100.Plato's
Guardians: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
Plato's
Guardians
Coal made common citizens dangerous for
the first time. The Coal Age put inordinate physical power within the reach of common people. The power
to destroy through coal- derived
explosive products was an obvious dramatization of a cosmic leveling
foreseen only by religious
fanatics, but much more dangerous
as power became the power coal unleashed to create and to produce —
available to all.
The dangerous flip side of the power to
produce isn't mere destruction, but
overproduction, a condition which could degrade or even ruin the basis
for the new financial system. The
superficial economic advantage that overproduction seems to confer — increasing sales by reducing
the unit price of products through savings realized by positivistic gains in machinery, labor, and energy utilization
— is more than offset by the
squeezing of profits in industry, commerce, and finance. If profit could not
be virtually guaranteed,
capitalists would not and could not gamble on the huge and continuous investments that a
positivistic science-based business system demands.
Now you can see the
danger of competition. Competition pushed manufacturers to overproduction in self-defense. And for
double jeopardy, the unique American
entrepreneurial tradition encouraged an overproduction of manufacturers.
This guaranteed periodic crises
all along the line. Before the modern age could regard itself as mature, ways had to be found to control
overproduction. In business, that was begun by the Morgan interests who developed a system of cooperative
trusts among important business
leaders. It was also furthered through the conversion of government from servant of the republic to servant of
industry. To that end, the British government provided a clear model; Britain's military and foreign
policy functioned as the right arm
of her manufacturing interests.
But of what lasting value could
controlling topical overproduction be — addressing it where and when it threatened to break out — when the
ultimate source of overproduction
in products and services was the overproduction of minds by American
libertarian schooling and the overproduction
of characters capable of the feat of production in the first place? As long as such a pump
existed to spew limitless numbers of independent, self-reliant, resourceful, and ambitious minds onto the
scene, who could predict what risk
to capital might strike next? To minds capable of thinking cosmically
like Carnegie's, Rockefeller's,
Rothschild's, Morgan's, or Cecil Rhodes', real scientific control of overproduction must rest ultimately on
the power to constrain the production of intellect. Here was a task worthy of immortals. Coal provided capital
to finance it.
If the Coal Age promised anything
thrilling to the kind of mind which thrives on managing the behavior of others, that promise would best be
realized by placing control of
everything important — food, clothing, shelter, recreation, the tools of war —
in relatively few hands, creating
a new race of benevolent, godlike managers, not for their own good but the good of all. Plato had
called such benevolent despots "guardians." Why these men would necessarily be
benevolent nobody ever bothered to explain.
Abundant supplies of
coal, and later oil, cried out for machinery which would tirelessly convert a stream of low- value raw
materials into a cornucopia of things which everyone would covet. Through the dependence of the all on the few,
an instrument of management and of
elite association would be created far beyond anything ever seen in the past.
This powerful promise was,
however, fragilely balanced atop the need to homogenize the population and all its descendant
generations. 1 A mass production economy can neither be created nor sustained without a leveled population, one
conditioned to mass habits, mass
tastes, mass enthusiasms, predictable mass behaviors. The will of both maker
and purchaser had to give way to
the predestinated output of machinery with a one-track mind.
Nothing posed a more formidable obstacle
than the American family. Traditionally, a self-sufficient production unit for which the marketplace
played only an incidental role,
the American family grew and produced its own food, cooked and served
it; made its own soap and
clothing. And provided its own transportation, entertainment, health care, and old age assistance. It entered freely
into cooperative associations with neighbors, not with corporations. If that way of life had
continued successfully — as it has for the modern Amish — it would have spelled curtains for corporate
society.
Another factor which made ordinary
citizens dangerous in a Coal Age was that coal gave rise to heavy industries whose importance for war-making
made it imperative to have a
workforce docile, dependable, and compliant. Too much was at stake to
tolerate democracy. Coal-fired
industry had such a complex organization it could be seriously disrupted by worker sabotage, and
strikes could be fomented at any moment by a few dissident working men with some training in rhetoric and a
little education. The heightened
importance to high-speed industry of calculating mass labor as a
predictable quality rendered
nonconformity a serious matter.
The danger from ordinary people is
greatly magnified by the positive philosophy which drives a mass production, corporate management epoch. While it
was necessary to sensitize
ordinary people to the primacy of scientific needs, and to do this partially
by making the study of biology,
chemistry, physics, and so forth formal school lessons, to go further and reveal the insights of
Bacon and Comte about how easily and inevitably Nature surrenders her secrets to anybody in possession of a
simple, almost moronic method, was
to open Pandora's box. The revolutionary character of scientific discovery discussed earlier — that it requires
neither genius nor expensive equipment and is within reach of anyone — had to be concealed.
It was through schooling that this
revolutionary aspect of science (once known or at least suspected by tens of thousands of
small, subsistence farming families and miscalled "Yankee ingenuity") was hidden right out in the
open. From the start, science teaching
was what it remains today: for the ordinary student, a simplified
history of scientific discovery,
and for the better classes, a simple instilling of knowledge and procedures.
In this transmission of factual
data and chronicles, the positive method remains unseen, unsuspected, and untaught.
Taught correctly,
science would allow large numbers of young people to find and practice the most effective techniques of
discovery. The real gift science confers is teaching how to reach potent conclusions by common
powers of observation and reasoning. But if incidental overproduction was already a crisis item in the
minds of the new social planners,
you can imagine what hysteria any attempt to broadcast the secrets of
discovery would have
occasioned.
The General Education Board said it best
when it said children had to be organized and taught in a way that would not make them "men of
science." 2 To that end, science was
presented in as authoritarian a form as Latin grammar, involving vast
tracts of memorization. Children
were taught that technical competence is bought and sold as a commodity; it does not presume to
direct activities, or even to inquire into their purpose. When people are brought together to
build a shopping mall, a dam, or an atomic bomb, nothing in the contract gives them latitude to question what
they have been paid to do, or to
stir up trouble with co-workers. Recruitment into the dangerous sciences was
mostly limited
to those whose family background made them safe. For the rest, science was taught in a fashion to make it harmless,
ineffective, and even dull.
Now my job is to open
a window for you into that age of economic transformation whose needs and opportunities gave us the
schools we got and still have. Thorstein Veblen said back in 1904, just a year or two before the forced schooling
project began to take itself
seriously, that "any theoretical inquiry into cultural life as it
is running into the future must
take into account the central importance of the businessman and his work."
Insofar as any theorist aims to explain
aspects of modern life like schools, the line of approach has to be from the businessman's
standpoint, for it is business that drives the course of events.
And while I urge the
reader to remember that no notion of single causes can possibly account for schooling, yet the model of
modern medicine — where the notion of single causes has been brilliantly productive — can teach us
something. When medicine became
"modern" at the end of the nineteenth century, it did so by
embracing germ theory, a
conception much less "factual" than it appears. The idea in
germ theory is to trace specific
pathologies to single instigators. Whatever its shortcomings, this narrowing
of vision frequently revealed the
direction in which successful treatment lay.
Just so, the
important thing in viewing the development of the modern economy is not to find in it a conspiracy against
children, but to remain detached enough to ask ourselves how the development of forced schooling
could have been any different than it was. To understand the modern economy and modern schooling, we need
to see how they grow organically
from coal and oil.
1. Coal
explains a part of the curious fact that modern Mexico is still not a mass
society in spite of its authoritarian governing class and traditional ways, while the wealthy
neighboring United States is. Mexico had no coal, and while it has recently
acquired oil (and NAFTA linkage to
the mass economy of North America) which will level its citizenry into a mass
in time, centuries of individuation must first be overcome.
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