Teaching with Tim

“[In public schools] only one performance act is demanded by the state, just as it is demanded with all other types of made-up government work: the children must attend.  They must be present through the school day as they are passed from stranger to stranger to the sound of horns in this eerie form of growing up they have been assigned.”

–John Gatto, three-time New York City teacher of the year and 1991 New York State teacher of the year. 

            I’ve been reading this book by Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher (thanks for the loan Aunt Marnie, I knew I’d get to it at some point).  He is a rabid opponent of compulsory education, claiming that we have destroyed a once thriving home-brewed American education system–an eclectic mix of home-schooling, trade schools, and private schools that fostered the highest historic levels of American literacy until the late 1800s–by forcing students into a school system inspired by assembly lines and industrial greed.  Our public schools, Gatto claims, are nothing more than government job factories, incredibly inefficient behemoths of bureaucratic waste that rob children of their right to solitude and self-directed discovery.  There’s a lot more to his argument than that, but that’s the gist of it.  I don’t agree with everything, but what he says does strike a cord with my experience.  When I am disciplining kids for mere insubordination, as I was at the end of the period yesterday with two girls who brought gum and drinks to class, I often forget that really, fundamentally, they shouldn’t have to do what I say at all.  Who am I to tell them what to do?  I’m not their father.  Relatively speaking, I barely know them.  What gives me the right to command their obedience?  There are some possible answers to that—I’m trying to help them, it’s my responsibility to maintain order in the classroom so that all students have a chance to learn, etc.—but the fact remains that sometimes when I chastise students simply for stepping out of line, I feel a little less human.  I feel like an unwilling drill sergeant who, if he’s not careful, will soon actually become the rigid disciplinarian he’s pretending to be.  It’s not a good feeling.  So I wrote a letter to John Gatto yesterday:

Compulsory education doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon, so which of these options makes more sense? 1) Stay in teaching, like you did, but instead of fighting the system itself, try to be the best TRUE teacher I can, sabotaging the system by providing students with real, hands-on experiences and opportunities for reflection and growth.  2) Abandon the system and seek employment in another field that would still utilize my best talents–writing, alternative education, etc. 3) Jump a crabbing ship to Alaska and do my best to get in touch with the real world before I sink into this vicious cycle of American capitalism too deeply.

We’ll see if I get a response.  I don’t know that I have the capacity to be an incendiary, life-changing Gatto-caliber teacher—I’m certainly not one at the moment—but his model is inspiring.  Still, I got $50 for second place in a short story writing contest last week (story here: the-bowler1), and if I can pull that off a few thousand more times, I won’t have to teach anymore…