School As Religion
Nothing about school is what it seems, not even boredom. To show you what I mean is
the burden of this long essay. My book represents a try at arranging my own thoughts in
order to figure out what fifty years of classroom confinement (as student and teacher) add
up to for me. You'll encounter a great deal of speculative history here. This is a personal
investigation of why school is a dangerous place. It's not so much that anyone there sets
out to hurt children; more that all of us associated with the institution are stuck like flies
in the same great web your kids are. We buzz frantically to cover our own panic but have
little power to help smaller flies.
Looking backward on a thirty-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I
can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe
that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting
machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God
help me.
School is a religion. Without understanding the holy mission aspect you're certain to
misperceive what takes place as a result of human stupidity or venality or even class
warfare. All are present in the equation, it's just that none of these matter very much —
even without them school would move in the same direction. Dewey's Pedagogic Creed
statement of 1 897 gives you a clue to the Zeitgeist:
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of
the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the
teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom
of heaven.
What is "proper" social order? What does "right" social growth look like? If you don't
know you're like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who
did, too.
Somehow out of the industrial confusion which followed the Civil War, powerful men
and dreamers became certain what kind of social order America needed, one very like the
British system we had escaped a hundred years earlier. This realization didn't arise as a
product of public debate as it should have in a democracy, but as a distillation of private
discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but that didn't disturb
them. They had a stupendous goal in mind — the rationalization of everything. The end of
unpredictable history; its transformation into dependable order.
From mid-century onwards certain Utopian schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a
greater good were put into play, following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in
the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be reached in stages, was an
orderly, scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make the
decisions, unhampered by democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the
evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal
forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into
what had traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking
up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.
During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a
special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a
phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people
didn't stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to
cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The
greatest victory for this Utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain
occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the
1950s it wasn't unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands,
waiting to start their lives.
He Was Square Inside And Brown
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