically different. Change happens slowly.
I doubt I liked being dragged away from my bricks and my Dinky Toys to go to school. Given a different upbringing, I might have turned out a different person. Who is to say a better one?
Now, because I learned to read and write at school, I can teach myself to write the best postcard ever! Given my advantages in life, I might have learned these skills at home. But for many children this is not a realizable alternative, and without school they would be disadvantaged.
The erudite Mr Gatto believes "it’s impossible for schooling and education to be the same thing". This may be so, but they are inextricably linked. At present there is nothing to replace school, except a welter of radical opinion, which, thanks to school, I am able to read and our blogger is able to espouse.
Excellent post. It makes me realize the energy of words and pictures.
ReplyDeleteMost of us are homeschooled at least the first five years of our lives and many of us go to school already knowing how to read. Being literate is not always a cultural expectation and perhaps if as part of human evolution we had, instead of concentrating on language and coding we might instead have developed better understanding of each other via group think and social consciousness, bridging the barriers of difference to highlight instead what we have in common. We may even be restricted in our development as a species by our chosen form of communication...which shapes thought with rules, labels and the full stop. We start out born with 'universal mentalease' as Steve Pinker puts it and linguistic determinism then limits and determines our knowledge and thought processes and our experience of the world. Language shapes thought. Our culture is encoded in our language ...however it is only an example of one culture, one form of encoding and one language.
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