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.
Young men and women
during their brightest, most energetic years are kept from working or from being a part of the
general society. This is done to keep them from aggravating this delicate work situation, either by working
too eagerly, as kids are prone to
do, or by inventing their own work, which could cause shocks throughout
the economy. This violation of the
injunction to work, which Western spirituality imposed, has backed us into a corner from which
no authority has any idea how to extricate us. We cannot afford to let too many children really learn to work,
as Amish children do, for fear
they will discover its great secret: work isn't a curse, but a
salvation.
About the second penalty, pain, Western
spirituality has regarded pain as a friend because it forces attention off things of this world and
puts it squarely back on the center
of the universe, yourself. Pain and distress in all forms are ways we
learn self-control (among other
valuable lessons), but the siren call of sensuality lures us to court
physical satisfactions and to
despise pain as a spoiler of pleasure. Western spirituality teaches that pain is a road to self-knowledge,
self-knowledge a road to trusting yourself. Without trust, you can't like yourself; without liking yourself, how
can you feel capable of giving
love?
About the third
penalty, good and evil, Western spirituality demands you write your own script through the world. In a
spiritual being, everything is morally charged, nothing neutral. Choosing is a daily burden,
but one which makes literally everything a big deal.
I heard second hand, recently, about a
woman who said to her mother about an affair she was conducting openly, despite the protest of her husband
and in full knowledge of her
six-year-old daughter, "It's no big deal." That's what she
said to her mother. But if
infidelity, divorce, and the shattering of innocence in a child isn't a
big deal, then what could ever be?
By intensifying our moral sense, we constantly feel the exhilaration of being alive in a universe where
everything is a big deal.
To have much of a life, you must bring
as many choices as you can out of
preprogrammed mode and under the conscious command of your will. The
bigger the life you seek, the less
anything can be made automatic, as if you were only a piece of machinery. And because every choice has
moral dimension, it will incline toward one or the other pole of that classic dichotomy: good and evil.
Despite extenuating circumstances — and
they are legion — the accumulating record of our choices marks us as worthy or unworthy people. Even if
nobody else is aware how accounts
stand, deep inside yourself the running balance will vitally affect your
ability to trust, to love, to gain
peace and wisdom from relationships and community.
And finally, aging and death. In the
Western spiritual tradition, which grew out of a belief in original sin, the focus was primarily on the
lesson that nothing in this world is
more than illusion. This is only a stage on some longer journey we do
not fully understand. To fall in
love with your physical beauty or your wealth, your health, or your power to experience good feelings is to
kid yourself because they will be taken away. A ninety- four- year-old aunt of mine with a Ph.D. from the
University of Chicago, and a woman
I love dearly, said to me tearfully after the death of her husband, who had
left her in comfortable
circumstances, "They don't let you win. There is no way to win."
She had lived her life in the camp of
science, honorably observing all its rules of rationality, but at his passing, science was useless to her.
The Western spiritual tradition
would reply, "Of course you can win. Everyone can win. And if you
think you can't, then you're
playing the wrong game." The only thing that gives our time on earth any
deep significance is that none of
this will last. Only that temporality gives our relationships any urgency. If you were
indestructible, what a curse! How could it possibly matter whether you did
anything today or next year or in the next hundred years, learned anything, loved anybody? There would
always be time for anything and everything. What would be the big deal about anything?
Everyone has known
the experience of having had a surfeit of candy, company, or even money, so that no individual purchase
involves real choice because real choice always closes the door on other choices. I know that we would all
like to have endless amounts of
money, but the truth is, too much money wipes out our pleasure in choosing
since we can now choose
everything. That's what Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius discovered for himself in his reflections about what
really matters — the Meditations, one of the great classics in Western history. He discovered none of the
important things was for sale. If
you don't believe an emperor would feel this way, read the
Meditations.
Too much time, like
too much money, can hang heavily on our hands as well. Look at the millions of bored schoolchildren. They
know what I mean. The corrective for this
boredom is a full spiritual awareness that time is finite. As you spend
time on one thing, you lose
forever the chance to spend it on something else. Time is always a big deal.
Science can't help
with time. In fact, living scientifically so as not to waste time, becoming one of those poor souls who
never goes anywhere without a list, is the best guarantee your life will be eaten up by errands and that
none of those errands will ever
become the big deal you desperately need to finally love yourself. The list
of things to do will go ever
onward and onward. The best lives are full of contemplation, full of
solitude, full of
self-examination, full of private, personal attempts to engage the
metaphysical mystery of existence,
to create an inner life.
We make the best of
our limited time by alternating effort with reflection, and I mean reflection completely free of the
get-something motive. Whenever I see a kid daydreaming in school, I'm careful never to shock the
reverie out of existence.
Buddha is reputed to have said, "Do
nothing. Time is too precious to waste." If that advice seems impossible in the world described on the
evening news, reflect on the
awesome fact that in spite of hype, you still live on a planet where 67
percent of the world's entire
population has never made or received a single phone call and where the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County
live prosperous lives virtually free of crime, of divorce, or of children who go beyond the eighth grade in
school. Yet not a single one has a
college degree, a tractor to plow with, a telephone in the house, or is on
welfare.
If I seem to have stepped away from
original sin with these facts, it is not so. Until you acknowledge that the factual contents
of your mind upon which you base decisions have been inserted there by others whose motives you cannot fully
understand, you will never come to
appreciate the neglected genius of Western spirituality which teaches that
you are the center of the
universe. And that the most important things worth knowing are innate in you already. They cannot be
learned through schooling. They are self-taught through the burdens of having to work, having to sort out right
from wrong, having to check your
appetites, and having to age and die.
The effect of this
formula on world history has been titanic. It brought every citizen in the West a mandate to be sovereign, a
concept which we still have not learned to use wisely, but which offers the potential for such
wisdom. Western spirituality granted every single individual a purpose for being alive, a purpose independent
of mass behavioral prescriptions,
money, experts, schools, and governments. It conferred significance on every aspect of relationship and
community. It carried inside its ideas the seeds of a self- activating curriculum which gives
meaning to time, and imposes the duty of compassion, even for enemies, on believers.
In Western spirituality, everyone
counts. It offers a basic, matter-of-fact set of practical guidelines, street lamps for the
village of your life. Nobody has to wander aimlessly in the universe of Western spirituality.
What constitutes a meaningful life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility, acceptance of
aging and loss, preparation for
death. In this neglected genius of the West, no teacher or guru does the
work for you. You do it for
yourself. It's time to teach these things to our children once again.
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