Adapted from a talk given at the University of Washington, the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane Australia and Budapest, Hungary.
(Reflections On Open Source Learning)
by John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
PART FOUR: Dropouts Are Dead Ducks?
Branson’s walkabout, and the dirt-farmer savvy of Shen Wenrong, are things more easily achieved outside school than in, which is the common historical experience of mankind and which helps to explain why it took almost all of recorded history before factory schooling came about. I hear all the time these days that people who don’t graduate high school are ruined, and those without college are doomed to be lifelong flunkies. And yet, something puzzles me: America’s two best Presidents, Washington and Lincoln, had almost no school and neither had college, either, and America’s two most potent industrial titans, Rockefeller and Carnegie, were in the same unschooled boat. “Yes, but what about scientists”, I hear you say. Well, two-time Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling, didn’t even have a high school diploma[1], and the head of the Human Genome Project, Francis S. Collins didn’t see the inside of a classroom until high school, and followed a perfect open-source method until then.
On April 27, 2007, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal carried front-page stories about the firing of MIT’s Admissions Director, Marilee Jones who held the top spot there for ten years, and for eighteen more was a nationally famous admissions executive, also at MIT, specializing in recruiting women. During her tenure, she nearly tripled the female fraction of the student body. MIT gave her its highest honor for administrators, The Excellence Award for Leading Change.
So why was she fired after 28 years of superb service? It seems that on her original job application, she had claimed three college degrees, but her background was actually as a torch-singer in upstate New York nightclubs. Don’t laugh; it took MIT nearly three decades to flush out the scoundrel. Meanwhile, according to the press accounts, she had become “beloved,” “almost revered,” and considered “irreplaceable.” Even the many who fired her acknowledged that she was superb at what she did.
MIT Chancellor, Phillip Clay told the press the door was now closed to another Miss Jones. “In the future, we will take a big lesson from this experience.” You’ll forgive me for being rude, but Mr. Clay is clearly unable to see the real lesson in the Jones affair: that degrees are paper with no power to signal merit. Quality resides solely in an ability to add value to the community and on that score, torch-singer Jones gets an A+ and bureaucrat Clay flunks shamefully.
American genius has always been about making silk purses out of sow’s ears—judging people on merit, not titles. But the cancerous growth of test-driven schooling since the end of WWII has marked a return to the medieval outlook of Scholasticism, whereby the godly or ungodly can be deduced through faith-based syllogisms like honors degrees. Unfortunately, for the degreed, merit still demands visible works, not abstract promissory notes.
In the modern through-the-looking-glass universe, Jones lacked enough paper credentials to warrant her high position, but, even in this epidemic or credential-sickness, I hope you can see that a dropout is a dead duck only if he or she believes the propaganda. Dropping out of school doesn’t mean dropping out of education. George Eastman, who created Kodak and donated millions to MIT in Kodak’s heyday, understood that. He was a dropout, of course.
Under any wisdom-based form of governance, dropouts would be regarded as a major untapped source of ideas and pioneer-spirit energies and given subsidies, support, and encouragement. The same pragmatic perspective which produced Ben Franklin would see that the dropout was picking up a huge chunk of time and money at the most opportune moment in life to apply those things to advantage. Just as a fine chess player sacrifices immediate material advantage for a freedom to maneuver, any dropout capable of ignoring the mindless prejudice and insults to focus on a goal of his or her own choosing, can more than compensate for a loss of academic seat-time.
We’re talking here about 1¼ million people a year in the U.S. and, perhaps, ten times that number who would like to drop out if any respectable alternatives were offered. The reason my proposal isn’t possible is that schooling is the biggest employer of the civilized world when all associated forms of labor are factored in. And, the major contract-giver, too. When attendance dips, jobs are lost. No wiener roast without the wieners. The minute you take your blinders off and see schooling as a jobs project, you know why the dropout is despised.
And, there’s another reason just as strong or stronger: they represent an unpredictable “X-factor,” a potential fifth column to management because they’ve been insufficiently adjusted to accept standardization. It’s understandable in a short-sighted way, but over the long haul, an economy so dysfunctional it compels its citizens to accept services not wanted or needed, is a bed of Procrustes which spells trouble for the nation.
Every school day, 7000 students walk away and don’t look back in spite of the propaganda. Several million more daily fake illness to buy some temporary respite from torture. Should all be dragged back screaming and jammed into cells with others who, in theory at least, want to be there? If that had been done to Abraham Lincoln who didn’t go to school, would his spirit have survived to become Abraham Lincoln?
Some say it’s only fair to force attendance because the kids don’t realize that without certificates you can’t find opportunity. But where that is true, it’s only so because law and prejudice make it so. Think of Merilee Jones at MIT.
Think of filthy slum urchin, Lula da Silva, grown to the presidency of Brazil without a certificate; think of Hitler, a penniless guttersnipe from Linz, Austria, who couldn’t make the cut at art school so, for want of anything better to do, rose like a meteor to dominate Germany, the most formally educated nation on earth. How did these folks figure things out? Think of John D. Rockefeller, who floated the future on a sea of oil, or the Wright brothers who taught us to fly. What effect should these facts and thousands more just like them have on our unexamined assumptions about seat-time in classrooms or about college degrees?
[1] Pauling’s high school issued him a diploma after he received his second Nobel. He did go to college and after dropping out of his first, he got a degree from his second.
