This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

It’s no secret that education in the United States—at least, formalized, factory-style education—is broken, and quite badly.  No one, however, quite understands why.  State politicians, federal Department of Education bureaucrats, and local schoolboards all pass more and more regulations and requirements, few of which actually address the root causes of this brokenness.  Instead, they merely treat the symptoms, symptoms they themselves have created, and the treatments usually just breed more symptoms, to be treated once again with another dose of “education reform.”

Naturally, these “reforms” and “treatments” fall squarely on teachers to administer.  Politicians and school administrators are like aloof doctors who are so disconnected from their patient, and so motivated by their own agendas, they don’t really care about the patient’s health, so long as they can say, “we did something.”  Parents—forced into long working hours and with little free time—foist their students into a system that is supposed to work, but ultimately is just government-funded daycare.  How else is mom supposed to work sixty hours a week alongside dad?  That’s progress, after all!

So students and teachers are caught in the middle.  Teachers become nurses in this sick system.  Like real nurses, most of them think they know everything, and know better than the doctors.  Typically, teachers are correct in assuming they know more than the doctors; the problem, however, is that most of the most strident nurse-teachers go on to become the doctors, and then proceed to prescribe the same medicines, only this time they think they know better.

The other teachers labor on with some quiet grumbling, making the best of an increasingly impossible situation.  Caught between parents who are by turns indifferent and meddling and administrators and politicians who are inflexible and demanding, teachers administer whatever prescriptions they are forced to deliver, and try to do some actual teaching in the process.

The results are clear:  the worst become whiney thorns that are absorbed into the administrative ranks.  The best labor on, looking forward to summer.  The rest burnout quickly, leaving the profession early.

Students, meanwhile, are alternatively coddled and hyper-micromanaged.  They spew obscenities in the hallways and locker rooms with abandon; they vandalize bathroom stalls; they vape (the gayest form of nicotine consumption) between classes; they show up late every day.  At the same time, their every movement is tracked—by cameras, by sign-in and sign-out sheets, by teachers roaming the halls.  It’s a bizarre form of anarcho-tyranny in which all the poor behaviors are allowed to run rampant like kudzu, a weed the administration timidly trims from time to time while blaming the teachers for not realizing Johnny was at the vending machine instead of in the bathroom.

Is it any wonder we live in a world with rampant cheating and arbitrary rules, which are just arbitrarily waived the moment anyone offers up a sob story?  We’ve bred generations of students who are paradoxically rebellious and conformist—as long as Johnny takes his shot and is a good little office worker, he can indulge in whatever lame vices he wishes, so long as he shows up mostly on time the next day.  Did Johnny sleep with the secretary or steal money from the till?  Well, he must have had a good reason—he had a rough home life, you know.

None of these problems are particularly new or novel.  We’ve all come to accept them as the price for modern living:  send the kids off to indoctrination daycare, because God forbid both parents aren’t working.  After all, that’s feminism—women are liberated when they can slave for some strange man eight hours every day.  That’s way better than staying home with her kids and maintaining a good home for her husband and children… right?

Into this Orwellian nightmare stepped the great John Taylor Gatto.  Gatto taught in New York City public schools for thirty years, and was a renowned teacher, author, and public speaker.  He was one of the pioneers and major proponents of the “unschooling” movement, a variation on homeschooling that emphasizes activities chosen by the learner.  He was also a major critic of the kind of factory-style public education we have today (itself an innovation from socialist German intellectuals that, unfortunately, glommed its way onto the minds of American education “reformers” in the late nineteenth century).  Gatto argued forcefully that modern education is not only broken, but actively destroys real learning.  Instead, it merely creates conformist worker drones who are educated simpletons.

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