182. Codes Of Meaning: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

182. Codes Of Meaning: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Codes Of Meaning 

      This unique moral chronicle led to an everyday behavioral code which worked so well  that in a matter of centuries it became the dominant perspective of Europe, and soon it  made inroads into every belief system across the planet. But the sheer extent of its     success caused it to run afoul of three other competing systems for producing meaning,  each of which held common people in contempt or worse.

      These competing codes viewed  Christianity antagonistically because of its power to liberate ordinary people from the  bondage of fear and envy.   Those competing codes of meaning gave us formal schooling, public and private. The  first competitor, the aristocratic code, comes out of pagan traditions. It is still the  philosophy taught in upper-class boarding schools like Middlesex and Gunnery, and  through home training and particular class institutions. Its operating principles are  leadership, sportsmanship, courage, disdain for hardship, team play, self-sacrifice (for the  team), and devotion to duty — as noble traditions define duty. The boardrooms of certain  global corporations are one of the great preserves of this exclusive but universally  attractive pagan attitude. 

      The second code in competition with Christianity was taken from the practice of great  commercial civilizations like the Hanseatic League of medieval times or the society of  Holland in the seventeenth century. This behavioral code makes security, comfort, health,  and wealth the central purpose of life. The main thrust of this kind of seeking is radically  anti-Christian, but the contradiction isn't obvious when the two come into contact  because commercial cultures emphasize peaceful coexistence, tolerance, cooperation, and  pragmatism. They reject the value of pain, and take principled behavior with a grain of  salt, everything being relative to security and prosperity. Pragmatism is the watchword. 

      The wealth that a commercial perspective delivers produced a dilemma for Puritan  society to wrestle with, since the intense neo-Christianity of Puritanism was yoked to an  equal intensity of business acumen, a talent for commercial transaction. In the Calvinist  vein, this contradiction was resolved by declaring wealth a reliable sign of God's favor,  as poverty was a sign of His condemnation. Both pagan and mercantile ethical codes  operated behind a facade of Christianity during the Christian era, weakening the gospel  religion, while at the same time profiting from it and paying lip service to it. Proponents  of these different frames called themselves Christians but did not live like Christians,  rejecting certain tenets of Christianity we've just examined, those which interfered with  personal gain. Yet in both cases, the life maps these competing theories tried to substitute  were not, ultimately, satisfying enough to stop the spreading influence of Christian  vision.   Stated more directly, these competing moral codes were unable to deliver sufficient  tangible day-to-day meaning to compete against the religious prescription of a simple  life, managed with dignity and love, and with acceptance of the demands of work, self-  control, and moral choice, together with the inevitability of tragedy, aging, and death.  Neither the pagan outlook nor the commercial philosophy was equal to overthrowing  their unworldly rival. Because the commercial code lacked sufficient magic and mystery,  and the aristocratic code, which had those things, froze out the majority from enjoying  them, it fell to yet a third scheme for organizing meaning to eventually cause the major  sabotage of spiritual life.    

     I refer to the form of practical magic we call Science. Kept rigorously and strictly  subordinate to human needs, science is an undeniably valuable way to negotiate the  physical world. But the human tendency has always been to break loose from these  constraints and to try to explain the purpose of life. Instead of remaining merely a useful  description of how things work, great synthesizing theories like Big Bang or Natural  Selection purport to explain the origin of the universe or how life best progresses. Yet by  their nature, these things are beyond proof or disproof. Few laymen understand that the  synthesizing theories of Science are religious revelations in disguise.  

     In the years around the beginning of the twentieth century, the scientific outlook as a  substitute religion took command of compulsion schools and began to work to eradicate  any transcendental curriculum in school. This happened in stages. First was the passage  of compulsion school legislation and invention of the factory school (isolated from family  and community), appearing in conjunction with the extermination of the one-room  school. That job had been largely accomplished by 1900. The second stage was  introduction of hierarchical layers of school management and government selected and  regulated teaching staff. That job was complete by 1930. The third stage comprised  socialization of the school into a world of "classes" and de-individualized individuals  who looked to school authorities for leadership instead of to their own parents and  churches. This was accomplished by 1960. The fourth and last stage (so far) was the  psychologizing of the classroom, a process begun full scale in 1960, which, with the  advent of national standardized testing, outcomes-based education, Title I legislation,  School-to-Work legislation, etc., was accelerating as the last century came to a close. 

      All these incremental changes are ambitious designs to control how children think, feel,  and behave. There had been signs of this intention two centuries earlier, but without long-  term confinement of children to great warehouses, the amount of isolation and mind-  control needed to successfully introduce civil religion through schooling just wasn't  available.