“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. \u2018Take hold the children!\u2019 said John Cotton back in colonial Boston, and that seemed such a good idea that eventually the people who looked at \u2018unity\u2019 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\u2014\u2018they\u2019 had the children. For the last one hundred and ten years, the \u2018one-right-way\u2019 crowd has been trying to figure out what to do with the children and they still don\u2019t know. . . .<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014with our help\u2014just as they did at the nation\u2019s beginning. . . .We need less school, not more.” (John Taylor Gatto,\u00a0Dumbing Us Down<\/span><\/a>, pp. 78-79)<\/p>\n One of the things I love about Gatto is his emphasis on family and community.\u00a0 And his description of institutional schooling as a\u00a0“homogenizing umbrella” is priceless…and right on the money, in my opinion.<\/p>\n Mary Jo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}