Paul Horton teaches history at the University of Chicago lab School. He has been writing brilliant critiques of corporate reform. In this post, he reviews the history of efforts to make education rational, predictable, and measurable.

A few nuggets:

“Have you ever read Dr. Seuss’, The Butter-Battle Book? It made perfect sense to me, a Cold War military brat. The “boys in the backroom” were very smart. They were data whizzes and they invented computers that made them a lot smarter than everybody else. Both the “Yooks” and the “Zooks” believed that those “boys in the back room” could figure out solutions to every problem. But the biggest problem was that only human beings who could effectively communicate, not computers or data, could solve the world’s problems. “The boys in the backroom” were only doing what they were told: they were the smartest, but not the best communicators in town. None of those “boys” said, “making more weapons that can kill more people might not be the best way to go.” But everybody believed in them, almost religiously, to the brink of nuclear war. Slim Pickins didn’t bat an eye when he decided to ride his big A-bomb to victory.

“This might seem strange to you, but, from my very humble perspective, we might need another Dr. Seuss to write a book with a similar theme, but in a different setting. The question has become, what happens when the “boys in the backroom” take over after the “Yooks” and the “Zooks” have stopped threatening each other? What happens when one of the “boys in the backroom” becomes the richest guy in the world and decides that he wants to build “Gatopia”? What happens if he convinces many of the other richest guys that our country is doomed unless we completely tear down and rebuild the way that we teach our kids? And what happens when he and many of his very wealthy friends tell the red and blue politicians that he and his friends can make sure that they will not get campaign funding if they don’t support “Gatopia”?”

Gatopia “seeks to turn human beings into computers that are efficient and well behaved. Most importantly, computers do not ask questions or demand accountability: they do what they are told.”

Horton describes how he fell in love with learning and recognizes that Gatopia has no room for the experiences he had:

“Learning for me was about connecting with a human being. Learning was reflected in my ability to write something. I wanted to please my very demanding teachers, I wanted to conform to their expectations of excellence. I dreaded the conference to go over a paper that fell hopelessly below those standards, but respected my teachers for holding me to them.

I want my son to have teachers like I had, and I want the same for his kids. I do not want “the boys in the back room” telling me how my kid and grandkids should be educated. Sometimes the smartest people can’t think up the most important questions. Democracy requires citizens, and computers cannot produce citizens. Computers often mask deficits that we most need to develop. Data is not knowledge. We are in grave danger if we are tempted to believe that it is.”