gat

Nothing in human history gives us any reason to be optimistic that powerful social machinery,
through its very existence, doesn’t lead to gross forms of oppression. If engines of mass control
exist, the wrong hands will find the switches sooner or later. That’s why standing armies, like the
enormous one we now maintain, are an invitation to serfdom. They will always, sooner or later,
go domestic. The more rationally engineered the machinery, the more certain its eventual
corruption; that’s a bitter pill rationalists still haven’t learned to swallow.
We are, I think, at one of those great points of choice in the human record where society gets to
select from among widely divergent futures. It’s customary to say there will be no turning back
from our choice, but that is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that we will not be able to
turn back from our next choice without a great and dreadful grief. It is best to heed the Amish
counsel not to jump until you know where you’re going to land.
Not jumping at this moment in time means rejecting further centralization of children in
government schooling. It means rejecting every attempt to nationalize the religious enterprise of
institutional schooling. If centralizers prevail, the connection between schooling and work will
become total; if decentralizers prevail it will be diffuse, irregular, and for many kinds of work, as
utterly insignificant as it should be. Experts have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the
problem of schooling. The problem is not that children don’t learn to read, write, and do
arithmetic well—the problem is that kids hardly learn at all from the way schools insist on
teaching. Schools desperately need a vision of their own purpose. It was never factually true that
all young people learn to read or do arithmetic by being "taught" these things—though for many
decades that has been the masquerade.
When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to
justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which puts
experience first. Only much later, after a long bath in experience, does the thin gruel of abstraction
mean very much. We haven’t "forgotten" this; there is just no profit in remembering it for the
businesses and people who make their bread and butter from monopoly schooling.
The relentless rationalization of the school world has left the modern student a prisoner of
low-grade vocational activities. He lives in a disenchanted world without meaning. Our cultural
dilemma here in the United States has little to do with children who don’t read, but lies instead in
finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life. Any system of values that accepts
the transformation of the world into machinery and the construction of pens for the young called
schools, necessarily rejects this search for meaning.
Schools at present are the occupation of children; children have become employees, pensioners of
the government at an early age. But government jobs are frequently not really jobs at all—that
certainly is the case in the matter of being a schoolchild. There is nothing or very little to do in
school, but one thing is demanded—that children must attend, condemned to hours of
desperation, pretending to do a job that doesn’t exist. At the end of the day, tired, fed up, full of
aggression, their families feel the accumulated tedium of their pinched lives. Government jobs for
children have broken the spirit of our people. They don’t know their own history, nor would they
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