7. Putting Pedagogy To The Question: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Putting Pedagogy To The Question

More than anything else, this book is a work of intuition. The official
story of why we school doesn't add up today any more than it did
yesterday. A few years before I quit, I began to try to piece together
where this school project came from, why it took the shape it took, and
why every attempt to change it has ended in abysmal failure.

By now I've invested the better part of a decade looking for answers.
If you want a conventional history of schooling, or education as it is
carelessly called, you'd better stop reading now. Although years of
research in the most arcane sources are reflected here, throughout it's
mainly intuition that drives my synthesis.





This is in part a private narrative, the map of a schoolteacher's mind as it tracked strands
in the web in which it had been wrapped; in part a public narrative, an account of the
latest chapter in an ancient war: the conflict between systems which offer physical safety
and certainty at the cost of suppressing free will, and those which offer liberty at the price
of constant risk. If you keep both plots in mind, no matter how far afield my book seems
to range, you won't wonder what a chapter on coal or one on private hereditary societies
has to do with schoolchildren.




What I'm most determined to do is start a conversation among those who've been silent
up until now, and that includes schoolteachers. We need to put sterile discussions of
grading and testing, discipline, curriculum, multiculturalism and tracking aside as
distractions, as mere symptoms of something larger, darker, and more intransigent than
any problem a problem-solver could tackle next week. Talking endlessly about such
things encourages the bureaucratic tactic of talking around the vital, messy stuff. In
partial compensation for your effort, I promise you'll discover what's in the mind of a
man who spent his life in a room with children.

Give an ear, then, to what follows. We shall cross-examine history together. We shall put
pedagogy to the question. And if the judgment following this auto dafe is that only pain
can make this monster relax its grip, let us pray together for the courage to inflict it.

Reading my essay will help you sort things out. It will give you a different topological
map upon which to fix your own position. No doubt I've made some factual mistakes, but
essays since Montaigne have been about locating truth, not about assembling facts. Truth
and fact aren't the same thing. My essay is meant to mark out crudely some ground for a
scholarship of schooling, my intention is that you not continue to regard the official
project of education through an older, traditional perspective, but to see it as a frightening
chapter in the administrative organization of knowledge — a text we must vigorously
repudiate as our ancestors once did. We live together, you and I, in a dark time when all



official history is propaganda. If you want truth, you have to struggle for it. This is my
struggle. Let me bear witness to what I have seen.

Author's Note

With conspiracy so close to the surface of the American imagination and American
reality, I can only approach with trepidation the task of discouraging you in advance from
thinking my book the chronicle of some vast diabolical conspiracy to seize all our
children for the personal ends of a small, elite minority.

Don't get me wrong, American schooling has been replete with chicanery from its very
beginnings.*

Indeed, it isn't difficult to find various conspirators boasting in public about what they
pulled off. But if you take that tack you'll miss the real horror of what I'm trying to
describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a
planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth
century. I think what happened would have happened anyway — without the legions of
venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I'm correct,
we're in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil
genius or two.

If you obsess about conspiracy, what you'll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of
highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond
the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap
we're in, it won't be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys.

Who are the villains, really, but ourselves? People can change, but systems cannot
without losing their structural integrity. Even Henry Ford, a Jew-baiter of such colossal
proportions he was lionized by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, made a public apology and
denied to his death he had ever intended to hurt Jews — a too strict interpretation of
Darwin made him do it! The great industrialists who gave us modern compulsion
schooling inevitably found their own principles subordinated to systems-purposes, just as
happened to the rest of us.

Take Andrew Carnegie, the bobbin boy, who would certainly have been as appalled as
the rest of us at the order to fire on strikers at his Homestead plant. But the system he
helped to create was committed to pushing men until they reacted violently or dropped
dead. It was called "the Iron Law of Wages." Once his colleagues were interested in the
principles of the Iron Law, they could only see the courage and defiance of the
Homestead strikers as an opportunity to provoke a crisis which would allow the steel
union to be broken with state militia and public funds. Crushing opposition is the
obligatory scene in the industrial drama, whatever it takes, and no matter how much
individual industrial leaders like Carnegie might be reluctant to do so.



My worry was about finding a prominent ally to help me present this idea that inhuman
anthropology is what we confront in our institutional schools, not conspiracy. The hunt
paid off with the discovery of an analysis of the Ludlow Massacre by Walter Lippmann
in the New Republic of January 30, 1915. Following the Rockefeller slaughter of up to
forty-seven, mostly women and children, in the tent camp of striking miners at Ludlow,
Colorado, a congressional investigation was held which put John D. Rockefeller Jr. on
the defensive. Rockefeller agents had employed armored cars, machine guns, and fire
bombs in his name. As Lippmann tells it, Rockefeller was charged with having the only
authority to authorize such a massacre, but also with too much indifference to what his
underlings were up to. "Clearly," said the industrial magnate, "both cannot be true."

As Lippmann recognized, this paradox is the worm at the core of all colossal power. Both
indeed could be true. For ten years Rockefeller hadn't even seen this property; what he
knew of it came in reports from his managers he scarcely could have read along with
mountains of similar reports coming to his desk each day. He was compelled to rely on
the word of others. Drawing an analogy between Rockefeller and the czar of Russia,
Lippmann wrote that nobody believed the czar himself performed the many despotic acts
he was accused of; everyone knew a bureaucracy did so in his name. But most failed to
push that knowledge to its inevitable conclusion: If the czar tried to change what was
customary he would be undermined by his subordinates. He had no defense against this
happening because it was in the best interests of all the divisions of the bureaucracy,
including the army, that it — not the czar — continue to be in charge of things. The czar
was a prisoner of his own subjects. In Lippmann 's words:

This seemed to be the predicament of Mr.
Rockefeller. I should not believe he personally hired
thugs or wanted them hired. It seems far more true to
say that his impersonal and half-understood power
has delegated itself into unsocial forms, that it has
assumed a life of its own which he is almost
powerless to control.... His intellectual helplessness
was the amazing part of his testimony. Here was a
man who represented wealth probably without
parallel in history, the successor to a father who has,
with justice, been called the high priest of
capitalism.... Yet he talked about himself on the
commonplace moral assumptions of a small
businessman.

The Rockefeller Foundation has been instrumental through the century just passed (along
with a few others) in giving us the schools we have. It imported the German research
model into college life, elevated service to business and government as the goal of higher
education, not teaching. And Rockefeller- financed University of Chicago and Columbia
Teachers College have been among the most energetic actors in the lower school tragedy.
There is more, too, but none of it means the Rockefeller family "masterminded" the
school institution, or even that his foundation or his colleges did. All became in time



submerged in the system they did so much to create, almost helpless to slow its
momentum even had they so desired.

Despite its title, Underground History isn't a history proper, but a collection of materials
toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion
schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our
understanding; it's a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The burden of an
essay is to reveal its author so candidly and thoroughly that the reader comes fully awake.
You are about to spend twenty- five to thirty hours with the mind of a schoolteacher, but
the relationship we should have isn't one of teacher to pupil but rather that of two people
in conversation. I'll offer ideas and a theory to explain things and you bring your own
experience to bear on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read
with this goal before you and I promise your money's worth. It isn't important whether
we agree on every detail.

A brief word on sources. I've identified all quotations and paraphrases and given the
origin of many (not all) individual facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of
too many trees, I've avoided extensive footnoting. So much here is my personal take on
things that it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels that way: of minor value to those
who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even maddening, to those
who do not.

This is a workshop of solutions as well as an attempt to frame the problem clearly, but be
warned: they are perversely sprinkled around like raisins in a pudding, nowhere grouped
neatly as if to help you study for a test — except for a short list at the very end. The advice
there is practical, but strictly limited to the world of compulsion schooling as it currently
exists, not to the greater goal of understanding how education occurs or is prevented. The
best advice in this book is scattered throughout and indirect, you'll have to work to
extract it. It begins with the very first sentence of the book where I remind you that what
is right for systems is often wrong for human beings. Translated into a recommendation,
that means that to avoid the revenge of Bianca, we must be prepared to insult systems for
the convenience of humanity, not the other way around.

END

*For instance, for those of you who believe in testing, school superintendents as a class are virtually the stupidest people to pass through a
graduate college program, ranking fifty-one points below the elementary school teachers they normally "supervice," (on the Graduate Record
Examination), abd about eighty points below secondary-school teachers, while teachers themselves as an aggregate finish seventeenth of
twenty occupational groups surveyed. The reader is of course at liberty to believe this happened accidentally, or that the moon is composed of
blue, not green, cheese as is popularly believed. It's also possible to take this anomaly as conclusive evidence of the irrelevance of standardized
testing. Your choice.