Ch 1 ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTION - The Forgiveness of Original Sin By Ministers of Government Schooling by John Taylor Gatto from spinninglobe.net

ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTION -

The Forgiveness of Original Sin By Ministers of Government Schooling

by John Taylor Gatto

 

"...the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and

the usherer in of the true kingdom of God."

&emdash;John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed (1897)

 

 

Program, ideology, philosophy, theology - all are frames of meaning differing in the degree of conviction they require from us, the amount of sustained passion we assent to conferring upon them. If a frame of meaning conforms to our inner reality it can sustain itself across millennia as Christianity did; if it does not, it withers away regardless of how much energy its defenders expend in its service - witness the Soviet Union after 85 years or our common-school system after 140.

Frames of meaning. What do we want? What should we seek? When answers to such questions linger long enough they become foundations of a civilization, as the Christian curriculum became a major architectural support of Western civilization. Since about the 4th century A.D., widely shared beliefs in four realms of thought have created a geopolitical entity distinct enough to recognize as "The West". Two of its invisible support pillars come out of the North of Europe, two out of the South: these Western ideas are major continuities in our lives, bases upon which we live and act - or react. Without such forges of meaning people tend to go a bit crazy.

About a century and a half ago certain ideological, philosophical, and theological interests set out to revoke the Christian charter of Western civilization. On the basis of Christian political history these groups decided that Christianity was unable to organize society rationally. Put another way, that Christianity was unable to lead the human race out of warfare into a state of permanent peace, out of sectarianism into unity, out of nationhood into a global state, a world government, and out of confusion into the light. These groups, which were not unified in any formal way, still shared the common purpose of eliminating Christianity as a political force, and beginning in the first decades of the 19th century each of the groups, (although for widely differing motives) came to see government compulsion schooling as a vehicle to achieve that end, as well as other desirable ends. The groups I'm talking about included, but weren't limited to, utopian socialists, the embryonic labor movement which regarded churches as allies of management, the decaying associations of guild craftsmen, Deists, Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and Freethinkers, scientific rationalists of the Positivistic stripe, Enlightenment Liberals, manufacturing and commercial interests, and pragmatic social and economic thinkers.

Much of the great confusion attendant upon understanding the rise of government schooling comes from the fact it was simultaneously sponsored and shepherded by a bewildering array of interests who emerged and disappeared in a cyclical way, exchanging positions of prominence with each other according to accidents of circumstance. Many participants in the effort had a foot in more than one camp, in some cases, such as that of Orestes Brownson, in almost all the camps, and some of the motives for supporting forced schooling went beyond the cancellation of a Christian curriculum, or stopped at some point short of completely cancelling it. But without being aware of the deconstruction of sectarian Christianity being a central goal of institutional schooling, it is impossible to understand the profound disturbance state schooling has wrought in our society by removing two cornerstones of our Western heritage and replacing them with what so far have been inadequate substitutes. Imagine a table missing two of its legs, in whose place are a stack of dishes and a large dog; the table may look the same on its surface but who knows whether it will get you through dinner. Whether the net result of this undertaking has been so far positive or negative will depend, of course, on your own outlook.

 

The four principal supports of Western civilization are these:

1.) A unique belief in the sovereign rights of the individual. These rights are always in balance with the rights of the collective, but the dominant partner is the individual and not the collective. This phenomenon occurs in no other civilization as unmistakably as our own.

 

2) The scientific vision. A way of thinking which allows complex wholes to be treated as simple fragments and encourages the breaking of the integrity of nature for the presumed net benefit of human beings.

 

3) The need for atonement. This arises from the allegory of the "Fall" and from certain specific burdens assigned to mankind upon expulsion from Eden.

 

4) A code of moral behavior. As it was set down in the 10 commands of the Old Testament and the Gospels of the New Testament.

 

Notice that l) and 2), although found in various concentrations in the Mediterranean world, were refined and became the dominant characteristic of Northern Europe, and 3)/4) were principally circulated through missions from the Roman church of Southern Europe, although the transfer of this code to North America was performed exclusively by agents of the Northern outlook. Thus the reciprocity of these four ideas surging back and forth across the face of Europe for 15 centuries, and across oceans and continents for the past 4 has fashioned a tough and enduring hybrid form out of which personal meaning can so successfully be fashioned that it dominates the planet.

Now, whether you are Christian or not, a poor Christian or a good one, if you live in a Western land or deal with representatives of the West you must find a way to come to terms with each of the organizing principles I named, including Christianity, because each leads to forms of behavior and valuing. You may reject some or all of this, true, but nonetheless your life and relationships will be profoundly affected by your choices. Every Western institution has been importantly shaped by the Christian curriculum, a shaping now invisible but none the less psychoactive because it cannot be seen.

Before we go on and get into the specifics of the Christian curriculum I want to point out there are other codes of meaning available that don't stem from Christianity, even in the Christian world. For instance each of the first two pillars of Western civilization can be used to generate an entire curriculum from. Rather than acting in concert with Christianity, each, or both in a hybrid form, can be forced to produce an entire code of behavior. The sovereign rights of the individual are a legacy from the great pagan tradition of Europe's Nordic Rim, a gift of the Vikings and warrior chiefs. The code that derives from this is still the code in action in English upper-class boarding schools, a code which numbers among its operating principles: leadership, sportsmanship, courage, team-play, self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, and disdain for hardship. A fuller explication of this code is caught in the scene from Macbeth where Duncan denies he possesses the 12 "kingly virtues", and a little research in your dusty Shakespeare will reveal how well this engine of meaning had been formalized by the early 17th century.

Another code of meaning possible to organize one's life about comes most clearly from the great trading civilization of 16th and 17th century, Holland. It is variously known as "middle-class values" or petit bourgeois values, or even in Max Weber's mistaken formulation as "The Protestant Ethic", but since it antedates the Reformation it is well to keep in mind that it is a fairly radical deviation from traditional Christianity. Its attributes include:

 

l) Self-discipline

2) Deferred satisfaction

3) Ambition

4) Hard Work

5) Specialization

6) Comfort-seeking

7) Avoidance of conflict, where possible.

8) Materialism

 

Still another code of meaning can be extracted from the scientific vision which can speak to every decision in life; it generates five major themes of behavior:

 

1. A Questioning Attitude: Nothing remains unexamined or unchallenged. Respect is a counter-productive virtue.

2. Objectivity: Feelings cloud judgment. Thinking works best when everything is considered a lifeless object.

3. Neutrality: Make no lasting commitments. Loyalty is the end of flexibility/maximum advantage.

4. Instrumentalism: Knowledge is Power

5. The Scientizing of Society: Surface behavior is all that has any meaning. The measurement, prediction, and control of behavior, security, and freedom from want is the end meaning of human life.

 

Each of the three curricula I've given you - none of them Christian in origin - are intertwined in every aspect of our world, as they must have been at every period in Western history. Christians behave in some of these ways and honor some of these things, but they do not, with a few exceptions, overlap the Christian code. I'm deliberately withholding what I think that is for a while until the terms of this investigation are clear: we are not exploring religion but principles of behavior and meaning - attitudes and values are the game we stalk, not God.

Somewhere at the beginning of the 20th century schools set out to recover the lost Eden of Christianity by reversing certain penalties inflicted after the Fall which are set down in the Book of Genesis. If we're going to get anywhere together I need you to think of my expression "lost Eden" not as a romantic metaphor, but a real possibility. For you to see it this way doesn't require donning a religious habit, but merely examining the state of Eden as described in Genesis before the Fall. Nothing I'm about to say can't be verified from the Gideon Bible in any motel drawer. Eden looked like this:

 

1) It had a beautiful Nature, completely tamed.

2) The idea of right and wrong didn't exist there.

3) There was no work to do.

4) Food was abundant.

5) There was no shame in Eden.

6) There were no great passions in Eden.

7) There was no fear of Death in Eden.

 

Those are Eden's seven framing timbers if it could be rebuilt.

I hope you can see that when anatomized in this rational, matter-of-fact way, that there is a real intellectual temptation to believe that Eden could be rebuilt. It doesn't even require faith in the existence of God to imagine a completely tame Nature, plenty of food, no shame, no work, ignorance of right and wrong...indeed I've just described New York City for you. The fear of Death is a little stickier but certainly it's not a very long reach to believe that Death could be whipped - given the right investment in research Science, hospitals, doctors, medicines, public hygiene, etc., etc., and on the way to that point the progress of old age can be retarded by cosmetics, diets, creams, unguents, potions, masks, surgery; whatever it takes.

Great passions also seem well on the way to becoming tamed. In a welfare society without substantial mystery or danger, the only passions which appear to survive are the excitement of violence and the excitement of fornication, which may be the same thing. No student of television or film, popular music or journalism can be unaware that the vital core of these media is violence and fornication in one or another disguised state, nor that the constant presentation of dramatic representations of these things makes the reality less and less able to arouse. I remember an exercise I used to perform with school classes early in my career before I realized I had no right to do it. I would ask kids to tell me about the most horrible physical accident they had ever witnessed: car crashes, bus accidents, people falling out of windows, heart attacks, street murders, (at least half my Harlem kids had seen one or more of these); then I would ask the kids to tell the class how they felt. Invariably the students, always teenagers, would say it made them feel horrible, etc., etc. At that point I would challenge the speaker openly, saying that since the kid had seen much worse on television and in the movies he was just faking the feling. I said I guessed most people felt nothing at all apart from curiosity.

At that point some incredible dam would burst and "truth" would pour forth; hands wildly waving, children would deliver incredible confession after incredible confession of having witnessed ghastly things with not the slightest trace of feeling.

"But where did you learn to fake it?" I would ask.

"From television!" "From movies!" "My mother told me what to say I felt!"

So you'll forgive me for saying that Eden, as described in Genesis, doesn't seem to be very far-fetched for the architects of schooling, and if it could be achieved without picking up the burden God assigned after the Fall (which I still haven't gotten to) the house of Western identity might really be able to stand on just two of its four legs. After all, if Eden was the prize of Christianity and Eden was within the reach of Science and Sociology, the Science of Humanity, who needed the mumbo-jumbo to get there?

Indeed, there was no religion at all in Eden; its occupants were able to speak directly to God. No religion, so anyone attempting to renew the notion of Eden was justified in eliminating or sharply modifying the commands of God allegedly preserved in literary form by the sects of the Christian religion. The easiest way to do this was not by rejecting what had passed as God's advice for centuries, but in reducing it from theology to philosophy, a less compelling frame of meaning, and then by rational discussion to show that elsewhere on the planet, or in other parts of our own society, people held contrary philosophies. That these were just "opinions", one almost as good as another. Many technical ways to introduce this relativistic strain into curricula were tried from the advent of factory schooling onwards, the most recent, perhaps, being curriculum games of "situational" ethics where even murder or abandonment of one's parents becomes the "right" behavior. Variously named "global" curricula or "rainbow" curricula are, operationally, the same thing.

It's time now to look at the Christian curriculum as it comes to us from Moses and Christ, or rather I should say the "first - Christian curriculum because there are two, both equally important in framing the meaning of Western civilization.

 

The First Christian Curriculum:

1) Respect the Mysteries; know your place.

2) Respect your parents and ancestors.

3) Don't kill your fellow man

4) Don't steal.

5) Don't lie or bear false witness.

6) Don't envy others.

7) Bear witness to the good things.

8) Love, care for, and help others.

 

Near the end of the 19th century a group of scientific moralists, backed up by industrial wealth, an upperclass pagan outlook, and great political sophistication came to believe that they could synthetically impose a new ethical code, an "ethical culture", on humanity by restoring Eden. They would do this by wiping away Original Sin, then subordinating the curriculum of Christianity (which had a modest value as a philosophy if the theological base could be extinguished) to the curriculum of Science. On the upper levels of society the curriculum of classical paganism as written down by the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, would become the guiding code of the ruling aristocracy in place of the curriculum of Science which lacked the power to inspire great leadership.