63. Munsterberg And His Disciples: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
CHAPTER
FIVE
True Believers And The Unspeakable
Chautauqua
A very small group of young psychologists
around the turn of the century were able to create and market a system for measuring human talent that
has permeated American
institutions of learning and influenced such fundamental
social concepts
as democracy, sanity, justice,
welfare, reproductive rights, and economic progress. In creating, owning, and advertising this social technology
the testers created themselves as professionals.
—
Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in
the History of Intelligence
Testing
I have undertaken to get at the facts
from the point of view of the business men — citizens of the community who, after all, pay the bills and,
therefore, have a right to say what they
shall have in their schools.
— Charles H. Thurber, from an address at
the Annual Meeting of the National Education Association, July 9, 1897
The self-interested
have had a large hand conceiving and executing twentieth-century schooling, yet once that's said,
self-interest isn't enough to explain the zeal in confining other people's children in rooms,
locked away from the world, the infernal zeal which, like a toadstool, keeps forcing its way to the surface in
this business. Among millions of
normal human beings professionally associated with the school adventure,
a small band of true believers has
been loose from the beginning, brothers and sisters whose eyes gleam in the dark, whose heartbeat
quickens at the prospect of acting as "change agents" for a purpose beyond self-interest.
For true believers, children are test
animals. The strongest belt in the engine of schooling is the strand of true belief. True
believers can be located by their rhetoric; it reveals a scale of philosophical imagination
which involves plans for you and me. All you need know about Mr. Laszlo, whose timeless faith song is cited in
the front of this book (xiii), is
that the "we" he joins himself to, the "masters who
manipulate," doesn't really include
the rest of us, except as objects of the exercise. Here is a true
believer in full gallop. School
history is crammed with wild-eyed orators, lurking just behind the lit stage.
Like Hugo Munsterberg.
Munsterberg was one
of the people who was in on the birth of twentieth-century mass schooling. In 1892, a recent emigre to
America from Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory of physiological psychology at Leipzig, in Saxony, he was a
Harvard Professor of Psychology.
Munsterberg taught his students to look at schools as social laboratories suitable for testing theory, not as
aggregates of young people pursuing their own purposes. The St. Louis Exposition of 1904 showcased his
ideas for academicians all
over the world, and the popular press made his notions familiar to upper
middle classes horrified by the
unfamiliar family ways of immigrants, eager to find ways to separate immigrant children from those alien
practices of their parents.
Munsterberg's particular obsession lay
in quantifying the mental and physical powers of the population for central government files, so policymakers
could manage the nation's
"human resources" efficiently. His students became leaders of
the "standardization"
crusade in America. Munsterberg was convinced that racial differences
could be reduced to numbers,
equally convinced it was his sacred duty to the Aryan race to do so. Aryanism crackled like static
electricity across the surface of American university life in those days, its implications part of
every corporate board game and government bureau initiative.
One of Munsterberg's
favorite disciples, Lillian Wald, became a powerful advocate of medical incursions into public schools.
The famous progressive social reformer wrote in 1905: "It is difficult to place a limit upon the
service which medical inspection should
perform," 1 continuing, "Is it not logical to conclude that
physical development. ..should so
far as possible be demanded?" One year later, immigrant public
schools in Manhattan began
performing tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies in school without notifying parents. The New York Times (June 29,
1906) reported that "Frantic Italians" — many armed with stilettos — "stormed"
three schools, attacking teachers and dragging children from the clutches of the true believers
into whose hands they had fallen. Think of the conscience which would ascribe to itself the right to
operate on children at official
discretion and you will know beyond a doubt what a true believer smells
like.
Even a cursory study of the history of
the school institution turns up true belief in rich abundance. In a famous book, The Proper Study of Mankind
(1948), paid for by the Carnegie
Corporation of New York and the Russell Sage Foundation, the favorite principle of true believers since Plato
makes an appearance: "A society could be completely made over in something like 15 years, the time it
takes to inculcate a new culture
into a rising group of youngsters." Despite the spirit of profound
violence hovering over such
seemingly bloodless, abstract formulas, this is indeed the will-o-the- wisp pursued throughout the twentieth
century in forced schooling — not intellectual development, not character development, but the inculcation
of a new synthetic culture in
children, one designed to condition its subjects to a continual
adjusting of their lives by unseen
authorities.
It's true that numerically, only a small
fraction of those who direct institutional schooling are actively aware of its ideological bent, but we need to
see that without consistent
generalship from that knowledgeable group in guiding things, the
evolution of schooling would long
ago have lost its coherence, degenerating into battles between swarms of economic and political interests
fighting over the treasure-house that hermetic pedagogy represents. One of the hardest things
to understand is that true believers — dedicated ideologues — are useful to all interests in the school stew
by providing a salutary continuity
to the enterprise.
Because of the predictable greed
embedded in this culture, some overarching "guardian" vision, one indifferent to material
gain, seems necessary to prevent marketplace chaos. True believers referee the school game, establishing its
goals, rules, penalties; they
negotiate and compromise with other stakeholders. And strangely enough,
above all else, they can be
trusted to continue being their predictable, dedicated, selfless selves. Pragmatic stakeholders need them to
keep the game alive; true believers need pragmatists as cover. Consider this impossibly melodramatic if you must.
I know myself that parts of my
story sound like leaves torn from Ragtime. But from start to finish this is a
tale of true believers and how by
playing on their pipes they took all the children away.
1
Forced medical inspection had been a prominent social theme in northern Germany
since at least 1750.
The Prototype Is A Schoolteacher
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