15. The Fresco At Herculaneum: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Fresco At Herculaneum 

Sparta, Athens' neighbor, was a horse of a different color. Society in Sparta was 
organized around the concept of cradle-to-grave formal training. The whole state was a 
universal schoolhouse, official prescriptions for the population filled every waking 
minute and the family was employed as a convenience for the state. Sparta's public 
political arrangements were an elaborate sham, organized nominally around an executive 
branch with two legislative bodies, but ultimate decision-making was in the hands of 
ephors, a small elite who conducted state policy among themselves. The practical aspect 
of imitation democracy figures strongly in the thought of later social thinkers such as 
Machiavelli (1532) and Hobbes (1651), as well as in minds nearer our own time who had 
influence on the shape of American forced schooling. 

Spartan ideas of management came to American consciousness through classical studies 
in early schooling, through churches, and also through interest in the German military 
state of Prussia, which consciously modeled itself after Sparta. As the nineteenth century 
entered its final decades American university training came to follow the 
Prussian/Spartan model. Service to business and the political state became the most 
important reason for college and university existence after 1910. No longer was college 
primarily about developing mind and character in the young. Instead, it was about 
molding those things as instruments for use by others. Here is an important clue to the 
philosophical split which informed the foundation of modern schooling and to an 
important extent still does: small farmers, crafts folk, trades people, little town and city 
professionals, little industrialists, and older manorial interests took a part of their dream 
of America from democratic Athens or from republican Rome (not the Rome of the 
emperors); this comprised a significant proportion of ordinary America. But new urban 
managerial elites pointed to a future based on Spartan outlook. 

When the instructional system of Athens transferred to Imperial Rome, a few schools we 
would recognize began to appear. The familiar punishment practices of colonial America 
can be found anticipated vividly in the famous fresco at Herculaneum, showing a Roman 
schoolboy being held by two of his classmates while the master advances, carrying a long 
whip. Roman schools must have started discipline early in the morning for we find the 
poet Martial cursing a school for waking him up at cock's crow with shouts and beatings; 
Horace immortalizes pedagogue Orbilius for whipping a love of old poets into him. But 
we shouldn't be misled by these school references. What few schools there were in Rome 
were for boys of prosperous classes, and even most of these relied upon tutors, tradition, 
and emulation, not school. 

The word pedagogue is Latin for a specialized class of slave assigned to walk a student to 
the schoolmaster; over time the slave was given additional duties, his role was enlarged 
to that of drill master, a procedure memorialized in Varro's instituit pedagogus, docet 
magister. in my rusty altar-boy Latin, The master creates instruction, the slave pounds it 
in. A key to modern schooling is this: free men were never pedagogues. And yet we often 
refer to the science of modern schooling as pedagogy. The unenlightened parent who 
innocently brings matters of concern to the pedagogue, whether that poor soul is called 



schoolteacher, principal, or superintendent, is usually beginning a game of frustration 
which will end in no fundamental change. A case of barking up the wrong tree in a dark 
wood where the right tree is far away and obscure. 

Pedagogy is social technology for winning attention and cooperation (or obedience) 
while strings are attached to the mind and placed in the hands of an unseen master. This 
may be done holistically, with smiles, music, and light-duty simulations of intellection, or 
it can be done harshly with rigorous drills and competitive tests. The quality of self-doubt 
aimed for in either case is similar. 

Pedagogy is a useful concept to help us unthread some of the mysteries of modern 
schooling. That it is increasingly vital to the social order is evinced by the quiet teacher- 
pay revolution that has occurred since the 1960s. As with police work (to which 
pedagogy bears important similarities), school pay has become relatively good, its hours 
of labor short, its job security first rate. Contrast this with the golden years of one-room 
schooling where pay was subsistence only and teachers were compelled to board around 
to keep body and soul together. Yet there was no shortage then of applicants and many 
sons of prominent Americans began their adult lives as schoolteachers. 

With the relative opulence of today, it would be simple to fill teaching slots with 
accomplished men and women if that were a goal. A little adjustment in what are 
rationally indefensible licensing requirements would make talented people, many 
performance-tested adults in their fifties and sixties, available to teach. That there is not 
such fluid access is a good sign the purpose of schooling is more than it appears. The 
year- in, year-out consistency of mediocre teacher candidates demonstrates clearly that the 
school institution actively seeks, nurtures, hires, and promotes the caliber of personnel it 
needs. 

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