“American national unity has always been the central problem of American life. It was inherent in our synthetic beginnings and in the conquest of a continental landmass. . . . Somewhere around the time of the Civil War we began to try shortcuts to get the unity we wanted faster, by artificial means. Compulsory schooling was one of those shortcuts, perhaps the most important one. ‘Take hold the children!’ said John Cotton back in colonial Boston, and that seemed such a good idea that eventually the people who looked at ‘unity’ almost as if it were a religious idea did just that. It took thirty years to beat down a fierce opposition, but by the 1880s it had come to pass—‘they’ had the children. For the last one hundred and ten years, the ‘one-right-way’ crowd has been trying to figure out what to do with the children and they still don’t know. . . .
We attacked the problem of unity mechanically, as though we could force an engineering solution by crowding the various families and communities under the broad, homogenizing umbrella of institutions like compulsory schools. In working this scheme the democratic ideas that were the only justification for our national experiment were betrayed.
The attempt at a shortcut continues, and it ruins families and communities now, just as it always did then. Rebuild these things and young people will begin to educate themselves—with our help—just as they did at the nation’s beginning. . . .We need less school, not more.” (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down, pp. 78-79)
One of the things I love about Gatto is his emphasis on family and community. And his description of institutional schooling as a “homogenizing umbrella” is priceless…and right on the money, in my opinion.
Mary Jo