Weapons of Mass Instruction: Book Report

A book authored by John Taylor Gatto, a teacher of 30 years, and a state of New York Teacher of the Year award winner.

Jul 29, 2024

The sub-title of the book is, “A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling,” which together with title should give you some indication of what Gatto writes about.

Systems Design in General

A system does exactly what it is designed to do.
— John Newell

A corollary to that statement is; if you want to know what a system is designed to do, look closely at what it actually does. I want to talk about this for a few minutes.

I wrote on the Department of Education, which I suppose you could say is the top tier of our “education system” in the United States. <Never mind that its very existence is entirely un-Constitutional.> In that post I listed the outcomes that the Department says the system is supposed to deliver. In that post I also show, using the Department’s own metrics, that the system has failed to deliver on two of its objectives; educational excellence/achievement, and to deliver more equitable outcomes. Failed. There is no question about it. What then has the system actually delivered? The Department says that one the third of its objectives is to improve our competitiveness in the global economy; it has done this, by ensuring that the productivity of employees increases at a much faster pace than the pay of said employees. That’s it. That is what the system is designed to do; improve productivity, and keep a thumb on wage growth. Period.

You can argue with the facts all day long, but you won’t win; the system is not designed to improve academic excellence/achievement, and it is not designed to produce more equitable outcomes, because its designers don’t want those things. They’ve had 40 years to “improve” the design of the system, or to eliminate the “bugs” in the system, and to deliver those things, but they don’t, and won’t, because they are perfectly happy with what the system has done, does, and will do; which is to increase the productivity-to-wages ratio.

The Advent of Our Modern Education System

It wasn’t always this way. The first chapter of the book covers the “why,” why our school system is what it is. And this is where a distinction needs to be drawn; it’s not about education, it is about schooling. An education for their children is what most parents are expecting, most students however, are simply schooled. This idea really found its legs in the early 20th century.

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
— Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, and later, the worst President of the United States ever (at least to date)

So, how do we distinguish between the class to be liberally educated, and the class to be “fit to perform specific difficult manual tasks?” Welcome to the world of “standardized tests.” But I digress.

…our schools are…factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned…And that is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down
— Ellwood P. Cubberly, dean of Stanford’s School of Education, in the book Public School Administration (1922)

Those quotes, and the entire “Prologue: Against School,” was published as the cover essay in Harper’s magazine. More from that prologue:

School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.
Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, “Prologue: Against School”

There are exceptions of course, both in the ranks of teachers and students; Gatto tells stories of a couple of students in particular, who changed his thinking through their behavior. Those are interesting chapters. As for teachers, some, too few, “bucked the system,” Gatto being one, and actually attempted to educate his students, with some success. The problem is that the system makes a point of deterring teachers from such exploits. Most teachers simply fall in line. As do most students, knowing of nothing else to do.

Rockefeller, Of Course, Was Involved

In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions (of intellectual and moral education) fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen — of who we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children…and teach hem to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
Rockefeller’s General Education Board, Occasional Letter Number One, 1906

Literally, they write as if they are gods. In other words though, it is to be about training, like training a horse, or an ox, or a working dog, but it is expressly not to be about education.

Some Early “Success”

We tested soldiers when they were pressed into services for various and sundry wars, beginning with WW II.

World War II: literacy rate 96%, most of these people were educated in the ‘30s

Korea: literacy rate 81%

Vietnam: literacy rate 73%

Yup, we’re on the right track, so far as the power elite are concerned.

And Yet More “Success”

But the ball really got rolling in the 60’s; “between 1967 and 1974, teacher training was radically revamped through the coordinated efforts of important private foundations, select universities, think-tanks, and government agencies, encouraged by major global corporations and harmonized through the US Office of Education…” That re-training had the desired effect.

John’s Hopkins University Press, in 1996, published a book, Fat and Mean, with surprising news about our by now well-schooled society. The book reported that while the American economy had grown massively through the 1960’s, real spendable working-class wages hadn’t grown at all for 30 years. During the booms of the 1980s and 1990s, purchasing power had risen steeply for 20 percent of the population, but it actually declined for all the rest by 13 percent. After inflation was factored in, purchasing power of a working couple in 1995 was only 8 percent greater than for a single man in the 1950s.
Despite a century-long harangue that schooling is the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred.
Weapons of Mass Instruction, Gatto

It is absolutely no coincidence that the Amish, who until the 60s sent their children to English schools, then began the process of “opting out.” They saw and read the writing on the wall, while the rest of us had our heads up our asses. The Amish fought in Yoder v. Wisconsin, and won at the Supreme Court; they then quickly and without public funding built 50,000 neighborhood schools nationwide.

Open-source Learning

Gatto mentions many who have not had the “benefit” of schooling, or who dropped out of school at some point along the way; George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, not one of which ever graduated from even a secondary school; admirals like Farragut, who captained a ship at 12 or 13 years of age; Edison, Carnegie, Rockefeller; writers like Melville, Twain and Conrad. Of course then you have the founders, two each, of both Microsoft and Apple; all of them dropouts. “In fact,” says Gatto, “until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all;” they were growing young adults.

"the age following childhood, the age of growing" (roughly the period from the 15th to the 21st year; or age 14 to 25 in males, 12 to 21 in females), early 15c., from Old French adolescence (13c.), from Latin adolescentia/adulescentia "youth, youthful people collectively," abstract noun from adulescentem "growing, youthful"
Online Etymology Dictionary

The point of open-source learning is to Do-It-Yourself. Educate yourself. And by that I mean, seek out the teachers you need to advance your education along whatever lines you see fit. For me, in the last decade, that has included milling and drying lumber, making pure maple syrup products; permaculture (permanent agriculture) and grass-based farming; chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, oxen and the like; homesteading, being prepared; finance and economics, and so on and so forth. Not to mention Christianity. I have availed myself of many teachers, and most of my teachers I’ve never met.

I think the Amish have it right, which I wrote about in my post, The Amish, and What We "English" Can Learn. They go only through the 8th grade; beyond that their education is open-source, and given the number of successful Amish entrepreneurs in the area, they are doing quite well.

Some Comments on the Foregoing

I know that what I just wrote will be hurtful to some. My family in particular, is heavily populated with teachers. I know it hurts, because as I noted in my post Sad Day, Bad Day, it hurt me to come the realization that my 17 years in the military or military schools, had not been about “serving my country.” No, like schooling, it is about serving our power elite masters. And about serving the economic machinery of the nation-state in both cases. Yeah, I admit, as difficult as that is, to having been a “useful idiot.”

So. Like I am having to do, get over it, change your mind, make the necessary course changes, and get moving!