201. Serving The Imperial Virus: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Serving
The Imperial Virus
Toynbee thought he could calculate
Britain's jeopardy if it allowed the masses dreams of independence by a comparison with the Soviet Russia where
revolutionary dreaming once
dictated social arrangements:
In Marxian Communism
we have a notorious example in our midst of a modern Western philosophy which changed in a lifetime
quite out of recognition into a proletarian religion, taking the path of violence and carving its New
Jerusalem with the sword on the
plains of Russia.
The working-class
proletariat conceived by Toynbee is in a permanent childlike state, one that requires constant management.
Because of this ongoing necessity, a second proletariat must be created, "a special social
class" which represents a professionalized proletariat, "often quite abruptly
and artificially" gathered by the national leadership to aid in managing the lumpish mass of
ordinary folk.
The size this bureaucratic cohort will
reach depends upon the circumstances which call it into being. If the dominant minority decides to wage war,
for instance, a vast enlargement
of noncoms and line officers will occur; if it decides to concentrate
public attention on charitable
benevolence, a mushrooming of social work positions will ensue; if the
public is to be kept fearfully
amused and titillated by the spectacle of crime and law enforcement, a new horde of police and
detectives will be trained and commissioned. The social management of public attention is a vital aspect of
modern states. To the extent that
schools, together with commercial entertainment, control an important share of
the imagination of the young, they
must be heavily involved in such a project. There is no possibility they can be allowed to opt
out. Social management of public attention through schooling can be seen as very similar to management of
public attention by corporate advertising
and by public relations initiatives. Mass production demands psychological interventions intended to create wants
that otherwise wouldn't exist. Among its other roles, school is an important agent of this initiative.
The professional proletariats created to
do this important task and others like it can be seen, says Toynbee, to be "a special class of liaison
officer" between the governing
minorities and the masses. This English way of seeing middle classes
clears some of the fog away.
Consider the real- life effect of an abstract rule of first allegiance to management on those schoolteachers who
work too intimately with parents, or struggle in children's interests too resolutely — inevitably they become
marked for punishment. Good teachers from the human perspective are natural
system-wreckers. They don't fit
comfortably into a service class designed to assist governing elites to
manage. Their hearts aren't in
it.
Toynbee is brutally candid about where
loyal pedagogues fit: "As the [imperial] virus works deeper into the social life of the society which is in
the process of being permeated and
assimilated, the intelligentsia develops its most characteristic types:
the schoolmaster... the civil
servant... the lawyer...."
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