How children become liars and toadies

John Taylor Gatto, in his book “Dumbing Us Down,” delves into the topic of compulsory schooling:

“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even.”

This is one of the quotes that stick with me forever, it seems like. To me, John Taylor Gatto is one of the most brilliant, incorruptible speakers for humanity. He was born in his beloved Monongahela, Pennsylvania, US, lived from 1935 to 2018. For the longest part of his life he was celebrated for his achievements as a school teacher, was honoured as New York City & New York State Teacher of the Year, several times… and then shunned by the establishment, as soon as he turned on them. He died penniless, as far as I know. He tells about this turn in Chapter 4, “I Quit, I Think,” in his book “The Underground History Of American Education.” He barely got it published, lack of funding.

Contrariwise, just for example, Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson played it by the book and wrote the much acclaimed international bestseller “The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.” The promotional text says:

“Our brains are designed to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. Our unconscious motives drive more than just our private behaviour; they also infect our venerated social institutions such as school.”

From my perspective, this turns a blind eye on one key aspect: It didn’t infect schools. According to John Taylor Gatto schools are designed to teach deception and self-deception. But of course, who’d dare to say that part out loud? Apparently not Robin Hanson, who has tenure. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” is not just cautionary advice but more like Survival 101. Despite the widespread acclaim for the book, many reviewers noted the absence of a solid explanation or scientific foundation for its claims, leaving readers without actionable suggestions or guidance. And for good reason.

Looking at the originator of my own field of expertise, Moshé Feldenkrais, he too spoke extensively about dependency relationships, their origins and persistence, and called it childish in adults. But Moshé Feldenkrais fell short, too, and like most thought leaders, even today, he looked for the elephant only within the family, or was waving his fist of Goethe’s Prometheus against society as a whole.

As I understand, Moshé Feldenkrais’s early years were marked by unstable political situations and adventures, frequently moving houses, and focused studying, but there was little of compulsory, large-scale, institutional schooling. And even though he earned a diploma at an engineering school in Paris, France, around 1930 at age 26, in sum total, as I understand, he just didn’t do enough years in institutional schooling to have been able to say anything of substance against it; he lacked those emotional wounds and the humiliation, the thousands of hours of having to sit still and shut up, don’t move, don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t have critical thoughts, read only from the poorly written, heavily censored and haphazardly formatted books that were pre-selected for you, and listen to whatever was presented, by whomever, however badly, yet stay alert and respond to arbitrary questions when addressed, in exactly the way expected. Actually, well over 10,000 hours of that in your first 12 years of basic education. How do you remember that time of your life? Did you frame that as a pleasant, carefree, happy time? And filed it away into the darkest corner of your body & soul, to never be bothered again? After all, it wasn’t all that bad?

As I understand, Moshé Feldenkrais didn’t have to live through that. Mark Reese’s Biography on Moshé Feldenkrais, “A Life In Movement” describes a day at school like this (heder is a traditional Jewish school):

“In the morning I wake up, wash, get dressed, go over my homework to remember it well. Then I drink a cup of tea and go to the heder. The teacher has not yet arrived, and I review the homework for the third time. When we see the teacher coming, all the boys immediately sit down around the table. During the lesson there is silence. But there is one boy that tells a joke or makes a face and all the boys laugh. Then there is a very short break. We hardly get to take a book in our hands and the break is over. When I come home, I read in the book for half an hour. Then I do my homework for about three or four hours. The oral homework I leave for the evening. At the sixth hour all the boys who study with the same teacher get together and we go into the woods. When we are between the tall bushes I stand still and look at the sky like a dreamer. I dream pleasant dreams. When I return I drink tea or read or chat a little and then go to sleep.”

They sat around a table. No dark, airless corridors. No cell-like rooms with chairs in rows where students, as well as their assigned teachers, were confined to from one ring of the bell to the next. None of the ordinary madness we call good schooling. Good for him, good for us.

“America’s first national commissioner of education, eminent Hegelian scholar William Torrey Harris, said in a long essay in 1906 entitled »The Philosophy of Education,« that a prime purpose of the new institutional schooling was to teach self-alienation, and that this could be best accomplished in dark, airless corridors. It never fails to amaze me how people can hear words like that — and the school trail is littered with them — and ignore them, as if they were only idle talk.” – John Taylor Gatto, Weapons Of Mass Instruction

Regarding the twist on the metaphor “the elephant in the room”, The Elephant In The Brain, there’s no need to point fingers at Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, or any other such thought leaders. They’ve been out on their profitable safari since their early school days, and we don’t know if they’ll ever want to find their way back. John Taylor Gatto warned us, compassionately. He laid it all out, the entire history of compulsory, institutional schooling and where it’s heading, and even included a roadmap for a way out. It’s just… we don’t listen. We’re too busy ignoring the elephant in the brain. Or maybe, considering how strongly these issues captivate our attention, I might suggest to inverse the metaphor, akin to the biblical cautionary tale of the golden calf, and call it The Golden Calf In The Brain.

In the past 6 decades (or so) people have come to accept looking at their childhood and their relationship with their parents, if necessary; maybe change their own attitude and behaviour accordingly, or maybe even establish strong boundaries. But institutional schooling? A textbook case of a blind spot. 200+ years ago the state still had to take children from their parents at gun point in order to tear the traditional family structure apart and put children through the schooling system. How times have changed, haven’t they? Nowadays parents will sue if schools refuse to process their children for them.

Well, what can I say. Maybe I could end today’s blog post on a quote by Charles Bukowski, from his novel “Pulp.” The main character, Nick Belane, best dick in L.A., seemed to be able to maintain a level head in the face of existential challenges and uncertainties of the modern world. I quote Chapter 40, back at his office:

“So, there I was the next day, back at my office. One assignment left: locate the Red Sparrow. Nobody was beating at my door with new work for me to do. That was fine. It was a time for a tabulation, a tabulation of myself. All in all, I had pretty much done what I had set out to do in life. I had made some good moves. I wasn’t sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren’t fools, they just didn’t fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering. It was a grim set-up and if you found yourself sleeping in your own bed at night, that alone was a precious victory over the forces.”