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.
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- 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.
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