John Taylor Gatto was a school teacher for 30 years before leaving the profession and becoming an advocate for a different way of doing things.

I became interested in reading his work after seeing him mentioned on more than one homeschooling email list or blog.   His is an American experience, and may not be directly translated to other countries, but I was interested to see what this often referenced man had to say about conventional, mass education.

This book is a collection of his essays and speeches.  It is organised in three sections:

1. Schoolrooms Speak Bluntly
2. Analyzing the System
3. The Search for Meaning

As I start this review I am only just heading in to Section Two, but it has become quite clear to me that there is more than one blog post to be written on the content of this interesting and confronting book.  So please be prepared to have the socks bored off of you over the next few days.  I am only a little over eighty pages in and the book is riddled with my lovely Japanese stick-it notes marking points I want to raise.  It looks rather like an explosion in the 3M factory.

This particular post will be about the topics raised in the first section.
The context for this part is twenty years old, with We Can’t Afford School Reform being his speech from 1990 when he was named New York City Teacher of the Year and Why Do Bad Schools Cost So Much? being his 1991 speech from his presentation with the New York State Teacher of the Year Award.

The essays are of their time and place, but I do not believe that the questions raised by them should be ignored with the assumption of “that was then, it won’t be like that now” or “that is in their country, it won’t be like that here”.  As I’m sure most cynics would agree reform, whether beneficial or not, does tend to be a process run by snails where government departments or ministries are concerned.

In Why Do Bad Schools Cost So Much?, he produces some rather jaw-dropping financial statistics around how schools are funded and what the cost, per seat, is.  It makes me wonder what it is like here, and if it has improved at all in the US in the past twenty years.
By way of example, the City of New York spends $7,300 per pupil.  New York state schools, on average, after three layers of administration costs and sundry non-teaching costs, have 25 cents in every funding dollar for actual teaching costs.  The breakdown of the costs leaves you in no doubt that the administrators are skinning the cat in no uncertain terms.
I wonder how our system here would fare if we looked closely at the average operating costs of most state schools.  Would it be the same, better, or radically different?

Financially speaking, those of us who choose (or may be considering choosing) to homeschool or home educate their children, are a boon to the general taxpayer.  If a child costs anything like the US figures in our economy then we are helping out by ensuring a bit more cashflow to those children still attending classes.  I hardly think the approximately $500 a year (or so I believe it to be) grant from the Ministry of Education to cover costs is likely to go very far.  Clearly you don’t choose to home educate in this country for the big bucks.

Still on the financial side of the story, it is interesting to see that private schools in the US spend about half that of public schools on average, and parochial schools even less.  Naturally their homeschool fraternity cost next to nothing or nothing at all.  I’m not even sure they get any sort of grants.  Yet the latter three institutions (yes, the family is an institution) produce superior results.

Gatto has some very interesting ideas about what the problems are with government monopolised, compulsory, mass education.  They are quite confronting and I can’t quite bring myself to believe his viewpoint wholeheartedly.  Yet, I know that some of his observations on the outcome of mass education are some of my primary drivers for wanting to home educate the Oh Waily kids.

Moving on to We Can’t Afford School Reform we get into the more gritty aspects of his views and observations.  This passage was certainly an eye-popper.

What schools are about in their structural design is dependency, obedience, regulation, and the subordination an orderly class system needs – in which people stick to their own kind and don’t get out of line.  Schools achieve these goals by endless exercises in subordination.

He goes on to explain the roots of this structure and intent, but I will come to that in the next post.  In the meantime, be assured he continues along a similar path.  Speaking about the outcome of this he says,

By and large my kids are indifferent to the past, indifferent to the future, indifferent to each other, and indifferent to themselves.  They don’t seem to be able to hold interest in anything for very long.

And on the wider implication of mass schooling,

No effect of compulsory mass-schooling is more resistant to remedy than the damage it has done to the American family by separating parents and kids.  If teachers claim privileged information about education, and school-time takes the best time available for the self-discoveries of growing up, then the most important reason for families to exist at all vanishes.

Are you still with me?  Just a bit confronting.  Don’t write it off though, at least before you have read the whole and in context.  There is more historical information provided later that is the support for his viewpoint.

This last passage strikes me strongly though.  I have always felt that it is my job to raise my kids, otherwise why would I have wanted to bring them in to this world.  I have never wanted to “farm them out” for someone else to teach or look after.  I do take advantage of sessional daycare so that I can take care of myself, that’s the reality of full-time parenting, finding gaps for yourself.  But, for me*, this is the extent of my farming out.
Reading that final sentence sums it all up for me.  What is the point of my family if I am merely a bystander and an after-school and weekend teacher for my kids?  It just doesn’t feel right and it just doesn’t sit right – for me.  I can’t explain to you exactly why this is the case for me, it just is.

And this rather fragmented post is the first in a series I feel coming on about some unorthodox views on the mass education system.  I hope I don’t frighten you all away into brighter corners of the internet.  I promise it will all be over soon, and relatively painlessly.

—
* let me be clear.  This is my way of looking at things and how I feel about this.  I do not in any way, as a result of my views, condemn or look down on anyone else’s choices.  Your choices, situation and desires are your own to make and have, just as I would expect my views to be respected.

Scots Wha Hae

Scots, Wha Hae.
Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed
Or to victorie!

Now’s the day, and now’s the hour:
See the front o’ battle lour,
See approach proud Edward’s power -
Chains and slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha will fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave? -
Let him turn, and flee!

Wha for Scotland’s King and Law
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand or freeman fa’,
Let him follow me!

By oppression’s woes and pains,
By your sons in servile chains,
We will drain our dearest veins
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us do or dee!

Today I followed through on links from a post by Tim Ferriss of The 4 Hour Work Week and more recently The 4 Hour Body.  It led me to a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on Genius.  Now, I do this creativity lark here at Oh Waily Waily out of a sheer hobbyist enjoyment of taking ideas and experiences out of my head and life and putting them on some virtual paper.  However, I know a few of you take the path of writing a lot more seriously than I.  I thought you might like this.

So enjoy the almost 20 minute talk and I hope when you get to the end you put your Genius in a good spot.  Mine is going to be kept over my left shoulder from now on, as it is an appropriate spot for watching what I’m going to do next.

It is based on Peter Boxall’s “1001 Books: You Should Read Before You Die”.
The original list.

And rather imaginatively we have called the blog 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.

We have seventeen existing reviews carried over from the original idea and Blogspot blog of one of our friends.  Now we are looking for new reviewers and readers to come and join in.

We are planning to have two new reviews out each week, so using some basic mathematics it will take us over nine years of continuous blogging to cover all 1001 books.  So if that makes you feel sorry for us, come on over and offer to produce regular reviews and we might even manage to get that up to three reviews a week and total blogging time down to a smidgen over six years.

It is about books and it is collaborative.  We are currently buttonholing and inveigling friends and associates, even random strangers with good taste, who we think would be interested in and good at reviewing books.

If you would like another outlet for your creativity and you think you would be pretty good at reviewing books, then joining our Review Crew might be something you should consider.  Naturally you will get full credit for your work, along with links to your own blog from any reviews that hit the screen with us.

There is a catch.

Of course.

You can choose which books you want to read and write a review for.  The catch is, there is a set list of books to choose from.
Not put off yet?  Do you love Douglas Adams, Paul Auster, Jane Austen, J.M.Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, H.G.Wells or Fyodor Dostoevsky?
Then perhaps you should leave me a message or drop me an email if you are slightly intrigued by the idea.

I’m currently looking for someone willing to write about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Poisonwood Bible (there needs to be an antidote to my negative review), The Virgin Suicides, Beloved and Thank You, Jeeves.  Other titles can be provided to willing victims volunteers by the wonderful medium of personal email.

We hope to have the blog up and running shortly, but are looking for willing readers and authors now.  This way we can keep up a steady stream of reviews for everyone to read once we are open to the world.

Come join us on this adventure in literature, I’m sure you will enjoy it.

In the end, following a little bit of parental pressure, I admitted that I had been eyeing up a method of both displaying and storing my little Oh Wailys’ pieces of art.
That was enough encouragement for Gran Oh Waily and off to the internet shopping she went.  It arrived shortly before Christmas and since we were visiting then, I had an extra pseudo-Christmas present to enjoy opening.

Enjoy it I have.  It is a Li’l Davinci from dynamicFrames.   It’s a very simple system to use and I can see that should I ever be rough with the internals that I have a chance of fixing it myself at home.  It can hang both portrait and landscape and it comes with a very nifty little leg that allows it to behave like a photograph frame.

We have it as a photograph frame at the moment as there are no suitable places to hang it in this particular house.  Here it is in action.

And a little closer…

No more random images stuck to the fridge by magnets, taped to cupboards or resigned to a folio.  Now Miss Oh’s works of art get a display worthy of the creativity put in to them.
I think another one of these is on the cards for Master Oh’s use, at least once he has graduated from random three stroke scribbles and in to “named” but not quite understandable images.

What do you do with your children’s art?

Whether you love the article I am going to suggest, find it heavy going, confronting or a load of rubbish, will be up to you. However, I would like to hear your opinion on it.
As someone who has a love of history and has in fact read a few Greeks in my time, although now lost in the mists of my youth, I loved it.  I’m not up on American politics, and as a rule don’t reflect on things of that nature, so forgive me if this is left-leaning and you are conservative or if you are conservative and this is left-leaning.  No political intent is meant on my part.

The article is called So Why Read Anymore? by Victor Davis Hanson.

I do love his concluding paragraph and the language he uses throughout.  But pithy little comments like this, about instantaneous communication, just made me smile.

to remind us that Twitter or Facebook speed up communication, but can slow down thought.

I would love to quote entire paragraphs, but frankly they are best read in the context of the whole.  I hope you will spend the ten minutes it will take to read it.  If nothing else, it isn’t a one-liner from Twitter or a couple of swift status updates on Facebook, and you may even be inspired to revisit the Classics.

Miss Oh Waily asked to make a “Christmas Tower” out of duplo.
Here it is.

And we can’t forget the little ones, now can we?

No doubt you cannot make it out, but that is a star shaped piece of duplo right on top.  I couldn’t quite convince her to put in on one of those pokey out pieces so that we could all see it was topped with a star.  Still, I know it was there.

I hope you all have had a good festive season and that you are already heading in to the new year with lots of vim and vigour.

This year is going to be different though.  It is going to be the year where I experiment with the idea of having no resolutions and no goals*.

Starting with this guest post about living without goals for 100 days which nudged the idea into my head I began to wonder why I set goals and what they did, or didn’t do, for me.  Then a bit later came this post about kicking the self-improvement drive which led me to start thinking about how the urge to improve myself merges in to the setting of goals and creates a perpetual cycle.  Now this cycle could be a good thing, or it could be a bad thing.  If it brings misery and stress, even if it is only a nagging sensation at the back of your mind, then clearly it is not contributing to a great life.  Isn’t that the whole point of self-improvement and setting goals – achieving something positive and better in our lives.
Then I began to think about my angry shelf and things started to click for me.  Some of the things I have been doing have been creating unwanted and unrecognised stress.

At this point I’m beginning to get the feeling that maybe some of my hardest to crack issues may be permanent in my life unless I take a new approach to things.  Then like all good things, along comes this post about trying new approaches and ditching the end view for the process view.  In regular language, ditch the goals and work on the habits.

This is the point that I finally got it.  2012 shouldn’t start with another list of “I should do this, that or the others”, it should be about establishing an array of habits that lead to a content person and a happier life.
This could be seen as a bit semantic, but it seems to me that the idea is to focus on the present, what you are doing today and tomorrow, not on those big goals that seem unattainable.  Getting up half an hour early every day and writing a page or two while everyone around you is still sleeping seems much more attainable that “write the next great novel”.  And who knows just where those small daily habits may lead you.

I’ll tell you come December 31, 2o12 just where, if anywhere, my no resolution year has taken me.   Feel like joining me?
Let me know what goals you are ditching and what habits you are planning to start.

—
* Mostly.

Rather cheekily I am claiming this as my first “Off the Shelf” book as well.  It was a birthday gift for Mr Oh Waily, and his birthday is just at the beginning of December.  Not much time was spent “On the Shelf” for this little beauty.

Mind you, in this household, a Pratchett has very little chance of surviving a month without being devoured cover to cover.

This, amazingly, is the 39th book in the Discworld series.
Good grief.  If this isn’t the biggest series of books set in an author’s own creation, I don’t know what is.

In this outing we are reunited with Commander Sam Vimes, or Blackboard Monitor Vimes, or Sir Samuel Vimes or the Duke of Ankh-Morpork, whichever is the most useful title to him at the time.  In this episode we are taken with his Grace and family to the Ramkin country estate where all sort of mischief has been going on.

Goblins.  Vermin or a sentient people?  That is the question that Sam, Sybil and Young Sam deal with.  This takes our valiant po-lees-man through the perils of “country society” and the local nobs who consider themselves to be the lawmakers for the masses, but only if they benefit from it.  We delve in to the world of the river boat and take a trip to Quirm just for good measure.  And Young Sam develops something of an obsession with poo.  All sorts of poo.  Above all we finally see Lord Vetinari angry.  If only with the crossword compiler of The Times.

There is a load of commentary about people feeling themselves to be “outside” the law, or “above” it and just where that feeling might, in some societies, come from.  The theme of bringing into the fold or perhaps redeeming many of fantasy’s villainous groups continues, this time with the goblins.  Everyone seems to have redeeming features and we should perhaps take the time to look for them before condemning people outright or setting ourselves above others.  That’s what I took from this story.

It all comes together to produce another wonderful read in the Discworld series.  Existing Pratchett fans will enjoy it, but I think new readers would benefit from starting at the beginning of the series so that it fits into context.

I’d give it a solid 4 stars.  Nicely written, good commentary and the usual dose of very funny moments.