The Awful Fate of Being Nobody; How To Avoid It A Commencement Address for Homeschoolers by John Taylor Gatto (Copyright,

2005 by John Taylor Gatto. All rights reserved.) 1. Modern institutional schooling by force is a deliberate project of social engineering, one brought about for purposes seldom discussed. The inspiration for bulk-process schooling by force came from utopian writings like Edward Bellamys Looking Backwards and other philosophical musings about the creation of a better society by the deliberate extension of a childlike state in the general population. About the year 1975 I began to call this process "the artificial extension of childhood" and changed the way I taught to combat it, but for a long time I was baffled: How had this idea of keeping children childish long into adulthood stepped out of the pages of utopian writing and become serious policy? The answer is perfectly logical, as Mr. Spock would say. This radical contention so perfectly dove-tailed with the needs of corporate industry to find some way to revoke the self-reliant, libertarian charter of American history in order to thrive, that the utopian school project, the great socialist ideal, was underwritten, promoted and guided by industrialists and other capitalists from the start. Surely, this is one of the colossal ironies on the human record. You homeschoolers have avoided most of the pernicious effects of this deadly conjunction, but since you are fated to live in a society of well-schooled men and women, people made incomplete by the institutional schools they trusted to help them, I thought it might be useful to you, on graduation day, to explore some of these ideas. To a very important extent, modern schooling exists to trick us into surrendering our critical intellects and becoming nobodies. Being a nobody, in the sense Im using the term, means being extremely dependent on the good opinion, and on the instruction, of strangers. As a nobody, your opinion, your income, your status, your peace of mind, the way you regard your family is decided by strangers. This is the very opposite of self-reliance. The homeschooling youve done is a living contradiction of the mission of official schooling, which seeks to extend childhood dependencies lifelong, to create a beehive or an anthill society. Its important you understand that this school project wasnt inflicted on the world out of malice or out of a wish to oppress the common population, but out of very real needs of a mass production economy to prevent excessive production of independent intellects and of too many people grounded in strong families, since family life profoundly undercuts reliance on authority outside the family.

Independent, self-reliant, family-grounded young people, who can speak and write well, are so inherently destabilizing to the needs of corporate management, both as employees and as customers, that back in the time just after the Civil War, when this project was gathering steam, people of wealth and power were prepared to contemplate a radical blue-print as old as Plato, a plan to confine the entire youth population for a long period of years, to be passed from one strangers hands to anothers, in a great system of forced schooling. A system designed to tailor its inmates to the needs of a corporate economy and of a centralized government. Youll be disappointed if you try to locate a political bias to explain what Ive just said. Both the so-called "left" and the so-called "right" were solidly behind this project of liberty destruction. They remain so to this day.

The Hall of Mirrors By John Taylor Gatto As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is much as it was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test-driven, belldriven, pedagogue-dominated, and thoroughly dumbed down. Let me give you an excerpt from a boys manual of instructions on how to build things, published in 1937. It was sold on newsstands as The Amateur Craftsmans Cyclopedia of Things to Make and was expressly intended, as it states in print, for ten to twelve year old boys. Ive selected the project on building a model racing schooner because I dont want to shock you with the pages which teach boys how to cut a new entrance

into a frame home or build a small portable arc furnace out of clay and bricks. So the modest schooner project will have to make my point by itself. Lets begin with glue to hold the ship together. Our ten-year-old will make that himself by melting toothbrush handles in acetone. Got that? Then, after he cuts and planes hull and mainmast, casts the keel in molten lead, masters diction like jib-stay and peak halyard, and uses his sewing skills to sew the foresail, he tackles the main assembly narrative: Spring the sides apart and slip the lower ribs in place at their proper stations. Set the ribs in so the bevel begins at edge of the side. Drive an escutcheon pin into each rib from each side. Make the inside keel from - inch square wood. Fit it inside the inside stem in the notches of the lower ribs, and spring it over to, and inside of, the stern, as shown. Theres more, but youve heard enough, I think. Efficient Marketing = Stupid Customers That was 1937. Such instructions for little people were commonplace from Ben Franklins day until the end of WWII, but suddenly a new standard seemed to appear after that war was over. In classrooms in every big city at first, and soon everywhere, it looked like this: a) Students were confined to chairs in quality-ranked classrooms, for six hours a day, 185 days a year. b) Each day they were set to copying notes off blackboards to memorize and listening to lectures. c) They were given regular paper/pencil tests to measure their obedience in memorizing, and publicly humiliated if they fell short. d) Casting ship keels in molten lead was forbidden. e) They were sharply enjoined to remain silent. f) Many other procedures, similar in spirit, were imposed. Pedagogy had arrived, big-time. This wasnt how education happened (or happens), of course, and everybody seemed to know that. The solution to the mystery of why it was done and continues to be done belongs to philosophy and economics, and to dark secrets of human nature secrets which used to be actively studied in schools in the days before Literature, History, and Economics gave way to Language Arts and Social Studies. Now, young people began to emerge from classrooms into adulthood as ignorant of these things as forest savages. But they were pushovers for modern marketing techniques. They lived to buy stuff; having grown older in school, but never having grown up.

Nearly all work in A New World Order our society has been centralized. To pull this transformation off, children in bulk had to be taught to think of their futures in terms of jobs, instead ofindependent livelihoods. Parents had to be taught to accept lifelong subordination as a freedom from burdensome responsibility, and to turn their children over to anonymous agents of the political state as a further freedom from responsibility. No wonder our nation is so profoundly childish. By 1910, signs abounded that a massive project was underway to change the nature of America from a place of independent livelihoods and self-reliant, argumentative people into an administrative utopia, one inspired by Prussian Germany, by Edward Bellamys prophetic utopia Looking Backwards and by Frederick W. Taylor, inventor of time and motion studies and the slip-on loafer. According to philosopher John Dewey, America was being converted by its most powerful people into a centrally managed village. In this new world order, the marketplace of ideas would be monopolized by corporations and institutions individuals and local interests were now quaint and irrelevant. Dewey thought this an advance in civilization and, in any case, irreversible. He called this transformation, the new individualism with not a trace of irony. School training must adapt. More than a hundred years have passed since Dewey put the bell on this cat. By 2000, common people were frozen out of policy debates, treated as functions if considered at all, and public opinion, so-called, was almost never spontaneous, but most often manufactured.

Get Your Filthy Fingers Off My Brain The colonization of ones private inner life by strangers is so inherently pornographic an undertaking that no monarch or nation historically was ever able to compel its entire people to accept it for long not, that is, until Prussia succeeded during the second decade of the nineteenth century, justifying its system of universal schooling by force by citing national necessity and the highly negative opinions of ordinary people held by philosophers from Plato to Spinoza. As the nineteenth century crossed its midpoint, even Science came to agree. Darwins Origin of Species (1859) spoke of favored and dis-favored races, and in his Descent of Man (1871), he pronounced the majority of humankind biologically inferior, without hope of improvement, and a clear and deadly menace to advanced evolutionary stock. Protective barriers were required to preserve racial purity. Horace Manns own writings partially overlap Darwins and hint at darker aspects of the school project. Merle Curti, the historian, tells us in Social Ideas of American Educators that Mann sold compulsion schooling to his wealthy backers as the best police they could buy, a much different message than ordinary householders heard. Manns biographer, Jonathan Messerli, remarks than Mann once jotted a revealing note to himself while watching a workingmans parade in Boston during the early 1840s. The note read: We must find a way to break the bonds of association among the working classes. His high praise of Prussian schooling, which he claimed eye-witness experience with, played an important part in bringing the compulsion system to Massachusetts, but the claim of first-hand knowledge was a lie. Nor was it Manns only lie. Forced schooling turned out from the first to be a breeding ground for crime and public outrage, not the best police as promised. As a philosophical notion, mass child indoctrination by force keeps popping up through history, yet as I told you before, nobody could make it work. But the groundwork for profound change in school fortunes was laid during the British takeover of India in the late eighteenth century. During that time, the secrets of institutional school management were disclosed through examination of eight constituents employed by the Hindu aristocracy to manage its common population through a voluntary form of mass schooling. The eight secrets looked like this: 1) In place of skills training, rote memory drills. 2) In place of exercise to develop independent judgment, habit and attitude training. 3) Strict limits on student questioning. 4) Strict limits on student-to-student association. 5) Silent testing of material previously assigned for memorization, followed by

publicly announced rankings of student test results. This done regularly. 6) Denial of student rights to initiate curriculum based on personal interests. 7) Long-term confinement in conditions of near-immobility and enforced silence, extended over a term of years. 8) Removal of students from familiar surroundings, routines, and people; placement under direction of strangers who discourage attempts to build personal student-teacher relationships. This recipe was written down by a British military chaplain, Alexander Bell, who published a version of it in London in 1797 as the methodology in use by Hindu elites to manage their huge population. He thought such a discipline might prove useful to Britains own class-driven social order. Seldom has a single short essay had such lasting influence on world history. In a short time, Bells words were being read in governing circles across the world. Lancaster Versus the Anglicans Upon reading Bell, a twenty-year-old Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, took his suggestions to heart and began training a thousand poor children to read virtually all by himself in an alley next to his London home. The Hindu method allowed a single teacher to instruct a great many pupils by dividing the total group into student-led teams. The leaders were known as monitors, and the world was to learn of this fashion in teaching as the monitorial method. Except for the breathtaking student-teacher ratio, it was a fairly close cousin to the system at work in one-room schools in North America. But that vast scale difference, and its mind-deadening formula, by extending the gulf between student subjects and authority in the form of official teachers, made mental colonization almost a certainty. As Hindus employed it, the monitorial system created reliable subordinates, psychologically and behaviorally conditioned to remain subordinate. Argumentation was non-existent. The active literacies of persuasive speech and writing were rigorously avoided. Napoleons ideal that every common soldier should be able to think like a field marshal was antithetical to the purposes of monitorial schooling. Youthful Mr. Lancaster knew nothing of these ulterior motives; driven by desire to do good while winning fame and fortune, he concentrated on the pure mechanics of reading well, rather than memorization; he personalized training as much as circumstances allowed. Because he did these things, his rapidly spreading system threatened for a time to upset the applecart of state-sponsored mass training, which always aims at ordering society through an elaborate scheme of divide-and-conquer subordinations.

Something had to be done, and the official state church of Britain did it. In response to Lancasters do-goodism, the Anglicans opened a competing chain of Hindu schools schools which aimed to indoctrinate, not educate, just like the Hindu originals. Their prestige drove Lancasters rough-edged competition from the field, to the point where he fled to America in 1818. There, under the patronage of powerful men like DeWitt Clinton, he opened Lancaster schools in virtually every large city east of the Mississippi. But under the stewardship of pragmatic entrepreneurs who were of necessity Nobody with an ounce of commonsense asks for, or makes use of, test scores when hiring. You dont ask your barber, your grass cutter, or your babysitter, doctor, or architect for their own test numbers because on some level you know the data is worthless, however many tens of billions of dollars it took to produce. heavily influenced by local elites, American monitorials regressed to the mean very quickly. They adopted the original Hindu control design because that pleased local families of substance much more than the alternative actually teaching common children to acquire formidable skills. One important by-product of the Lancaster phenomenon was that it offered practical evidence that mass indoctrination of the young through school schemes could work. The first nation to follow this promising trail to its end was the military state of Prussia. By 1820, Prussia had an institutionalized, universal forced schooling system up and running. Its purpose: to render the young into human resources, useful to important interests. Powers of expression were suppressed through schooling, information needed to think in contexts was denied, the time and associations of common children were closely controlled, and the young were forced daily to compete with one another for status and dignity. This was the system which Horace Mann asked America to imitate. School as a Civil Religion

And imitate it we did, although not with the same zeal for another half-century. Whig movers and shakers like Mann and his influential Unitarian backers, were able to impose their will on only two states Massachusetts and New York in the 1850s. To that short list, however, a fatal third jurisdiction must be added: the national government center, Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia. Washington was the straw which broke the camels back. It is certain the school institution we finally got would look much different were it not for Washington offering incentives behind the scenes to convince individual state decision-makers to play ball. Its fairly easy to demonstrate that centralized compulsion schooling was never part of the democratic American Dream (or, for that matter, its republican counterpart). Not a word to that end appears in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration, or in any of the nation-building debates. Jefferson had heard of a movement to do this in Europe, a movement which drew its inspiration from Spinozas Tractatus Religico-Politicus of l690, which denounced ordinary people as murderously irrational and sought to establish forced schooling in order to replace faith-based religion, which he despised. But Jefferson rejected this idea to bamboozle common men and women as a mere civil religion, precisely the expression Spinoza had employed. Nor was there popular clamor for institutional schooling after the Revolution. It took a full sixty-five years before the first two states fell, and another sixty-five before the last one did. Youve heard a few of the philosophical rationales to defend what happened, but now its time to hear some hard-nosed economic ones. The most obvious one is easy to understand: This novel institution offered a rich new field of personal opportunity. As one of the largest hiring agencies in history and one which could bestow lucrative contracts it was a quietly spectacular economic engine from the start, a jobs project with no civilian parallel. And school performed subtler services as well. By offering a break from motherhood, it allowed millions of women to be drawn into the labor pool an immense windfall for management because it cut the value of a labor unit in half. In conjunction with a new requirement for state-issued pedagogical licenses, it created a wholly new sub-industry called teacher- training, and in many other ways, feathered collegiate nests. From the outset, this economic aspect of institutional schooling became the tail that wagged the dog. It guaranteed that school training of the young would be forever political. Nobody who benefits materially from politicized education, whether left, right, or center, would be crazy enough to allow schools to be depoliticized. The tidal flow of money through school corridors in good times and

in bad is in the last analysis much more important than philosophy as an ultimate determinant of school affairs. Other economic reasons to push forced schooling exist, but they are remote from general understanding. By a sort of gentlemans agreement, they arent discussed in places where the public is likely to be listening. For example, institutional schooling provides a partial remedy for two deadly diseases corporate capitalism is prone to contract: overproduction and hyperdemocracy. Ill take overproduction first. The history of North America is one in which families and individuals were taught to produce for themselves to the greatest extent possible: to produce food, shelter, clothing, medical care, entertainment, education, and more. But under corporatized governance and economy, self-sufficiency, and personal enterprise frustrate the will of companies and agencies to provide for the whole population. Its a tribute to the power of mass schooling to misdirect attention that this clear truth isnt recognized by everyone. If schools taught us to connect the dots instead of memorizing them, it would be. Independent minds are toxic to our social order and no qualities are so poisonous to corporate health as self-reliance and active imagination. To understand this you need to see that imagination is a necessary prerequisite for personal production a condition which entrepreneurial societies must encourage. Yet, when too many imaginative individuals produce for the market and are allowed to do so excessive amounts of goods and services become available. Prices collapse, banks take a beating, and the lifeblood of high-stakes capitalism concentrating investment capital becomes difficult because profits have been put at risk. As bizarre as it sounds, under corporate capitalism and governance, ways must be found to make the general public less productive, less self-reliant. The great financial panics of the nineteenth century grew on the soil of overproduction, and the disruption of Asian economies in the 1990s, a century and more later, stemmed from overproduction, too, as Japanese banks, seeking to enlarge their own profits, stimulated too much production. Policy leaders have been privy to this daunting secret for centuries. Early on, they erected defenses against overproduction: licensing laws, subsidies to favored producers, sweetheart contracts, and so on. Sabotaging Democracy For Cause A second disease menacing corporate capitalism was dubbed hyperdemocracy by the Trilateral Commission in 1975. In our hall of mirrors society, a crisis occurs

every time the collective will of the public seeks to contradict the official will of the political state. You need only remember the consternation in official circles when street demonstrations by the young led to a premature end of American military involvement in Vietnam. You need only revisit the disgust in federal circles when a reckless outsider, Ross Perot, attempted a political takeover of government through the ballot box. And nearly succeeded in doing that in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Should a hyperdemocratic revolution ever come to pass, countless comfortable arrangements would be profoundly disturbed. The new managers would be unpredictable, owing no loyalty to the old order. But the dangers of hyperdemocracy only become real in an environment when large numbers of ordinary people like one another well enough, and trust one another well enough, to be able to cooperate in a collective expression of public will. Now suppose, for the sake of argument, you wanted to prevent such trust from ever forming? How would you go about doing that? Remember, cooperation had been the norm in Americas one-room school period they couldnt work without it. But what if an institution could be fashioned where continuous high-stakes competitions could be imposed on the confined, and where some participants would be publicly honored by the results, some would be labeled mediocre, and some would be humiliated? What if Thomas Hobbes war of all against all was deliberately reenacted in classrooms daily, with full approval of school authorities? Wouldnt the involuntary competitors eventually become incapable of productive cooperation? As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is much as it was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test- driven, belldriven, pedagoguedominated, and thoroughly dumbed down. And what if you physically divided the young from one another: by age, by social class, by neighborhood, by endless segregations into groups of winners and losers? Wouldnt all these do the trick of discouraging a cooperative outlook, thus side-stepping the prospect of hyperdemocracy?

Does this sound crazy to you? Would it sound so crazy if you fervently believed what Charles Darwin wrote in Descent of Man (1871), that ordinary people were evolutionarily retarded and posed a threat to the favored races as he called them. Suppose you believed such things as Andrew Carnegie and John D.

Rockefeller did? If you were a responsible civic leader, wouldnt you move mountains to insure protection for the best against the worst? Could institutional schooling be that protection? Winning As Everything School conditions its subjects so thoroughly in games of winning and losing that the deeper purpose of learning something becomes peripheral. Winning is the point of the enterprise, not gaining enlightenment, not developing skill, not gaining insight. But winning in absence of any narrative context besides the prospect of personal advantage over the people around you is a trivial, ultimately meaningless achievement, like taking snuff in order to sneeze. Whats that about? Under a regimen sorting boys and girls into winners and losers, what you win never stays won; your victories must be repeated over and over until you wear out and another winner takes your place. Nor does it take into account that winners at school tests are very frequently losers at life. Saying these things isnt intended to dismiss all forms of competition. Indeed, one form of competition is an essential part of a good life: competition against yourself. When you learn to love competing against yourself, you learn to refuse your own mediocrity at the same time. Your victories are permanent and progressive. But attempting to win against faceless others inevitably leads to gaming the system a moral disease, which in time destroys your soul. Why should students of winning follow Warren Buffets hard road to wealth when Bernie Madoffs is so much easier? Why strive to emulate Babe Ruth when Barry Bonds chemical success is more reliable? The classroom version of performance-enhancing drugs cheating and sucking up to the instructor teaches you nothing. Just so, competing for grades and praise forecloses long-lasting life-altering rewards, which only learning for its own sake can bestow. Competition was selected by the canniest Prussian school designers to divide the young against one another. Divided people are easiest to manage. Caesars Gallic Wars was once a standard secondary school textbook which illustrated this principle, but although well-written and very interesting to teenagers, and still a staple of elite private schooling, it has vanished from public schools. As A Vampire Fears Garlic, The Marketplace Fears Wisdom Well-schooled populations are usually trained to pay lip-service to democracy at the same time they are being conditioned to avoid the attitudes and behaviors it requires. Its a dilemma without an easy answer because, while our national consciousness honors the idea of democratic society, our national economy and

government would wither and die under anything less than a command and control reality. Would you teach critical judgment and moral behavior to all? How could an economy grounded in the global sale of war machinery, industrially produced meat, fruit, and vegetables, financial trickery, and the mass sale of cradle to grave schooling peddled as education endure in a climate of critical intelligence and morality? When I was growing up during WWII in a coal-mining town near Pittsburgh, the general ability to debate abstract concepts such as overproduction, hyperdemocracy, and divide and conquer politics was much more widespread among ordinary people than it is today. A vivid memory I carry from sixty-five years ago is of the band of ragamuffin poor kids I ran with huddling near the open doors of the town saloon so we could overhear conversations of miners and mill workers drinking at the bar. Their discussions, sometimes shouting matches, were richly laced with ideas in conflict. Just as they were on the bocce courts at the Italian Club, or in the bowling alley where I set pins for a dime a game. That might fall as hyperbole on modern ears, so your first assignment is to read E.P. Thompsons classic account of working class men and women in nineteenth century Britain passionately striving for a life of the mind, and for the tools necessary to express ideas. An appetite, I should add, which the better classes took vigorous steps to shut down. The book is entitled The Making of the English Working Class (Vintage, 1966). Remember those ten-year-old boys building racing yachts and cutting new entrances for their homes? I never did those things, but I did make several soapbox racers from similar plans in 1945. And a rubber-band driven P-51 Mustang that could fly four city blocks at respectable altitudes. Every ten-year-old I knew did things like that in working-class Monongahela, Pennsylvania before modern pedagogical principles were applied to its schools. At Xavier Academy, the Jesuit boarding school where I was sequestered for a year in 1943/1944, we learned fundamental algebra in third grade, studied dialectic in fourth. Then, returning to public school, I read Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, John Milton, and Shakespeare in a common seventh grade class, and had an option in ninth to read the Latin writers in Latin. Today, all that stuff, including the building projects, would be looked upon a child abuse but no working class kid I knew would have agreed. It was so exciting to grow a powerful mind that nobody had to browbeat us much to do it.

If this sounds too radical for you to swallow, I prescribe two autobiographies to cure your skepticism: the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill and the Autobiography of Norbert Weiner. Weiner is regarded as the grandfather of the computer revolution and Mill, I hope, needs no introduction. At birth, their fathers deliberately set out to make their sons geniuses without benefit of school instruction. Both succeeded. Precise details and blueprints are in the books. The ancient Chinese Imperial strategy known as The Policy of Keeping the People Dumb was adopted by Hindu India and Prussia, and from there spread far and wide, eventually reaching North America. In 1922, the then nationally famous New York City mayor John Hylan said in a speech that the schools of his city had been seized as an octopus would seize its prey. The schools were wrapped in the tentacles of an invisible creature acting through the great private foundations of Carnegie and Rockefeller. You could still say things like that in 1922 but, by the end of WWII, nobody who worried about a career would dare say a word seriously critical of the powers who manage institutional schooling. Dumping on politicians and school administrators was always allowed they were, after all, only flunkies, front men in the school game but woe betide any reckless traitor who invited the public behind the scenery to see how the school illusion was being manufactured. Subjects, Not Skills Early schooling in colonial America aimed at creating desirable skills like concentration, imagination, cooperation, good manners, the potent active literacies of persuasive speaking and writing. The descendant form, however, stressed memorizing detached bits of information said to be necessary to learn abstract categories of intellect called subjects. What subjects were actually for, few teachers ever even tried to explain. Subjects are what schools teach, not skills. Notice that skills-training can only be evaluated by requiring performance demonstrations, but subject-training demands passive tests of memory. Whether these memories can be applied to something useful in a utilitarian sense is never an issue that matters to schools. Nobody with an ounce of commonsense asks for, or makes use of, test scores when hiring. You dont ask your barber, your grass cutter, or your babysitter, doctor, or architect for their own test numbers because, on some level, you know the data is worthless, however many tens of billions of dollars it took to produce. The Great Dis-connector As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is much as it was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test-driven, bell-driven,

pedagogue-dominated, and thoroughly dumbed down. The terms pedagogue/pedagogy are labels borrowed from the ancient Mediterranean world where they designated a specialized form of slave and slavery respectively. Do you find these survivals curious? Do you think they endure by accident? School is the great dis-connector. It disconnects children from the working community where a variety of styles and techniques are constantly on display for study; it disconnects them from family relationships and valuable neighborhood associations, disconnects them from one another, and distances them from their own inner lives. Americas first national commissioner of schooling, William Torrey Harris, wrote in his Philosophy of Education, published in 1906, that school must give training in self-alienation, a task best undertaken in dark, airless corridors, in preference to cheerful surroundings. Everything You Know Is Wrong Standardized schooling by force isnt even remotely about education; its about the same things here political and economic and philosophical things that it was about in ancient China, Hindu India, and Prussia. The Germanized version of the instrument focuses on converting individuals into a mass population for ease of management. When we had an entrepreneurial culture, personal sovereignty was an absolute blessing, but in our corporate culture its only a curse. The corporate logic demands that the young be rendered radically incomplete, to the end of converting them into human resourcesconverting them into means, rather than seeing them as ends in themselves. Nearly all work in our society has been centralized. To pull this transformation off, children in bulk had to be taught to think of their futures in terms of jobs, instead of independent livelihoods. Parents had to be taught to accept lifelong subordination as a freedom from burdensome responsibility, and to turn their children over to anonymous agents of the political state as a further freedom from responsibility. No wonder our nation is so profoundly childish The new American economy built by Astor, Vanderbilt, Harriman, Carnegie, and Rockefeller drenched America with pro-school propaganda. These men bought every newspaper and journal of importance to assist in colonizing the public mind. In short order, they convinced the public that seat-time in school was equivalent to education. But their own lives showed no commitment to school confinement at all; as young people, some of the principal names behind the scenes preferred factory work for themselves rather than school confinement. Today, we are witnessing another expansion of the school empire and an energetic propaganda campaign designed to impose universal college schooling on the population.

"The fact that Google and Twitter and Microsoft and Apple and Dell The fact that Google and Twitter and Microsoft and Apple and Oracle are and Dell and Oracle are the products of college dropouts or the products of never-registereds, as well as CNN, Avis Rent A Car, Whole college dropouts Foods Markets, Ikea, and all the fast food and or neverentertainment empires, is an anomaly politicians and registereds, as pedagogues would rather not discuss. well as CNN, Avis Rent A Car, Whole Foods Markets, Ikea, and all the fast food and entertainment empires, is an anomaly politicians and pedagogues would rather not discuss." There is another anomaly: All the top performing nations in international math and science competitions send their kids to school for far fewer hours than we do. In Singapore often the best nation in math they attend for a full 247 hours less. The same is true of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Finland, and others. An inconvenient truth concealed by attending more days, but for many less hours. I Would Prefer Not To What a long century of forced schooling has done in a positive sense for all of us is to expose the myth of expertise and the myth of hierarchy as co-residents in our hall of mirrors. A students do not do better at life than c students like George Bush, John Kerry, or Al Gore, not unless the game is rigged. Your life is not ruined if school pronounces you hopeless or dyslexic as it did Thomas Edison or Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, who became a bicycle peddler of fish when he dropped out. The C averages of FDR and JFK didnt hurt their prospects. To reform this business demands that it be rigorously de-professionalized, its cozy guild system scrapped. Standardized schooling cannot meet the challenges of our time. Promising solutions lie in the direction of hyperdemocracy and the Internet; away from professional expertise and toward the wisdom of the bazaar, not the cathedral. We need a revolt without guns. Polite individual refusals should be our shield, not pointless further negotiations with the flunkies paid to protect the status quo. The short declarative: I would prefer not to should be our battle-standard. You might

recognize Herman Melvilles inspirational refusal, as he put it in the mouth of his immortal office drudge, Bartleby, the Scrivener. If they have to attend school, kids can write across the face of standardized tests, I would prefer not to take this test. No curses or defiant explanations, just that. Make well-mannered refusings your common practice: I would prefer not to ask permission to use the toilet. I would prefer not to memorize textbook explanations of historically alleged truths as if they actually were truths at all. I would prefer not to attend school. The only way out of this suffocating trap we find ourselves in a trap maintained by forced, standardized, institutional schooling is by throwing sand into the gears of the machine just as the colonists sabotaged the mighty British Empire, by the death of a thousand cuts. Let us break the glass in our hall of mirrors and dispose of it once and for all, shard by shard, before it cuts us up.

What youve just heard is the essence of rationality at work, not politics. Think of it as a project in scientific management. Nobodies, even rich nobodies, are considerably more easy to manage than somebodies who think for themselves and can always take solace and inspiration in the bosom of their families. As long as you can herd millions of kids together into compounds, ring bells in their ears all day as if they were laboratory rats, direct them to memorize disconnected bits of information which must be retrieved upon command in order to earn privileged treatment and status... As long as you can do these things, the net result will be an artificial extension of childhood across entire lifetimes, putting to death the adult-in-embryo which lives within each one of us. In this way school completes its mission of producing manageable nobodies. Whether they graduate from Harvard or go into the coal mines makes little difference. They will remain nobodies lifelong, incomplete people sentenced to wander through life like light-duty zombies, waiting for the next command from a somebody. You homeschool graduates have beaten this game already. Youve been trained in self-reliance, in self-sufficiency, in generating your own work, in taking risks, in preparing to have tough independent minds trained in critical thought, and in cherishing your families -- with those assets, its impossible to be a nobody -even if you decide to live on a desert island as a hermit.

So Im nervous to be up here on stage lecturing you. As a public school teacher for 30 years, being around nobodies-in-the-making puts me at ease. My own specialty was teaching a few of my nobodies to be somebodies, but in the nature of the business, I couldnt help many. So, Im nervous with all you somebodies out there listening to my argument. Homeschoolers constitute a peculiar graduating class because they arent a class at all, but each a fire-breathing individual. While attempting to come up with advice for graduating homeschool kids, that fact made me sweat a little. You couldnt know, of course, that youve provided the major inspiration in my life for the past 20 years, which only makes it worse -I should be down there in the audience and all of you behind this microphone! Isnt it ironic that the people we all call "classy" -- like the homeschoolers in front of me -- are always one-of-a-kind individuals, while cookie-cutter people, we never give a second look to are always easily classified? Anthropologists call these graduation things "rites of passage", an academics way of identifying important ceremonies like graduation as boundary markers between the regions of your life. The earlier zone gives way to its successor in a one-directional transit from which there is no escape, no return. I hope that sends a chill up your spine. I was informally denied admission to my own high school graduation 52 years ago, in the green mountains of western Pennsylvania because I owed $32 in library fines, an enormous sum equivalent to $344.40 today. And although I mowed lawns like a madman, I couldnt raise it in time. Miss Neill, the director of ceremonies and my own English teacher, for whom I worked long and hard in menial labor at her home for $.10 an hour, let me know that if I showed my face at graduation I would receive a blank diploma and everyone would mock me. So I was intimidated into not attending. My crime was reading too many books for too long a time. A striking memorial of what school was from the beginning for me: A theater of endless humiliations. Where were my parents in all this? Alienated from one another, living fifty miles apart from one another, too busy to have energy left for graduations. I dont blame them; they were doing their bit, unknowingly, for the industrial economy by enlisting our family in the great army of proletariat demanded by mass production for its success. People who define success by relationships are pretty much outlaws to our way of life which depends upon shopping and discarding to stay healthy. Take a test, throw it away; take a test, throw it away; take a class, ring a bell, forget that class, take another, ring a bell, take a test, you get the picture, I know. Its a form of Pavlovian conditioning, which depends crucially on various forms of alienation to work right.

2. But that was my graduation; this is yours. Unlike mine, you showed up. Amazing. Dont you owe library fines? Here you are then, having crossed over the Great Divide and entered the zone of Legal Responsibility. You must be saying to yourselves, "Whats next?" "Will I do okay against real high school graduates?" Youll do just fine. In the past 950-odd years only one member of the British Royal family wasnt educated at home, and hes often wished aloud in print that he had been. Since Im compelled to give you advice and youre compelled to listen, Im going to tell you things I wish I had told my own children, Briseis and Raven, before they graduated -- each with high honors, but each knowing very little, as I think theyd acknowledge. Ill take full blame for both and for the circumstances in which they missed my lecture. But youre stuck with it. Its also my obligation to keep this short. There are exactly 187 sentences in this speech and youve already heard 32 of them. I know Ill get mail with a different count, but what the hey? Lets start with this: Never overlook the army of ghosts watching you closely every minute. Dont believe that youre alone, even when you seem to be. Youre the strong forward link in an ancient family chain stretching backwards to the beginning of time. Its your ancestors who are watching. Millions upon millions of family chains have been permanently terminated to this point in time, but not yours! Ay caramba! The evidence youve won so far in the survival sweepstakes is your own existence. Pinch yourself, youre real! Your personal chain of ancestors runs backwards through mother and father into the swirling mists of the dawnless past. Even if huge hunks of history are gone from memory, all survive deep inside your cells. Seen that way, youre a miracle even if you havent bothered to notice; it doesnt matter a whit if your predecessors were nobility or rag-pickers, the miracle of the chain overwhelms trivia like that. One day soon youll be called upon to make a choice: To help build a bridge between the ancestral past and future by contributing children of your own, or refuse the call. In the time ahead, make yourself ready for this moment when it arrives, even if "No" is your answer. It should be thoughtful, your reply, not thoughtless. 3. To comprehend the magnificence of your family in its ancient struggle to live on, youll need to have done your homework. Its worth it, believe me, but the payoff of family, even of family that exists only in memory, isnt given to those who just go through the motions. You have to work for it

and it isnt easy to achieve because it demands a lot of time and effort. There are no shortcuts. Thats one great beauty of homeschooling: It provides opportunity to do real homework. Phony school drills like staying in seats, memorizing what youre told to memorize, competing for grades -- these things make it impossible to understand what real homework is. Pity the lost legion of well-schooled children. How can they understand that no stranger, however loving, can substitute for a family lost? With family, even a bad one, you cant be insignificant. Theres always an important role for you to play as long as you realize there will be times when your parents arent able to be leaders of family and the young have to assume the burden of leadership. A family has to acknowledge you one way or another, real families dont have the option of turning you away when youre in trouble; of course, many families arent real, they just fake it, but if you find yourself frozen out, at least these fake families are compelled to see themselves as phonies. And perhaps in time if you dont turn away from them, they will actually change for the better. One things certain, you have to keep your hand extended, you have to provide the opportunity for the others to finally reach for their best. 4. Homeschoolers have a big head start in good family relations, without which a body is doomed to the awful fate of being nobody, but everybody can grab the brass ring, even those poor souls whove been cheated out of family relations up till now. As Ive gotten old, Ive learned that by intense acts of imagination and homage, achieved more in solitary wrestling with yourself than any other way, deep family currents can be tapped into even without the factual reality of the clan. Be careful that all this talk about strong family isnt taken as a slight on the independent self, the sovereign you; it needs to exist too, apart from, but paradoxically in dynamic partnership with, the family side. Its likely youll use your family talents and background in much different ways than your parents and thats fine, but try to understand the laboratory of different (possible) yous that a family tree models (if youre lucky enough to have one). Even when you leave the family room for good, cherish your people; even as you go a-roving, take your people with you in your heart. For thousands of years utopians have tried to do away with family, offering synthetic substitutes and systems in its place. It doesnt work; its never worked; it never will work. Be wary of the snake-oil salesmen who tell you that you are different, that you will be the exception. Be wary of yourself as that snake-oil vendor. 5. School kids often confided in me that they hated their parents, denouncing them bitterly, not always without justice. I listened. In all my school years, however, I never met a single kid who understood that this

was exactly the way the modern world wanted them to feel; to many of its managers, family is, in Senator Clintons words, "a retrograde institution" standing in the way of progress. In a slim volume published in 1906, our first national superintendent of education, William Torrey Harris, stated bluntly that a principal purpose of forced schooling was to deliberately teach alienation! Following Plato and Hegel, Harris thought school should do its best to wipe the slate clean so that social engineers would have a blank slate to write upon in building a better society. Only as isolani would graduates become sufficiently malleable and suggestible to fulfill their assigned functions in corporate government and corporate economy. My advice to the family-hating kids who came to me was this: If you poison your family, however much it seems they deserve it, youll be weakened considerably; if you hate your mother and father, youll inevitably end up hating yourself, since that pair is mixed in every single cell inside you. And in terms of the rest of society, youll be marginalized without understanding that the best parents warn their own children away from family-less friends and romantic partners. Teaching that the best way to understand the hidden depths of character is by watching closely what a prospective husband, friend or business party does with family is ancient wisdom, ignored at peril. Havent you wondered why family presentation plays such an important part in presidential elections? Now you know. To my angry kids Id shout, "If your parents cant parent you, step up to the plate and parent them. But run away from this challenge only if you want to be crippled for life. I know all this flies in the face of social-work wisdom or old-fashioned pragmatism, but 30 years in a public school classroom showed me that no family was so bad that family alienation was the answer. You have to stay caring -- for your own good. And then one fine day I realized that alienation cant happen without the cooperation of two parties, one alienated individual cant pull it off without cooperation from the person reviled! From that moment to this, I made up my mind never to be alienated again. Should "they" refuse to speak to me I would yet speak to them; if they refused to answer letters, I would continue writing letters, to the grave if need be. Even in serious matters like theft and slander, I vowed to do my best never to return treachery for treachery. This strategy marked a great turning point in my life for the better; this understanding that turning the other cheek is a practical strategy of power, not

weakness, and it isnt merely an abstract religious injunction. The returns in personal power from this prescription are truly incredible ones. Seen correctly, this is one aspect of Marcus Aurelius stoicism, a deliberate philosophy which frees its acolytes from material dependence; only the stoical spirit is ever truly free. So always think sympathetically about those you contend with and keep your heart open for them, too, in case they change their minds, however long that may take. Dont impose deadlines or the payoff in personal strength wont happen. 6. More advice: Each of you is a story being written, up to now by other people in good measure, but beginning tomorrow principally by yourself (anyway I hope so). You must become the storyteller of your life or youre guaranteed not to like the story authorities write you into as one of their minor characters. You arent a stupid collections of facts. You werent hatched from an egg as a blank slate, but grown inside a mother, emerging with a set of fairly specific agendas written in your genes; and your mother was grown inside her mother, likewise engendered. And all the mothers in your chain wrote stories which caused them to meet prospective fathers with whom they commingled their lives. You have to learn some of these stories if you dont want to become shallow, superficial, weightless, inconsequential, because your indifferent commitment trivialized the sequence. And isnt it astonishing that we have a word, "inconsequential," to warn us about the importance of sequence in our lives and the serious punishment for ignoring this? One day youll need these stories at your fingertips, the myths, jokes, histories, cautionary tales as well, so that the horrible fate of inconsequentiality isnt visited upon your daughter or son as a legacy of your own foolishness. Having family lore active in your imagination at all times will help you to become solid and deep. Even if its all bad, thats still true. Examining yourself this way will help you evaluate others. As my grandmother told my mother: "His mouth may lie, but his relationships always tell the truth." You know a man by the company he keeps. See that you memorize this. 7. Success . . . some advice about same: Schools and media have already barraged you with well-crafted lies about the meaning of success, I know, yet success has nothing at all to do with being listed in Whos Who. Its true and I should know, since Im listed there. Success has nothing to do with winning competitions, getting good grades or keeping up with the neighbors. You can make money and stay out of trouble by listening to bosses or gurus, but you cant be successful without knowing yourself, and that isnt easy. If you ever drank the whole six-pack or ate the whole

pizza you dont know yourself; if you ever followed instructions you knew to be wrong just to stay in the good graces of someone who could hurt you, you dont know yourself; if you hang around with friends who waste your time, then you dont have a clue to the person you are. But dont worry inordinately, it takes years of rigorous self-inspection to accomplish, its the quest of all quests, without which none of us amount to anything real. Incidentally, theres a lot of bad information circulated at graduations by authorities such as myself, so you want to be wary of everything you hear, roll it around in your mind and test it before swallowing anything hook, line and sinker. If you want some evidence of that, look at the line count I gave you up front about this speech. Heres a better example: Speaking at another college graduation, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor once said, "As students, your challenge will come not so much in breaking new paths, but in deciding to choose among the many paths now open to you, and in knowing how you should travel among them" Really? From my perspective, fitting into the world you inherit is brainwashing for slaves. Listen to Tom Jefferson cross swords with Justice OConnor. Heres Jefferson on the same idea: "Good citizens," said Jefferson, "make the society they live in; bad citizens train themselves to fit the world they are given by their masters." Now you pick one of the above. All around you the schools of America are indoctrinating more than 50 million young people, of whom 5 million graduate from secondary school each year, indoctrinating them to fit an economy which traffics in toys, weapons, dangerous foods and other forms of trash; an economy built on illusion to the degree it might have been designed by P.T. Barnum, the great flim-flam artist. Our classrooms and tracking echo a society poisoned by rigid class divisions disguised by a non-stop mechanism of mass entertainment which conceals these divisions; our curriculum conceals the degree to which our nation is portrayed as an outlaw nation in many parts of the world: Military outlaws, financial outlaws, commercial outlaws, ecological outlaws. You need to travel extensively, as I do, to feel the brunt of the worlds scorn; you need to read foreign newspapers to find out whats happening in America. Perhaps all these voices are wrong about us; certainly reality is too complex to be understood through journalism, but nobody should want to "fit in" to our national agenda without questioning first what might be wrong with it. Unfortunately, public school graduates hardly ever question, theyve been subjected to 12 years of laboratory conditioning in which the questioning kids are

sharply marginalized. You homeschoolers are different. Were going to need your leadership in the future to break out of this trap of fitting in. Please start with an all-out assault on fitting into the mainstream definition of success. Here is my own partial contribution to redefining success: If you cant take constructive criticism from those who love you or like you, you are a huge failure already, and likely to remain so. Examine your own frail ego before it ruins you. Learn to apologize: If you cant say to those youve insulted, slandered, humiliated, ignored and abused, "I was wrong. I was way out of line. Im sorry. Forgive me," then youre such a failure, decent people should avoid you as toxic. On the other hand, if you can face setbacks and horrible defeats with courage; if you dont quit on life because its wounded you, but always come off the floor and try again, youre already a successful human being. If you can say, "Sorry, I prefer not to" to anyone, even the powerful, youre a trophy winner for sure. Keep in mind that we are defined by our denials just as much as by our affirmations. If you can stay married for 40 years to the same person and still remain full of love and admiration in spite of everything, youre one for the ages and anybody but a damn fool can learn things from you. Go after real success, graduates, follow your heart, take all professional counsel with a big grain of salt -- its so often tainted with self-interest, and you arent the self its interested in. Self-help manuals deal in categorical people and you arent a category, hence the bad fit between people and the entire genre of self-help. 8. Even official advice should be closely examined since it, too, deals in categories and can only regard you as a fit for column "a" or column "b", whether you fit or not. Talk about Procrustes bed, official voices built it. As my daughter was graduating from MIT in the 1980s, authorities had convinced the great majority of MIT students to become computer majors (not her, but most). None of the official voices, of course, had the slightest idea whether the computer field could absorb an army of new graduates year after year, but then the bread of university officialdom has never been buttered by looking out for student interests, but instead by doing the bidding of government agencies, corporations and media moguls who in turn, take care of them. It has many of the characteristics of a closed system, this academic Cosa Nostra, and naturally enough, its in no-ones interests to take the student body in on the game. Now, a quarter century after my daughter graduated, a respectable number of those obedient MIT computer nerds have been unemployed for some time, and

even more under-employed a bleak picture which threatens to become much worse as the 21st century unfolds. My daughters classmates, now in their forties, are discovering that nobody wants forty-year-old computer people if they can get their hands on twenty-year-olds who work cheaper (and in the gruesome Darwinism of all tech businesses, better) than old hands. Past 50, most of her classmates, those who havent developed businesses of their own, will be as the dead. Im saying this from the vantage point of being seventy: Never treat expert prophecies seriously -- every single one of them which sees the light of big-time publishing has been bought and paid for by foundation grants, government grants, university grants or corporations. You live in a world which has absolutely no place for independent scholarship, only sponsored scholarship. And sponsored scholarship, whatever else it may be, is always propaganda too. It is possible, from time to time, that a childish research team, one missing the signals, will kick their sponsors in the teeth inadvertently; what isnt possible is that those people will ever get a second chance to betray their betters. Without a lot of public attention, as the 20th century dawned, the principal function which great universities assumed was to serve the corporate economy and the corporate government (which is for the most part a reciprocal of the economy), one hand washing the other. The part assigned to universities, and for which university insiders are lavishly compensated, is to resonate the attitudes, opinions and goals of great corporations, along with the prevailing government agenda of the day, in concert with publishing and media. In this way the national imagination is trapped in a smothering net, unable to conceive of any alternatives, or get a hearing for objections to "what is." In the first decade of the 21st century, the prevailing mantra heard everywhere is, "Thats just the way it is," an inarticulate recognition of the power of the trap we find ourselves in. If you want to understand just how badly youve been educated, read Francis Bacons famous fragment, The New Atlantis, written 400 years ago. Bacon had caught onto all the principal details of the great scam coming down the pipeline way back then; during the 19th century he was revered in realpolitik circles as a god, and today is still a fixture in high-level academic seminars at the power colleges. At least this will help you see the difference between schooling and education. And there isnt any law which prevents homeschooling post grads from assigning themselves Bacon. Not yet, at least. 9. You graduates want to always remember that some very important nasty customers pay the salaries of journalists, college presidents and school superintendents alike, and that these folks learned long ago that group behavior can be managed by tampering with information. Since they own

the information stream, it might be well to maintain a healthy skepticism (not cynicism, skepticism) toward official information of all sorts. Remember how you were told the people of Iraq would welcome us with open arms? Remember that the Enron Corporation, the countrys seventh largest business, was held to have discovered an entirely new way to get very rich making markets in energy resources, while at the same time, serving the public well, when what it really had done was to rediscover an ancient way to loot customers and stockholders alike by simply inventing information out of whole cloth and entering it in financial reports; and of course, this same critique applies to WorldCom and others as well. I was fascinated to learn recently from high-powered financial sources, the kind ordinary people are not aware even exist, that General Motors hasnt been principally an automaker for years; about 15% of its business is cars, the other 85% is as a virtual hedge fund, a speculator in foreign currencies and variable mortgages -- stuff like that. Stuff like that is hidden by the common curriculum of forced schooling and if you think that isnt on purpose, then shame on you for illpreparing yourself to face reality and wrestle with it. In light of the fact that the two leading occupations in America today are fast food jockey at places like McDonalds, a job which one American in six has held at one time or another, and clerk at Wal-Marts, a job which one American in eight has held: According to the Financial Times of London and many other sources, millions of well-trained tech workers, engineers and others from China and India are being released on the world labor market. These men and women are willing to work, and work very well, for a small fraction of what our own graduates demand. Is this going to affect you? I dont see how it can help but. The entire middleclass basis of American society requires that something in excess of a living wage must be paid to a substantial chunk of people. But when virtually nothing these people do cant be done by people far off for one-sixth -- or even onethirtieth -- of what is charged for labor here, then what is to be done? Nobody whos brought this reckoning on America can be trusted with the answer to that because, while a clear answer can be extracted from American history and even local practices around America, any commitment to a way out of this trap would deal a body blow to corporations. The simple answer under our noses is that the philosophy of continuous consumption has no ability to protect you graduates from profound changes in the offing for America. Nor is there any way to prevent these changes because what looks like a tragedy to you is a blessing for those who will inherit your jobs.

The pied pipers who try to tell you the economic pie can be magically enlarged to accommodate everyone in an American middle-class lifestyle arent just crazy, theyre dangerously dishonest. Were the world -- or even just China and India, with their 2-1/2 billion people -- to insist on a consumption standard like ours, the planet would reel into an ecological disaster. But what if consumption were abandoned as a guiding philosophy, as Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, abandoned it for himself thousands of years ago? What if personal production, not consumption, came back as the center of American family life, just as it reigned in the colonial period and in the periods just before and just after the Civil War? Such a center lies at the heart of the prosperity of contemporaries like the Old Order Amish or the Mennonites. The idea is that we stop defining success for ourselves by what we can consume, and redefine it by what we can personally produce. In this formula, schools would examine how individuals and small groups could produce some of their own food; build their own shelters and maintain them; administer their own health care, as is done spectacularly well in Cuba; cook most of their own meals; improvise most of their own entertainment, education and goals. Not all at once, of course, but bit by happy bit. The Amish are a fantastic working laboratory of whats available to all of us if we pinch ourselves hard enough to come awake. Im not talking about utopia, but plain, ordinary, common sense. People who produce for themselves are many times happier than people who merely consume; they have better, stronger families, healthier lifestyles, genuine community life in place of the thin networks we call neighborhoods these days. They make better parents hands-down, over absentee parents, who watch T.V. with their kids... sometimes. The truth is that most of the things that money can buy, worthwhile things, that is, can be had for virtually nothing. The reason this is hard to see is that its been masked by corporations, media and government, to protect those whose interests would be damaged by a renaissance in old-fashioned American selfreliance. Nobody who produces his or her own staples can possibly be a nobody; all are individuals of substance; all make the ideals of democracy crackle with energy. You graduates have been brainwashed so badly -- although homeschoolers, least of all -- that going down the new road will only be accomplished in part by a single generation; your kids (when they happen) will go further than you, and their kids further still. But well all be more optimistic and happier for having our feet back on a healthier, more solid road -- one which America pioneered long ago for the whole world. Anyone who tells you that the current system isnt posed to collapse doesnt read the financial press, doesnt know how to interpret what it means when a powerful

country spends its treasure, common citizens, and goodwill in an endless series of violent attacks on weaker places like Panama, Libya, Grenada, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, et al. Read Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and I promise you a hair-raising set of parallels to whats currently afoot. Anybody with awareness understands what it means that on the day I write this, if you want to buy a unit of European currency, youll have to put up $1.41 of U.S. money (the official exchange is listed at $1.31, but as American Express explained to me, you cant actually get that rate, only the wealthy can); anyone who understands the details of the monumental trade deficit weve amassed in peacetime, will see clearly that our national management is out of control and has mortgaged the future of common citizens already. A new day is imminent whether we adopt a new philosophy to confront it or not. Ive shown you one living alternative, proven to be successful. Is there a better one? Perhaps. Go ahead, show me. Ill be delighted to concede the field. 10. Finally, graduates, its high time to think about Time itself. Time is the real wealth, equally available to the favored and the disfavored alike. But be warned, its a non-renewable resource. Guard it with your life; it is your life measured in durations. Time on your hands isnt boring, held in your hands and cherished, its a tabula rasa for free will to write upon. Only in free time can we be said to make ourselves; in our enslaved time, others do the making. Most time you think you have has been pledged in advance. A frightening thought, that one. Its what Calvin meant by Predestination, the discovery that all your time has been claimed by obligations and appointments and accidents out of your control. A huge chunk of the remainder must be paid to your frailty as a human being in sleep. And much of the diminishing balance leaks away in phone calls, television, computer games, angers, revenges, lusts, fears, envy and bewilderments. In predestinated time, you are mostly a mechanism; only in the leftovers, the free will moments, have you a possibility of cooking the real turtle soup instead of the mock. My present age is sixty-nine years and one month, which seems to distance me from the graduates Im addressing by more than fifty years, but thats only an illusion. The fifty-year head start I seem to have on you isnt real -- most of it has been so automated and predestinated I wasnt really alive as those hours and years passed. If I count only the real time Ive had to be myself and choose for myself, it cant amount to more than five years of the total. Like you, graduates, I spent most of my time thoughtlessly. Nobody ever bothered to give me the advice Im giving you. The people who loved me, and who I loved in return, and still do, were much too alienated from one another to consider how quickly we were losing the opportunity at family. And suddenly one

day it was too late. I miss them all desperately, even with all the bad times we had, and I bring them back to life every day in imagination. I would gladly trade the Ivy League experience I received, mis-named "education," if I could retrieve my bad family and hug each one of them hard. And I count myself as bad as any because my schooling failed to show me what really matters. See to it, graduates, you dont fall into the same trap. Dont glide hypnotically through the onrushing years, obeying the prompts of stupid formulas, or the "stages" of child-rearing stage-theory manuals. Every one of them is based upon statistical averages, so when you go to force your own children into those murderous boxes, you will mutilate them beyond repair, in service to another magical theory like those magical others which have ruined modern life. Throw away your self-help books, slap yourself awake, stick a pin in your arm . . . WAKE UP! You dont have a reverse gear. You can only go forward in time, not backwards. 11. The only thing serious you face at the moment, regardless of what youve been told, is deciding what quests you will choose for yourself. If it were me, Id look hard for love -- not sex, love. Without someone special to hug and grow old with, it seems to me youll miss the best that time has to offer. I love my Janet, now old, fat and crippled, a great deal more than when she was so beautiful and lively. I wanted to cry out just looking at her. If this is so for me, its the common experience of many others as well; it explains why, in a time of easy sex, that marriage is still where life is at. Not in the pages of Cosmopolitan, of course, but everywhere real people gather. And if this is so, why does institutional schooling make no mention of Love. Its forbidden to mention love in the classroom, you know. The Greek word for sin, amartia, explains the mystery as well as anything. It can tell you what official schooling does wrong. Amartia, sin, to the orthodox Greeks, means only this: That youve missed the mark in Love. To sin is to be unable to love. The mark isnt high grades, money or fame, its Love, without which the other things are hollow at the end of your time. Love is the only divine energy most of us will ever know; its a movement toward others, ultimately a movement toward the other which cant be found in fancy cars, penthouses or trophy brides. If you want to know love, there isnt any other way but to leave pride and selfishness behind. No other way. No other way. No other way. Do you hear me? If it were me graduating today, Id want to abandon smugness and certainty in a search for things I didnt know and wasnt comfortable with; Id want to understand the whole range of human possibility as its been known across time; in that, books are your best friends. So for your own sake, read good ones even if the effort makes your head ache. Nobody has enough time to ignore the wonderful thoughts from every time and place preserved in print. The essence of

those thoughts abstracted by Monarch Notes wont do. You need the language of the original. Im too tired here to explain why. Trust me. Youll want some portion of your clock devoted to just being. Youre a human being, not a human doing. In this way, after many a long summer, youll discover what is meant by saying that the best things in life are free. Its true, but you cant think your way to understanding why. Oh, theres lots more to say, but Im weary for the moment with my own words. One last thought: Stay away from institutions; even the word should make you sick at your stomach; above all else, dont let them institutionalize you. 12. Now I see its really time for you to graduate. How time flies! My time is up; yours just beginning. Thats it -- 187 sentences, 188 if you include this one. But a word to the wise: Count them for yourself, dont take my word on faith. -- J.T.G. [John Taylor Gatto spent 30 years teaching in the public schools of New York City. He was named the city Teacher of the Year and state Teacher of the Year in different years. Since his retirement, Mr. Gatto has worked tirelessly to promote homeschooling as the only viable alternative to public schooling.]