232. A
Fool's Bargain: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
A
Fool's Bargain
A recent analysis of American diet by the
Harvard School of Public Health disclosed the curious fact that the extremely poor eat healthier diets
than upper-middle-class Americans.
If that doesn't break you up, consider the lesson of the 232-year-old aristocratic merchant bank of Barings,
destroyed in the wink of an eye through the wild speculations of an executive who turned out to have
been the
son of a plasterer bereft of any
college degree! The poor man's schemes were too impenetrable for company management to understand, but they needed
his vitality badly so they were afraid to
challenge his decisions.
"They never
dared ask any basic questions," said the young felon who gambled away $1 .3 billion on parlays so fanciful
you might think only a rube would attempt them. "They were afraid of looking stupid about not
understanding futures and options. They
knew nothing at all." Quis custodiet ipsios custodesl
You can't help but
smile at the justice of it. Having procured a Leviathan state finally, its architects and their children seem
certain to be flattened by it, too, soon after the rest of us become linoleum. No walled or gated
compound is safe from the whirring systems rationalizing everything, squeezing children of social
engineers just as readily as yours
and mine. "They knew nothing," said the criminal. Nothing.
That's the feeling I frequently
got while tracking the leaders of American schooling at every stage of the game while they mutilated their own
lives as fantastically as they did the lives of others. All that sneaking, scheming, plotting,
lying. It ruined the grand designers as it ruined their victims. The Big Schoolhouse testifies more to the
folly of human arrogance, what the
Greeks called hubris. Our leaders, one after another, have been childish
men.
So many of the builders of School were
churchmen or the sons of churchmen. We need to grasp the irony that they ruined the churches as well, the
official churches anyway. That
probably explains the mighty religious hunger loose in the land as I
write; having slipped the bonds of
establishment churches as it became clear those vassal bodies were only subsystems of something quite unholy,
the drive to contemplate things beyond the reach of technology or accountants is far from extinct as the
social engineers thought it was
going to be. Such an important part of the mystery of coal-nation
schooling is locked up in the
assassination of religion and the attempted conversion of its principles of
faith into serviceable secular
wisdom and twelve-step programs that we will never understand our failure with schools if we become impatient
when religion is discussed, because School is the civil religion meant to replace Faith.
American
Protestantism, once our national genius, left its pulpit behind, began to
barter and trade in the
marketplace, refashioning God and gospel to sustain a social service vision of life. In doing so it ruined
itself while betraying us all, Protestants and non- Protestants alike. A legacy of this is the fiefdom of
Hawaii, saddest American territory of
all, an occupied nation we pretend is an American state, its land area
and economy owned to an
astonishing degree by the descendants of a few missionary families, managed
by government agencies. The
original population has been wiped away. Under the veneer of a vacation paradise, which wears thin
almost at once, one finds the saddest congregations on earth, parishioners held prisoner by barren ministers
without any rejuvenating sermons
to preach. Hawaiian society is the Chautauqua forced schooling aims
toward.
The privileges of leadership shouldn't
rest on the shaky foundation of wealth, property, and armed guards but on the allegiance, respect, and love of
those led. Leadership involves
providing some purpose for getting out of bed in the morning, some reason
to lay about with the claymore or
drop seeds in the dirt. Wealth is a fair trade to grant to leaders in exchange
for a purpose, but the leaders' end of the bargain and must be kept. In the United States the pledge has been
broken, and the break flaunted for an entire century through the mass schooling institution.
Here is the crux of
the dilemma: modern schooling has no lasting value to exchange for the spectacular chunk of living time it
wastes or the possibilities it destroys. The kids know it, their parents know it, you know it, I know it, and
the folks who administer the
medicine know it. School is a fool's bargain, we are fools for accepting
its dry beans in exchange for our
children. Roland
Legiardi-Laura
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