Ch 1 ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTION - The Forgiveness of Original Sin By Ministers of Government Schooling by John Taylor Gatto from spinninglobe.net
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ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTION
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The Forgiveness of Original
Sin By Ministers of Government Schooling
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by John Taylor
Gatto
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"...the teacher
always is the prophet of the true God
and
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the usherer in of
the true kingdom of God."
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&emdash;John
Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed (1897)
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- l) Self-discipline
- 2) Deferred
satisfaction
- 3) Ambition
- 4) Hard Work
- 5) Specialization
- 6) Comfort-seeking
- 7) Avoidance of conflict, where
possible.
- 8) Materialism
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- 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:
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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