How I Survived Government Schools

by Steven Yates
by Steven Yates

Gary North’s Reality Check is among the few items turning up regularly in my inbox that will often compel me to stop whatever I am doing and read it through, from start to finish. One of the most recent, on the Peter Principle, computers, and the collapse of literacy and numeracy which Lew Rockwell republished here, was an example. North noted how he escaped being maimed by government schools:

That got me to thinking. I came out of government schools, attended them all my years except for grades 7 through part of 10, graduated from one. As I was born in ’57, well after North, the removal of phonics was pretty much complete by the time I was in grade school. Yet I became an avid reader. The so-called "new math" had been introduced. I am not great at math, but don’t consider it rocket science to make change. And I excelled at matters conceptual. How did I do it?

To a great extent, I credit my parents. My dad has three degrees in the sciences – in chemistry and zoology. My mom is an RN. She often read to me when I was very small. I grew up around books and encyclopedias. No one forced me to take them off the shelves and read them, but there they were and I was a curious child. One day my mom took me to the public library and checked out a book on the planets. I was hooked on astronomy after that. Today I am told that my first attempts at writing – I was five or perhaps six – were summaries of what I had learned about each planet. Those little manuscripts are still around someplace. Maybe if I ever become a wealthy and famous philosopher and writer of commentary they will fetch someone a pretty penny someday.

I went through other phases, when I was fascinated by dinosaurs, marine life, later rocks and minerals. I had a chemistry set for a while, and would disappear for hours at a time in the basement. That phase worried my parents a little, I think. They wondered how long it would be before I set the house on fire.

There were other occasions when reading materials seemed to be left where I would find them. I recall an item entitled No Smoking! It was a set of pamphlets about the health risks of cigarette smoking, which I learned included heart disease as well as lung cancer. One of my earliest encounters with death was the death of a neighbor from lung cancer (I was around four). I decided then and there that I would never smoke. I never have. I don’t recall even being tempted by the habit, not in high school, not even by college roommates or other peers who smoked. So much for "peer pressure."

That was home. Then there was grade school: in government schools. Even though they were admittedly better in those days, I remember being bored a lot. I entered first grade knowing how to read. I had encountered the discovery of Jupiter’s four largest moons, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and soon began reading about rocks in order to explain the curious dark rocks I kept picking up on the grade school playground and elsewhere in the neighborhood. I couldn’t have cared less about Dick, Jane and Spot. I actually remember the name of the workbooks inflicted on first graders: The Think & Do Books. Students were told to match words with pictures. There were other such assignments that seemed stupid beyond belief. Sometimes I simply refused to do them, saying they were stupid. Other times, I would play mind games with teachers to quell my boredom: I would do them, but try to see how many I could get wrong. Teachers were infuriated with me. They sensed I was smarter than that.

Some of what went on in government schools was bizarre even then. I had been writing with a ballpoint pen at home since age five. Teachers didn’t want us kids using ballpoint pens. It suppose it wasn’t in their one-size-fits-all educratic manuals telling them what little kids should know how to do. So we used pencils. Or at least, I did when I was there. When I went home, I pulled out my ballpoint pen. I recall the day my fourth grade teacher introduced the class to ballpoint pens. She made a Hollywood production out of it. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. They were ballpoint pens, not magic wands.

This stuff seemed to me too stupid to take seriously. I think it may have been that attitude that saved me from the illiteracy and anti-intellectualism that would infect a lot of my peers by the time my generation reached high school. It stemmed from the fact that my real education had begun years before, at home.

I had known the multiplication tables for years. Dad had made a chart and given it to me. I don’t think I was more than six at the time. The chart involved rows for multiplier and columns for multiplicand. Following row and column to get the correct answer for any two numbers to be multiplied was simple, and before long I could do it in my head. We often made a game of it around the supper table. He would call out something like, "Six times eight," and I would respond on cue, "Forty eight!" This was how I learned to multiply and divide. Before I was seven I knew the multiplication tables from memory up to twelve times twelve.

Naturally, I had trouble when we got to multiplication in my government school. For one thing, government schools seemed to have a knack for taking a subject and draining it of everything that made it interesting. It was as if this strange talent was built into a teacher’s job description. By the third grade I was taking home bad reports for not doing my homework, or for acting up in class or not getting along with my better-adjusted peers. While I don’t remember specifics, doubtless they occurred because I was bored to death. My punishment for not doing my arithmetic homework: more problems to work. My dad once asked a teacher, "If he wouldn’t do the first set of problems, what makes you think he’s going to do these?" She was dumbfounded.

Speaking of punishments, in retrospect a lot of them seemed designed to kill a child’s interest in learning. For example, when I was in the fifth grade one of my classmates was told by a teacher – this is a direct quote I can remember as clearly as if it happened yesterday, "I want to know about Socrates." He was to research and write a two-page paper on the ancient Greek philosopher to hand in the next day! If a child didn’t write one of these papers, the required length doubled for the following day. I suppose that if a kid either refused or couldn’t do it, after a full week he’d be expected to write a paper 32 pages long, and after the second week, it would be up to 1,024 pages long. This sort of punishment was fairly standard in that class. I was once told (I have no idea of the infraction): write two pages on Turkey. For whatever reason, I didn’t get it done. So it doubled to four pages. I wrote the four pages, a length I was more comfortable with anyway, and actually learned something about the country.

But that was me. I was different. Most children weren’t different. For them, the need to learn in order to write was being inflicted as punishment! No doubt, many adults even then wondered why their children were turned off of academics by the time they reached their teens.

Was this deliberate? I think so! Although this was before Outcome-Based Education and School-to-Work, the Progressive Education model was in full force, emanating from teachers colleges and certification programs. It doubtless included using systems of rewards and punishments to discourage independent inquiry and learning, so that children would become members of a herd – a collective, for the socialist order John Dewey and his cohorts had envisioned years before.

I was immune to it. The ongoing stream of stupid events like those I’ve been recounting only reinforced my belief at some level that school couldn’t really be taken seriously. I did what I could to bring up my grades, but grades weren’t my measure of learning. Most of my real education still seemed to be going on elsewhere – at home, in libraries, and so on. Sometimes my grades were 180 degrees wrong. For example, I once received an ‘F’ in writing. Imagine that. The reason: I wouldn’t cursive write. I printed everything. I didn’t cursive write because I couldn’t see the point to it. Printing worked just fine, and my printing was more legible than my cursive writing, anyway. So I just said No. As the saying goes, if it isn’t broken, don’t try and fix it. Exercising personal preferences were frowned on in government schools even then, however – hence the low grades in writing. This also illustrates how government-sponsored education attempts to strip children of their individuality. (For whatever it’s worth, when I’m at a meeting or in church or at some other event where I am taking notes, I still print everything, although I do sign my name on checks, letters and official documents.)

As I grew up I didn’t lose my love of reading. I was ahead of my peers in certain areas (science, for example) and behind in others (literature, history and geography – my encounter with Turkey notwithstanding). To some degree this is pure accident. I had encountered science much earlier than literature, history and geography. Plus I continued to have teachers who had a knack for draining the interest out of everything they touched. This surely affected my reading of fiction. I had developed a love for science fiction early in life, and by the time I was in high school, it ticked me off no end that none of my English teachers wanted anything to do with it. It wasn’t "serious" literature – i.e., John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Albert Camus and so on. I later realized that these authors were worth reading – but not until after beginning the study of philosophy, which supplied a context that restored the life my teachers had drained from them.

Today, I doubt that such authors receive the emphasis they did then. There’s just too many white males on that list. Which probably means that teachers are now finding ways to bore kids to tears with black, Hispanic and female writers.

Such issues aside, I now believe this is how I avoided becoming a teen mall rat whose mind had been partly obliterated by government schools. Rather like Gary North, certain specific experiences led me to a tacit conviction that they weren’t for real. School was more like something to be endured every day, with no guiding principles behind it unless "Don’t think for yourself, just obey" ’ is supposed to be a guiding principle. As children we had to attend; it was the law (i.e., the government said so). But the kind of learning I could take seriously – independently reading of books and exploring subjects on my own – all went on outside classrooms.

It is a melancholy thought that a lot of children don’t have the kind of upbringing I did, with two loving parents who teach them to read, expose them to books, and encourage an enthusiasm for learning even if they aren’t actually homeschooling. After all, the nuclear family was under attack even as I was growing up, and the number of families that stay together has declined precipitously over the intervening decades. Moreover, with the escalating tax burden and the hidden tax of inflation, in many families both parents now have to work to make ends meet. Children end up in day care, where I doubt they’ll find many books about the planets or anything else to stimulate their minds. This wasn’t the case when I was a kid.

But on the other hand, I am encouraged that there are plenty of parents who have government schools’ number and are figuring out ways to do it. They are cutting back expenditures, deciding for example, that they their children’s education is more important than an SUV or a vacation to Daytona Beach. The homeschooling movement is the fastest growing educational movement in the country. Not everybody homeschools for the same reasons. Some are Christians and see government schools as godless. Others might see them as "educationless" in the sense that academic subjects are taught only if they can be integrated into the vocationalism that rose to prominence in the noxious ’90s with School-to-Work and Workforce Investment. Vocationalism may give teenagers a few job skills, but it won’t teach them what they need to know to be intelligent participants in a free society, i.e., a society whose citizens must be vigilant watchdogs on their government.

Southern Baptists recently sent a message that resounded across the country. Even though their resolution was turned down, nothing is preventing Christian parents from removing their children from government schools. There were those who thought the measure was too radical or sectarian. I do not always know what to say to teachers or others involved in one way or another with government schools who write to me angrily or out of hurt, telling me they are Christians and just don’t see an anti-Christian agenda, or who believe Christians need to maintain a presence in public education. I usually reply with my standard reading list: Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (which Gary North also mentioned) and B.K. Eakman’s The Cloning of the American Mind. Everyone concerned about education in this country ought to read these three books!

I also do not question that there are teachers out there who care about children and are sincere, serious, and dedicated to their craft. But they are also caught up in schemes like "classroom management" (the euphemism for teachers as social directors, controlling unruly children in today’s politically correct environment of hypersensitivity) and teaching to standardized tests. Many suffer from high levels of stress, and some eventually leave the profession out of frustration. There are too many agendas in government schools not under the control of teachers, or even of principals and local districts. They result from directives coming from Rome on the Potomac, often with huge sums of money as a reward for compliance. In most states, districts either follow the new federal guidelines or they lose federal dollars. Teachers either teach to the test or their recertification is refused! The current buzzword: accountability.

In sum, whatever anti-Christian bias exists in government schools is not their only problem. From the start, I perceived an anti-education bias, in the sense of education as what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called an adventure in ideas. In this conception, a primary purpose of education is to produce informed, intellectually curious and vigilant citizens for a free economy and a free society. That School-to-Work, Workforce Investment, No Child Left Behind, and other unconstitutional federal programs do not have this as their primary purpose, you can rest assured!

You do not need a resolution by some religious body to remove your children from government schools. You don’t even need to be a Christian. You only need a strong sense that your child’s mind might be at stake.

July 21, 2004

Steven Yates [send him mail] has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994). He is an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His new book, In Defense of Logic, is almost completed. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina, and plans to launch his author’s website soon.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com

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