The New
Individualism
The little essay went off in March and I forgot it.
Somewhere along the way I must have gotten a note saying it would be published
at the editor’s discretion, but if so, it was quickly forgotten in the press of
turbulent feelings that accompanied my own internal struggle. Finally, on July
5, 1991, I swallowed hard and quit. Twenty days later the Journal published the piece. A week later I was studying
invitations to speak at NASA Space Center, the Western White House, the
Nashville Center for the Arts, Columbia Graduate Business School, the Colorado
Librarian’s Convention, Apple Computer, and the financial control board of
United Technologies Corporation. Nine years later, still enveloped in the orbit
of compulsion schooling, I had spoken 750 times in fifty states and seven
foreign countries. I had no agent and never advertised, but a lot of people
made an effort to find me. It was as if parents were starving for someone to tell
them the truth.
My hunch is it wasn’t so much what I was saying that
kept the lecture round unfolding, but that a teacher was speaking out at all
and the curious fact that I represented nobody except myself. In the great
school debate, this is unheard of. Every single voice allowed regular access to
the national podium is the mouthpiece of some association, corporation,
university, agency, or institutionalized cause. The poles of debate blocked out
by these ritualized, figurehead voices are extremely narrow. Each has a stake
in continuing forced schooling much as it is.
As I traveled, I discovered a universal hunger, often
unvoiced, to be free of managed debate. A desire to be given untainted
information. Nobody seemed to have maps of where this thing had come from or
why it acted as it did, but the ability to smell a rat was alive and well all
over America.
Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the
twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation
has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special
interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is
managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings.
Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect
is to reduce men and women to the status of
functions in whatever subsystem
they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All
this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced
schooling.
Dewey called this transformation "the new
individualism." When I stepped into the job of schoolteacher in 1961, the
new individualism was sitting in the driver’s seat all over urban America, a
far cry from my own school days on the Monongahela when the Lone Ranger, not
Sesame Street, was our nation’s teacher, and school things weren’t nearly so
oppressive. But gradually they became something else in the euphoric times
following WWII. Easy money and easy travel provided welcome relief from wartime
austerity, the advent of television, the new nonstop theater, offered easy
laughs, effortless entertainment. Thus preoccupied, Americans failed to notice
the deliberate conversion of formal education that was taking place, a
transformation that would turn school into an instrument of the leviathan
state. Who made that happen and why is part of the story I have to tell.
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