# The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher - cantrip.org Synced: [[2024_05_12]] 12:33 PM Last Highlighted: [[2024_05_12]] Tags: [[Education]] [[Explainer]] [[Politics]]  Summary: American schools teach six detrimental lessons that promote dependency, conformity, and surveillance, hindering true education and personal growth. The current school system limits children's potential, perpetuates social inequality, and fails to foster essential life skills. Homeschooling may be a more empowering alternative for families seeking to break free from these damaging educational norms. ## Highlights [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp57ssz9x4qzwxp14844k0p) > My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place. You have to trick kids into thinking it is normal to be stuck in their current class with no way to get ahead. Encouraging complacency. [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp58nq4jbzgcgegqh3cadhk) > I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible. This has always bothered me, test scores have no correlation to anything in the real world. Even within school, you are told that you won't be able to get into a college based on test scores alone. What are they for? To stack-rank. To "objectify" learning. [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp59814385hrfk5z0fyabqt) > **The second** lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Arbitrary units of time. Sounds like training for manufacturing work. "But it is to teach them a schedule and time management" It is to condition on a regiment. With no time to actually get anything useful done. [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp59z556xbvc9rhgdd4zzj9) > **The third** lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory. Children can be unruly. But to deny a human the ability to go to the bathroom has always struck me a bit out of touch [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5azkznv1ant3v2mzd1m88) > **The fourth** lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity. [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5bbndhwdtabp4wvpqc4m8) > Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat! People are increasingly specialized. Becoming utterly incapable in everything except their line of work. Specialization should be left to the ants. [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5bt88hwbh0gjm4saajqq1) > **In lesson** five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers. Is it any wonder that kids have self-confidence issues so frequently now? Between social media and this, you are either constantly judged or an outcast [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5e20wd72c8bt0wnkq50mw) > **In lesson** six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too. Is anywhere so strict on this than schools? Block scheduling is like being in a prison schedule. Limit the interactions to a minimum [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5gbgd1e75s07na7sdk703) > I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood. In work life, there is no homework. Why is there such a thing for kids? Because there isn't enough time in the classroom. Because nothing of worth can be done in 90 minute increments [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5p0f7g9s0vvc2rs6ez8zp) > **With lessons** like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction. [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5q7sscdtw5qyj6zpp3tv7) > **At the** pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue. [[2024_05_12]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxp5qxy4dm1zreh8q6rh8947) > School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.