6. The New Dumbness: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The New Dumbness




Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling
teaches is dumbness. It's a religious idea gone out of control. You don't have to accept
that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart
people who understand too much. I won't ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I'll let
a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in
just a little while. Be patient.



Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from
ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and
talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the
good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are
indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared
disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.

Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us
that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling
because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:


Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no
way can there ever be collective critical
judgment. ...The individual can no longer judge for
himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts
to the entire complex of values and prejudices
established by propaganda. With regard to political
situations, he is given ready-made value judgments
invested with the power of the truth by... the word of
experts.

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and
upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple
pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their
usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they
are certain they must know something because their
degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so
convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate
downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness
upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity,
their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of
incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

Ellul puts it this way:

The individual has no chance to exercise his
judgment either on principal questions or on their
implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not
comfortably exercised under [the best of]
conditions. ..Once personal judgment and critical
faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they
will not simply reappear when propaganda is
suppressed... years of intellectual and spiritual
education would be needed to restore such faculties.
The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda,




will immediately adopt another, this will spare him
the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event
without a ready-made opinion.

Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming
dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote
that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids
dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very
long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways
easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.

According to all official analysis, dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a
great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a
term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to
official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call
mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the
three highest positions on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small
a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly
dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice to this social coup
which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been
rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey
means by "proper" social order.

If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology
(the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because
they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved
moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies from
the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature's way of providing
someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it's evidence of bad
karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the
position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a
vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder
us in our beds.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient
numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem
incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first
had to be imagined; it isn't real.

Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable
functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be
watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized,
ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a
challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you
want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid




attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or
another.



Putting Pedagogy To The Question