## Foreword, by Zachary Slayback “You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else’s script.” The best teacher I had was one who signed passes so students could skip other classes to go to her classroom and work on whatever they wanted. The worst were those obsessed with meeting state-mandated standards. We don’t need school reform. Schools are working exactly as their designers intended. We need more choices and options outside of school. At the end of the day, the person who creates those is you. Stop waiting for permission from others and create opportunities to learn. ## Preface—About the Author sometimes when I hear a news report from TV I wonder, Who are you? and, Why are you telling me these things? The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence—insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality—that I became confused. that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction. I dropped the idea that I was an expert whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself. Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education, I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central myths are exposed and abandoned. I get out of kids’ way, I give them space and time and respect. ## 1. The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher I don’t teach English; I teach school—and I win awards doing it. What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn’t idiosyncratic—that there is some system to it all and it’s not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That’s the task, to understand, to make coherent. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess. Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning. I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference. rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior. Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth. I assign a type of extended schooling called“homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. IT IS THE GREAT TRIUMPH of compulsory government monopoly mass schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. School, as it was built, is an essential support system for a model of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. All of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith. institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. These options exist now in miniature, wonderful survivals of a strong and vigorous past, but they are available only to the resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. ## 2. The Psychopathic School men and women who were never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine what the word“education” should mean. schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions It’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities. All of these are addictions of dependent personalities, and this is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce. between schooling and television, all the time the children have is eaten up. There simply isn’t enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be other significant causes. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. We need to invent curricula where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance. Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. until we force open the idea of“school” to include family as the main engine of education. It’s time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. ## 4. We Need Less School, Not More schools, as networks, create a large part of the agony of modem life. We don’t need more schooling—we need less. By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables—and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways—network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, and not parents. when you’ve spent more than a decade listening to other people talk and trying to do what they tell you to do, trying to please them after the fashion of schools. It makes a real lifelong difference whether you avoid that training or it traps you. If performance within these narrow confines is conceived to be the supreme measure of success, if, for instance, an A average is considered the central purpose of adolescent life—the requirements for which take most of the time and attention of the aspirant—and if the worth of the individual is reckoned by victory or defeat in this abstract pursuit, then a social machine has been constructed which, by attaching purpose and meaning to essentially meaningless and fantastic behavior, will certainly dehumanize students, alienate them from their own human nature, and break the natural connection between them and their parents, to whom they would otherwise look for significant affirmations. Institutional goals, however sane and well-intentioned, are unable to harmonize deeply with the uniqueness of individual human goals. every institution’s unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally staked out for itself. On this question of meanings we’ve hidden from ourselves for so long hangs both an understanding of the illness that is killing us and the cure we are searching for. 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—and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time. It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally degrading them, identifying them as“low-class” material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff! stopping these places from functioning like cysts, impenetrable, insular bodies that take our money, our children, and our time and give nothing back. schools reached their maximum efficiency long ago, meaning that“more” for schools will make things worse, instead of better. WHATEVER AN EDUCATION IS, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die. theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up. American ideals of privacy, variety, and individuality Children learn what they live. Mass schooling damages children. We don’t need any more of it. And under the guise that it is the same thing as education, it has been picking our pockets just as Socrates predicted it would thousands of years ago. ## 5. The Congregational Principle In the face of a century and a half of searching for it unsuccessfully, nobody seems to doubt for a minute that there is an answer. One answer. The one right answer. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The people who think globally do so by abstractly and statistically reducing the globe to quantities. Political tyrants and industrial exploiters have done this most successfully. Their concepts and their greed are abstract and their abstractions lead with terrifying directness and simplicity to acts that are invariably destructive. Because there is plenty of local tyranny as well, the temptation is to cede power to a central authority in the name of fairness, to manage some best way for all from central headquarters. people are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family, and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole; only slaves are gathered by others. To many of us, the greatest attraction of social engineering and antisocial demonologies is that both, at bottom, promise a quick fix. how we think about social problems depends on our philosophy of human nature: what we think people are, what we think they are capable of, what the purposes of human existence may be, if any. Because these privileges, once achieved, will not willingly be given over, whole apparatuses of privilege have been fashioned that are impregnable to change. Even under the severest criticism, they grow larger and more dangerous because they nourish important parts of our political and economic system. In the most literal sense, they are impossible to reform because they have ceased to be human, having been transformed into abstract structures of superb efficiency, independent of lasting human control survival mechanisms. education and schooling are, as we all have experienced, mutually exclusive terms. Turn your back on national solutions and toward communities of families as successful laboratories. Let us turn inward until we master the first directive of any philosophy worthy of the name:“Know Thyself.” Encourage and underwrite experimentation; trust children and families to know what’s best for themselves; stop the segregation of children and the aged in walled compounds; involve everyone in every community in the education of the young: businesses, institutions, old people, whole families; look for local solutions and always accept a personal solution in place of a corporate one. I feel certain that the structure we built then still houses powerful potential. Let’s use it once again, and create a truly American solution to the great school nightmare. ## Extra Bonus Chapter: Against School during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the“problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no“problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong, but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said he would“leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up? the aim of public education is not... to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence.... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern. an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens—all in order to render the populace“manageable." The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. The integrating function. This might well be called“the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in“your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been“diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits—and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called“the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit—with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments—clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor. “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology—all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone; they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more important life, and they can. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. ## Afterword Remarks? I set him straight, or so I thought.“Nobody,” I told him,“wants to hear a public school teacher make a speech.” There would be no remarks.“But you have to make speech,” he demanded.“You have to speak for me, for Wendy, for Amy, for Bruce, for Tamir, for Janet, Jane, Jill, Andy; for all your classes over the years you have to sum up what it’s all meant.”“No one will listen,” I said.“I’ll listen,” he said. forced institutional schooling is absolutely unreformable because it is already an unqualified success! Schools are a great mechanism to condition the onrushing generations to accept total management, to impose a kind of lifelong childishness on most of us in the interests of scientific management. This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that. a place where one can be alone with oneself, with no schedule, no agenda, no lectures, no classes, no planned recreation.