34. The Dangan: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Dangan
In the first decades
of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John
Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia
Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of
Clark, and an ambitious handful of
others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney,
Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend
government schooling to the service of
business and the political state — as it had been done a century before in Prussia.
Cubberley delicately voiced what was
happening this way: "The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education
provided." National need, of course,
depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding
by specifying in a resolution of
its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an "effective use of
capital" through which our "unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained." When you
look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs
of schooling had been transplanted
into the corporate body of the new economy.
It's important to keep in mind that no
harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they
perceived it, working
progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The
real force behind school effort
came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church
were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and
economic considerations there
existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the
imagination of dreamers and firing
the blood of zealots.
The entire academic community here and
abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by this time and to this contingent school seemed an instrument
for managing evolutionary destiny.
In Thorndike's memorable words, conditions for controlled selective
breeding had to be set up before
the new American industrial proletariat "took things into their own hands."
America was a
frustrating petri dish in which to cultivate a managerial revolution, however, because of its historic
freedom traditions. But thanks to the patronage of important men and institutions, a group of academics were
enabled to visit mainland China to
launch a modernization project known as the "New Thought Tide."
Dewey himself lived in China for
two years where pedagogical theories were inculcated in the Young Turk elements, then tested on a
bewildered population which had recently been stripped of its ancient form of governance. A similar
process was embedded in the new
Russian state during the 1920s.
While American public opinion was
unaware of this undertaking, some big-city school superintendents were wise to the fact that they were part of
a global experiment. Listen to
H.B. Wilson, superintendent of the Topeka schools:
The introduction of the American school into the
Orient has broken up 40 centuries of
conservatism. It has given us a new China, a new Japan, and is working
marked progress in Turkey and the
Philippines.
The schools. ..are in
a position to determine the lines of
progress. {Motivation of School Work,\9\6)
Thoughts like this don't
spring full-blown from the heads of men like Dr. Wilson of Topeka. They have to be planted
there.
The Western-inspired
and Western-financed Chinese revolution, following hard on the heels of the last desperate attempt by
China to prevent the British government traffic in narcotic drugs there, placed that ancient province in a
favorable state of anarchy for
laboratory tests of mind-alteration technology. Out of this period rose
a Chinese universal tracking
procedure called "The Dangan," a continuous lifelong personnel file
exposing every student's intimate
life history from birth through school and onwards. The Dangan constituted the ultimate overthrow of
privacy. Today, nobody works in China without a Dangan.
By the mid-1960s preliminary work on an
American Dangan was underway as
information reservoirs attached to the school institution began to store
personal information. A new class
of expert like Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie Endowments quietly began to urge collection of personal
data from students and its unification in computer code to enhance cross-referencing. Surreptitious data
gathering was justified by Tyler as
"the moral right of institutions."
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