
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (1991) - neonate
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
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nugget
The author of this piece wrote a book called "Dumbing Us Down" that is one of
the most influential books on education I've ever read.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down)

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aklemm
I'm sympathetic to Gatto's arguments and also intrigued by alternative
schooling models, but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe? Does anyone
have insights into Gatto's credibility?

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teslabox
> [...] but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe?

A lot of people are employed by the school system. Like the other guilds,
teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching
instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not
realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was
the one-room schoolhouse.

> Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility?

John Gatto was most active in the 90's and 2000's (Wikipedia says Gatto had
two strokes in 2011). He seemed to start his protest against school in the
latter years of John Holt's rebellion:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_\(educator\))

[https://web.archive.org/web/20050206095110/http://www.holtgw...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050206095110/http://www.holtgws.com:80/index.html)

~~~
cproctor
> Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and
> indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed
> their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to
> education in America was the one-room schoolhouse.

This is an uninformed generalization that I see around here quite a bit.

Gatto's ideas are actually not particularly fringe. There are certainly many
teachers who are resistant to change for various reasons [1]. But there are
also are many smart, dedicated people working hard to improve our schools,
inside them and outside of them. I know several who have given the larger part
of their careers, and given up much more lucrative opportunities, to create
new models of schools. So why do our schools seem to be stuck?

The comment above implicitly makes the "Scott Walker" hypothesis: that schools
are staffed by unmotivated, low-quality humans.

I'd like to offer a few other possibilities. [2] argues that schools are
pinned between three competing goals: "democratic equality (schools should
focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training
workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for
social positions)." What looks like an intractable mess is really just the
current political equilibrium of these goals.

[3] chronicles how schools became dominated by the values and structures of
business over the 20th century--Taylorism, not the qualities of business
celebrated on HN. The same forces that sometimes cause huge companies to
become lumbering uncompetitive behemoths were imported into schools, most
recently with the centralized technocratic accountability movement. It is hard
to make change from within such an organizational structure.

The reason I took the time to write this, after a full day of work in a
teacher preparation program, is that all this is intimately connected to tech.
If you buy "Scott Walker," the prevalent anti-labor ideology that teaching is
a routine low-skill job, you might also believe in disruption, that systemic
change in education will come from technological solutions. Silicon Valley has
no shortage of wealthy fools trying to automate education. (Ask where they
send their kids to school.) [4] documents the lousy track record of
educational technologies promising disruptive change; anyone working in ed-
tech ought to have a story for why it's different this time. I'm more hopeful
for design-based research and design-based implementation research approaches,
but that's for another post.

Anyway, teaching and software development have a lot of similarities: they're
deeply collaborative, creative activities which require balancing priorities
on many axes and scales. The complexity of the work is often invisible to
outsiders. It takes a long time to get good at it, there's a fair amount of
personal style involved, and skill is hard to measure. I get that they're in
pretty different socioeconomic positions at present, but I wish there were
more thoughtful and supportive discourse between the two.

[1] Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. [2] Labaree, D.
F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational
goals. American educational research journal, 34(1), 39-81. [3] Callahan, R.
E. (1964). Education and the cult of efficiency. University of Chicago Press.
[4] Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Harvard University Press.

~~~
panic
Exactly -- imagine how hard it is for a single software developer to change
the direction of a large corporation. Teachers trying to change the school
system face a problem orders of magnitude harder than that.

~~~
skolemtotem
> orders of magnitude harder

They seem to be at about the same difficulty to me; it would be nice if you
could elaborate.

~~~
barry-cotter
If a private company fails over and over again it goes bankrupt and is
dissolved. If a government department or organisation completely fails at
their goal they’ll generally be given more money and resources. See many, many
school districts in America, the CIA (failed to predict the fall of the USSR
and 9/11), the Pentagon (Iraq and Afghanistan), the State Department (Let’s
destroy Libya and Syria!)

Organisations very rarely reform or change. Usually they die and other
successful ones take over their market niche. Where this doesn’t happen or
happens very rarely things change very slowly.

Any competitor with the public school system has to compete with free at the
point of access. Absent transferable budget per child local school systems
have a huge advantage.

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compiler-guy
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182727)

~~~
dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231109).

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kwhitefoot
Sounds like much the stuff that Ivan Illich said a couple of decades earlier:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society).

He didn't convince those in control of education either.

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icc97
> Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it
> was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in
> the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon

Made me think of Calvin and Hobbes - but there's conflicting evidence if this
was the main inspiration behind the names [0]

[0]: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-significance-behind-the-
na...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-significance-behind-the-names-Calvin-
and-Hobbes-I-know-they-refer-to-John-Calvin-and-Thomas-Hobbes-but-why)

