14 ms·

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (1991)

91 points by neonate 8y ago

nugget 8y ago
The author of this piece wrote a book called "Dumbing Us Down" that is one of the most influential books on education I've ever read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
compiler-guy 8y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182727
- dang 8y ago
  Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231109.
aklemm 8y ago
I'm sympathetic to Gatto's arguments and also intrigued by alternative schooling models, but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe? Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility?
- teslabox 8y ago
  > [...] but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe? A lot of people are employed by the school system. Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse. > Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility? John Gatto was most active in the 90's and 2000's (Wikipedia says Gatto had two strokes in 2011). He seemed to start his protest against school in the latter years of John Holt's rebellion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator) https://web.archive.org/web/20050206095110/http://www.holtgws.com:80/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050206095110/http://www.holtgw...
  - cproctor 8y ago
    > Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse. This is an uninformed generalization that I see around here quite a bit. Gatto's ideas are actually not particularly fringe. There are certainly many teachers who are resistant to change for various reasons [1]. But there are also are many smart, dedicated people working hard to improve our schools, inside them and outside of them. I know several who have given the larger part of their careers, and given up much more lucrative opportunities, to create new models of schools. So why do our schools seem to be stuck? The comment above implicitly makes the "Scott Walker" hypothesis: that schools are staffed by unmotivated, low-quality humans. I'd like to offer a few other possibilities. [2] argues that schools are pinned between three competing goals: "democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions)." What looks like an intractable mess is really just the current political equilibrium of these goals. [3] chronicles how schools became dominated by the values and structures of business over the 20th century--Taylorism, not the qualities of business celebrated on HN. The same forces that sometimes cause huge companies to become lumbering uncompetitive behemoths were imported into schools, most recently with the centralized technocratic accountability movement. It is hard to make change from within such an organizational structure. The reason I took the time to write this, after a full day of work in a teacher preparation program, is that all this is intimately connected to tech. If you buy "Scott Walker," the prevalent anti-labor ideology that teaching is a routine low-skill job, you might also believe in disruption, that systemic change in education will come from technological solutions. Silicon Valley has no shortage of wealthy fools trying to automate education. (Ask where they send their kids to school.) [4] documents the lousy track record of educational technologies promising disruptive change; anyone working in ed-tech ought to have a story for why it's different this time. I'm more hopeful for design-based research and design-based implementation research approaches, but that's for another post. Anyway, teaching and software development have a lot of similarities: they're deeply collaborative, creative activities which require balancing priorities on many axes and scales. The complexity of the work is often invisible to outsiders. It takes a long time to get good at it, there's a fair amount of personal style involved, and skill is hard to measure. I get that they're in pretty different socioeconomic positions at present, but I wish there were more thoughtful and supportive discourse between the two. [1] Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. [2] Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American educational research journal, 34(1), 39-81. [3] Callahan, R. E. (1964). Education and the cult of efficiency. University of Chicago Press. [4] Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Harvard University Press.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility? I don't, but I like it that way. I get to judge the man and the merits of his essays and arguments on their own. In that light, he makes very compelling cases. He certainly writes like a man who knows what he is talking about. My favorite is his essay that describes the whole premise of the school system was to raise factory workers that were not too dumb, not too smart to think for themselves -- echoed by George Carlin in many of his stand up routines
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  As to his credibility “He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto What’s keeping it fringe is partly that schools do childcare, domestication and ranking well and that’s way over 90% of what the average person wants out of them. If education was a large part of what people wanted out of school we’d see a lot more experimentation and variety. As it is we don’t even have skill or competency grouped classes. If there is a country in the world where grade skipping is common I have not heard of it. Maybe age based grouping is the best thing for most children most of the time but there isn’t a government education system that doesn’t use it. That isn’t a system maximising for learning. Basic literacy and numeracy are obviously great but the way instruction is structured is ludicrously inefficient in terms of using children’s time. You can teach a nine year old to read in 50 hours. The graduates of democratic schools like Sudbury or Summerhill don’t even have classes and they do fine in life. School looks like an institution designed to get people used to sitting down, shutting up and doing as they’re told. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.h...
- zaphar 8y ago
  As the product of alternative methods of schooling I've thought about this a lot. I think the answer is that it is hard to scale individualized approaches. You get economies of scale of everything is regimented and largely similar. It's easier to measure outcomes even if those outcomes are arbitrary, when everything is standardized.
icc97 8y ago
> Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon Made me think of Calvin and Hobbes - but there's conflicting evidence if this was the main inspiration behind the names [0] [0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-significance-behind-the-names-Calvin-and-Hobbes-I-know-they-refer-to-John-Calvin-and-Thomas-Hobbes-but-why https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-significance-behind-the-na...
kwhitefoot 8y ago
Sounds like much the stuff that Ivan Illich said a couple of decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society. He didn't convince those in control of education either.

91 points by neonate 8y ago

The author of this piece wrote a book called "Dumbing Us Down" that is one of the most influential books on education I've ever read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

compiler-guy 8y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182727

dang 8y ago
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231109.

aklemm 8y ago

I'm sympathetic to Gatto's arguments and also intrigued by alternative schooling models, but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe? Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility?

teslabox 8y ago
> [...] but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe? A lot of people are employed by the school system. Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse. > Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility? John Gatto was most active in the 90's and 2000's (Wikipedia says Gatto had two strokes in 2011). He seemed to start his protest against school in the latter years of John Holt's rebellion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator) https://web.archive.org/web/20050206095110/http://www.holtgws.com:80/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050206095110/http://www.holtgw...
- cproctor 8y ago
  > Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse. This is an uninformed generalization that I see around here quite a bit. Gatto's ideas are actually not particularly fringe. There are certainly many teachers who are resistant to change for various reasons [1]. But there are also are many smart, dedicated people working hard to improve our schools, inside them and outside of them. I know several who have given the larger part of their careers, and given up much more lucrative opportunities, to create new models of schools. So why do our schools seem to be stuck? The comment above implicitly makes the "Scott Walker" hypothesis: that schools are staffed by unmotivated, low-quality humans. I'd like to offer a few other possibilities. [2] argues that schools are pinned between three competing goals: "democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions)." What looks like an intractable mess is really just the current political equilibrium of these goals. [3] chronicles how schools became dominated by the values and structures of business over the 20th century--Taylorism, not the qualities of business celebrated on HN. The same forces that sometimes cause huge companies to become lumbering uncompetitive behemoths were imported into schools, most recently with the centralized technocratic accountability movement. It is hard to make change from within such an organizational structure. The reason I took the time to write this, after a full day of work in a teacher preparation program, is that all this is intimately connected to tech. If you buy "Scott Walker," the prevalent anti-labor ideology that teaching is a routine low-skill job, you might also believe in disruption, that systemic change in education will come from technological solutions. Silicon Valley has no shortage of wealthy fools trying to automate education. (Ask where they send their kids to school.) [4] documents the lousy track record of educational technologies promising disruptive change; anyone working in ed-tech ought to have a story for why it's different this time. I'm more hopeful for design-based research and design-based implementation research approaches, but that's for another post. Anyway, teaching and software development have a lot of similarities: they're deeply collaborative, creative activities which require balancing priorities on many axes and scales. The complexity of the work is often invisible to outsiders. It takes a long time to get good at it, there's a fair amount of personal style involved, and skill is hard to measure. I get that they're in pretty different socioeconomic positions at present, but I wish there were more thoughtful and supportive discourse between the two. [1] Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. [2] Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American educational research journal, 34(1), 39-81. [3] Callahan, R. E. (1964). Education and the cult of efficiency. University of Chicago Press. [4] Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Harvard University Press.
jimmy1 8y ago
> Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility? I don't, but I like it that way. I get to judge the man and the merits of his essays and arguments on their own. In that light, he makes very compelling cases. He certainly writes like a man who knows what he is talking about. My favorite is his essay that describes the whole premise of the school system was to raise factory workers that were not too dumb, not too smart to think for themselves -- echoed by George Carlin in many of his stand up routines
barry-cotter 8y ago
As to his credibility “He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto What’s keeping it fringe is partly that schools do childcare, domestication and ranking well and that’s way over 90% of what the average person wants out of them. If education was a large part of what people wanted out of school we’d see a lot more experimentation and variety. As it is we don’t even have skill or competency grouped classes. If there is a country in the world where grade skipping is common I have not heard of it. Maybe age based grouping is the best thing for most children most of the time but there isn’t a government education system that doesn’t use it. That isn’t a system maximising for learning. Basic literacy and numeracy are obviously great but the way instruction is structured is ludicrously inefficient in terms of using children’s time. You can teach a nine year old to read in 50 hours. The graduates of democratic schools like Sudbury or Summerhill don’t even have classes and they do fine in life. School looks like an institution designed to get people used to sitting down, shutting up and doing as they’re told. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.h...
zaphar 8y ago
As the product of alternative methods of schooling I've thought about this a lot. I think the answer is that it is hard to scale individualized approaches. You get economies of scale of everything is regimented and largely similar. It's easier to measure outcomes even if those outcomes are arbitrary, when everything is standardized.

icc97 8y ago

> Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon Made me think of Calvin and Hobbes - but there's conflicting evidence if this was the main inspiration behind the names [0] [0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-significance-behind-the-names-Calvin-and-Hobbes-I-know-they-refer-to-John-Calvin-and-Thomas-Hobbes-but-why https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-significance-behind-the-na...

kwhitefoot 8y ago

Sounds like much the stuff that Ivan Illich said a couple of decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society. He didn't convince those in control of education either.