School As
Religion
Nothing about school is what it seems, not even
boredom. To show you what I mean is the burden of this long essay. My book
represents a try at arranging my own thoughts in order to figure out what fifty
years of classroom confinement (as student and teacher) add up to for me.
You’ll encounter a great deal of speculative history here. This is a personal
investigation of why school is a dangerous place. It’s not so much that anyone
there sets out to hurt children; more that all of us associated with the
institution are stuck like flies in the same great web your kids are. We buzz
frantically to cover our own panic but have little power to help smaller flies.
Looking backward on a thirty-year teaching career full
of rewards and prizes, somehow I can’t completely believe that I spent my time
on earth institutionalized; I can’t believe that centralized schooling is
allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine,
robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God
help me.
School is a religion. Without understanding the holy
mission aspect you’re certain to misperceive what takes place as a result of
human stupidity or venality or even class warfare. All are present in the
equation, it’s just that none of these matter very much—even without them
school would move in the same direction. Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed statement of 1897 gives you a clue to the
zeitgeist:
Every
teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of
the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this
way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the
true kingdom of heaven.
What is "proper" social order? What does
"right" social growth look like? If you don’t know you’re like me,
not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who did, too.
Somehow out of the industrial confusion which followed
the Civil War, powerful men and dreamers became certain what kind of social
order America needed, one very like the British system we had escaped a hundred
years earlier. This realization didn’t arise as a product of public debate as
it should have in a democracy, but as a distillation of private discussion.
Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but that didn’t disturb
them. They had a stupendous goal in mind—the rationalization of everything. The
end of unpredictable history; its transformation into dependable order.
From mid-century onwards certain utopian schemes to
retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play,
following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first
goal, to be reached in stages, was an orderly, scientifically managed society,
one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic
tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species,
would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the
prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had
traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking
up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.
During the post-Civil War period, childhood was
extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very
old children. It was called adolescence,
a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young
people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws
were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving
set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making
school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to
draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find
graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start
their lives.
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