76-78 The Necessity Of Detachment: Enlarging The Nervous System:Producing Artificial Wants: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Necessity Of Detachment 

Hertzler's History of Utopian Thought traces the influence of Francis Bacon's New 
Atlantis, a book you need to know something about if you are ever to adequately 
understand the roots of modern schooling. Hertzler makes a good case from the testimony 
of its founders that the Royal Society itself arose from the book's prophetic scheme of 
"Salomon's House," a world university assembling the best of universal mankind under 
its protection. One of its functions: to oversee management of everything. 

New Atlantis had immense influence in England, Germany, Italy, and France. In France it 
was considered the principal inspiration of the Encyclopedia whose connection to the 
American Revolution is a close one. That story has been told too many times to bear 
repeating here. Suffice it to say that the very same triangle-encased eye that appears on 
the back of the American dollar appears as the center of Solomon's Temple in early 
eighteenth-century French artistic representations. 

One consistent requirement of Utopian procedure is the detachment of its subjects from 
ordinary human affairs. Acting with detached intelligence is what Utopians are all about, 
but a biological puzzle intrudes: detaching intelligence from emotional life isn't actually 
possible. The feat has never been performed, although imaginative writers are endlessly 
intrigued by the challenge it presents. Sherlock Holmes or Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame 
come to mind. 

Utopian thinking is intolerant of variety or competition, so the tendency of modern 
Utopians to enlarge their canvas to include the whole planet through multinational 
organizations becomes disturbing. Utopians regard national sovereignty as irrational and 
democracy as a disease unjustified by biological reality. We need one world, they say, 
and that one world should (reasonably) be under direction of the best Utopians. 
Democracy degrades the hierarchy necessary to operate a rational polity. A feature of 
nearly all Utopias has been addiction to elaborate social machinery like schooling and to 
what we can call marvelous machinery. Excessive human affection between parents, 
children, husbands, wives, et al, is suppressed to allow enthusiasm for machine magic to 
stand out in bold relief. 



It is useful to remember that Britain's Royal Society was founded not in the pursuit of pure knowledge and not by university dons but by 
practical businessmen and noblemen concerned with increased profits and lower wages. 

Enlarging The Nervous System 

There is a legend that in lost Atlantis once stood a great university in the form of an 
immense flat-topped pyramid from which star observations were made. In this university, 
most of the arts and sciences of the present world were contained. Putting aside that 
pleasant fancy which we can find clearly reflected on the obverse of our American Great 
Seal, almost any early Utopia holds a profusion of inside information about things to 
come. In 1641 Bishop John Wilkins, a founder of the Royal Society, wrote his own 
Utopia, Mercury: or the Secret and Swift Messenger. Every single invention Wilkins 
imagined has come about: "a flying chariot," "a trunk or hollow pipe that shall preserve 
the voice entirely," a code for communicating by means of noise-makers, etc. Giphantia, 
by de la Roche, unmistakably envisions the telephone, the radio, television, and 
dehydrated foods and drinks. Even the mechanisms suggested to make these things work 
are very like the actual ones eventually employed. 

Marshall McLuhan once called on us to notice that all machines are merely extensions of 
the human nervous system, artifices which improve on natural apparatus, each a 
utopianization of some physical function. Once you understand the trick, Utopian 
prophecy isn't so impressive. Equally important, says McLuhan, the use of machinery 
causes its natural flesh and blood counterpart to atrophy, hence the lifeless quality of the 
Utopias. Machines dehumanize, according to McLuhan, wherever they are used and 
however sensible their use appears. In a correctly conceived demonology, the Devil 
would be perceived as a machine, I think. Yet the powerful, pervasive influence of 
Utopian reform thinking on the design of modern states has brought Utopian 
mechanization of all human functions into the councils of statecraft and into the 
curriculum of state schooling. 

An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the 
United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly 
reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers 
since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of 
escape-discipline employed in a living tableau. 

Producing Artificial Wants 

Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a 
series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and 
business leadership. 1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace 
Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its 
wake. 2 

A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was 
acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving 



way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were 
appearing. 

And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, 
Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes 
referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without 
compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central 
hold on society to allow Utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its 
function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals — those of the 
perfected State. 

Mann saw that society's "guards and securities" had to increase because an unsuspected 
pathological phenomenon was following the introduction of mass production into life. It 
was producing "artificial wants." It was multiplying the temptation to accumulate things. 
But the barbarous life of the machine laborer made family ideals a hollow mockery. 
Morality could no longer be taught by such families. Crime and vice were certain to 
explode unless children could be pried away from their degraded custodians and civilized 
according to formulas laid down by the best minds. 

Barnas Sears, Mann's Calvinist colleague, saw the rapid growth of commercial mass 
entertainment catering to dense urban settlements as "a current of sensuality sweeping 
everything before it." Former bucolics, who once looked to nature for entertainment, 
were now pawns in the hands of worldly wisemen vending commercial amusement. 
Urban confinement robbed men and women of their ability to find satisfaction outside the 
titillation of mechanical excitation. Whoever provided excitement became the master. 

Mann's other colleague, George Boutwell, who would inherit the leadership of New 
England education from Sears, argued that a course must be selected from which there 
could be no turning back. Urbanization spelled the collapse of worker families; there was 
no remedy for it. Fathers were grossly diverted by nonagricultural labor from training 
their own children. Claims of a right to society and fashion led to neglect by mothers, too. 
"As in some languages there is no word which expresses the true idea of home," said 
Boutwell, "so in our manufacturing towns there are many persons who know nothing of 
its reality." 

Mann proclaimed the State must assert itself as primary parent of children. If an infant's 
natural parents were removed — or if parental ability failed (as was increasingly 
certain) — it was the duty of government to step in and fill the parent's place. Mann noted 
that Massachusetts had a long tradition of being "parental in government." His friend 
Sears described the State as "a nourishing mother, as wise as she is beneficent. Yet, 
should difficulties arise, the State might become stern — as befits a ruling patriarch." 
(emphasis added) 



Much light on these developments is shed by Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform and by 

Joel Spring's historical writings. Both writers are recommended for a dense mine of information; both strike a good balance between the 
perspective supplied by their personal philosophies and reportage without allegiance to any particular dogma. 

"The decline of American agriculture was part of a movement to replicate the centralized pattern found 

in Britain, which had deliberately destroyed its own small farm holdings by 1800. Agriculture had been conducted on a capitalist basis in 
Britain since the notorious enclosure movement prompted by the growth of farming. In its first stage, peasants were displaced to make room for 
large-scale pasture farming. The second displacement transformed the small farmer into the "farm hand" or the factory worker. 

Capitalist farming was established in Britain side by side with a growing manufacturing industry which made it possible to rely on the import 
of foodstuffs from abroad. Freely imported food meant cheap food. Cheap food meant cheap labor. The development of factory farming in 
America (and Australia) provided an outlet for the investment of surplus capital at good rates of interest; hence the decline of small farming in 
America was hastened considerably by direct inducements from its former motherland. Although as late as 1934, 33 percent of American 
employment was still in agriculture (versus 7 percent in Great Britain), the curriculum of small farm, which encouraged resourcefulness, 
independence, and self-reliance, was fast giving way to the curriculum of government education which called for quite a different character. 

The Parens Patriae Powers