3 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, 1 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.
School As Religion
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