I've taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore.

For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry.

So I'm going to quit, I think.

I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach.

A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality

and utter dependency.

I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore. I can't train children to wait to be told what to do. I can't train people to drop what they're doing when a bell

sounds. I can't persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn't

any. And I can't persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire

by becoming our disciples. That isn't true. Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history.

It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood

and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren't meant to

participate in our form of schooling rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as

school teacher are to make children fit an

animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path. The

whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman.

It grows from the faith that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.

That idea passed into American history through the Puritans.

It found its scientific presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some iron law of biology.

It's a religious idea, and school is its church.

New York City hires me to be a priest.

I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.

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