School
As Religion
Nothing about school
is what it seems, not even boredom. To show you what I mean is the burden of this long essay. My book
represents a try at arranging my own thoughts in order to figure out what fifty years of classroom
confinement (as student and teacher) add
up to for me. You'll encounter a great deal of speculative history here.
This is a personal investigation
of why school is a
dangerous place. It's not so much that anyone there
sets out to hurt children; more
that all of us associated with the institution are stuck like flies in the same great web your kids are. We
buzz frantically to cover our own panic but have little power to help smaller flies.
Looking backward on a
thirty-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent
my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a
gigantic indoctrination and sorting
machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was
this my life? God help me.
School is a religion.
Without understanding the holy mission aspect you're certain to misperceive what takes place as a
result of human stupidity or venality or even class warfare. All are present in the equation, it's just that
none of these matter very much —
even without them school would move in the same direction. Dewey's
Pedagogic Creed statement of 1 897
gives you a clue to the Zeitgeist:
Every teacher should
realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the
securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the
usherer in of the true kingdom of
heaven.
What is
"proper" social order? What does "right" social growth look
like? If you don't know you're
like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons,
who did, too.
Somehow out of the
industrial confusion which followed the Civil War, powerful men and dreamers became certain what kind
of social order America needed, one very like the British system we had escaped a hundred years earlier. This
realization didn't arise as a
product of public debate as it should have in a democracy, but as a
distillation of private
discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but
that didn't disturb them. They had
a stupendous goal in mind — the rationalization of everything. The end of unpredictable history; its
transformation into dependable order.
From mid-century
onwards certain Utopian schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play,
following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be
reached in stages, was an orderly,
scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make
the decisions, unhampered by
democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach.
Universal institutionalized formal
forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the
young well into what had
traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from
taking up important work until a
relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.
During the post-Civil
War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe
very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The
infantilization of young people
didn't stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws
were extended to cover more and
more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this Utopian
project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work
into the school net. By the 1950s
it wasn't unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running
errands, waiting to start their
lives.
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