68.
Godless, But Not Irreligious: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Godless,
But Not Irreligious
True
believers are only one component of American schooling, as a fraction probably
a
small
one, but they constitute a tail that wags the dog because they possess a
blueprint
believers we
call
great educators — Komensky, Mather, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Mann, Dewey, Sears,
Cubberley,
Thorndike, et al. — were ideologues looking for a religion to replace one they
never
had or had lost faith in. As an abstract type, men like this have been analyzed
by
some
of the finest minds in the history of modern thought — Machiavelli,
Tocqueville,
Renan,
William James to name a few — but the clearest profile of the type was set down
by
Eric Hoffer, a one-time migrant farm worker who didn't learn to read until he
was
fifteen
years old. In The True Believer, a luminous modern classic, Hoffer tells us:
Though
ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true
believer is
everywhere
on the march, shaping the world in his own image. Whether we line up with
him
or against him, it is well we should know all we can concerning his nature and
potentialities.
It
looks to me as if the energy to run this train was released in America from the
stricken
body
of New England Calvinism when its theocracy collapsed from indifference,
ambition,
and the hostility of its own children. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century,
shortly
after we became a nation, this energy gave rise to what Allan Bloom dubbed
"the
new
American religion," eventually combining elements of old Calvinism with
flavors of
Anabaptism,
Ranting, Leveling, Quakerism, rationalism, positivism, and that peculiar
Unitarian
spice: scientism. 1
Where
the parent form of American Calvinism had preached the rigorous exclusion of
all
but
a tiny handful deemed predestinated for salvation (the famous
"Saints" or "justified
sinners"),
the descendant faith, beginning about the time of the Great Awakening of the
1740s,
demanded universal inclusion, recruitment of everyone into a universal,
unitarian
salvation
— whether they would be so recruited or not. It was a monumental shift which in
time
infiltrated every American institution. In its demand for eventual planetary
unity the
operating
logic of this hybrid religion, which derived from a medley of Protestant sects
as
well
as from Judaism, in a cosmic irony was intensely Catholic right down to its
core.
After
the Unitarian takeover of Harvard in 1805, orthodox Calvinism seemingly reached
the
end of its road, but so much explosive energy had been tightly bound into this
intense
form
of sacred thought — an intensity which made every act, however small, brim with
significance,
every expression of personality proclaim an Election or Damnation — that in
its
structural collapse, a ferocious energy was released, a tornado that flashed
across the
Burned
Over District of upstate New York, crossing the lakes to Michigan and other
Germanized
outposts of North America, where it split suddenly into two parts — one
racing
westward to California and the northwest territories, another turning southwest
to
the
Mexican colony called Texas. Along the way, Calvin's by now much altered legacy
deposited
new religions like Mormonism and Seventh Day Adventism, raised colleges
like
the University of Michigan and Michigan State (which would later become
fortresses
of
the new schooling religion) and left prisons, insane asylums, Indian
reservations, and
poorhouses
in its wake as previews of the secularized global village it aimed to create.
School
was to be the temple of a new, all-inclusive civil religion. Calvinism had
stumbled,
finally, from being too self-contained. This new American form, learning from
Calvinism's
failure, aspired to become a multicultural super-system, world-girdling in the
fullness
of time. Our recent military invasions of Haiti, Panama, Iraq, the Balkans, and
Afghanistan,
redolent of the palmy days of British empire, cannot be understood from the
superficial
justifications offered. Yet, with an eye to Calvin's legacy, even foreign
policy
yields
some of its secret springs. Calvinist origins armed school thinkers from the
start
with
a utilitarian contempt for the notion of free will.
Brain-control
experiments being explored in the psychophysical labs of northern
Germany
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century attracted rich young men from
thousands
of prominent American families. Such mind science seemed to promise that
tailor-made
technologies could emerge to shape and control thought, technologies which
had
never existed before. Children, the new psychologies suggested, could be
emptied,
denatured,
then reconstructed to more accommodating designs. H.G. Wells' Island of Dr.
Moreau
was an extrapolation-fable based on common university-inspired drawing room
conversations
of the day.
David
Hume's empirical philosophy, working together with John Locke's empiricism,
had
prepared the way for social thinkers to see children as blank slates — an
opinion
predominant
among influentials long before the Civil War and implicit in Machiavelli,
Bodin,
and the Bacons. German psychophysics and physiological psychology seemed a
wonderful
manufactory of the tools a good political surgeon needed to remake the
modern
world. Methods for modifying society and all its inhabitants began to
crystallize
from
the insights of the laboratory. A good living could be made by saying it was
so,
even
if it weren't true. When we examine the new American teacher college movement
at
the
turn of this century we discover a resurrection of the methodology of Prussian
philosopher
Herbart well underway. Although Herbart had been dead a long time by then,
he
had the right message for the new age. According to Herbart, "Children should
be cut
to
fit."
This
essay is packed with references to Unitarians, Quakers, Anglicans, and other
sects because without understanding something about their
nature,
and ambitions, it is utterly impossible to comprehend where school came from
and why it took the shape it did. Nevertheless, it should
be
kept in mind that I am always referring to movements within these religions as
they existed before the lifetime of any reader. Ideas set in
motion
long ago are still in motion because they took institutional form, but I have
little knowledge of the modern versions of these sects,
which
for all I know are boiling a different kettle offish.
Three
groups descending from the seventeenth-century Puritan Reformation in England
have been principal influences on American schooling,
providing
shape, infrastructure, ligatures, and intentions, although only one is
popularly regarded as Puritan — the New England
Congregationalists.
The Congregational mind in situ, first around the Massachusetts coast, then by
stages in the astonishing Connecticut Valley
displacement
(when Yale became its critical resonator), has been exhaustively studied. But
Quakers, representing the left wing of Puritan
thought,
and Unitarians — that curious mirror obverse of Calvinism — are much easier to
understand when seen as children of Calvinist energy,
too.
These three, together with the episcopacy in New York and Philadelphia,
gathered in Columbia University and Penn, the Morgan Bank and
elsewhere,
have dominated the development of government schooling. Baptist Brown and
Baptist Chicago are important to understand, too,
and
important bases of Dissenter variation like Presbyterian Princeton cannot be
ignored, nor Baptist/Methodist centers at Dartmouth and
Cornell,
or centers of Freethought like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and New York
University in New York City. But someone in a hurry to
understand
where schooling came from and why it took the shape it did would not go far
wrong by concentrating attention on the machinations
of
Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford, and New York City in school affairs from 1800
to 1850, or by simply examining the theologies of
Congregationalism,
Unitarianism, Hicksite and Gurneyite Quakerism, and ultimately the Anglican
Communion, to discover how these, in
complex
interaction, have given us the forced schooling which so well suits their
theologies.
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