6
188. The
Illusion Of Punishment: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Illusion Of Punishment
What Western spirituality says is paradoxical — rather than avoiding
these hardships, it asks you to
embrace them. It taught the counter-intuitive response that willing acceptance of these burdens was the only way to a
good, full life, the only way to inner peace. Bending your head in obedience, it will be raised up strong,
brave, indomitable, and wise. Now
let me go through the list of penalties from this perspective.
About labor, the
religious voice says that work is the only avenue to genuine self-respect. Work develops independence,
self-reliance, resourcefulness. Work itself is a value, above a paycheck, above praise, above
accomplishment. Work produces a spiritual reward unknown to the reinforcement schedules of behavioral
psychologists like B.F. Skinner,
but if you tackle it gladly, without resentment or avoidance, whether
you're digging a ditch or building
a skyscraper, you'll find the key to yourself in work. If the secular aversion to work is a thing to be
rationalized as schools do, requiring only minimal effort from children, a horrifying problem is
created for our entire society, one that thus far has proven incurable. I refer to the psychological, social, and
spiritual anxieties that arise
when people have no useful work to do. Phony work, no matter how well
paid or praised, causes such great
emotional distortions that the major efforts of our civilization will soon go into solving them, with no hint of
any answer in sight.
In the economy we have allowed to
evolve, the real political dilemma everywhere is keeping people occupied. Jobs have to be invented by
government agencies and
corporations. Both employ millions and millions of people for which they
have no real use. It's an inside
secret among top-echelon management that should you need to cause a rise in stock value, this can be
engineered by eliminating thousands of "useless" jobs; that is done regularly and, I would presume,
cynically.