75. The Lure of Utopia: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Chapter Six 



The Lure of Utopia 

Every morning when you picked up your newspaper you would read of some new scheme 
for saving the world. ..soon all the zealots, all the Come-Outers, all the transcendentalists 
of Boston gathered at the Chardon Street Chapel and harangued each other for three 
mortal days. They talked on nonresistance and the Sabbath reform, of the Church and the 
Ministry, and they arrived at no conclusions. "It was the most singular collection of 
strange specimens of humanity that was ever assembled, " wrote Edmund Quincy, and 
Emerson was even more specific: "Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, 
Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, 
Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, all came successively to the top 
and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach or 
protest. ...There was some-thing artificial about the Chardon Street debates, there was a 
hothouse atmosphere in the chapel. There was too much suffering fools gladly, there was 
too much talk, too much display of learning and of wit, and there was, for all the talk of 
tolerance, an unchristian spirit. 
— Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker 

So Fervently Do We Believe 

The cries of true believers are all around the history of schooling, thick as gulls at a 
garbage dump. 

School principal Debbie Reeves of the upscale Barnwell Elementary School in an Atlanta 
suburb was quoted recently by the USA Today newspaper as the author of this amazing 
testimonial of true belief, "I'm not sure you ever get to the point you have enough 
technology. We just believe so fervently in it." 

It's that panting excitement you want to keep an eye out for, that exaggerated belief in 
human perfectibility that Tocqueville noticed in Americans 170 years ago. The same 
newspaper article wanders through the San Juan Elementary School in the very heart of 
Silicon Valley. There, obsolete computers sit idle in neat rows at the back of a spacious 
media center where years ago a highly touted "open classroom" with a sunken common 
area drew similar enthusiasm. The school lacks resources for the frequent updates needed 
to boast state-of-the-art equipment. A district employee said: "One dying technology on 
top of a former dying technology, sort of like layers of an archaeological dig." 

America has always been a land congenial to Utopian thought. The Mayflower Compact 
is a testimonial to this. Although its signers were trapped in history, they were ahistorical, 
too, capable of acts and conceptions beyond the imagination of their parents. The very 
thinness of constituted authority, the high percentage of males as colonists — homeless, 
orphaned, discarded, marginally attached, uprooted males — encouraged dreams of a 



better time to come. Here was soil for a better world where kindly strangers take charge 
of children, loving and rearing them more skillfully than their ignorant parents had ever 
done. 

Religion flourished in the same medium, too, particularly the Independent and Dissenting 
religious traditions of England. The extreme rationalism of the Socinian heresy and 
deism, twin roots of America's passionate romance with science and technology to come, 
flourished too. Most American sects were built on a Christian base, but the absence of 
effective state or church monopoly authority in early America allowed 250 years of 
exploration into a transcendental dimension no other Western nation ever experienced in 
modern history, leaving a wake of sects and private pilgrimages which made America the 
heir of ancient Israel — a place where everyone, even free thinkers, actively trusted in a 
god of some sort. 

Without Pope or Patriarch, without an Archbishop of Canterbury, the episcopal principle 
behind state and corporate churches lacked teeth, allowing people here to find their own 
way in the region of soul and spirit. This turned out to be fortunate, a precondition for our 
laboratory policy of national utopianism which required that every sort of visionary be 
given scope to make a case. It was a matter of degree, of course. Most Americans, most 
of the time, were much like people back in England, Scotland, Scandinavia, Germany, 
and Ireland, from which domains they had originally derived. After all, the Revolution 
itself was prosecuted by less than a quarter of our population. But enough of the other 
sort existed as social yeast that nobody could long escape some plan, scheme, 
exhortation, or tract designed to lead the faithful into one or another Promised Land. For 
the most part, Old Testament principles reigned, not New, and the Prophets had a good 
part of the national ear. 

From 1830 to 1900, over one thousand Utopian colonies flourished around the country, 
colonies which mixed the races, like Fanny Wright's Neshoba in Tennessee, colonies 
built around intensive schooling like New Harmony in Indiana, colonies which 
encouraged free love and commonly shared sexual partners as did the Perfectionists at 
Oneida in upstate New York. In the wonderful tapestry of American Utopian thought and 
practice, one unifying thread stands out clearly. Long before the notion of forced 
schooling became household reality, Utopian architects universally recognized that 
schooling was the key to breaking with the past. The young had to be isolated, and drilled 
in the correct way of looking at things or all would fall apart when they grew up. Only 
the tiniest number of these intentional communities ever did solve that problem, and so 
almost all vanished after a brief moment. But the idea itself lingered on. 

In this chapter I want to push a bit into the lure of Utopia, because this strain in human 
nature crisscrosses the growth curve of compulsion schooling at many junctures. Think of 
it as a search for the formula to change human nature in order to build paradise on earth. 
Such an idea is in flagrant opposition to the dominant religion of the Western world, 
whose theology teaches that human nature is permanently flawed, that all human 
salvation must be individually undertaken. 



Even if you aren't used to considering school this way, it isn't hard to see that a 
curriculum to reach the first end would have to be different from that necessary to reach 
the second, and the purpose of the educator is all important. It is simply impossible to 
evaluate what you see in a school without knowing its purpose, but if local administrators 
have no real idea why they do what they do — why they administer standardized tests, for 
instance, then any statement of purpose made by the local school can only confuse the 
investigator. To pursue the elusive purpose or purposes of American schooling as they 
were conceived about a century ago requires that we wander afield from the classroom 
into some flower beds of Utopian aspiration which reared their head in an earlier 
America. 

The Necessity Of Detachment