Chapter 4 ~ We need less school, not more
In this chapter I really appreciate how Gatto writes about community versus networks. After completing the CMP masters program here at GSU, building community in my classroom with my students has become a central and significant part of my philosophy of teaching. After reading this chapter I wonder what things we can do as a school to combat the negative effects of schools as networks, and instead support our families and build a community.
Gatto defines a real community as “a collection of real families who themselves function in a participatory way” (48). Throughout the chapter he describes what communities are and how compulsory education forms networks not communities.
These are his arguments for why schooling is a network and therefore why we need less school not more:
· networking fragments our lives
· networks require only a fraction of your whole self
· networks have a very narrow way of allowing people to associate (49)
· schooling demands so much time of families and children that the family unit is broken
· networks lack any ability to nourish their members emotionally (52)
· networks require and center on rationality; but as human beings we are much more than rational thought.
· networks divide people and make people lonely
This scary truth is that networks look like they are communities but in reality they are not. As a school, we can look like we are a family. We can say we value each student, each teacher, each family, but in the end we are just a network that “steals the vitality of communities” and stifles one’s spirit. “No one can survive these places [schools] with their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, and not parents” (51). I personally can relate to this last quotation. I have only been teaching for five years, and yet I feel like my spirit is always under duress with the demands of education. Especially now that I am in first grade and have the CRCT looming over me. I feel like I can never do enough. These high demands on me probably are also displaced in my teaching and onto my students as well. I also feel like most people at my school don’t know who I am nor do I know who they are. Only those teachers who are on my grade-level and who share the same beliefs about teaching with me know who I am and vice versa (not because I am disinterested in getting to them, but because our schedule and the “grind” interferes with building as sort of relationship with one another.)
At the beginning of this school year we did a little community building in our professional learning communities. I really enjoyed the activities and games, but there were many teachers who saw these activities as a waste of time. Needless to say we haven’t had any since. I know that the administration at my school would like us to be a “family.” My principal often refers to us a the “Spalding Family.” But I feel like it’s an empty phrase and just a “buzzword.”
Much of what Gatto describes in this chapter I agree with. I do feel like schooling is “killing” our human spirit. We have talked about the high demands and academics standards affecting the amount of time children play in Olga’s class about Play. In Rhina’s class our discussions and readings about culturally relevant teaching and multicultural education are about teaching the whole child and learning about and respecting children’s cultural and familial backgrounds. It is too easy and too common for education as an institution to ignore the humanness of our children and of ourselves as teachers. It’s the networking of school that causes this and has contributed to the breakdown of communities and families.
At one point in the chapter, Gatto questions what we are doing and what is the purpose of education? I believe as a society we are lost. We have lost sight of the goals of education. Gatto states,
“What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit…I can’t help feeling that if we could only answer the question of what it is that we want from these kids we lock up, we would suddenly see where we took a wrong turn” (61).
We have read several chapters including a few from Teaching to Change the World in Rhina’s class that describe how education and curriculum has changed throughout our country’s history based on political and social events. But what is the goal of schooling? What exactly are we trying to achieve with NCLB? What do we want our kids to grow up and be and do? What kind of American citizens are we “training” and “building?” Again, sometimes I really do feel like a robot trying to teach little robots.
I think I mentioned this after reading the last chapter, but it’s interesting how Gatto asserts that schools are to blame for the breakdown of the family. Although in my undergraduate classes we learned of other factors such as divorce, mass schooling also contributes to the breakdown of families. “They separate parents and children from vital interactions with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives. Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop – then blame the family for its failure to be a family” (67). How do we awaken people to these truths? It’s the nature of the network to deceive its members. I feel like most teachers and people in education don’t even realize the full extent of what we are doing to our children and what we are doing to ourselves. I wish everyone could be enlightened to these perspectives and at least give thought to them!
Other important quotes from this chapter:
Children learn what what they live (68).
Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and intimidation (69).
Sixty-five years ago Bertrand Russell, one of the great mathematicians of this century… saw that mass schooling in the United States had a profoundly anti-democratic intent, that it was a scheme to artificially deliver national unity by eliminating human variation and by eliminating the forge that produces variation: the family (70).