Thanks to Sunni Maravillosa for posting this great piece, The Bartleby Project, by John Gatto.
“The Bartleby Project
By the end of WWII, schooling had replaced education in the US, and shortly afterwards, standardized testing became the steel band holding the entire enterprise together. Test scores rather than accomplishment became the mark of excellence as early as 1960, and step by step the public was brought, through various forms of coercion including journalism, to believe that marks on a piece of paper were a fair and accurate proxy for human quality. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Nobel Prize winning Russian author, said, in a Pravda article on September 18, 1988, entitled “How to Revitalize Russia:”
No road for the people [to recover from Communism] will ever be open unless the government completely gives up control over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the country into an abyss and it does not know the way out.
Break the grip of official testing on students, parents and teachers, and we will have taken the logical first step in revitalizing education. But nobody should believe this step can be taken politically—too much money and power is involved to allow the necessary legislative action; the dynamics of our society tend toward the creation of public opinion, not any response to it. There is only one major exception to that rule: Taking to the streets. In the past half-century the US has witnessed successful citizen action many times: In the overthrow of the Jim Crow laws and attitudes; in the violent conclusion to the military action in Vietnam; in the dismissal of a sitting American president from office. In each of these instances the people led, and the government reluctantly followed. So it will be with standardized testing. The key to its elimination is buried inside a maddening short story published in 1853 by Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
I first encountered “Bartleby” as a senior at Uniontown High School, where I was unable to understand what it might possibly signify. As a freshman at Cornell I read it again, surrounded by friendly associates doing the same. None of us could figure out what the story meant to communicate, not even the class instructor.
Bartleby is a human photocopy machine in the days before electro-mechanical duplication, a low-paid, low-status position in law offices and businesses. One day, without warning or explanation, Bartleby begins to exercise free will—he decides which orders he will obey and which he will not. If not, he replies, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to participate in a team-proofreading of a copy he’s just made, he announces without dramatics, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to pop around the corner to pick up mail at the post office, the same: “I would prefer not to.” He offers no emotion, no enlargement on any refusal; he prefers not to explain himself. Otherwise, he works hard at copying.
That is, until one day he prefers not to do that, either. Ever again. Bartleby is done with copying. But not done with the office which employed him to copy! You see, without the boss’ knowledge, he lives in the office, sleeping in it after others go home. He has no income sufficient for lodging. When asked to leave that office, and given what amounts to a generous severance pay for that age, he prefers not to leave—and not to take the severance. Eventually, Bartleby is taken to jail, where he prefers not to eat. In time, he sickens from starvation, and is buried in a pauper’s grave.
The simple exercise of free will, without any hysterics, denunciations, or bombast, throws consternation into social machinery—free will contradicts the management principle. Refusing to allow yourself to be regarded as a “human resource” is more revolutionary than any revolution on record. After years of struggling with Bartleby, he finally taught me how to break the chains of German Method schooling. It took a half-century for me to understand the awesome instrument each of us has through free will to defeat Germanic schooling, and to destroy the adhesive which holds it together—standardized testing…..”
by John Gatto
My Comment
I once wrote the libretto for a one-act opera about Bartleby composed by a friend of mine at Catholic University. Unlike John Gatto, I always related to Bartleby and understood it because my first education was in India.
Education in the liberal arts was terribly rote-like in India in the 1980s. Long lists of figures to memorize. Map boundaries that had to be drawn from recollection. Senseless lists of obscure kings and their completely fungible achievements. Venkatappa I built 40 highways, 500 hospitals and 35 colleges. Krishnayya III built 35 roads, 502 colleges, 25 temples. Chandravarma XX conquered the Marathas or Rajputs or whoever in 807 AD…etc., etc. Not much in the way of ideas. The whole thing was like a long catalog. Lists of the building materials (limestone, gypsum, white marble) used for various famous mosques, monuments, temples – none of which I’d ever seen, since traveling in India was difficult and expensive for middle-class families. Nehru’s Five-Year Plans, every dam and hydel project, with the exact monetary figure for each one.
We’d copy the whole thing onto a large piece of brown wrapping paper and then memorize it in sections until we could reel it off without a flaw. Some of the girls took a few – shall we say – chemical stimulants to pull off this feat. The week after our exams, we would all be flat on our backs with exhaustion, fifteen pounds lighter, and hardly any more enlightened than before our labors. The next term, we’d go back to “bunking” class (playing truant) for the first few weeks to make up for this torture.
There was also a lot of long-hand copying of notes, because photocopy machines were nonexistent in our college and books were precious when you were living in a hostel. I copied scores of T. S. Eliot poems into a long notebook. In another I copied essays about Jane Austen. We took notes copiously in the classroom, although our lecturers were often less informed about things than we were. When things got boring, the more practical girls took to crocheting long scarves or eating lunch surreptitiously.
The whole thing was calculated to destroy any intelligence or interest in the subjects we were studying. It was a long, medieval exercise in mental gymnastics.
Amazingly, many of us ended up no worse intellectually than people who had had the finest undergraduate training.
But it was in spite of what we went through, not because.
When I was first in college, I didnt care about a major but took the greatest variety of challenging classes I could, usually jumping right up to the 400 lvl ones because the class size was small. I studied linguistics, art history, history, economics, chemistry, poly sci, philosophy, classics and latin etc. I left after three and a half years an ungraduated and undeclared senior. Later, I went back for an engineering degree.
At any rate, one of my favorite professors, in a class about classical rhetorical theory, provided my theory of education in a single sentence; “I cannot teach you anything,” he thundered, “but merely point the way.”
That’s the best way. Fortunately for me, I had a really outstanding high school education, and I had my parent’s library where I probably did more reading than any time else. We had hundreds of classics….and we were left to ourselves to read. That gave me the basis to resist incompetent teaching (one of my colleges in India) and highly competent indoctrination (one of my colleges in the US). But others aren’t so fortunate.
Its interesting how civil rights and breaking Jim Crow is always raised as an example of people power. To some extent it is, but the reason Jim Crow was broken and civil rights eneacted was that at core it was about the expansion of the federal goverment at the expense of the states/municipalities w Jim crow laws. That it was the right thing to do and that people took to the streets made it all the more inevitable. It was only possible as it enabled an expansion of federal power.
The point: Unless some problem or issue in America has a state power expansion angle to it–you will see no meaningful action. Any problem that can be solved with a reduction in the involvment of the state will not be solved–studies, new programs, privatization the replacement of government emplyees by governmetn paid contractors (I love that one) and other expedients will continue. It will be very hard to remove official “concern” from “education” because the “well being of children” is great fodder for politics and a great shere for expansion of state power. If you are against more funding, control, equality, self esteem in schools–you are againts children and there go your chances of election and influence.
In the current economic circumstance there is one area of hope–a lot of government programs will be discontinued and persons may well benefit significantly in many ways. There is always a sliver lining and here is hoping….
I think Gatto has Bartleby confused with Gandhi.
Bartleby is “No Man”, the polar opposite of Jim Carrey’s recent turn as “Yes Man”, and the story details how a life of less and less involvement leads inexorably to entropic dissolution.
Gandhi, on the other hand, “was the pioneer of satyagraha—resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon ahimsa or total non-violence—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.” (says Wikipedia)
Gatto is as bad at choosing his tactics for change as he is at picking role models for his revolution. If he wants somebody to set an example he should simply write across his 1040 each year “I prefer not to” rather than get a few gullible kids in trouble and screw up their lives for a while because they listened to his crap and took it seriously.
Alan –
You’re right there…and initially I didn’t understand why Gatto thinks Bartleby is a hero…
B reminds me more of Ivan Ilitch (sp?)
in the story by Tolstoi – someone who realizes too late that he’s lived a life of abject conformism and meaninglessness.
But I take his point. That at a certain point you can refuse to go along. It’s not Gandhi…true…but it’s resistance..
Would kids’ lives be screwed up if they didn’t do standardized tests? I don’t know.
I think they wouldn’t make the corporate track at the middle level….but it wouldn’t stop them being successful in other ways and if they were very entrepreneurial, it wouldn’t matter at all..
Also – Gandhi was playing in a field which had been softened up by bomb throwing revolutionaries for years… Gandhi “worked” in some part because the British preferred him to the other alternatives…there’s more there than meets the eye
A socioeconomic society which is hierarchical needs to keep the system functioning for the benefit of and by the top tier. Schooling is their tool, it ensures that the lower tiers do not become too rich, or too clever. Masters need slaves, and will make sure the slaves never become too independent, or it will be game over.
This is why wars using sophisticated and expensive technology are fought…money gets channeled into the pockets of the top tiers through war industries, if it went to the general population instead they would become independent of their masters. Wars also allow the same statist system to expand into countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Hi Ron –
I like your point, although I have a slightly different take on it.
Societies with vast differences in wealth and poverty (such as in India and Brazil) cannot stay republican. True. They can be democratic in the sense of being mass-based….but that inevitably leads to hero worship, dear leaders, and despots.
But too much egalitarianism produces the same result too…the egalitarianism (since it never exists in reality) becomes a kind of tool by which the middle and upper middle class is finished off and becomes dependent on the state as well, along with the working class…that leaves the place free for the oligarchs..
That is, I tend to think that hierarchy of a variable sort…not just very rich and very poor..but all sorts of levels and qualities… is actually the best defense against totalitarianism.
From observation, it seems like the most conformist societies need a certain amount of equality to ensure that conformism.
To me egalitarianism (or rather claims to it) are made by people who want others “equal” so they can be “more equal”..
It’s a delicate issue though..and others probably see it differently.
What does “Education” do for the individual? Really?
“Education” tells us that the way to success in our Capitalistic society is to get as much “Education” as possible so you can get a job! Capitalism, simply defined, is the private ownership of capital. How well does the private accumulation of capital work for the wage earner?
What is the greatest impediment to the private accumulation of capital? Of course, it’s competition! What better way to ensure a lack of competition than by taking the most impressionable, energetic, inventive, easily mobilized segment of the population and subjecting them to a steady stream of carrot and stick exercises and then telling them that the only way to be successful in life is to conform to the notion that they’re eventually going to make a living by being subjected to someone else’s carrots and sticks?
Of course the impressionable, energetic, inventive, easily mobilized segment of our society could also pose a potent force for political change in their own right. And wouldn’t that just get in the way of proper Government? What better way to ensure a docile public than to subject them to an environment, completely divorced from the real-world, where they are told what is right and wrong, when to organize, where to organize, when to move, when not to move, etc. Any dissention is punished. Compliance is rewarded.
I pity anyone who thinks “Education” does anything for the individual. Gatto’s call to action is right on the mark.
You know, that’s an original point of view. And quite convincing in some respects. I don’t know if capital “intentionally” sets up the population to waste its time in universities forever to avoid competition….but it’s a thought. More likely bureaucracy (which is what governmentalized society is) needs it..it makes people more docile.
Docility toward authority has its uses. You don’t want a piano student who refused to submit to any kind of discipline. But unquestioning obedience is more apt to provide the kind of automatons that make mass murder, mass theft and mass control more possible.
One word: Prussia. Have you heard of it? It was officially disbanded after WWII–basically what used to be modern day Germany.
In the 19th century, Prussia instituted a model of education that follows us to this very day. It was so efficient and produced such good results, at least in terms of creating a servile populace, that the “Father of American Education,” Horace Mann, lobbied the State of Massachusetts to implement this glorious system.
Under Edward Everett, the first American to receive a Ph.D.–in Prussia–Massachusetts became the first state to adopt compulsory schooling in 1852; the Prussian model.
The first head of the department of Philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1810 and a significant influence on Prussian schooling, Johann Fichte wrote, “The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will” and “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking and acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished…When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Fichte also wrote that the Jews were a “state within a state” and Jewish civil rights were only possible if one managed “to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea.”
So, Fichte had a significant influence on the development of the Third Reich too. How is it that the Third Reich were able to achieve their ends? Education, of course! The kind of education that promotes duty, discipline, respect for authority, and the ability to follow orders–unquestioning obedience.
This is what the “Father of American Education” brought to our shores. This is why the system cannot be fixed. It’s working exactly as it was intended.
Hi,
Just found your blog on Technorati & Digg upcomming news feeds and read a few of your other posts.
ISeems good contents,Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Thanks,
Michael
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev7Y-XbapLc
Thanks so much Eric