Ch 5 ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTION - The Forgiveness of Original Sin By Ministers of Government Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

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It has never been the method of the West to operate for very long on the basis of faith; what doesn't work in a psychological sense is eventually discarded, even though a grim price may have been paid for a trial period. What I've been calling the Christian curriculum had been around in a recognizable form for about 15 centuries when scientific schooling, beginning in earnest about 1900 after a 50-year warm-up period, decided to chuck it out.

The disestablishment of Christianity was undertaken in stages, the most gentle of which was the one-room schoolhouse period when the Bible was presented in every classroom de-spiritualized - as a great work of philosophy and good advice, with Jesus making a regular appearance as a nice man and a purveyor of good advice.

The pattern of the West comes from these assumptions: that there is such a thing as Truth which applies at all times. We believe that no person or group has the whole truth, however, so there is no final human authority. For this reason we scorn both credentialed experts and nihilists and whiners. We think that every person, rich or poor, has some aspect of the truth from the angle of his own background, and so each person has something to contribute. We believe that truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus; we hope to approach truth this way by successive stages.

Given all this you can catch some glimmering of the radical nature of State confinement schooling, which presents a world of supposed expert specialists who impose some abstract orthodoxy from the top down. The institution is a contradiction of all that has gone before - as the well-respected American historian Bernard Bailyn said in his provocative essay, "Education in the Forming of American Society" (1960).

Late 19th century education did not grow from known 17th century seeds; it was a new and unexpected genus whose ultimate character could not have been predicted and whose emergence troubled well-disposed, high-minded people.

All of the conventional, historically developmental essays you may have read about the growth of our schools are fairy tales; they are a forced growth, very recent in origin, whose bizarre and complicated mission hides behind matter-of-fact publicity handouts about reading, writing, and arithmetic. One of the arms of that mission is to restore Eden by cancelling the Christian curriculum.

School is only one of the agencies of a profound philosophical vision which seem aimed at producing an Eden-like utopian future. It might be worth mentioning a few others to break the hypnotic state most of us enter when we hear the word "school". I want to confess I don't see it as a self-contained institution at all but part of something much larger which includes the economy, our social relationships, our connections to ourselves and our families, our contract with the sovereign government, with nature, and with many other things, too.

In this larger engine of which school is a part, we want to keep in mind a centrally managed economy which has managed to divert the bulk of its labor into jobs that don't need doing, so by now almost everyone has caught onto the fact it doesn't matter very much whether we do our work well or not. Keep in mind that we have allowed, since 1914, a group of private bankers to determine the value of our currency, whether business enter-prise expands or contracts, and that these private indivi-duals, who are mostly unknown to the public, have been given the magical power to create money or destroy it as they see fit. Thus the responsibility of managing has been removed from our shoulders. Keep in mind the content of our commercial entertainment industry, the unparalleled destructive power of the legal tobacco industry, and many, many other anomalies of 20th century life and you will see that each of these things constitutes, in one of its aspects, hard evidence that Eden is possible to regain. Just abandon notions of right and wrong, treat work lightly, surrender to passion, keep out of the way of old age and death - and you have it. A new Adam. A new Eve.

It is difficult for all of us, believers and non-believers alike, to untangle the spiritual tradition of the West from its religious/political tradition which has produced countless occurrences of intolerance, bigotry, persecution, and other disfigurations. Yet we're going to have to make a stab at it if you're to see that personal and congregational Christianity has had, and still retains, tremendous vitality and power because it addresses an important aspect of our humanity left otherwise untended in a secular age. It is quite possible to stand in awe of the quiet strength conferred by personal Christianity at the same time you feel some horror at the institutional vehicle which conveys it. In any case, I'd urge you to separate the two things in order to understand the mistake 19th and especially 20th century social engineers made when they set out to extinguish the Christian curriculum. What they gained in political power they lost many times over. They sowed a psychological epidemic of meaninglessness which, from where I sit, looks to be well out of control.

Unlike political Christianity, personal Christianity at its heart has always been tentative and flexible about interpreting the word of God; this style compels active participation from the believer in the completion of meaning, not mindless acolytes. At its maximum power this kind of personal Quest creates Bartleby the Scrivener, humble people with the strong will of Kings. Thomas Aquinas talks about this tentative quality in Summa Theologiae:

Revelation is not oracular....Propositions do not descend on us from heaven ready made, but are more a draft of work in progress than a final and completed document, for faith itself, though rooted in immutable truth, is not crowning knowledge, and its elaboration in teaching, namely, theology, is still more bound up with discourses progressively manifesting fresh truths or fresh aspects of the truth to the mind. So the individual Christian grow(s)...in understanding; indeed, they must if, like other living organisms, they are to survive by adaptation to a changing environment of history, ideas, and social pressures.

 

Aquinas said that in 1260 at a time when his voice was almost decisive in church affairs; his high order intellect makes him authoritative in the affairs of the Roman church even today. Observations like this one help us to see that the black eye Western church politics gave the religious life is a long way from the whole of the story.