227 Autonomous Technology: The Underground History of Amercian Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Autonomous
Technology
The simple
truth is there is no way to control this massive corporate/school thing
from the human end. It has to be
broken up. It has become a piece of autonomous technology. Its leadership is bankrupt in ideas.
Merchants are merchants, not moral leaders or political ones. It surely is a sign of retrogression, not
advance, that we have forgotten
what the world's peoples knew forever. A merchant has the same right to
offer his opinion
as I do, but it
makes little sense for people who buy and sell soap and
cigarettes to tell you how to
raise your kid or what to believe in. No more sense than it does for a pedagogue to do the same. How would a
huckster who pushes toothpaste, a joker who vends cigarettes, or a video dream peddler know anything
about leading nations or raising
children correctly? Are these to be the Washingtons, Jacksons, and
Lincolns of the twenty-first
century?
The timeless core of Western tradition,
which only the cowardly and corrupt would wish to surrender, shows that we can't grow into the truth of our
own nature without local
traditions and values at the center of things. We do not do well as
human beings in those abstract
associations for material advantage favored by merchants called networks, or
in megalithic systems, whether
governmental, institutional, or corporate. In his book An Open Life, Joseph Campbell put his
finger on the heart of the matter:
[It is] an Oriental model. One of the
typical things of the Orient is that any criticism disqualifies you for the guru's instruction. Well in
heaven's name, is that appropriate for
a Western mind? It's simply a transferring of your submission to a
childhood father onto a father for
your adulthood. Which means you're not growing up.... The thing about the guru in the West is that he represents
an alien principle, namely, that you don't follow your own path, you follow a given path. And that's totally
contrary to the Western spirit!
Our spirituality is of the individual quest, individual realization —
authenticity in your own life out
of your own center, (emphasis added)
Mario Savio, the
1960s campus radical, stood once on the steps of Sproul Hall, Berkeley, and screamed: There is a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you so sick
at heart that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part,
and you've got to put your bodies
upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the
apparatus and you've got to make
it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you are free the machine will be
prevented from working at all.
Limiting the power of
government, in order to liberate the individual, was the great American revolutionary insight. Too
much cooperation, avoiding conflict from ordinary people, these things aren't acceptable in America although
they may suit China, Indonesia,
Britain, or Germany just fine. In America the absence of conflict is a sign
of regression toward a global
mean, hardly progress by our lights if you've seen much of the governance of the rest of the world
where common people are crushed like annoying insects if they argue.
Carl Schurz, the
German immigrant, said upon seeing America for the first time in 1848, "Here you can see how slightly a
people needs to be governed." What it will take to break collectively out of this trap is a
change in the nature of forced schooling, one which alters the balance of power between societies
and systems in favor of societies again. We need once more to debate angrily the purpose of public education.
The power of elites to set the
agenda for public schooling has to be challenged, an agenda which includes totalitarian labeling of the ordinary
population, unwarranted official prerogatives, and near total control of work. Until such a change happens, we
need to individually withhold
excessive allegiance from any and all forms of abstract, remotely
displaced, political and economic
leadership; we need to trust ourselves and our children to remake the
future locally, demand that
intellectual and character development once again be the mission of schools; we need to smash the
government monopoly over the upbringing of our young by forcing it to compete for funds whose commitments should
rest largely on the judgment of
parents and local associations. Where argument, court action,
foot-dragging, and polite
subversion can't derail this judgment, then we must find the courage to be saboteurs, as the maquis did in
occupied France during WWII.
It isn't difficult, someone once said,
to imagine young Bill Clinton sitting at the feet of his favorite old professor, Dr. Carroll Quigley of
Georgetown. As Quigley approached
death, he came back to Georgetown one last time in 1976 to deliver the
Oscar Iden Lecture Series. The
Quigley of the Iden lectures said many things which anticipate the argument of my own book. His words
often turn to the modern predicament, the sense of impending doom many of us feel:
The fundamental, all-pervasive cause of
world instability is the destruction of
communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the
resulting neuroses and psychoses.
..another cause of today's instability is that we now have a society.... which is totally dominated
by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking,
and the corporation. These are
free to political controls and social responsibility, ...The only element of
production they are concerned with
is the one they can control: capital.
Quigley alludes to a
startling ultimate solution to our problems with school and with much else in our now state-obsessed
lives, a drawing of critical awareness:
...out of the Dark Age that
followed the collapse of the Carolingian Empire came the most magnificent thing. ..the
recognition that people can have a society without having a state. In other words, this experience
wiped out the assumption that is found throughout Classical Antiquity, except among unorthodox and heretical
thinkers, that the state and the
society are identical, and therefore you can desire nothing more than to be a
citizen, (emphasis added)
A society without a state. If the only
value hard reading had was to be able to tune in on minds like Quigley's, minds free of fetters, sharp axes with
which to strike off chains, that
alone would be reason enough to put such reading at the heart of a new kind
of schooling which might strongly
resemble the education America offered 150 years ago — a movement to ennoble
common people, freeing them from the clutches of masters, experts, and those terrifying true
believers whose eyes gleam in the dark. Quigley thought such a transformation was
inevitable:
Now I come to my last statement... I'm
not personally pessimistic. The final result will be that the American people will ultimately... opt out of the
system. Today everything is a
bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities
are trained to fit into this
bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life — although I would assume
that many on their death beds must
feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already
copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a
large scale basis.... People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what's
going on in the world, and by
increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in
their own neighborhoods.... When
Rome fell, the Christian answer was, "Create our own communities."
We shall do that again. When we want
better families, better neighbors, better friends, and better schools we shall turn our backs on national and
global systems, on expert experts
and specialist specialties and begin to make our own schools one by one, far
from the reach of systems.
Did you know that Lear of Lear Jet fame
was a dropout? Pierre Cardin, Liz Claiborne, the founder of McDonald's, the founder of Wendy 's, Ben
Franklin, one in every fifteen
American millionaires?
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