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OBE and the Seven Lessons
It is obvious that Outcome-Based Education will reinforce the seven deadly lessons. Confusion will be taught by the arbitrary content of the curriculum, beginning with whole language and invented spelling and ending with a confusing mishmash called social-studies. Class position will be enhanced by separating the gifted and talented (the rulers of tomorrow) from the vocational proles whose future place in society will have been determined by the pyscho-visionaries of OBE. Indifference will be reinforced through mastery learning which turns the student into a parrot who must demonstrate what he has learned in order to move up to the next level. Emotional dependency will be instilled since the student-prisoner will have to demonstrate competency in what he has learned in order to be released from compulsory attendance, no matter how old he is. Intellectual dependency will be taught by the requirement that the student learn exactly what he or she had been taught. The OBE visionaries will determine what vocation, what lifestyle that student will have and will design the curriculum to fit that predetermined future. Provisional self-esteem will be taught in order to get the student to do what the pyscho-educators require, or else. And finally the student will discover that in OBE no one can hide because the student will be monitored as closely as any prisoner in a penitentiary and a permanent record will be kept in the federal computer available to all future controllers.
In other words, what Gatto now sees as a stifling, inhuman education system will simply get worse and more oppressive under the OBE plan. Can the system be reformed? Gatto writes:
The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produced physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects….Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good "Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid…"
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching...all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius.
Of course, things were not always this way. Back in the 1930’s, when your editor attended public school in New York City, one was taught to read, write and do arithmetic in a well-organized, systematic, traditional way. There was no confusion in what we were being taught. In studying American history, we started at the beginning and proceeded chronologically to the current period. It all made sense. The same was true of every other subject. Whatever was taught was very much worth learning. Nor was the teacher interested in how we felt, or what the political leanings of our parents were, or what our values were. These were clearly no concern of hers. Gatto writes:
Only a few lifetimes ago things were very 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 much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government sticking its nose into and measuring every aspect of our lives, without institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and feel….[T]here are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, 20 percent of whom were slaves and 50 percent indentured servants….
It becomes obvious that the institution of government education itself did much to lead us away from the values of independence and self-reliance that governed America in its early days. And the only way to recapture these values is to get the government out of the education business. Gatto writes:
The character of large compulsory institutions is inevitable; they want more and more until there isn’t any more to give. School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life—in fact it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts—and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human.
Is there a solution to the problem? Gatto offers the same solution this writer has been advocating for the last ten years. He writes:
Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I’m trying to describe a free market in schooling exactly like the one the country had until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education; it didn’t hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see….
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education. All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love—and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
Finally, Gatto ends his discourse with this memorable line:
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
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