The Seven Lessons or Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

If you had to do it all over again, would you subject yourself to public schooling? Or would you want to escape from it?

In 1991, John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year (he also won teacher of the year for NY City three times). In the speech for the award, he described the seven lessons that constitute the national curriculum of compulsory schooling.

“…believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach. These are the things you pay me to teach.”

1. Confusion

Confusion comes through “the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections.”

?? “Even in the best schools, a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, a host of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of the natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education.”

“School sequences are crazy. There is no particular reason for any of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized, since everything must be accepted.”

“I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion… I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny.”

2. Class Position

“I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. I don’t know who decides my kids belong there, but that’s not my business.”

“My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at least to endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else because I’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline, the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That’s the lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.”

“I frequently insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though my own experience is that employers are rightly indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and schoolteaching are, at bottom, in compatible, just as Socrates said thousands or years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and that there is no way out of your class except by magic number. Failing that, you must stay where you are put.”

3. Indifference

“I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do… When I’m at my best, I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings, I insist that they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in any class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.”

?? “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.”

4. Emotional Dependency

“By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because rights do not exist inside a school–not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled–unless school authorities say they do… Individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children and teenagers, so my judgments come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.”

“Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in pockets of children angry, depressed, or happy about things outside my ken; rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.”

5. Intellectual Dependency

“Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all: we must wait for other people, better trained that ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives… The power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.”

?? “Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm… Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.”

?? “Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about that they will learn and when they will learn it. How can be allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are tested procedures to break the will of those who resist.”

?? “Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends on this lesson being learned… a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.’

“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.”

6. Provisional Self-esteem

“Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.”

“The ecology of ‘good’ schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematical records, the cumulative weight of these objective-seeming documents establishes a profile that compels children to arrive at certain decision about themselves and their futures based on the casual judgments of strangers. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor… The lessons 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’re worth.”

7. One Can’t Hide

“I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by me and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time… Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file reports about their own child’s waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to contain any dangerous secrets.”

“The meaning of constant surveillance and denial or privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.”

About the Seven Lessons, Gatto continued, “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…”

?? “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. We were something special, as individuals, we Americans.

?? “But we’ve become a society essentially under central control in the United States since just after the Civil War, and such a society requires compulsory schooling–government monopoly schooling–to maintain itself. Before this development schooling wasn’t very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway…”

?? “Were the Colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading , writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as she audience is eager and willing to learn… Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level…”

“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 produces physical, moral, intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach, and they do it very well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.”

Many good, caring people go into teaching to help students learn. But the system is irredeemably corrupt and destructive, and that is by design. It was created by industrialists who wanted to turn the children of independent-minded farmers and tradesmen into mill workers and clerks, and utopian visionaries who wanted to perfect society and had to take the children away from families to mold them into conformity, fit for Utopia. It is not designed to educate.

Can you imagine a different way to promote real education, which is the antithesis of schooling??

Do you recognize the hideous effects of compulsory schooling? Its monumentally exorbitant costs? The ruinous ways we will continue to pay these costs?

Do you see how the situation in the schooling prison system has gotten worse, exponentially more harmful, in the nearly 30 years since John Taylor Gatto wrote his landmark book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling? Or even within the last five years?

Public schools are the incubator for the hideous effects destroying America.