reading response: schooling as factory

[response paper - the Gatto reading is online and extremely interesting, even essential in my opinion: The Underground History of American Education, Chapter 7--I'll post more about it]

This week’s readings are quite grim in their discussion of the ineffectiveness and inhumanity of many current school practices; yet they are also extremely illuminating, in that they help explain why the reality of U.S. public schooling bears so little resemblance to the “Goals2000” rhetoric, which is largely consistent with ideals of democracy and human values.

Very little observation is needed to conclude that U.S. schools do much more to rationalize inequality than to eradicate it. I am one of those who believe that meritocracy is a myth—an effectively hegemonic myth in that it justifies gross inequality while shaming and subduing the majority who supposedly “failed” to take advantage of their theoretically “equal” opportunity. However, until now I was not aware of the actual historical process by which these school systems had been initially imagined and constructed, nor of the overtly anti-democratic principles on which they were founded. The Gatto and Darling-Hammond readings, in particular, clarify chillingly how the current school system came to be based on inhuman principles of obedience, efficiency, compliance, conformity and “mass production.”

To me, the “human capital” conceptualization discussed in the Spring reading is the modern articulation of this same inhumanity. Thinking of schools as a production process in which money is invested with the hope of financial return is absolutely antithetical both to democracy and to human values. Worse still is the idea that businesses should shape curricula or indeed should come anywhere near schools. Corporate executives must prioritize the goal of making as much money as possible for the company—if they do not, they should be removed from their position by the board of directors, who are entrusted by stockholders with finding the executives who will make as much money as possible for the company. People whose primary goal is private profit have interests that are at best irrelevant, and at worst highly detrimental, to the interests of children in school.