Putting
Pedagogy To The Question
More than anything else, this book is a work of
intuition. The official story of why we school doesn’t add up today any more
than it did yesterday. A few years before I quit, I began to try to piece
together where this school project came from, why it took the shape it took,
and why every attempt to change it has ended in abysmal failure.
By now I’ve invested the better part of a decade
looking for answers. If you want a conventional history of schooling, or
education as it is carelessly called, you’d better stop reading now. Although
years of research in the most arcane sources are reflected here, throughout
it’s mainly intuition that drives my synthesis.
This is in part a private narrative, the map of a
schoolteacher’s mind as it tracked strands in the web in which it had been
wrapped; in part a public narrative, an account of the latest chapter in an
ancient war: the conflict between systems which offer physical safety and
certainty at the cost of suppressing free will, and those which offer liberty
at the price of constant risk. If you keep both plots in mind, no matter how
far afield my book seems to range, you won’t wonder what a chapter on coal or
one on private hereditary societies has to do with schoolchildren.
What I’m most determined to do is start a conversation
among those who’ve been silent up until now, and that includes schoolteachers.
We need to put sterile discussions of grading and testing, discipline,
curriculum, multiculturalism and tracking aside as distractions, as mere
symptoms of something larger, darker, and more intransigent than any problem a
problem-solver could tackle next week. Talking endlessly about such things
encourages the bureaucratic tactic of talking around the vital, messy stuff. In
partial compensation for your effort, I promise you’ll discover what’s in the
mind of a man who spent his life in a room with children.
Give an ear, then, to what follows. We shall
cross-examine history together. We shall put pedagogy to the question. And if
the judgment following this auto da fe
is that only pain can make this monster relax its grip, let us pray together
for the courage to inflict it.
Reading my essay will help you sort things out. It
will give you a different topological map upon which to fix your own position.
No doubt I’ve made some factual mistakes, but essays since Montaigne have been
about locating truth, not about assembling facts. Truth and fact aren’t the
same thing. My essay is meant to mark out crudely some ground for a scholarship
of schooling, my intention is that you not continue to regard the official
project of education through an older, traditional perspective, but to see it
as a frightening chapter in the administrative organization of knowledge—a text
we must vigorously repudiate as our ancestors once did. We live together, you
and I, in a dark time when all official history is propaganda. If you want
truth, you have to struggle for it. This is my struggle. Let me bear witness to
what I have seen.
Author's Note
With conspiracy so close to the surface of the
American imagination and American reality, I can only approach with trepidation
the task of discouraging you in advance from thinking my book the chronicle of
some vast diabolical conspiracy to seize all our children for the personal ends
of a small, elite minority.
Don’t get me wrong, American schooling has been
replete with chicanery from its very beginnings.*
Indeed, it isn’t difficult to find various
conspirators boasting in public about
what they pulled off. But if you take that tack you’ll miss the real horror of
what I’m trying to describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent
in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so
proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have
happened anyway—without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who
schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I’m correct, we’re in a much worse
position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.
If you obsess about conspiracy, what you’ll fail to
see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully
concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the
managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap
we’re in, it won’t be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good
guys.
Who are
the villains, really, but ourselves? People can change, but systems cannot
without losing their structural integrity. Even Henry Ford, a Jew-baiter of
such colossal proportions he was lionized by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, made a public apology and
denied to his death he had ever intended to hurt Jews—a too strict
interpretation of Darwin made him do it! The great industrialists who gave us
modern compulsion schooling inevitably found their own principles subordinated
to systems-purposes, just as happened to the rest of us.
Take Andrew Carnegie, the bobbin boy, who would
certainly have been as appalled as the rest of us at the order to fire on
strikers at his Homestead plant. But the system he helped to create was
committed to pushing men until they reacted violently or dropped dead. It was
called "the Iron Law of Wages." Once his colleagues were interested
in the principles of the Iron Law, they could only see the courage and defiance
of the Homestead strikers as an opportunity to provoke a crisis which would
allow the steel union to be broken with state militia and public funds.
Crushing opposition is the obligatory scene in the industrial drama, whatever
it takes, and no matter how much individual industrial leaders like Carnegie
might be reluctant to do so.
My worry was about finding a prominent ally to help me
present this idea that inhuman anthropology is what we confront in our
institutional schools, not conspiracy. The hunt paid off with the discovery of
an analysis of the Ludlow Massacre by Walter Lippmann in the New Republic of January 30, 1915.
Following the Rockefeller slaughter of up to forty-seven, mostly women and
children, in the tent camp of striking miners at Ludlow, Colorado, a
congressional investigation was held which put John D. Rockefeller Jr. on the
defensive. Rockefeller agents had employed armored cars, machine guns, and fire
bombs in his name. As Lippmann tells it, Rockefeller was charged with having
the only authority to authorize such a massacre, but also with too much
indifference to what his underlings were up to. "Clearly," said the
industrial magnate, "both cannot be true."
As Lippmann recognized, this paradox is the worm at
the core of all colossal power. Both
indeed could be true. For ten years Rockefeller hadn’t even seen this
property; what he knew of it came in reports from his managers he scarcely
could have read along with mountains of similar reports coming to his desk each
day. He was compelled to rely on the word of others. Drawing an analogy between
Rockefeller and the czar of Russia, Lippmann wrote that nobody believed the
czar himself performed the many despotic acts he was accused of; everyone knew
a bureaucracy did so in his name. But most failed to push that knowledge to its
inevitable conclusion: If the czar tried to change what was customary he would
be undermined by his subordinates. He had no defense against this happening
because it was in the best interests of all the divisions of the bureaucracy,
including the army, that it—not the czar—continue to be in charge of things.
The czar was a prisoner of his own subjects. In Lippmann’s words:
This
seemed to be the predicament of Mr. Rockefeller. I should not believe he
personally hired thugs or wanted them hired. It seems far more true to say
that his impersonal and half-understood power has delegated itself into
unsocial forms, that it has assumed a life of its own which he is almost
powerless to control....His intellectual helplessness was the amazing part of
his testimony. Here was a man who represented wealth probably without
parallel in history, the successor to a father who has, with justice, been
called the high priest of capitalism....Yet he talked about himself on the
commonplace moral assumptions of a small businessman.
|
The Rockefeller Foundation has been instrumental
through the century just passed (along with a few others) in giving us the
schools we have. It imported the German research model into college life,
elevated service to business and government as the goal of higher education,
not teaching. And Rockefeller-financed University of Chicago and Columbia
Teachers College have been among the most energetic actors in the lower school
tragedy. There is more, too, but none of it means the Rockefeller family
"masterminded" the school institution, or even that his foundation or
his colleges did. All became in time submerged in the system they did so much
to create, almost helpless to slow its momentum even had they so desired.
Despite its title, Underground
History isn’t a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a
history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling
is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our
understanding; it’s a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The
burden of an essay is to reveal its author so candidly and thoroughly that the
reader comes fully awake. You are about to spend twenty-five to thirty hours
with the mind of a schoolteacher, but the relationship we should have isn’t one
of teacher to pupil but rather that of two people in conversation. I’ll offer
ideas and a theory to explain things and you bring your own experience to bear
on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read with this goal
before you and I promise your money’s worth. It isn’t important whether we
agree on every detail.
A brief word on sources. I’ve identified all
quotations and paraphrases and given the origin of many (not all) individual
facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of too many trees, I’ve
avoided extensive footnoting. So much here is my personal take on things that
it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels that way: of minor value to those
who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even maddening, to
those who do not.
This is a workshop of solutions as well as an attempt
to frame the problem clearly, but be warned: they are perversely sprinkled
around like raisins in a pudding, nowhere grouped neatly as if to help you
study for a test—except for a short list at the very end. The advice there is
practical, but strictly limited to the world of compulsion schooling as it
currently exists, not to the greater goal of understanding how education occurs
or is prevented. The best advice in this book is scattered throughout and
indirect, you’ll have to work to extract it. It begins with the very first
sentence of the book where I remind you that what is right for systems is often
wrong for human beings. Translated into a recommendation, that means that to
avoid the revenge of Bianca, we must be prepared to insult systems for the
convenience of humanity, not the other way around.
END
*For instance, for those of you who believe in testing,
school superintendents as a class are
virtually the stupidest people to pass through a graduate college program,
ranking fifty-one points below the elementary school teachers they normally
"supervice," (on the Graduate Record Examination), abd about eighty
points below secondary-school teachers, while teachers themselves as an
aggregate finish seventeenth of twenty occupational groups surveyed. The reader
is of course at liberty to believe this happened accidentally, or that the moon
is composed of blue, not green, cheese as is popularly believed. It's also
possible to take this anomaly as conclusive evidence of the irrelevance of
standardized testing. Your choice.
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