Chapter books are not worth finishing–or even beginning.

John Taylor Gatto, radical education dude about whom I should know more, saith:

“Suppose that you and I … decided to create some structural way to make young people indifferent to everything. And suppose we came up with the idea that we would enthusiastically launch them on an hourly basis on one or another project of art or thinking and then we would ring a bell and say you must stop and move immediately away from this. And we did that for year after year after year after year. Would that not produce an internal mechanism that said nothing is worth finishing? And if nothing’s worth finishing, isn’t the next logical step that nothing’s worth beginning?” (quoted in Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe)

I guess. But only bad teachers launch their students hourly on projects that take more than an hour to complete (yes, the overarching project of learning math or history takes more than an hour, but is that really going to be accomplished all in one sitting anyway?), and having a bad teacher all day as opposed to for an hour would not seem to be an improvement over things as they are now. Doesn’t schooling also try to send the message that everything is worth beginning and that, um, we’re mortal and time is limited? Is it really that hard to plan a lesson that both feels whole unto itself and fits into a class period? (And yet, when I first read the quote above, I thought it something approaching divine revelation.)