The Corruption of the Best is the Worst

If you conversed with Ivan Illich long enough about education, politics, and religion you would eventually hear him utter this Latin phrase: corruptio optimi pessima (“the corruption of the best is the worst”). Illich often used it to describe Christianity, where he saw that, in the words of this blogger, “'a community of spirit’ has been betrayed by church systems and methods designed to control, institutionalize, and manage Christian vocation.” Upon reading this New York Times article today, I’m certain Ivan would be nodding in agreement and praying even harder that we see clearly and understand the predicament we are in instead of just blindly reacting, or simply ignoring, the deeper issues these things reveal about us.

Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.

. . . After years of dismal employment prospects, Americans are losing trust in a broad range of institutions, including Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency, public schools, labor unions and the church.

. . . In 2001, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the United States as the 16th least-corrupt country. By last year, the nation had fallen to 24th place. The World Bank also reports a weakening of corruption controls in the United States since the late 1990s, so that it is falling behind most other developed nations.

The most pointed evidence that breaking the rules has become standard behavior in the corporate world is how routine the wrongdoing seems to its participants. “Dude. I owe you big time! . . . I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,” e-mailed one Barclays trader to a colleague for fiddling with the [LIBOR-PF] rate and improving the apparent profit of his derivatives book.

 Have we have gotten so used to the bland lies we are told by our “betters” and officials that our internal alarms do not go off about them anymore? For instance, I have long been struck by how no one has lost a job or their standing as a credible authority for repeating throughout the nineties and the turn of the century that statewide assessments and the federal No Child Left Behind act would not result in “teaching to the test.” (I have a file of such statements from MA and federal officials over the years). This is one small example, but once our words cease to be sincere, isn’t it just another small step to where our actions cease to be sincere?

Reading the Tea Leaves in School's Cups

Schooling The World: The White Man's Last Burden is a fascinating blog and this entry summarizes well the critiques of mass education made by Goodman, Holt, and Illich from the sixties forward. Homeschoolers, unschoolers, and anyone interested in knowing more about the debilitating nature of unasked-for, or misguided, help in both education and foreign policy will be rewarded by reading the complete essay. Here are a few excerpts to help move you toward reading it.

The recent revelation that Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea is based on fictionalized accounts of his experiences in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that his charity’s funds were misspent and its books were cooked, and that there was little or no followup or support for many of his schools once they were built – if they were built at all – has drawn a lot of media attention.  But the larger fiction which goes unquestioned is Mortenson’s romanticized portrayal of education as a panacea for all the world’s ills, a silver bullet that in one clean shot can end poverty, terrorism, and the oppression of girls and women around the world.

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Don’t get me wrong – I would never deny that there are individuals who benefit when money is spent on education, and I would never want to come between those individuals and that money.  If a girl from rural Pakistan wants to go to school and has a knack for academics, she deserves support and I hope she gets it.  But the idea that building schools and getting every kid on the planet inside them is a solution to the problem of global poverty, for example, is a real whopper.

Why?  Well, for starters  –  and everybody knows this –  a huge percentage of the children in those schools will fail.

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When we put children from traditional rural areas into school, what we’re doing is transitioning them from a non-cash agricultural economy where nobody gets rich but nobody starves into a hierarchical system of success and failure in which some lives may get “better,” but others will get much, much worse.  Guess which club has more members?  Welcome, boys and girls, to the global economy.

The reality is that there are few better ways to condemn a child to a life of poverty than to confine her in a bad school, and a very high percentage of schools in low-income areas are and will remain bad schools.  Many NGO’s as well as international programs like “Education for All” are focused on the body count, on getting more and more children into classrooms.  What happens to those kids in those classrooms is harder to quantify or to track.  One thing that seems clear is that an awful lot of them learn very little. A Brookings Institution study of education in Pakistan by Rebecca Winthrop and Corinne Graff reports that “the education system produces many unemployable youths with few skills for economic survival…..In a recent survey of Pakistani youth, half the students say that they believe they lack the skills necessary to compete in today’s labor market.”  A World Bank Policy Research working paper indicates that, contrary to popular belief, money spent on education often increases inequality in a country. This is partly because those who already have substantial assets are better positioned to take advantage of educational resources than those who have their hands full trying to get food on the table.  But it’s also because from its inception school was designed as a sorting mechanism, a rigged competition where only one form of intelligence is valued, only one way of learning is permitted, and one child’s success means another child’s failure.  We forget that the structure of schools as we know them today was developed during a time when people believed in racist eugenics and Social Darwinism; modern schools were structurally designed to perpetuate a hierarchical class system, and – despite the best efforts of many dedicated teachers – that’s exactly what they still do, through the non-democratic, hierarchical ranking of children which is hard-wired into our entire system of grading, testing, and one-size-fits-all standards.  Until we change that – at home as well as abroad –  education will continue to perpetuate and justify poverty, not to ameliorate it.

Read the entire blog entry: Three Cups of Fiction.

Learning Foreign Languages or Just Learning to Play the School Game?

One of my current projects is to redo the HoltGWS.com website and to scan all the issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine and put them online; I'm about halfway through this project as I write this. It is now ten years since we stopped publishing GWS and I'm only now able to look at all these papers, audio and video recordings, books, and back issues with fresh eyes. I've had to organize these materials several times since 2001 as we downsized the company, put many of Holt's papers in a research archive at the Boston Public Library, and sorted and moved boxes from different colleagues' homes to mine. To be honest, it was often emotionally difficult for me to go through these materials in the past—so many memories, friends who've died, children who've grown up—but recently I've been invigorated by engaging with this material. I'm struck by how relevant all the writing in GWS remains—so many issues are the same for homeschoolers in 2011 compared to 1977: Are my kids really learning if I'm not teaching? How will they get into college if they want to go? How do I deal with skeptical school officials and relatives? Further, many of the comments John Holt made about learning at home seem even more important today, and I'll be highlighting some of those in later entries. But what really excited me this week is the discovery of a cassette of John being interviewed on a Boston radio station about the "A Nation At Risk" report in 1983. John spends nearly an hour talking about school and school reform, with just a few mentions of homeschooling. I'm in the process of digitizing this interview but I discovered this transcription of a section from that interview that ran in Growing Without Schooling 51. Donna Richoux, the editor of GWS then, followed John's radio comments with earlier writing by John about learning foreign languages in school.

First, from the WBOS interview in 1983:

Q. Does it alarm you that the report ("A Nation At Risk) described that not one state has any kind of requirements for foreign language?

JH: Not at all. The whole foreign language thing in schools is a big shuck from the word go. If you want kids to learn foreign languages, send them to places where they speak those Languages. I taught for a while at a private school here in Boston, a private secondary school, very good one, small, lots of money, very, very bright kids, very capable teachers. We had a French teacher there, a native-born Frenchwoman, an extremely competent woman. She liked the kids, the kids liked her, she had all the latest jazz: language labs, audio-visual materials, all the latest techniques. She wrote a report to the head of the school. She said. "Children take French in this school for four years, and these are very bright kids with all the best, and they don't learn as much French as they’d learn if they spent three months in the country.”

Q: How are they going to do that? I mean, in a rich private school I can understand. But what about in a public school in the United States?

JH: What's the point of teaching it? If you're living in a part of the country where there are—this is true in many parts of the country—let us say Spanish-speaking groups, or here Italian, you know you've got Iots of people in Boston who speak Italian - if you want kids to learn Italian, send them down to the North End and let them talk to people who speak Italian. But generally speaking, human beings learn what they have a need for, what they feel a need for. We‘re not good at learning stuff because somebody says, "Hey, someday you may need it, someday it may come in handy.” When we see a connection between real life and this stuff that we need to learn, then we're good at learning. 

And from a 1968 paper based on questions asked by teachers:

Q. If learning is best when one needs it, why has foreign language learning been emphasized at the early primary stage for total contact with the foreign tongue?

JH: For two reasons. The first is the assumption that since children learn their own language best when young, they will learn foreign languages in school best when young. The assumption is false. The child learning his own language has a hundred practical reasons for learning; a child learning a foreign language in school has no practical reason for learning it. The second reason is, quite frankly, that the modern language lobby is powerful in education these days. It has been able to create a situation in which schools and teachers feel they have to teach foreign languages early, whether they want to or not, and whether or not this leads to any useful or lasting results . . .

Wondering About Life and Learning

Two things I've read so far this week have made me stop and think:

Boston Globe, September 20, 2010. Front page headline: AREA SCHOOL SEGREGATION CALLED RIFE. "Public schools in the Boston and Springfield metropolitan areas are among the most segregated in the country, often isolating black and Latino students in low-performing schools, according to a report released today by Northeastern University."

The irony of this report for homeschoolers is that we are often accused of fostering "parallel societies" and segregating our children from minorities and other social groups, the very problem our schools have not solved and, I think, a problem that is made worse by more intensive schooling. Indeed, I would argue that the majority of homeschoolers, unschoolers in particular, are seeking to get their children more involved in real-world activities and groups and therefore are not keeping them away from "others." Some homeschooling families, such as the Millmans, choose to live in blighted neighborhoods with mixed ethnic groups and poor schools yet are able to nurture positive outcomes for their children. Others, such as David Albert's family, make social work and volunteering part of their homeschooling lives.

But mainly I hear the voices of Ivan Illich and John Holt in my head when I consider this 21st century research, since both, in the 1970s, were making the point that schools don't integrate society but divide it into even finer class distinctions, creating an educational underclass. Education, as they predicted, has become a social divider based largely on one's ability to afford to live where private and public schools are well-funded and where neighborhoods and their social benefits are fully functioning. We certainly need more social glue but schooling, as currently conceived, is more about making children compete in a Race to the Top where, inevitably, a few will win and many will lose than it is about cooperating towards common goals. As John Holt noted when asked what he thought about the Back to Basics school reform movement in the early eighties, "'Increasing standards' is just a code for flunking more children."

It is remarkable that despite all the fear-mongering about segragation and child abuse that homeschooling's critics have complained about over the past 33 years (using 1977, when Holt started Growing Without Schooling magazine, as my milestone), these things are not nearly as wide-spread and common as the segragation and child abuse that continue to occur in public and private schools (over 20 states permit paddling and other forms of corporal punishment in public schools, to site one abuse). Families that can't wait for schools to change and want to avoid these unjust practices and model other ways of living and learning should be encouraged, not demonized.

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On another note:

I'm reading a fascinating book, The Forger's Spell, by Edward Dolnick. It is about a con man and art forger who scammed Herman Goering, Hitler's second-in-command. This footnote has reverberated with me since it illuminates much of what I see going on in politics today:

It was in a conversation with Gilbert in Goering's jail cell, on the night of April 18, 1946, that Goering offered what became a famous observation on mass psychology: "Why, of course, the people don't want war," he said. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in Englad nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

Gilbert remarked that in a democracy the people have a say in the decision to got to war.

"Oh, that is all well and good," Goering replied, "but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."