gat

care to.
In a short time such a system becomes addictive. Even when efforts are made to find real work for
children to do, they often drift back to meaningless busywork. Anyone who has ever tried to lead
students into generating lines of meaning in their own lives will have felt the resistance, the
hostility even, with which broken children fight to be left alone. They prefer the illness they have
become accustomed to. As the school day and year enlarge, students may be seen as people
forbidden to leave their offices, as people hemmed in by an invisible fence, complaining but timid.
Schools thus consume most of the people they incarcerate.
School curricula are like unwholesome economies. They don’t deal in basic industries of mind, but
instead try to be "popular," dealing in the light stuff in an effort to hold down rebellion. That’s
why we can’t read Paine’s Common Sense anymore, often can’t read at all. Only one person in
every sixteen, I’m told, reads more than one book a year after graduation from high school. Kids
and teachers live day by day. That’s all you can do when you have a runaway inflation of
expectations fueled by false promissory notes on the future issued by teachers and television and
other mythmakers in our culture. In the inflationary economy of mass schooling—with its "A’s"
and gold stars and handshakes and trophies tied to nothing real—you cease to plan. You’re just
happy to make it to the weekend.
Once the inflation of dishonesty is perceived, the curriculum can only be imposed by intimidation,
by a dizzapie of bells and horns, by confusion. With inflation of the school variety, a gun is held to
your head by the State, demanding you acknowledge that school time is valuable; otherwise
everyone would leave except the teachers who are being paid.
4 My reference is to the greatest of the old "Lights Out" radio shows I heard long ago in Monongahela, in which
university scientists messing around with a chicken heart find a way to make it grow indefinitely, sort of like what
schools are doing. It bursts from the laboratory and extends across the entire planet, suffocating every other living
thing. The show is purportedly broadcast from an airplane flying over the global chicken heart until it runs out of
fuel, crashes into the throbbing organ and is devoured with a giant sucking sound.
I Would Prefer Not To
What to do?
Take Melville’s insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your
own watchword. Read Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration about what really
matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid
out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first,
second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of
the damage is done. If you can manage that, they’ll be okay.
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