by Daniel Quinn
“Which in fact they do not learn.”
“Which in fact, when it’s all over and the last bell rings, they have not learned.”
Unschooling The World
But,” I went on, “you don’t actually think that the original system would work in the modern world, do you?”
Ishmael considered that for a while, then said, “Your schools would work perfectly if … what, Julie?”
“If people were better. If teachers were all brilliant and if kids were all attentive and obedient and hardworking and farsighted enough to know that learning everything in school would really be good for them.”
“You’ve found that people won’t be better, and you’ve failed to find a way to make them better, so you do what instead?”
“Spend money.”
“More and more and more and more money. Because you can’t make people better, but you can always spend more money.”
“That’s right.”
“What do you call a system that will only work if the people in it are better than people have ever been?”
“I don’t know. Is there a special name for it?”
“What do you call a system that’s built on the presumption that people in this system will be better than people have ever been? Everyone in this system is going to be kind and generous and considerate and selfless and obedient and compassionate and peaceable. What kind of system is that?”
“Utopian?”
“Utopian is right, Julie. Every one of your systems is a Utopian system. Democracy would be heaven—if people would just be better than people have ever been. Of course, Soviet communism was supposed to have been heaven too—if people had just been better than people have ever been. Your justice system would work perfectly if people would just be better than people have ever been. And of course your schools would work perfectly under the same conditions.”
“So? I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.”
“I’m turning your question back to you, Julie. Do you actually think your Utopian school system will work in the modern world?”
“I see what you mean. The system we have doesn’t work. Except as a device to keep kids off the job market.”
“The tribal system is a system that works with people the way they are, not the way you wish they were. It’s a thoroughly practical system that has worked perfectly for people for hundreds of thousands of years, but you apparently think it a bizarre notion that it would work for you, now.”
“I just don’t see how it would work. How it could be made to work.”
“First, tell me who your system works for and who it doesn’t work for.”
“Our system works for business but it doesn’t work for people.”
“And what are you looking for now?”
“A system that works for people.”
Ishmael nodded. “During the early years of your children’s lives, your system is indistinguishable from the tribal system. You simply interact with your children in a way that is mutually enjoyable, and you give them the freedom of the house—for the most part. You won’t let them swing on the chandeliers or stick forks into electric light sockets, but otherwise they’re free to explore what they want to explore. At age four or five, kids want to go farther afield, and for the most part they’re allowed to do so within the immediate vicinity of the home. They’re allowed to visit other kids down the hall or next door. In school, these would be social-studies lessons. At this stage, kids begin to learn that not all families are identical. They differ in membership, in manners, in style. After this point in your system, children are sent off to school, where all their movements are controlled for most of the waking day. But of course that doesn’t happen in the tribal system. At age six and seven children begin to diverge widely in their interests. Some will continue to stick close to home, some will—”
I was waving my hand. “How are they going to learn to read?”
“Julie, for hundreds of thousands of years, children have managed to learn the things they want to learn and need to learn. They haven’t changed.”
“Yes, but how do they learn to read?”
“They learn to read the same way they learned how to see, by being around sighted people. The same way they learned how to speak, by being around speaking people. In other words, they learn to read by being around reading people. I know you’ve learned not to have any confidence in this process. I know you’ve been taught that this is something best left to ‘the professionals,’ but in fact the professionals have a very doubtful record of success. Remember that, one way or another, the people of your culture managed to learn to read for thousands of years without ‘professionals’ teaching them to do it. The fact is that children who grow up in reading households grow up reading.”
“Yeah, but not all kids grow up in reading households.”
“Let us posit, for the sake of argument, a child who is growing up in a household where the cooking instructions on food packages are not read, where the messages on television screens are not read, where telephone bills are not read, where the parents are totally, one hundred percent illiterate. Where the parents can’t even tell whether they’re holding a one-dollar bill or a five-dollar bill.”
“Okay.”
“At age four the child begins to widen his acquaintance of life. Are we going to posit one hundred percent illiteracy for all his neighbors? I think that would be going too far, but let’s do it anyway. At age five the child’s range extends even farther, and I think it’s asking too much to suppose that his whole neighborhood is totally illiterate. He’s surrounded by written messages, bombarded by written messages—all of which are intelligible to people around him, especially to his peers, who are not at all modest about flaunting their superior expertise. He may not instantly learn to read at graduate-school level, but at this age in your schools, he would only be learning the ABC’s anyway. He learns enough. He learns what he needs to know. Without fail, Julie. I trust him to do this. I trust him to manage to do what human children have been doing effortlessly for hundreds of thousands of years. And what he needs right now is to be able to do anything his playmates do.”
“Yeah, I can believe that.”
“At age six and seven, as the child’s range continues to expand, he’s going to want to have a little money in his pockets, the way his playmates do. He won’t need to go to school in order to learn the difference between pennies, nickels, and dimes. And he’ll take in addition and subtraction like the air he breathes, not because he’s ‘good at mathematics,’ but because he needs it as he moves farther and farther out into the world.
“Children are universally fascinated by the work their parents do outside the home. In our new tribal system, parents will understand that including their children in their working lives is their alternative to spending tens of billions of dollars annually on schools that are basically just detention centers. We’re not talking about turning children into apprentices—that’s something else entirely. We’re just giving them access to what they want to know, and all children want to know what their parents are up to when they leave the house. Once they’re loose in an office, children do the same things they did at home—they dig up all the secrets, investigate every closet, and of course learn how to work every machine, from the date-stamp machine to the copier, from the shredder to the computer. And if they don’t know how to read yet, they’ll certainly learn to read now, because there’s very little they can do in an office without reading. This isn’t to say that children would be prohibited from helping. There’s nothing children like better at this age than feeling like they’re helping Mommy and Daddy—and again, this isn’t something learned, this is genetic.
“In tribal societies, it’s taken for granted that children will want to work alongside their elders. The work circle is also the social circle. I’m not talking about sweatshops. There are no such things in tribal societies. Children aren’t expected to behave like assembly-line workers, punching in and
punching out. How else are they to learn to do things if they’re not allowed to do them?
“But children will quickly exhaust the possibilities of their parents’ workplace, especially if it’s one where the same tasks are performed over and over. No child is going to be fascinated by stacking canned goods in a grocery store for long. The rest of the world is out there, and our supposition is that no door is closed to them. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with a musical bent could learn at a recording studio. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in animals could learn at a zoo. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in painting could learn in an artist’s studio. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in performing could learn in a circus.
“Of course there would be no prohibition against schools, but the only ones that would actually attract students are the ones that attract them now—schools of fine arts, schools of music and dance, schools of martial arts, and so on. Schools of higher learning would doubtless attract older students as well—schools devoted to scholarly studies, the sciences, and the professions. The important thing to notice is that none of these are merely detention centers. All are dedicated to giving students knowledge they actually want and expect to use.
“I would expect a common objection to be that such an educational system would not produce ‘rounded’ students. But this objection merely reaffirms your culture’s lack of confidence in your own children. Given free access to everything in your world, children would not become educationally rounded? I think the idea is absurd. They would become as rounded as they wanted to be, and there would be no presumption that education ends at age eighteen or twenty-two. Why would there be? These particular ages would become educationally meaningless. And in fact it would appear that very few people yearn to be Renaissance men and women. Why should they yearn for such a thing? If you’re content to know nothing beyond chemistry or woodworking or computer science or forensic anthropology, whose business is it but your own? Every specialty that there is somehow manages to find candidates in every generation who want to pursue it. I’ve never heard of a single specialty disappearing for lack of candidates avid to pursue it. One way or another, every generation produces a few people who burn to study dead languages, who are fascinated by the effects of disease on bodies, who yearn to understand the secrets of rat behavior—and this would be as true under the tribal system as it presently is under your system.
“But, of course, having your children underfoot in the workplace would seriously reduce efficiency and productivity. Even though sending them to educational detention centers is terrible for children, it’s unquestionably wonderful for business. The system I’ve outlined here will never be implemented among the people of your culture as long as you value business over people.”
“So,” I said, “you would be in favor of something like home schooling.”
“I’m not in the least in favor of home schooling, Julie. It’s not merely linguistic whimsy that connects the schooling of children with the schooling of fish. Schooling of any kind is unnecessary and counterproductive in human children. Children no more need schooling at age five or six or seven or eight than they need it at age two or three, when they effortlessly perform prodigies of learning. In recent years parents have seen the futility of sending their children to regular schools, and the schools have replied by saying, ‘Well, all right, we’ll permit you to keep your children at home, but of course you understand that your children still must be schooled, you can’t just trust them to learn what they need to learn. We’ll check up on you to make sure you’re not just letting them learn what they need to learn but are learning what our state legislators and curriculum writers think they should learn.’ At age five or six home schooling might be a lesser evil than regular schooling, but after that it’s hardly even a lesser evil. Children don’t need schooling. They need access to what they want to learn—and that means they need access to the world outside the home.”
I told Ishmael I could think of another reason why people wouldn’t go for the tribal system. “The world is too dangerous. People wouldn’t let their kids wander around loose in a city these days.”
“I’m not at all sure, Julie, that most urban business districts are any more dangerous than schools, these days. From what I read, children are much more inclined to go to school armed with deadly weapons than office workers are. Not many businesses need to have security guards in the hallways to protect executives from being attacked by workers and to protect workers from each other.”
I had to admit that he had a bunch of points there.
“But the main thing I want you to see is that it’s your system that is Utopian. The tribal system isn’t perfect, but it isn’t a Utopian scheme. It’s completely feasible, and it would save you tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars every year.”
“I don’t suppose you’d get many votes from teachers, however.”
Ishmael shrugged. “For half of what you’re spending right now, you could retire every teacher in the system with a full pension.”
“Yeah, they might go for that. But here’s something I know people will say about all this: There’s so much to learn in our fabulously terrific culture that we have to send them to school for all these years.”
“You’re right that it will be said, and those who say it will be right in the sense that there is a tremendous amount available to be learned in your culture that was not available to be learned in any tribal culture. But this misses the point I’m making here. Your basic citizen’s education wasn’t expanded from four grades to eight in order to include astronomy, microbiology, and zoology. It wasn’t expanded from eight grades to twelve in order to include astrophysics, biochemistry, and paleontology. It wasn’t expanded from twelve grades to sixteen in order to include exobiology, plasma physics, and heart surgery. Today’s graduates don’t leave school with all the advances of the past hundred years in their heads. Just like their great-great-grandparents a century ago, they leave with enough in their heads to start at the bottom of the job market, flipping burgers, pumping gas, and bagging groceries. It just takes today’s graduates a whole lot longer to get there.”
Wealth Taker Style
The next day, Sunday, I wanted to get my weekend homework out of the way before meeting again with Ishmael, so it was mid-afternoon by the time I got down to Room 105. I had my hand on the knob when I heard someone on the other side of the door say, very distinctly: “The gods would have it.”
The dork had gotten in ahead of me.
For about ten seconds I considered hanging around for a while then decided against it. Feeling pretty bleak, I turned around and headed home.
The gods would have it.
I wondered what conversation that reply was part of. Certainly not one about school systems and teacher pensions. Not that the subject matter made any difference. I would’ve felt the same if what I’d overheard was “The supermarkets would have it” or “The Green Bay Packers would have it.” You understand what I’m saying—I was jealous.
I suppose you think you wouldn’t have been.
“I’d like you to see, Julie, if you can penetrate to the core of my message to you,” Ishmael said when I was finally able to get back, on Wednesday. “See if you can discern what I’m saying to you again and again and again, every which way.”
I gave it some thought and said, “You’re trying to show me where the treasure is.”
“That’s it exactly, Julie. The people of your culture imagine that the treasury was completely empty when you came along and began to build civilization ten thousand years ago. You imagine that the first three million years of human life brought nothing of value to the store of human knowledge but fire and stone tools. In fact, however, you began by emptying the treasury of its most precious elements. You wanted to start with nothing and invent it all, and you did. Unfortunately, aside from the products (which work very well), you’ve been able to invent very little that works well—for people. Your
system of writing laws that you know will be broken works very badly for people, but no matter where you look in your treasury you can’t find a system to replace it with, because you started by throwing that system away. But it’s still there, working perfectly, in the Leaver treasury I’m showing you. Your system of punishing people who break the laws invented to be broken works very badly for people, but no matter where you look in your treasury you can’t find a system to replace it with, because you started by throwing that system away. But it’s still there, working perfectly, in the Leaver treasury I’m showing you. Your educational system works very badly for people, but no matter where you look in your treasury you can’t find a system to replace it with, because you started by throwing that system away. But it’s still there, working perfectly, in the Leaver treasury I’m showing you. All the things I’ve shown you and will show you before we’re finished were in the treasury of every Leaver people you’ve overrun and destroyed. Every one of those peoples knew how priceless these treasures were that you were trampling into the dirt. Many of them tried to make you see their value, but they never succeeded. Can you figure out why?”
“I think it would be because … We’d look at it this way: ‘Well, sure the Sioux think their way of life is terrific. Big deal. Sure the Arapaho think they should be left alone. Why wouldn’t they?’ ”
“That’s right. If I succeed in showing the value of what you discarded, it won’t be because I’m more brilliant than the Leavers of your own race but because I’m not one of them.”
“I get it.”
“What sack from the treasury shall I open for you today?” he asked.
“Wow,” I told him. “That’s not something I came prepared to answer.”
