Schooling and Altruism

"School teaches children to hate one another, not to love them."      John Taylor Gatto, former New York State Teacher of the Year

Most of the world’s children are taken from the company of their nearest and dearest and placed in schools where they are managed by professional strangers. The impossibility of altruistic, long-term relationships between teachers and pupils in schools is so clear to us as adults that it is easy to overlook its effects on the children.

How is a teacher supposed to comfort a young child who has fallen over? Since time immemorial, adults have used physical means (i.e. a hug) to comfort distressed kids. However, in UK and other countries laws have now been passed laws to forbid this. To deny the validity of the natural instinct to show altruism in this way is to abuse both teacher and child. Nor is this an isolated instance – altruism is not easily combined with mass compulsion of any kind, and the schooling system is no exception. Most people would agree that developing a child’s innate altruism is a vital part of a good education. Education, however, is not to be confused with schooling – which curbs altruism in order to fit children easily into the existing social order.

The high ideals of many teachers contribute to the popular misconception of forced schooling as an altruistic institution carried out by one generation for the benefit of the next. In fact¹, the modern model of compulsory schooling was copied from Prussia in the late 19^th century by plutocrats keen to reproduce Prussian success on the battlefield and to regiment their domestic populations for life as subservient factory workers.

"The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places… It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."     
William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education 1889-1906, The Philosophy of Education

As most of us who have experienced them know only too well, boredom is rampant in mass compulsion schools. Children instinctively perceive the artificial nature of the ‘work’ that is demanded from them at school, and instead would love the chance to do something with real meaning – something that actually helped other people. However, the school model denies them such an opportunity. Like prisons, schools pay lip service to the idea of involving the wider community, but do not generally welcome outsiders. Jealousy and spite thrive as children, starved of adult attention, are forced into a zero-sum competition with one another for the attention of their appointed teacher.

Miminising children’s competitiveness is a laudable aim that some teachers still attempt. However, the larger school system exists to frustrate their efforts by imposing strict rules that limit their freedom of action, and by focusing on individual achievements and awarding prizes to a select few. In school, children’s achievements are not valued with reference to personal relationships, but instead by a larger, mathematically based system. These ‘marks’ not only undermine the importance of personal relationships in children’s lives, they promote rivalry also subvert their natural tendencies to help one another. ‘Marks’ are always given by teachers, just as, in the money system, salaries are determined by bosses.

Children learn social skills from mixing with their peers at playtime. Such learning is natural and needs no assistance from adults. The characteristic socialization process of schooling is not to do with child-to-child relationships. It is the inculcation of obedience to an impersonal bureaucratic system. The emphasis it gives to individuals’ ‘results’ in the form of externally determined grades undermines children’s ability to work together and to self-evaluate.

It attention is paid to altruism in schools at all, it is usually a personal matter, not due to the system, but to altruistic efforts of individual teachers. Some schools have a ‘most helpful child of the year’ award, but this is understood to be only a distraction from the main business of sorting and ranking young minds. Competition is so deeply ingrained in the school business that the irony of using a competitive basis to reward altruism tends to go unnoticed.

"Each year the child is coming to belong more and more to the State and less and less to the parent."     Ellwood Cubberley, US Superintendant of Schools, Dean of Stanford University School of Education, Changing Conceptions of Education, 1909

The compulsory school system was designed to replace individual education. Children were to be taught not to be loyal to their own values, friends or community, but instead to be unswervingly loyal to a faceless and unaccountable authoritarian bureaucracy. This may seem like a poor preparation for life, but is more accurately described as preparation for a poor life: Discouraging their natural altruistic tendencies prepares children for life in a society in which most people’s work is devoid of personal interest, most relationships are temporary and self-serving, and most consumption serves as a thin veil over feelings of depression and powerlessness.

1 John Taylor Gatto: The Underground History of American Education, ISBN:0-945-70004-0