The Awful Fate of Being Nobody

7/28/2019 The Awful Fate of Being Nobody

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The Awful Fate of Being Nobody; How To Avoid It

A Commencement Address for Homeschoolers

by John Taylor Gatto (Copyright, 2005 by John Taylor Gatto. All rights reserved.)

1. Modern institutional schooling by force is a deliberate project of socialengineering, one brought about for purposes seldom discussed. Theinspiration for bulk-process schooling by force came from utopian writingslike Edward Bellamys Looking Backwards and other philosophicalmusings about the creation of a better society by the deliberate extensionof a childlike state in the general population. About the year 1975 I began tocall this process "the artificial extension of childhood" and changed theway I taught to combat it, but for a long time I was baffled: How had thisidea of keeping children childish long into adulthood stepped out of thepages of utopian writing and become serious policy? The answer is

perfectly logical, as Mr. Spock would say.

This radical contention so perfectly dove-tailed with the needs of corporateindustry to find some way to revoke the self-reliant, libertarian charter of

American history in order to thrive, that the utopian school project, the greatsocialist ideal, was underwritten, promoted and guided by industrialists and othercapitalists from the start. Surely, this is one of the colossal ironies on the humanrecord.

You homeschoolers have avoided most of the pernicious effects of this deadlyconjunction, but since you are fated to live in a society of well-schooled men and

women, people made incomplete by the institutional schools they trusted to helpthem, I thought it might be useful to you, on graduation day, to explore some ofthese ideas.

To a very important extent, modern schooling exists to trick us into surrenderingour critical intellects and becoming nobodies. Being a nobody, in the sense Imusing the term, means being extremely dependent on the good opinion, and onthe instruction, of strangers. As a nobody, your opinion, your income, your status,your peace of mind, the way you regard your family is decided by strangers. Thisis the very opposite of self-reliance. The homeschooling youve done is a livingcontradiction of the mission of official schooling, which seeks to extend childhood

dependencies lifelong, to create a beehive or an anthill society.

Its important you understand that this school project wasnt inflicted on the worldout of malice or out of a wish to oppress the common population, but out of veryreal needs of a mass production economy to prevent excessive production ofindependent intellects and of too many people grounded in strong families, sincefamily life profoundly undercuts reliance on authority outside the family.


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Independent, self-reliant, family-grounded young people, who can speak andwrite well, are so inherently destabilizing to the needs of corporate management,both as employees and as customers, that back in the time just after the CivilWar, when this project was gathering steam, people of wealth and power wereprepared to contemplate a radical blue-print as old as Plato, a plan to confine the

entire youth population for a long period of years, to be passed from onestrangers hands to anothers, in a great system of forced schooling. A systemdesigned to tailor its inmates to the needs of a corporate economy and of acentralized government.

Youll be disappointed if you try to locate a political bias to explain what Ive justsaid. Both the so-called "left" and the so-called "right" were solidly behind thisproject of liberty destruction. They remain so to this day.

The Hall of MirrorsBy John Taylor Gatto

As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is muchas it was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test-driven, bell-

driven, pedagogue-dominated, and thoroughly dumbed down.

Let me give you an excerpt from a boys manual of instructions on how to buildthings, published in 1937. It was sold on newsstands as The AmateurCraftsmans Cyclopedia of Things to Make and was expressly intended, as itstates in print, for ten to twelve year old boys.

Ive selected the project on building a model racing schooner because I dontwant to shock you with the pages which teach boys how to cut a new entrance


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into a frame home or build a small portable arc furnace out of clay and bricks.So the modest schooner project will have to make my point by itself.

Lets begin with glue to hold the ship together. Our ten-year-old will make thathimself by melting toothbrush handles in acetone. Got that? Then, after he cuts

and planes hull and mainmast, casts the keel in molten lead, masters diction likejib-stay and peak halyard, and uses his sewing skills to sew the foresail, hetackles the main assembly narrative:

Spring the sides apart and slip the lower ribs in place at their proper stations.Set the ribs in so the bevel begins at edge of the side. Drive an escutcheon pininto each rib from each side. Make the inside keel from - inch square wood. Fitit inside the inside stem in the notches of the lower ribs, and spring it over to, andinside of, the stern, as shown.

Theres more, but youve heard enough, I think.

Efficient Marketing = Stupid Customers

That was 1937. Such instructions for little people were commonplace from BenFranklins day until the end of WWII, but suddenly a new standard seemed toappear after that war was over. In classrooms in every big city at first, and sooneverywhere, it looked like this:

a) Students were confined to chairs in quality-ranked classrooms, for six hours aday, 185 days a year.b) Each day they were set to copying notes off blackboards to memorize and

listening to lectures.c) They were given regular paper/pencil tests to measure their obedience inmemorizing, and publicly humiliated if they fell short.d) Casting ship keels in molten lead was forbidden.e) They were sharply enjoined to remain silent.f) Many other procedures, similar in spirit, were imposed.

Pedagogy had arrived, big-time.

This wasnt how education happened (or happens), of course, and everybodyseemed to know that. The solution to the mystery of why it was done and

continues to be done belongs to philosophy and economics, and to dark secretsof human nature secrets which used to be actively studied in schools in thedays before Literature, History, and Economics gave way to Language Arts andSocial Studies. Now, young people began to emerge from classrooms intoadulthood as ignorant of these things as forest savages.

But they were pushovers for modern marketing techniques. They lived to buystuff; having grown older in school, but never having grown up.


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A New World Order

By 1910, signs abounded that a massive project was underway to change thenature of America from a place of independent livelihoods and self-reliant,argumentative people into an administrative utopia, one inspired by PrussianGermany, by Edward Bellamys prophetic utopia Looking Backwards and byFrederick W. Taylor, inventor of time and motion studies and the slip-on loafer.

According to philosopher John Dewey, America was being converted by its mostpowerful people into a centrally managed village. In this new world order, themarketplace of ideas would be monopolized by corporations and institutions individuals and local interests were now quaint and irrelevant. Dewey thought this

an advance in civilization and, in any case, irreversible. He called thistransformation, the new individualism with not a trace of irony. School trainingmust adapt.

More than a hundred years have passed since Dewey put the bell on this cat. By2000, common people were frozen out of policy debates, treated as functions ifconsidered at all, and public opinion, so-called, was almost never spontaneous,but most often manufactured.

Nearly all work in

our society has been

centralized. To pull

this transformation

off, children in bulk

had to be taught tothink of their

futures in terms of

jobs, instead

ofindependent

livelihoods. Parents

had to be taught to

accept lifelong

subordination as a

freedom from

burdensome

responsibility, andto turn their

children over to

anonymous agents

of the political state

as a further freedom

from responsibility.

No wonder our

nation is so

profoundly

childish.


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Get Your Filthy Fingers Off My Brain

The colonization of ones private inner life by strangers is so inherentlypornographic an undertaking that no monarch or nation historically was ever ableto compel its entire people to accept it for long not, that is, until Prussia

succeeded during the second decade of the nineteenth century, justifying itssystem of universal schooling by force by citing national necessity and the highlynegative opinions of ordinary people held by philosophers from Plato to Spinoza.

As the nineteenth century crossed its midpoint, even Science came to agree.Darwins Origin of Species (1859) spoke of favored and dis-favored races,and in his Descent of Man (1871), he pronounced the majority of humankindbiologically inferior, without hope of improvement, and a clear and deadlymenace to advanced evolutionary stock. Protective barriers were required topreserve racial purity.

Horace Manns own writings partially overlap Darwins and hint at darker aspectsof the school project. Merle Curti, the historian, tells us in Social Ideas ofAmerican Educators that Mann sold compulsion schooling to his wealthy backersas the best police they could buy, a much different message than ordinaryhouseholders heard. Manns biographer, Jonathan Messerli, remarks than Mannonce jotted a revealing note to himself while watching a workingmans parade inBoston during the early 1840s. The note read: We must find a way to break thebonds of association among the working classes.

His high praise of Prussian schooling, which he claimed eye-witness experiencewith, played an important part in bringing the compulsion system to

Massachusetts, but the claim of first-hand knowledge was a lie. Nor was itManns only lie. Forced schooling turned out from the first to be a breedingground for crime and public outrage, not the best police as promised.

As a philosophical notion, mass child indoctrination by force keeps popping upthrough history, yet as I told you before, nobody could make it work. But thegroundwork for profound change in school fortunes was laid during the Britishtakeover of India in the late eighteenth century. During that time, the secrets ofinstitutional school management were disclosed through examination of eightconstituents employed by the Hindu aristocracy to manage its commonpopulation through a voluntary form of mass schooling. The eight secrets lookedlike this:

1) In place of skills training, rote memory drills.2) In place of exercise to develop independent judgment, habit and attitudetraining.3) Strict limits on student questioning.4) Strict limits on student-to-student association.5) Silent testing of material previously assigned for memorization, followed by


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publicly announced rankings of student test results. This done regularly.6) Denial of student rights to initiate curriculum based on personal interests.7) Long-term confinement in conditions of near-immobility and enforced silence,extended over a term of years.8) Removal of students from familiar surroundings, routines, and people;

placement under direction of strangers who discourage attempts to buildpersonal student-teacher relationships.

This recipe was written down by a British military chaplain, Alexander Bell, whopublished a version of it in London in 1797 as the methodology in use by Hinduelites to manage their huge population. He thought such a discipline might proveuseful to Britains own class-driven social order. Seldom has a single short essayhad such lasting influence on world history. In a short time, Bells words werebeing read in governing circles across the world.

Lancaster Versus the Anglicans

Upon reading Bell, a twenty-year-old Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, took hissuggestions to heart and began training a thousand poor children to read virtually all by himself in an alley next to his London home. The Hindu methodallowed a single teacher to instruct a great many pupils by dividing the totalgroup into student-led teams. The leaders were known as monitors, and theworld was to learn of this fashion in teaching as the monitorial method.

Except for the breathtaking student-teacher ratio, it was a fairly close cousin tothe system at work in one-room schools in North America.But that vast scale difference, and its mind-deadening formula, by extending the

gulf between student subjects and authority in the form of official teachers, mademental colonization almost a certainty.

As Hindus employed it, the monitorial system created reliable subordinates,psychologically and behaviorally conditioned to remain subordinate.

Argumentation was non-existent. The active literacies of persuasive speech andwriting were rigorously avoided. Napoleons ideal that every common soldiershould be able to think like a field marshal was antithetical to the purposes ofmonitorial schooling.

Youthful Mr. Lancaster knew nothing of these ulterior motives; driven by desire to

do good while winning fame and fortune, he concentrated on the pure mechanicsof reading well, rather than memorization; he personalized training as much ascircumstances allowed. Because he did these things, his rapidly spreadingsystem threatened for a time to upset the applecart of state-sponsored masstraining, which always aims at ordering society through an elaborate scheme ofdivide-and-conquer subordinations.


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Something had to be done, and the official state church of Britain did it. Inresponse to Lancasters do-goodism, the Anglicans opened a competing chain ofHindu schools schools which aimed to indoctrinate, not educate, just like theHindu originals. Their prestige drove Lancasters rough-edged competition fromthe field, to the point where he fled to America in 1818. There, under the

patronage of powerful men like DeWitt Clinton, he opened Lancaster schools invirtually every large city east of the Mississippi.

But under the stewardship of pragmatic entrepreneurs who were of necessity

heavily influenced by local elites, American monitorials regressed to the meanvery quickly. They adopted the original Hindu control design because thatpleased local families of substance much more than the alternative actuallyteaching common children to acquire formidable skills.

One important by-product of the Lancaster phenomenon was that it offeredpractical evidence that mass indoctrination of the young through school schemescould work. The first nation to follow this promising trail to its end was the militarystate of Prussia. By 1820, Prussia had an institutionalized, universal forcedschooling system up and running. Its purpose: to render the young into humanresources, useful to important interests. Powers of expression were suppressedthrough schooling, information needed to think in contexts was denied, the timeand associations of common children were closely controlled, and the youngwere forced daily to compete with one another for status and dignity.

This was the system which Horace Mann asked America to imitate.

School as a Civil Religion

Nobody with an

ounce of

commonsense asks

for, or makes use

of, test scores when

hiring. You dont

ask your barber,

your grass cutter, oryour babysitter,

doctor, or architect

for their own test

numbers because

on some level you

know the data is

worthless, however

many tens of

billions of dollars it

took to produce.


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And imitate it we did, although not with the same zeal for another half-century.Whig movers and shakers like Mann and his influential Unitarian backers, wereable to impose their will on only two states Massachusetts and New York in the1850s. To that short list, however, a fatal third jurisdiction must be added: thenational government center, Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia.

Washington was the straw which broke the camels back.

It is certain the school institution we finally got would look much different were itnot for Washington offering incentives behind the scenes to convince individualstate decision-makers to play ball. Its fairly easy to demonstrate that centralizedcompulsion schooling was never part of the democratic American Dream (or, forthat matter, its republican counterpart). Not a word to that end appears in theConstitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration, or in any of the nation-buildingdebates.

Jefferson had heard of a movement to do this in Europe, a movement which

drew its inspiration from Spinozas Tractatus Religico-Politicus of l690, whichdenounced ordinary people as murderously irrational and sought to establishforced schooling in order to replace faith-based religion, which he despised. ButJefferson rejected this idea to bamboozle common men and women as a merecivil religion, precisely the expression Spinoza had employed.

Nor was there popular clamor for institutional schooling after the Revolution. Ittook a full sixty-five years before the first two states fell, and another sixty-fivebefore the last one did.

Youve heard a few of the philosophical rationales to defend what happened, but

now its time to hear some hard-nosed economic ones. The most obvious one iseasy to understand: This novel institution offered a rich new field of personalopportunity. As one of the largest hiring agencies in history and one whichcould bestow lucrative contracts it was a quietly spectacular economic enginefrom the start, a jobs project with no civilian parallel.

And school performed subtler services as well. By offering a break frommotherhood, it allowed millions of women to be drawn into the labor pool animmense windfall for management because it cut the value of a labor unit in half.In conjunction with a new requirement for state-issued pedagogical licenses, itcreated a wholly new sub-industry called teacher- training, and in many otherways, feathered collegiate nests.

From the outset, this economic aspect of institutional schooling became the tailthat wagged the dog. It guaranteed that school training of the young would beforever political. Nobody who benefits materially from politicized education,whether left, right, or center, would be crazy enough to allow schools to be de-politicized. The tidal flow of money through school corridors in good times and


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in bad is in the last analysis much more important than philosophy as anultimate determinant of school affairs.

Other economic reasons to push forced schooling exist, but they are remote fromgeneral understanding. By a sort of gentlemans agreement, they arent

discussed in places where the public is likely to be listening. For example,institutional schooling provides a partial remedy for two deadly diseasescorporate capitalism is prone to contract: overproduction and hyperdemocracy.

Ill take overproduction first. The history of North America is one in which familiesand individuals were taught to produce for themselves to the greatest extentpossible: to produce food, shelter, clothing, medical care, entertainment,education, and more.

But under corporatized governance and economy, self-sufficiency, and personalenterprise frustrate the will of companies and agencies to provide for the whole

population. Its a tribute to the power of mass schooling to misdirect attention thatthis clear truth isnt recognized by everyone. If schools taught us to connect thedots instead of memorizing them, it would be. Independent minds are toxic to oursocial order and no qualities are so poisonous to corporate health as self-relianceand active imagination.

To understand this you need to see that imagination is a necessary prerequisitefor personal production a condition which entrepreneurial societies mustencourage. Yet, when too many imaginative individuals produce for the market and are allowed to do so excessive amounts of goods and services becomeavailable. Prices collapse, banks take a beating, and the lifeblood of high-stakes

capitalism concentrating investment capital becomes difficult because profitshave been put at risk.

As bizarre as it sounds, under corporate capitalism and governance, ways mustbe found to make the general public less productive, less self-reliant. The greatfinancial panics of the nineteenth century grew on the soil of overproduction, andthe disruption of Asian economies in the 1990s, a century and more later,stemmed from overproduction, too, as Japanese banks, seeking to enlarge theirown profits, stimulated too much production.

Policy leaders have been privy to this daunting secret for centuries. Early on,

they erected defenses against overproduction: licensing laws, subsidies tofavored producers, sweetheart contracts, and so on.

Sabotaging Democracy For Cause

A second disease menacing corporate capitalism was dubbed hyperdemocracyby the Trilateral Commission in 1975. In our hall of mirrors society, a crisis occurs


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every time the collective will of the public seeks to contradict the official will of thepolitical state.

You need only remember the consternation in official circles when streetdemonstrations by the young led to a premature end of American military

involvement in Vietnam. You need only revisit the disgust in federal circles whena reckless outsider, Ross Perot, attempted a political takeover of governmentthrough the ballot box. And nearly succeeded in doing that in the last quarter ofthe twentieth century.

Should a hyperdemocratic revolution ever come to pass, countless comfortablearrangements would be profoundly disturbed. The new managers would beunpredictable, owing no loyalty to the old order. But the dangers ofhyperdemocracy only become real in an environment when large numbers ofordinary people like one another well enough, and trust one another well enough,to be able to cooperate in a collective expression of public will.

Now suppose, for the sake of argument, you wanted to prevent such trust fromever forming? How would you go about doing that? Remember, cooperation hadbeen the norm in Americas one-room school period they couldnt work withoutit.

But what if an institution could be fashioned where continuous high-stakescompetitions could be imposed on the confined, and where some participantswould be publicly honored by the results, some would be labeled mediocre, andsome would be humiliated? What if Thomas Hobbes war of all against all wasdeliberately reenacted in classrooms daily, with full approval of schoolauthorities? Wouldnt the involuntary competitors eventually become incapable of

productive cooperation?

And what if you physically divided the young from oneanother: by age, by social class, by neighborhood, byendless segregations into groups of winners and losers?Wouldnt all these do the trick of discouraging a cooperativeoutlook, thus side-stepping the prospect of hyperdemocracy?

Does this sound crazy to you? Would it sound so crazy if you fervently believedwhat Charles Darwin wrote in Descent of Man (1871), that ordinary people wereevolutionarily retarded and posed a threat to the favored races as he calledthem. Suppose you believed such things as Andrew Carnegie and John D.

As the twenty-first

century begins its

second decade, mass

schooling is much

as it was in 1910, at

least for the poor

and the ordinary. It

is test- driven, bell-

driven, pedagogue-

dominated, andthoroughly dumbed

down.


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Rockefeller did? If you were a responsible civic leader, wouldnt you movemountains to insure protection for the best against the worst? Could institutionalschooling be that protection?

Winning As Everything

School conditions its subjects so thoroughly in games of winning and losing thatthe deeper purpose of learning something becomes peripheral. Winning is thepoint of the enterprise, not gaining enlightenment, not developing skill, notgaining insight.

But winning in absence of any narrative context besides the prospect of personaladvantage over the people around you is a trivial, ultimately meaninglessachievement, like taking snuff in order to sneeze. Whats that about? Under aregimen sorting boys and girls into winners and losers, what you win never stayswon; your victories must be repeated over and over until you wear out and

another winner takes your place. Nor does it take into account that winners atschool tests are very frequently losers at life.

Saying these things isnt intended to dismiss all forms of competition. Indeed,one form of competition is an essential part of a good life: competition againstyourself. When you learn to love competing against yourself, you learn to refuseyour own mediocrity at the same time. Your victories are permanent andprogressive.

But attempting to win against faceless others inevitably leads to gaming thesystem a moral disease, which in time destroys your soul. Why should students

of winning follow Warren Buffets hard road to wealth when Bernie Madoffs is somuch easier? Why strive to emulate Babe Ruth when Barry Bonds chemicalsuccess is more reliable? The classroom version of performance-enhancingdrugs cheating and sucking up to the instructor teaches you nothing. Just so,competing for grades and praise forecloses long-lasting life-altering rewards,which only learning for its own sake can bestow.

Competition was selected by the canniest Prussian school designers to dividethe young against one another. Divided people are easiest to manage. CaesarsGallic Wars was once a standard secondary school textbook which illustrated thisprinciple, but although well-written and very interesting to teenagers, and still a

staple of elite private schooling, it has vanished from public schools.

As A Vampire Fears Garlic, The Marketplace Fears Wisdom

Well-schooled populations are usually trained to pay lip-service to democracy atthe same time they are being conditioned to avoid the attitudes and behaviors itrequires. Its a dilemma without an easy answer because, while our nationalconsciousness honors the idea of democratic society, our national economy and


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government would wither and die under anything less than a command andcontrol reality.

Would you teach critical judgment and moral behavior to all? How could aneconomy grounded in the global sale of war machinery, industrially produced

meat, fruit, and vegetables, financial trickery, and the mass sale of cradle tograve schooling peddled as education endure in a climate of critical intelligenceand morality?

When I was growing up during WWII in a coal-mining town near Pittsburgh, thegeneral ability to debate abstract concepts such as overproduction,hyperdemocracy, and divide and conquer politics was much more widespreadamong ordinary people than it is today.

A vivid memory I carry from sixty-five years ago is of the band of ragamuffin poorkids I ran with huddling near the open doors of the town saloon so we could

overhear conversations of miners and mill workers drinking at the bar. Theirdiscussions, sometimes shouting matches, were richly laced with ideas inconflict. Just as they were on the bocce courts at the Italian Club, or in thebowling alley where I set pins for a dime a game.

That might fall as hyperbole on modern ears, so your first assignment is to readE.P. Thompsons classic account of working class men and women in nineteenthcentury Britain passionately striving for a life of the mind, and for the toolsnecessary to express ideas. An appetite, I should add, which the better classestook vigorous steps to shut down. The book is entitled The Making of the EnglishWorking Class (Vintage, 1966).

Remember those ten-year-old boys building racing yachts and cutting newentrances for their homes? I never did those things, but I did make severalsoapbox racers from similar plans in 1945. And a rubber-band driven P-51Mustang that could fly four city blocks at respectable altitudes. Every ten-year-oldI knew did things like that in working-class Monongahela, Pennsylvania beforemodern pedagogical principles were applied to its schools.

At Xavier Academy, the Jesuit boarding school where I was sequestered for ayear in 1943/1944, we learned fundamental algebra in third grade, studieddialectic in fourth. Then, returning to public school, I read Caesar, Marcus

Aurelius, John Milton, and Shakespeare in a common seventh grade class, andhad an option in ninth to read the Latin writers in Latin.

Today, all that stuff, including the building projects, would be looked upon a childabuse but no working class kid I knew would have agreed. It was so excitingto grow a powerful mind that nobody had to browbeat us much to do it.


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If this sounds too radical for you to swallow, I prescribe two autobiographies tocure your skepticism: the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill and the

Autobiography of Norbert Weiner. Weiner is regarded as the grandfather of thecomputer revolution and Mill, I hope, needs no introduction. At birth, their fathersdeliberately set out to make their sons geniuses without benefit of school

instruction. Both succeeded. Precise details and blueprints are in the books.

The ancient Chinese Imperial strategy known as The Policy of Keeping thePeople Dumb was adopted by Hindu India and Prussia, and from there spreadfar and wide, eventually reaching North America. In 1922, the then nationallyfamous New York City mayor John Hylan said in a speech that the schools of hiscity had been seized as an octopus would seize its prey. The schools werewrapped in the tentacles of an invisible creature acting through the great privatefoundations of Carnegie and Rockefeller.

You could still say things like that in 1922 but, by the end of WWII, nobody who

worried about a career would dare say a word seriously critical of the powerswho manage institutional schooling. Dumping on politicians and schooladministrators was always allowed they were, after all, only flunkies, front menin the school game but woe betide any reckless traitor who invited the publicbehind the scenery to see how the school illusion was being manufactured.

Subjects, Not Skills

Early schooling in colonial America aimed at creating desirable skills likeconcentration, imagination, cooperation, good manners, the potent activeliteracies of persuasive speaking and writing. The descendant form, however,

stressed memorizing detached bits of information said to be necessary to learnabstract categories of intellect called subjects. What subjects were actually for,few teachers ever even tried to explain. Subjects are what schools teach, notskills.

Notice that skills-training can only be evaluated by requiring performancedemonstrations, but subject-training demands passive tests of memory. Whetherthese memories can be applied to something useful in a utilitarian sense is neveran issue that matters to schools.

Nobody with an ounce of commonsense asks for, or makes use of, test scores

when hiring. You dont ask your barber, your grass cutter, or your babysitter,doctor, or architect for their own test numbers because, on some level, you knowthe data is worthless, however many tens of billions of dollars it took to produce.

The Great Dis-connector

As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is much asit was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test-driven, bell-driven,


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pedagogue-dominated, and thoroughly dumbed down. The termspedagogue/pedagogy are labels borrowed from the ancient Mediterraneanworld where they designated a specialized form of slave and slaveryrespectively. Do you find these survivals curious? Do you think they endure byaccident?

School is the great dis-connector. It disconnects children from the workingcommunity where a variety of styles and techniques are constantly on display forstudy; it disconnects them from family relationships and valuable neighborhoodassociations, disconnects them from one another, and distances them from theirown inner lives.

Americas first national commissioner of schooling, William Torrey Harris, wrotein his Philosophy of Education, published in 1906, that school must give trainingin self-alienation, a task best undertaken in dark, airless corridors, inpreference to cheerful surroundings.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Standardized schooling by force isnt even remotely about education; its aboutthe same things here political and economic and philosophical things that itwas about in ancient China, Hindu India, and Prussia. The Germanized versionof the instrument focuses on converting individuals into a mass population forease of management. When we had an entrepreneurial culture, personalsovereignty was an absolute blessing, but in our corporate culture its only acurse. The corporate logic demands that the young be rendered radicallyincomplete, to the end of converting them into human resourcesconverting

them into means, rather than seeing them as ends in themselves.

Nearly all work in our society has been centralized. To pull this transformation off,children in bulk had to be taught to think of their futures in terms of jobs, insteadof independent livelihoods. Parents had to be taught to accept lifelongsubordination as a freedom from burdensome responsibility, and to turn theirchildren over to anonymous agents of the political state as a further freedom fromresponsibility. No wonder our nation is so profoundly childish

The new American economy built by Astor, Vanderbilt, Harriman, Carnegie, andRockefeller drenched America with pro-school propaganda. These men bought

every newspaper and journal of importance to assist in colonizing the publicmind. In short order, they convinced the public that seat-time in school wasequivalent to education. But their own lives showed no commitment to schoolconfinement at all; as young people, some of the principal names behind thescenes preferred factory work for themselves rather than school confinement.Today, we are witnessing another expansion of the school empire and anenergetic propaganda campaign designed to impose universal college schoolingon the population.


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The fact that Google and Twitter and Microsoft and Appleand Dell and Oracle are the products of college dropouts ornever-registereds, as well as CNN, Avis Rent A Car, WholeFoods Markets, Ikea, and all the fast food andentertainment empires, is an anomaly politicians and

pedagogues would rather not discuss.

There is another anomaly: All the top performing nations in international mathand science competitions send their kids to school for far fewer hours than wedo. In Singapore often the best nation in math they attend for a full 247 hoursless. The same is true of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Finland, and others. Aninconvenient truth concealed by attending more days, but for many less hours.

I Would Prefer Not To

What a long century of forced schooling has done in a positive sense for all of usis to expose the myth of expertise and the myth of hierarchy as co-residents inour hall of mirrors. A students do not do better at life than c students likeGeorge Bush, John Kerry, or Al Gore, not unless the game is rigged. Your life isnot ruined if school pronounces you hopeless or dyslexic as it did ThomasEdison or Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, who became a bicycle peddler offish when he dropped out. The C averages of FDR and JFK didnt hurt theirprospects.

To reform this business demands that it be rigorously de-professionalized, itscozy guild system scrapped. Standardized schooling cannot meet the challenges

of our time. Promising solutions lie in the direction of hyperdemocracy and theInternet; away from professional expertise and toward the wisdom of the bazaar,not the cathedral.

We need a revolt without guns. Polite individual refusals should be our shield, notpointless further negotiations with the flunkies paid to protect the status quo. Theshort declarative: I would prefer not to should be our battle-standard. You might

"The fact thatGoogle andTwitter andMicrosoft and

Apple and Delland Oracle arethe products ofcollege dropoutsor never-registereds, as

well as CNN, AvisRent A Car,Whole FoodsMarkets, Ikea,and all the fastfood andentertainmentempires, is ananomaly

politicians andpedagogues

would rather notdiscuss."


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recognize Herman Melvilles inspirational refusal, as he put it in the mouth of hisimmortal office drudge, Bartleby, the Scrivener.

If they have to attend school, kids can write across the face of standardized tests,I would prefer not to take this test. No curses or defiant explanations, just that.

Make well-mannered refusings your common practice:I would prefer not to ask permission to use the toilet.I would prefer not to memorize textbook explanations of historically allegedtruths as if they actually were truths at all.I would prefer not to attend school.

The only way out of this suffocating trap we find ourselves in a trap maintainedby forced, standardized, institutional schooling is by throwing sand into thegears of the machine just as the colonists sabotaged the mighty British Empire,by the death of a thousand cuts.

Let us break the glass in our hall of mirrors and dispose of it once and for all,shard by shard, before it cuts us up.

What youve just heard is the essence of rationality at work, not politics. Think ofit as a project in scientific management. Nobodies, even rich nobodies, areconsiderably more easy to manage than somebodies who think for themselves

and can always take solace and inspiration in the bosom of their families.

As long as you can herd millions of kids together into compounds, ring bells intheir ears all day as if they were laboratory rats, direct them to memorizedisconnected bits of information which must be retrieved upon command in orderto earn privileged treatment and status... As long as you can do these things, thenet result will be an artificial extension of childhood across entire lifetimes, puttingto death the adult-in-embryo which lives within each one of us. In this way schoolcompletes its mission of producing manageable nobodies. Whether theygraduate from Harvard or go into the coal mines makes little difference. They willremain nobodies lifelong, incomplete people sentenced to wander through life

like light-duty zombies, waiting for the next command from a somebody.

You homeschool graduates have beaten this game already. Youve been trainedin self-reliance, in self-sufficiency, in generating your own work, in taking risks, inpreparing to have tough independent minds trained in critical thought, and incherishing your families -- with those assets, its impossible to be a nobody --even if you decide to live on a desert island as a hermit.


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So Im nervous to be up here on stage lecturing you. As a public school teacherfor 30 years, being around nobodies-in-the-making puts me at ease. My ownspecialty was teaching a few of my nobodies to be somebodies, but in the natureof the business, I couldnt help many. So, Im nervous with all you somebodiesout there listening to my argument. Homeschoolers constitute a peculiar

graduating class because they arent a class at all, but each a fire-breathingindividual.

While attempting to come up with advice for graduating homeschool kids, thatfact made me sweat a little. You couldnt know, of course, that youve providedthe major inspiration in my life for the past 20 years, which only makes it worse --I should be down there in the audience and all of you behind this microphone!

Isnt it ironic that the people we all call "classy" -- like the homeschoolers in frontof me -- are always one-of-a-kind individuals, while cookie-cutter people, wenever give a second look to are always easily classified?

Anthropologists call these graduation things "rites of passage", an academicsway of identifying important ceremonies like graduation as boundary markersbetween the regions of your life. The earlier zone gives way to its successor in aone-directional transit from which there is no escape, no return. I hope that sendsa chill up your spine.

I was informally denied admission to my own high school graduation 52 yearsago, in the green mountains of western Pennsylvania because I owed $32 inlibrary fines, an enormous sum equivalent to $344.40 today. And although Imowed lawns like a madman, I couldnt raise it in time. Miss Neill, the director of

ceremonies and my own English teacher, for whom I worked long and hard inmenial labor at her home for $.10 an hour, let me know that if I showed my faceat graduation I would receive a blank diploma and everyone would mock me. So Iwas intimidated into not attending. My crime was reading too many books for toolong a time. A striking memorial of what school was from the beginning for me: Atheater of endless humiliations.

Where were my parents in all this? Alienated from one another, living fifty milesapart from one another, too busy to have energy left for graduations. I dontblame them; they were doing their bit, unknowingly, for the industrial economy byenlisting our family in the great army of proletariat demanded by mass productionfor its success. People who define success by relationships are pretty muchoutlaws to our way of life which depends upon shopping and discarding to stayhealthy. Take a test, throw it away; take a test, throw it away; take a class, ring abell, forget that class, take another, ring a bell, take a test, you get the picture, Iknow. Its a form of Pavlovian conditioning, which depends crucially on variousforms of alienation to work right.


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2. But that was my graduation; this is yours. Unlike mine, you showed up.Amazing. Dont you owe library fines?

Here you are then, having crossed over the Great Divide and entered the zone ofLegal Responsibility. You must be saying to yourselves, "Whats next?" "Will I do

okay against real high school graduates?"

Youll do just fine. In the past 950-odd years only one member of the BritishRoyal family wasnt educated at home, and hes often wished aloud in print thathe had been.

Since Im compelled to give you advice and youre compelled to listen, Im goingto tell you things I wish I had told my own children, Briseis and Raven, beforethey graduated -- each with high honors, but each knowing very little, as I thinktheyd acknowledge. Ill take full blame for both and for the circumstances inwhich they missed my lecture. But youre stuck with it.

Its also my obligation to keep this short. There are exactly 187 sentences in thisspeech and youve already heard 32 of them. I know Ill get mail with a differentcount, but what the hey?

Lets start with this: Never overlook the army of ghosts watching you closelyevery minute. Dont believe that youre alone, even when you seem to be. Yourethe strong forward link in an ancient family chain stretching backwards to thebeginning of time. Its your ancestors who are watching. Millions upon millions offamily chains have been permanently terminated to this point in time, but notyours! Ay caramba! The evidence youve won so far in the survival sweepstakes

is your own existence. Pinch yourself, youre real!

Your personal chain of ancestors runs backwards through mother and father intothe swirling mists of the dawnless past. Even if huge hunks of history are gonefrom memory, all survive deep inside your cells. Seen that way, youre a miracleeven if you havent bothered to notice; it doesnt matter a whit if yourpredecessors were nobility or rag-pickers, the miracle of the chain overwhelmstrivia like that.

One day soon youll be called upon to make a choice: To help build a bridgebetween the ancestral past and future by contributing children of your own, or

refuse the call. In the time ahead, make yourself ready for this moment when itarrives, even if "No" is your answer. It should be thoughtful, your reply, notthoughtless.

3. To comprehend the magnificence of your family in its ancient struggle tolive on, youll need to have done your homework. Its worth it, believe me,but the payoff of family, even of family that exists only in memory, isntgiven to those who just go through the motions. You have to work for it


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and it isnt easy to achieve because it demands a lot of time and effort.There are no shortcuts.

Thats one great beauty of homeschooling: It provides opportunity to do realhomework. Phony school drills like staying in seats, memorizing what youre told

to memorize, competing for grades -- these things make it impossible tounderstand what real homework is. Pity the lost legion of well-schooled children.

How can they understand that no stranger, however loving, can substitute for afamily lost? With family, even a bad one, you cant be insignificant. Theresalways an important role for you to play as long as you realize there will be timeswhen your parents arent able to be leaders of family and the young have toassume the burden of leadership.

A family has to acknowledge you one way or another, real families dont have theoption of turning you away when youre in trouble; of course, many families arent

real, they just fake it, but if you find yourself frozen out, at least these fakefamilies are compelled to see themselves as phonies. And perhaps in time if youdont turn away from them, they will actually change for the better. One thingscertain, you have to keep your hand extended, you have to provide theopportunity for the others to finally reach for their best.

4. Homeschoolers have a big head start in good family relations, withoutwhich a body is doomed to the awful fate of being nobody, but everybodycan grab the brass ring, even those poor souls whove been cheated out offamily relations up till now. As Ive gotten old, Ive learned that by intenseacts of imagination and homage, achieved more in solitary wrestling with

yourself than any other way, deep family currents can be tapped into evenwithout the factual reality of the clan. Be careful that all this talk aboutstrong family isnt taken as a slight on the independent self, the sovereignyou; it needs to exist too, apart from, but paradoxically in dynamicpartnership with, the family side. Its likely youll use your family talentsand background in much different ways than your parents and thats fine,but try to understand the laboratory of different (possible) yous that afamily tree models (if youre lucky enough to have one).

Even when you leave the family room for good, cherish your people; even as yougo a-roving, take your people with you in your heart. For thousands of yearsutopians have tried to do away with family, offering synthetic substitutes andsystems in its place. It doesnt work; its never worked; it never will work. Be waryof the snake-oil salesmen who tell you that you are different, that you will be theexception. Be wary of yourself as that snake-oil vendor.

5. School kids often confided in me that they hated their parents,denouncing them bitterly, not always without justice. I listened. In all myschool years, however, I never met a single kid who understood that this


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was exactly the way the modern world wanted them to feel; to many of itsmanagers, family is, in Senator Clintons words, "a retrograde institution"standing in the way of progress.

In a slim volume published in 1906, our first national superintendent of education,

William Torrey Harris, stated bluntly that a principal purpose of forced schoolingwas to deliberately teach alienation! Following Plato and Hegel, Harris thoughtschool should do its best to wipe the slate clean so that social engineers wouldhave a blank slate to write upon in building a better society.

Only as isolani would graduates become sufficiently malleable and suggestible tofulfill their assigned functions in corporate government and corporate economy.

My advice to the family-hating kids who came to me was this: If you poison yourfamily, however much it seems they deserve it, youll be weakened considerably;if you hate your mother and father, youll inevitably end up hating yourself, since

that pair is mixed in every single cell inside you.

And in terms of the rest of society, youll be marginalized without understandingthat the best parents warn their own children away from family-less friends andromantic partners. Teaching that the best way to understand the hidden depthsof character is by watching closely what a prospective husband, friend orbusiness party does with family is ancient wisdom, ignored at peril.

Havent you wondered why family presentation plays such an important part inpresidential elections? Now you know. To my angry kids Id shout, "If yourparents cant parent you, step up to the plate and parent them. But run away

from this challenge only if you want to be crippled for life.

I know all this flies in the face of social-work wisdom or old-fashionedpragmatism, but 30 years in a public school classroom showed me that no familywas so bad that family alienation was the answer. You have to stay caring -- foryour own good.

And then one fine day I realized that alienation cant happen without thecooperation of two parties, one alienated individual cant pull it off withoutcooperation from the person reviled!

From that moment to this, I made up my mind never to be alienated again.Should "they" refuse to speak to me I would yet speak to them; if they refused toanswer letters, I would continue writing letters, to the grave if need be. Even inserious matters like theft and slander, I vowed to do my best never to returntreachery for treachery.

This strategy marked a great turning point in my life for the better; thisunderstanding that turning the other cheek is a practical strategy of power, not


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weakness, and it isnt merely an abstract religious injunction. The returns inpersonal power from this prescription are truly incredible ones. Seen correctly,this is one aspect of Marcus Aurelius stoicism, a deliberate philosophy whichfrees its acolytes from material dependence; only the stoical spirit is ever trulyfree.

So always think sympathetically about those you contend with and keep yourheart open for them, too, in case they change their minds, however long that maytake. Dont impose deadlines or the payoff in personal strength wont happen.

6. More advice: Each of you is a story being written, up to now by otherpeople in good measure, but beginning tomorrow principally by yourself(anyway I hope so). You must become the storyteller of your life or youreguaranteed not to like the story authorities write you into as one of theirminor characters.

You arent a stupid collections of facts. You werent hatched from an egg as ablank slate, but grown inside a mother, emerging with a set of fairly specificagendas written in your genes; and your mother was grown inside her mother,likewise engendered. And all the mothers in your chain wrote stories whichcaused them to meet prospective fathers with whom they commingled their lives.

You have to learn some of these stories if you dont want to become shallow,superficial, weightless, inconsequential, because your indifferent commitmenttrivialized the sequence. And isnt it astonishing that we have a word,"inconsequential," to warn us about the importance of sequence in our lives andthe serious punishment for ignoring this?

One day youll need these stories at your fingertips, the myths, jokes, histories,cautionary tales as well, so that the horrible fate of inconsequentiality isnt visitedupon your daughter or son as a legacy of your own foolishness.

Having family lore active in your imagination at all times will help you to becomesolid and deep. Even if its all bad, thats still true. Examining yourself this waywill help you evaluate others. As my grandmother told my mother: "His mouthmay lie, but his relationships always tell the truth." You know a man by thecompany he keeps. See that you memorize this.

7. Success . . . some advice about same: Schools and media have alreadybarraged you with well-crafted lies about the meaning of success, I know,yet success has nothing at all to do with being listed in Whos Who. Itstrue and I should know, since Im listed there. Success has nothing to dowith winning competitions, getting good grades or keeping up with theneighbors. You can make money and stay out of trouble by listening tobosses or gurus, but you cant be successful without knowing yourself,and that isnt easy. If you ever drank the whole six-pack or ate the whole


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pizza you dont know yourself; if you ever followed instructions you knewto be wrong just to stay in the good graces of someone who could hurtyou, you dont know yourself; if you hang around with friends who wasteyour time, then you dont have a clue to the person you are.

But dont worry inordinately, it takes years of rigorous self-inspection toaccomplish, its the quest of all quests, without which none of us amount toanything real.

Incidentally, theres a lot of bad information circulated at graduations byauthorities such as myself, so you want to be wary of everything you hear, roll itaround in your mind and test it before swallowing anything hook, line and sinker.If you want some evidence of that, look at the line count I gave you up front aboutthis speech.

Heres a better example: Speaking at another college graduation, Supreme Court

Justice Sandra Day OConnor once said, "As students, your challenge will comenot so much in breaking new paths, but in deciding to choose among the manypaths now open to you, and in knowing how you should travel among them"

Really? From my perspective, fitting into the world you inherit is brainwashing forslaves. Listen to Tom Jefferson cross swords with Justice OConnor. HeresJefferson on the same idea: "Good citizens," said Jefferson, "make the societythey live in; bad citizens train themselves to fit the world they are given by theirmasters."

Now you pick one of the above. All around you the schools of America are

indoctrinating more than 50 million young people, of whom 5 million graduatefrom secondary school each year, indoctrinating them to fit an economy whichtraffics in toys, weapons, dangerous foods and other forms of trash; an economybuilt on illusion to the degree it might have been designed by P.T. Barnum, thegreat flim-flam artist.

Our classrooms and tracking echo a society poisoned by rigid class divisionsdisguised by a non-stop mechanism of mass entertainment which conceals thesedivisions; our curriculum conceals the degree to which our nation is portrayed asan outlaw nation in many parts of the world: Military outlaws, financial outlaws,commercial outlaws, ecological outlaws. You need to travel extensively, as I do,

to feel the brunt of the worlds scorn; you need to read foreign newspapers to findout whats happening in America.

Perhaps all these voices are wrong about us; certainly reality is too complex tobe understood through journalism, but nobody should want to "fit in" to ournational agenda without questioning first what might be wrong with it.Unfortunately, public school graduates hardly ever question, theyve beensubjected to 12 years of laboratory conditioning in which the questioning kids are


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sharply marginalized. You homeschoolers are different. Were going to need yourleadership in the future to break out of this trap of fitting in. Please start with anall-out assault on fitting into the mainstream definition of success.

Here is my own partial contribution to redefining success: If you cant take

constructive criticism from those who love you or like you, you are a huge failurealready, and likely to remain so. Examine your own frail ego before it ruins you.

Learn to apologize: If you cant say to those youve insulted, slandered,humiliated, ignored and abused, "I was wrong. I was way out of line. Im sorry.Forgive me," then youre such a failure, decent people should avoid you as toxic.

On the other hand, if you can face setbacks and horrible defeats with courage; ifyou dont quit on life because its wounded you, but always come off the floor andtry again, youre already a successful human being.

If you can say, "Sorry, I prefer not to" to anyone, even the powerful, youre atrophy winner for sure. Keep in mind that we are defined by our denials just asmuch as by our affirmations.

If you can stay married for 40 years to the same person and still remain full oflove and admiration in spite of everything, youre one for the ages and anybodybut a damn fool can learn things from you.

Go after real success, graduates, follow your heart, take all professional counselwith a big grain of salt -- its so often tainted with self-interest, and you arent theself its interested in. Self-help manuals deal in categorical people and you arent

a category, hence the bad fit between people and the entire genre of self-help.

8. Even official advice should be closely examined since it, too, deals incategories and can only regard you as a fit for column "a" or column "b",whether you fit or not.

Talk about Procrustes bed, official voices built it. As my daughter was graduatingfrom MIT in the 1980s, authorities had convinced the great majority of MITstudents to become computer majors (not her, but most). None of the officialvoices, of course, had the slightest idea whether the computer field could absorban army of new graduates year after year, but then the bread of university

officialdom has never been buttered by looking out for student interests, butinstead by doing the bidding of government agencies, corporations and mediamoguls who in turn, take care of them. It has many of the characteristics of aclosed system, this academic Cosa Nostra, and naturally enough, its in no-onesinterests to take the student body in on the game.

Now, a quarter century after my daughter graduated, a respectable number ofthose obedient MIT computer nerds have been unemployed for some time, and


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even more under-employed a bleak picture which threatens to become muchworse as the 21st century unfolds.

My daughters classmates, now in their forties, are discovering that nobody wantsforty-year-old computer people if they can get their hands on twenty-year-olds

who work cheaper (and in the gruesome Darwinism of all tech businesses,better) than old hands. Past 50, most of her classmates, those who haventdeveloped businesses of their own, will be as the dead.

Im saying this from the vantage point of being seventy: Never treat expertprophecies seriously -- every single one of them which sees the light of big-timepublishing has been bought and paid for by foundation grants, governmentgrants, university grants or corporations. You live in a world which has absolutelyno place for independent scholarship, only sponsored scholarship. Andsponsored scholarship, whatever else it may be, is always propaganda too. It ispossible, from time to time, that a childish research team, one missing the

signals, will kick their sponsors in the teeth inadvertently; what isnt possible isthat those people will ever get a second chance to betray their betters.

Without a lot of public attention, as the 20th century dawned, the principalfunction which great universities assumed was to serve the corporate economyand the corporate government (which is for the most part a reciprocal of theeconomy), one hand washing the other.

The part assigned to universities, and for which university insiders are lavishlycompensated, is to resonate the attitudes, opinions and goals of greatcorporations, along with the prevailing government agenda of the day, in concert

with publishing and media. In this way the national imagination is trapped in asmothering net, unable to conceive of any alternatives, or get a hearing forobjections to "what is." In the first decade of the 21st century, the prevailingmantra heard everywhere is, "Thats just the way it is," an inarticulate recognitionof the power of the trap we find ourselves in.

If you want to understand just how badly youve been educated, read FrancisBacons famous fragment, The New Atlantis, written 400 years ago. Bacon hadcaught onto all the principal details of the great scam coming down the pipelineway back then; during the 19th century he was revered in realpolitik circles as agod, and today is still a fixture in high-level academic seminars at the powercolleges. At least this will help you see the difference between schooling andeducation. And there isnt any law which prevents homeschooling post gradsfrom assigning themselves Bacon. Not yet, at least.

9. You graduates want to always remember that some very important nastycustomers pay the salaries of journalists, college presidents and schoolsuperintendents alike, and that these folks learned long ago that groupbehavior can be managed by tampering with information. Since they own


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the information stream, it might be well to maintain a healthy skepticism(not cynicism, skepticism) toward official information of all sorts.

Remember how you were told the people of Iraq would welcome us with openarms? Remember that the Enron Corporation, the countrys seventh largest

business, was held to have discovered an entirely new way to get very richmaking markets in energy resources, while at the same time, serving the publicwell, when what it really had done was to rediscover an ancient way to lootcustomers and stockholders alike by simply inventing information out of wholecloth and entering it in financial reports; and of course, this same critique appliesto WorldCom and others as well.

I was fascinated to learn recently from high-powered financial sources, the kindordinary people are not aware even exist, that General Motors hasnt beenprincipally an automaker for years; about 15% of its business is cars, the other85% is as a virtual hedge fund, a speculator in foreign currencies and variable

mortgages -- stuff like that. Stuff like that is hidden by the common curriculum offorced schooling and if you think that isnt on purpose, then shame on you for ill-preparing yourself to face reality and wrestle with it.

In light of the fact that the two leading occupations in America today are fast foodjockey at places like McDonalds, a job which one American in six has held atone time or another, and clerk at Wal-Marts, a job which one American in eighthas held: According to the Financial Times of London and many other sources,millions of well-trained tech workers, engineers and others from China and Indiaare being released on the world labor market. These men and women are willingto work, and work very well, for a small fraction of what our own graduates

demand.

Is this going to affect you? I dont see how it can help but. The entire middle-class basis of American society requires that something in excess of a livingwage must be paid to a substantial chunk of people. But when virtually nothingthese people do cant be done by people far off for one-sixth -- or even one-thirtieth -- of what is charged for labor here, then what is to be done?

Nobody whos brought this reckoning on America can be trusted with the answerto that because, while a clear answer can be extracted from American historyand even local practices around America, any commitment to a way out of thistrap would deal a body blow to corporations.

The simple answer under our noses is that the philosophy of continuousconsumption has no ability to protect you graduates from profound changes inthe offing for America. Nor is there any way to prevent these changes becausewhat looks like a tragedy to you is a blessing for those who will inherit your jobs.


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The pied pipers who try to tell you the economic pie can be magically enlarged toaccommodate everyone in an American middle-class lifestyle arent just crazy,theyre dangerously dishonest. Were the world -- or even just China and India,with their 2-1/2 billion people -- to insist on a consumption standard like ours, theplanet would reel into an ecological disaster.

But what if consumption were abandoned as a guiding philosophy, as MarcusAurelius, the Roman emperor, abandoned it for himself thousands of years ago?What if personal production, not consumption, came back as the center of

American family life, just as it reigned in the colonial period and in the periodsjust before and just after the Civil War? Such a center lies at the heart of theprosperity of contemporaries like the Old Order Amish or the Mennonites.

The idea is that we stop defining success for ourselves by what we canconsume, and redefine it by what we can personally produce. In this formula,schools would examine how individuals and small groups could produce some of

their own food; build their own shelters and maintain them; administer their ownhealth care, as is done spectacularly well in Cuba; cook most of their own meals;improvise most of their own entertainment, education and goals.

Not all at once, of course, but bit by happy bit. The Amish are a fantastic workinglaboratory of whats available to all of us if we pinch ourselves hard enough tocome awake. Im not talking about utopia, but plain, ordinary, common sense.People who produce for themselves are many times happier than people whomerely consume; they have better, stronger families, healthier lifestyles, genuinecommunity life in place of the thin networks we call neighborhoods these days.They make better parents hands-down, over absentee parents, who watch T.V.

with their kids... sometimes.

The truth is that most of the things that money can buy, worthwhile things, that is,can be had for virtually nothing. The reason this is hard to see is that its beenmasked by corporations, media and government, to protect those whoseinterests would be damaged by a renaissance in old-fashioned American self-reliance. Nobody who produces his or her own staples can possibly be a nobody;all are individuals of substance; all make the ideals of democracy crackle withenergy.

You graduates have been brainwashed so badly -- although homeschoolers,least of all -- that going down the new road will only be accomplished in part by asingle generation; your kids (when they happen) will go further than you, andtheir kids further still. But well all be more optimistic and happier for having ourfeet back on a healthier, more solid road -- one which America pioneered longago for the whole world.

Anyone who tells you that the current system isnt posed to collapse doesnt readthe financial press, doesnt know how to interpret what it means when a powerful


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country spends its treasure, common citizens, and goodwill in an endless seriesof violent attacks on weaker places like Panama, Libya, Grenada, Bosnia,

Afghanistan, Iraq, et al. Read Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empireand I promise you a hair-raising set of parallels to whats currently afoot.

Anybody with awareness understands what it means that on the day I write this,if you want to buy a unit of European currency, youll have to put up $1.41 of U.S.money (the official exchange is listed at $1.31, but as American Expressexplained to me, you cant actually get that rate, only the wealthy can); anyonewho understands the details of the monumental trade deficit weve amassed inpeacetime, will see clearly that our national management is out of control andhas mortgaged the future of common citizens already.

A new day is imminent whether we adopt a new philosophy to confront it or not.Ive shown you one living alternative, proven to be successful. Is there a betterone? Perhaps. Go ahead, show me. Ill be delighted to concede the field.

10. Finally, graduates, its high time to think about Time itself. Time is thereal wealth, equally available to the favored and the disfavored alike. But bewarned, its a non-renewable resource. Guard it with your life; it is your lifemeasured in durations. Time on your hands isnt boring, held in your handsand cherished, its a tabula rasa for free will to write upon. Only in free timecan we be said to make ourselves; in our enslaved time, others do themaking.

Most time you think you have has been pledged in advance. A frighteningthought, that one. Its what Calvin meant by Predestination, the discovery that all

your time has been claimed by obligations and appointments and accidents outof your control. A huge chunk of the remainder must be paid to your frailty as ahuman being in sleep. And much of the diminishing balance leaks away in phonecalls, television, computer games, angers, revenges, lusts, fears, envy andbewilderments. In predestinated time, you are mostly a mechanism; only in theleftovers, the free will moments, have you a possibility of cooking the real turtlesoup instead of the mock.

My present age is sixty-nine years and one month, which seems to distance mefrom the graduates Im addressing by more than fifty years, but thats only anillusion. The fifty-year head start I seem to have on you isnt real -- most of it hasbeen so automated and predestinated I wasnt really alive as those hours andyears passed. If I count only the real time Ive had to be myself and choose formyself, it cant amount to more than five years of the total.

Like you, graduates, I spent most of my time thoughtlessly. Nobody everbothered to give me the advice Im giving you. The people who loved me, andwho I loved in return, and still do, were much too alienated from one another toconsider how quickly we were losing the opportunity at family. And suddenly one


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day it was too late. I miss them all desperately, even with all the bad times wehad, and I bring them back to life every day in imagination. I would gladly tradethe Ivy League experience I received, mis-named "education," if I could retrievemy bad family and hug each one of them hard. And I count myself as bad as anybecause my schooling failed to show me what really matters. See to it,

graduates, you dont fall into the same trap.

Dont glide hypnotically through the onrushing years, obeying the prompts ofstupid formulas, or the "stages" of child-rearing stage-theory manuals. Every oneof them is based upon statistical averages, so when you go to force your ownchildren into those murderous boxes, you will mutilate them beyond repair, inservice to another magical theory like those magical others which have ruinedmodern life. Throw away your self-help books, slap yourself awake, stick a pin inyour arm . . . WAKE UP! You dont have a reverse gear. You can only go forwardin time, not backwards.

11. The only thing serious you face at the moment, regardless of whatyouve been told, is deciding what quests you will choose for yourself.

If it were me, Id look hard for love -- not sex, love. Without someone special tohug and grow old with, it seems to me youll miss the best that time has to offer. Ilove my Janet, now old, fat and crippled, a great deal more than when she wasso beautiful and lively. I wanted to cry out just looking at her. If this is so for me,its the common experience of many others as well; it explains why, in a time ofeasy sex, that marriage is still where life is at. Not in the pages of Cosmopolitan,of course, but everywhere real people gather.

And if this is so, why does institutional schooling make no mention of Love. Itsforbidden to mention love in the classroom, you know. The Greek word for sin,amartia, explains the mystery as well as anything. It can tell you what officialschooling does wrong. Amartia, sin, to the orthodox Greeks, means only this:That youve missed the mark in Love. To sin is to be unable to love. The markisnt high grades, money or fame, its Love, without which the other things arehollow at the end of your time. Love is the only divine energy most of us will everknow; its a movement toward others, ultimately a movement toward the otherwhich cant be found in fancy cars, penthouses or trophy brides. If you want toknow love, there isnt any other way but to leave pride and selfishness behind.No other way. No other way. No other way. Do you hear me?

If it were me graduating today, Id want to abandon smugness and certainty in asearch for things I didnt know and wasnt comfortable with; Id want tounderstand the whole range of human possibility as its been known across time;in that, books are your best friends. So for your own sake, read good ones evenif the effort makes your head ache. Nobody has enough time to ignore thewonderful thoughts from every time and place preserved in print. The essence of


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those thoughts abstracted by Monarch Notes wont do. You need the language ofthe original. Im too tired here to explain why. Trust me.

Youll want some portion of your clock devoted to just being. Youre a humanbeing, not a human doing. In this way, after many a long summer, youll discover

what is meant by saying that the best things in life are free. Its true, but you cantthink your way to understanding why.

Oh, theres lots more to say, but Im weary for the moment with my own words.One last thought: Stay away from institutions; even the word should make yousick at your stomach; above all else, dont let them institutionalize you.

12. Now I see its really time for you to graduate. How time flies! My time isup; yours just beginning. Thats it -- 187 sentences, 188 if you include thisone. But a word to the wise: Count them for yourself, dont take my wordon faith. -- J.T.G.

[John Taylor Gatto spent 30 years teaching in the public schools of New YorkCity. He was named the city Teacher of the Year and state Teacher of the Yearin different years. Since his retirement, Mr. Gatto has worked tirelessly to

promote homeschooling as the only viable alternative to public schooling.]

Documents

The Awful Fate of Being Nobody