The architecture of apathy: How bureaucratic schooling undermines learning and individuality

“ With administrators ordering the institution, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system--as opposed to its more rhetorical function of "searching for truth"--is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond. ”

“ Rules are accepted as "inevitable," bureaucracy as "just circumstances," irrelevance as "scholarship," selflessness as "martyrdom," politics as "just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."
Almost no students value activity as citizens. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will settle for "low success, and won't risk high failure." ”

“ Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.
Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man. As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. ”

“ In this life, such as we 57 see it from the interior when we do not fantastically materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is infinite.
Education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it presupposes in him a susceptibility of development,—educability, as we may call it. The learner could not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of receiving instruction, unless he were able to think. But thinking, we have already seen, signifies freedom. And not only is freedom presupposed by the educator, but it is the very thing he is aiming at in his work. ”

“ One does not come into this world simply to amuse oneself, and to do just what one pleases.”
“One comes into this world,” I responded, rather warmly, “to enjoy what is beautiful and what is good, and to do as one pleases, when the things one wants to do are noble, intelligent, and generous. An education which does not cultivate the will, is an education that depraves the mind. It is a teacher’s duty to teach the pupil HOW to will.”
I perceived that Maitre Mouche began to think me a rather silly man. ”

“ We absolutely must disabuse our minds of the theory that the functions of education are, in the main, gymnastic. In the early years of the child’s life it makes, perhaps, little apparent difference whether his parents start with the notion that to educate is to fill a receptacle, inscribe a tablet, mould plastic matter, or nourish a life; but in the end we shall find that only those ideas which have fed his life are taken into the being of the child; all the rest is thrown away, or worse, is like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury to the vital processes. ”

“ Education as Formation.—We now come to a type of theory which denies the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique rôle of subject matter in the development of mental and moral disposition. According to it, education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of faculties resident in mind itself. It is rather the formation of mind by setting up certain associations or connections of content by means of a subject matter presented from without. Education proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind from without. ”

“ Education as Reconstruction.—In its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end—the direct transformation of the quality of experience. ”

“ The crowding of sick and ailing children is more cruel and brutal than Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and so utterly needless and useless that fools couldn’t do worse. What is the use of education to a sick person, and especially when the sickness is the result of the educational process. God save us from any more such education!
Doubtless I shall be told that my ideas are impracticable. I know they are and ever will be to those who value “the system” more than the child. Granted that in cold and wet weather students can’t get out of doors much. ”

“ One word will suffice to characterise it—Violence. The school dominates the children physically, morally, and intellectually, in order to control the development of their faculties in the way desired, and deprives them of contact with nature in order to modify them as required. This is the explanation of the failure; the eagerness of the ruling class to control education and the bankruptcy of the hopes of reformers. “Education” means in practice domination or domestication. I do not imagine that these systems have been put together with the deliberate aim of securing the desired results. ”

“ Education of this sort is not the practice of families only, but also of great social organizations whose chief educational function consists in putting a strong hand on every new-comer, in order to fit him, in the most iron-bound fashion, into existing forms. It is the attenuation, pulverization and [169] assimilation of the individual in a social body, be it theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and routinary. Looked at from without, a like system seems the ideal of simplicity in education. ”

“ “What’s the matter?” asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.
“Why—why,” said Elizabeth Ann, “I don’t know what I am at all. If I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?”
The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. “you aren’t any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You’re just yourself, aren’t you? What difference does it make what grade you’re in! And what’s the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don’t know your multiplication table?” ”

“ In the course of discussion before a board Committee, Mr. Bettinger made so bold as to give his definition of education: “to aid in the unfoldment of a human mind.” Colonel Copp was so furious that he was hardly able to keep still until Mr. Bettinger finished. “Education?” he cried. “I’ll tell you what education is! Education is getting a lot of young people into a room, teaching them a lesson out of a book, hearing them recite it, putting down 25a mark in figures, and at the end of the year that’s their record. ”

“ That, having been called in to aid education, examination has grown and hardened into the master of education. Education is becoming the slave of its own creature and servant. I do not deny that examination has its uses: I do not say that we can do without it. I say that it is a good servant, but a bad master; and, like good servants turned bad masters, it is now bullying, spoiling, and humiliating education.
Those who teach are the proper judges of what should be taught, how it should be taught, and what are the results of teaching. ”

“ Or when objects—concrete facts, etc.—are introduced, it is as mere occasions for the mind to exercise its own separate powers—just as dumb-bells or pulleys and weights are a mere occasion for exercising the muscles. The world of studies then becomes a strange and peculiar world, because a world cut off from—abstracted from—the world in which pupils as human beings live and act and suffer. ”

“ And such abstractness means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means. That education is literally and all the time its own reward means that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worth while in its own immediate having. ”

“ It was complained that an education to things was not given. We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. ”

“ Nobody has shown a finer- 253 - appreciation of the delicacy of the material out of which character is to be made, and of the susceptibility of its elementary structure; nor of the fact that education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate repugnance to cowardice, cruelty, apathy, self-indulgence, and the other great roots and centres of wrong-doing. ”

“ Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structures to habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits.
8. In saying that “education is a life,” the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
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9. We hold that the child’s mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal ”

“ They are intermediate in learning, not final. All educational reformers, as we have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the passivity of traditional education. They have opposed pouring in from without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked drilling in material as into hard and resisting rock. ”

“ Another misconception.—The analogy between the plant and the school will not hold if we still retain in the parlance of school procedure the expression “getting an education.” The act of getting implies material substance. Education is not a substance but a process, and it is palpably impossible to get a process. So there can be no such thing as getting an education, in spite of the tenacity of the expression. ”

“ For these sciences reflect in themselves the fragmentary multiplicity of things which have been abstractly cut off from the centre of the spirit, to which however they too refer. And because they do refer to it, the teaching of them should be spiritualised, moralised, humanised; it ought to acquire the concreteness of philosophy, and therefore never ignore the exigencies of art and of religion. For otherwise it will be merely material instruction, “informative education,” which in reality is no education at all. ”

“ If the school means conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the scrappiness of education, the fractioning tendency which presumes to cut off one part from the rest of the body, as if education, that is, personality, could have many parts. We must learn to react against a 191 system of education which, conceiving its rôle to be merely intellectualistic, and such as to make of the human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of things. Unity ought to be our constant aim. ”

“ We cannot expect to educate and yet leave those we educate exactly where we find them; for with education comes invariably, inevitably, the growth of ideas planted by it—their growth, and no less invariable fruition. To show someone all that is to be gained by reaching forward, and then to expect him not to reach, but to remain quiescent, is the act of a fool. ”

“ But a mental review of the intellectual presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the world, will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and cultural education. Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to the notions of leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual activity not involving the active use of bodily organs. ”

“ It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an education which shall count in the vocations of life. But it also helps define the peculiar problem of present education. The school cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social conditions. But it should contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the improvement of those conditions. ”

“ It is easy to forget one's Greek or the higher mathematics; but an intellectual or a moral habit is not easily lost. [Pg 163]
He who has right habits will go farther and rise higher than he who has only brilliant attainments. It is an error, and a very common one, to suppose that education is merely, or chiefly, a mental process, and consequently that the best school is that in which the various kinds of knowledge are best taught. Our whole being, physical, intellectual, and moral, is subject to the law of education. We may educate the eye, the ear, the hand, the foot ”

“ For the school which gives instruction with no moral training in reality gives no instruction at all. All the objections voiced on this score against education, which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all that ought to integrate the truly educational function, 181 are the result of this abstract way of looking upon instruction solely as the culture of an intellect which in some way differs from the will, from character, and from moral personality. ”

“ But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common-sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. ”

“ We do this, we irresponsible parents and teachers, because we ourselves lack imagination, and do not see that we are blunting, instead of sharpening, our human tool. Yet we define education in terms of imagination when we say that education is the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit; or, that education is a setting-up in the heart of the child of a moral and æsthetic revelation of the universe; for the human spirit which we are trying to establish is not a fact, but a gracious possibility of the future. ”

“ We are now in a position to understand the meaning of the spirituality of culture, that is, of the reduction of culture to the human personality obtained in the preceding chapter, as well as the pedagogical interest of this reduction. Culture, as the entire content of education, because it must be sought within the personality, and because it resolves itself into the life of the spirit, is not a thing, and does not admit of being conceived statically either in books or in the mind: not before nor after it is apprehended. ”

“ Under the phrase, 'Education is a life,' I have tried to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life upon ideas, and, as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium for ideas, and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children have a natural desire for, and a right of admission to, all fitting knowledge, appears to me to be suggested by the phrase, 'Education is the science of relations.'
These considerations clear the ground towards that of a curriculum. ”