65. Teachers College Maintains The Planet: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Prototype Is A Schoolteacher 

One dependable signal of a true believer's presence is a strong passion for everyone 's 
children. Find nonstop, abstract interest in the collective noun "children," the kind of love 
Pestalozzi or Froebel had, and you've flushed the priesthood from its lair. Eric Hoffer 
tells us the prototype true believer is a schoolteacher. Mao was a schoolteacher, so was 
Mussolini, so were many other prominent warlike leaders of our time, including Lyndon 
Johnson. In Hoffer' s characterization, the true believer is identified by inner fire, "a 
burning conviction we have a holy duty to others." Lack of humor is one touchstone of 
true belief. 

The expression "true believer" is from a fifth-century book, The City of God, occurring in 
a passage where St. Augustine urges holy men and women to abandon fear and embrace 
their sacred work fervently. True Belief is a psychological frame you'll find useful to 
explain individuals who relentlessly pursue a cause indifferent to personal discomfort, 
indifferent to the discomfort of others. 1 All of us show a tiny element of true belief in our 
makeup, usually just enough to recognize the lunatic gleam in the eye of some purer 
zealot when we meet face to face. But in an age which distances us from hand-to-hand 
encounters with authority — removing us electronically, bureaucratically, and 
institutionally — the truly fanatical among us have been granted the luxury of full 
anonymity. We have to judge their presence by the fallout. 

Horace Mann exemplifies the type. From start to finish he had a mission. He spoke 
passionately at all times. He wrote notes to himself about "breaking the bond of 
association among workingmen." In a commencement harangue at Antioch College in 
1859, he said, "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." A few 
cynical critics snipe at Mann for lying about his imaginary school tour of Prussia (which 
led to the adoption of Prussian schooling methodologies in America), but those cynics 
miss the point. For the great ones, the goal is everything; the end justifies any means. 
Mann lived and died a social crusader. His second wife, Mary Peabody, paid him this 
posthumous tribute: "He was all afire with Purpose." 



Al Shanker, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in one of 
his last Sunday advertisements in The New York Times before his death: "Public schools 
do not exist to please Johnny's parents. They do not even exist to ensure that Johnny will 
one day earn a good living at a job he likes." No other energy but true belief can explain 
what Shanker might have had in mind. 



1 For instance, how else to get a handle on the Columbia Teachers College bureau head who delivered 
himself of this sentence in Education Week (March 18, 1998), in an essay titled "Altering Destinies": 
"Program officials consider no part of a student's life off limits." 



Teachers College Maintains The Planet 

A beautiful example of true belief in action crossed my desk recently from the alumni 
magazine of my own alma mater, Columbia University. Written by the director of 
Columbia's Institute for Learning Technologies, a bureau at Teachers College, this 
mailing informed graduates that the education division now regarded itself as bound by 
"a contract with posterity." Something in the tone warned me against dismissing this as 
customary institutional gas. Seconds later I learned, with some shock, that Teachers 
College felt obligated to take a commanding role in "maintaining the planet." The next 
extension of this strange idea was even more pointed. Teachers College now interpreted 
its mandate, I was told, as one compelling it "to distribute itself all over the world and to 
teach every day, 24 hours a day." 

To gain perspective, try to imagine the University of Berlin undertaking to distribute 
itself among the fifty American states, to be present in this foreign land twenty- four hours 
a day, swimming in the minds of Mormon children in Utah and Baptist children in 
Georgia. Any university intending to become global like some nanny creature spawned in 
Bacon's ghastly Utopia, New Atlantis, is no longer simply in the business of education. 
Columbia Teachers College had become an aggressive evangelist by its own 
announcement, an institution of true belief selling an unfathomable doctrine. I held its 
declaration in my hand for a while after I read it. Thinking. 

Let me underline what you just heard. Picture some U.N. thought police dragging 
reluctant Serbs to a loudspeaker to listen to Teachers College rant. Most of us have no 
frame of reference in which to fit such a picture. Narcosis in the face of true belief is a 
principal reason the disease progressed so far through the medium of forced schooling 
without provoking much major opposition. Only after a million homeschooling families 
and an equal number of religiously oriented private-school families emerged from their 
sleep to reclaim their children from the government in the 1970s and 1980s, in direct 
response to an epoch of flagrant social experimentation in government schools, did true 
belief find ruts in its road. 

Columbia, where I took an undergraduate degree, is the last agency I would want 
maintaining my planet. For decades it was a major New York slumlord indifferent to 
maintaining its own neighborhood, a territory much smaller than the globe. Columbia has 



been a legendary bad neighbor to the community for the forty years I've lived near my 
alma mater. So much for its qualifications as Planetary Guardian. Its second boast is even 
more ominous — I mean that goal of intervening in mental life "all over the world," 
teaching "every day, 24 hours a day." Teaching what? Shouldn't we ask? Our trouble in 
recognizing true belief is that it wears a reasonable face in modern times. 

A Lofty, Somewhat Inhuman Vision