1 | 2 | 3
The Time Factor
Gatto has some interesting things to say about time in his essay, “We Need Less School, Not More.” He writes:
A surprising number of otherwise sensible people find it hard to see why the scope and reach of our formal schooling networks should not be increased—by extending the school day or year, for instance—in order to provide an economical solution to the problems posed by the decay of the American family. One reason for their preference, I think, it that they have trouble understanding the real difference between communities and networks, or even the difference between families and networks.…
Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education. By preempting 50 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….
The feeding frenzy of formal schooling has already wounded us seriously in our ability to form families and communities, by bleeding away time we need with our children and our children need with us. That’s why I say we need less school, not more….
Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop—then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.
The distinction Gatto makes between “institutions and networks” and “families and communities” is a very important one. He writes:
Those of you who remember the wonderful closeness possible in army camp life or sports teams, and who have now forgotten those you were once close with, will understand what I mean. In contrast, have you ever forgotten an uncle or an aunt?
And perhaps that is one reason why homeschooling is becoming so popular. It consists of rediscovering the values of family life, values that had been inadvertently lost in the “feeding frenzy” of public education. And what the visionaries of Outcome-Based Education want is to steal more and more from the family so that the family resembles what’s left of an orange after the juice has been sucked out. Gatto writes:
I belong to some networks myself, of course, but the only ones I consider completely safe are the ones that reject their communal façade, acknowledge their limits, and concentrate solely on helping me do a specific and necessary task. But a vampire network like a school, which tears off huge chunks of time and energy needed for building community and family—and always asks for more—needs to have a stake driven through its heart and be nailed into its coffin.
No matter how good the individuals are who manage an institution, institutions lack a conscience because they measure by accounting methods….The deepest purposes of these gigantic networks is to regulate and to make uniform. Since the logic of family and community is to give scope to variety around a central theme, whenever institutions intervene significantly in personal affairs they cause much damage.
And that explains why Outcome-Based Education is so evil because it insists on destroying the independence of the family and the individualism of the child. Whatever the school does can only be done at the expense of the family. And that also explains why the education establishment is so hostile to homeschooling because it represents the family reasserting itself, taking back its power and integrity and educative functions and rejecting the institution which has indeed become, as Gatto describes, a vampire. “Perhaps,” he suggests, “it is time to try something different.”
1 | 2 | 3
