234 The Squeeze: The Underground History of Amercian
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Squeeze
Of course when you cheat people good you start to worry
about your victims getting even.
David Gordon's 1996 book Fa? and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial
Downsizing catches the spirit of the national guilty conscience this way:
Can't trust your
workers when left to their own devices? Peer over their shoulders. Watch behind their backs. Record their
movements. Monitor them. Supervise them. Boss them. Above all else, don't leave them alone. As
one recent study observed, "American
companies tend, fundamentally, to mistrust workers, whether they are
salaried employees or blue collar
workers."
And American schools tend,
fundamentally, to mistrust students. One way to deal with danger from the middle and bottom of
the evolutionary order is to buy off the people's natural leaders. Instead of killing Zapata, smart money deals
Zapata in for his share. We've
seen this principle as it downloaded into "gifted and talented"
classrooms from the lofty
abstractions of Pareto and Mosca. Now it's time to regard those de-fanged
"gifted" children grown
up, waiting at the trough like the others. What do they in their turn have to teach anyone?
David Gordon says 13
percent of U.S. nonfarm workers are managerial and administrative. That's one boss for every seven and a half
workers! And the percentage of nonteaching
school personnel is twice that. Compare those numbers to a manager/worker ratio of 4.2 percent in
Japan, 3.9 percent in Germany, 2.6 percent in Sweden. Since 1947, when the employment-hierarchy egg laid
during the American Civil War
finally hatched after incubating for a century, the number of managers and supervisors in America has exploded 360
percent (if only titled ones are counted) and at least twice that if de facto administrators — like teachers
without teaching programs — are
added in. All this entails a massive income shift from men and women who
produce things to managers and
supervisors who do not.
What does this add up to in human terms?
Well, for one thing, if our managerial burden was held to the Japanese ratio, somewhere in the neighborhood
of 20 million production level
jobs could be paid for. That would mean the end of unemployment. Totally.
An economy arranged as ours is
could not tolerate such a condition, I understand. Let me disabuse you next of any silly notion
the pain of downsizing is being spread out by an even-handed political management, touching comfortable and
hard-pressed alike. While it is
true, as James Fallows says, that the media pay disproportionate attention
to downsizing toward the top rungs
of the occupational hierarchy, the sobering facts are these: from 1991 to 1996 the percentage of managers among
nonfarm employees rose about 12
percent. For each fat cat kicked off the gravy train, 1.12 new ones
climbed aboard. All this is
evidence not of generosity, I think, but of a growing fear of ordinary people.
Is this all just more of the same scare
talk you've heard until you're sick of it? I don't know; what do you make of these figures? From 1790 until
1930 America incarcerated 50
people for every 100,000 in the population; for 140 years the ratio held
steady. Then suddenly the figure
doubled between 1930 and 1940. The Depression, you say? Maybe, but there had been depressions before,
and anyway, by 1960 it doubled again to 200 per 100,000. The shock of WWII could have caused that, but there
had been wars before. Between 1960
and 1970 the figure jogged higher once again to 300 per 100,000. And 400 per 100,000 by 1980. And near 500 per
100,000 where it hovers at the new century's beginning.
Has this escalation
anything to do in a family way with the odd remark attributed by a national magazine to Marine Major Craig
Tucker, of Ft. Leavenworth's Battle Command Training Program, that "a time may come when the
military may have to go domestic"? I
guess that's what he was taught at Ft. Leavenworth.
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