About The Author

Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best.

Wendell Berry

I am not a disinterested researcher. Like the American teacher Kristan Morrison, I am a refugee from “the deep, underlying paradoxes” of a system that I initially believed and excelled in.

I still remember the relaxed sociability with which I settled into my first morning at kindergarten, in 1958. It was to be the last time I would feel like that. A few hours later, I was shocked into complete docility. The technique was gentle and positive, and would have been admired for its effectiveness and civility in any school in the land.

There were no warnings or instructions as we settled into the bright room and played with plasticene. There was no admonishment that our friendly chatter as we created and fantasized was disruptive. But at the end of the morning, the teacher placed gold stars on the foreheads of children who had been quiet, the shy ones. The mothers who picked us up expressed their disappointment to those of us who emerged with bare foreheads. This was a gentle tactic for the time, but my spontaneity, trust and self-confidence instantly crashed and burned. Aware that I was constantly watched and judged, I could afterward barely speak in front of adults, and avoided children who might lure me into illicit behaviours—like friendly sociability.

Award-winning American teacher John Taylor Gatto claims that teachers don’t teach subjects, they always “teach school”—with seven lessons that, whatever content they are purportedly trying to transmit to students during any particular era or fad, “constitute a national curriculum”.

In a single morning, my kindergarten teacher had transmitted lessons 4 to 7. Through “stars and red checks . . . prizes, honors, and disgraces” this gentle teacher taught me emotional and intellectual dependency, the surrender of my will “to the predestined chain of command” (Lessons 4 and 5). Most effective was Lesson 6, provisional self-esteem, through being “constantly evaluated and judged”. This was enforced by Lesson 7, the awareness that one can’t hide from the judgmental gaze.

I was a quick study. Timid and attentive, I quickly learned to read, and developed a taste for the quiet, bookish life that kept me out of trouble. I did well academically, and tried hard to face the rigors that education put me through: the hours of silence and boredom, lining up, marching, struggling to keep up with faster children, watching “naughty” students spanked with rulers and straps. In my own experience it wasn’t the playground bullies who were most often strapped. It was small people, usually boys, whose itchy bodies couldn’t stop moving, or who couldn’t understand group instruction and were accused of being willfully inattentive and disruptive.

As I got older, my elders began to criticize me for not being social enough, for being too studious, for reading too much. I started to wonder what they wanted from me. When I first became aware of the youth counterculture that was forming as I entered my teens in 1966, I still accepted social control of youth as necessary for our betterment. But I was confused when adults who preached to me about freedom of thought, speech and action became upset about young men and women who grew their hair long and said what they thought. I began to wake up.