93. The Technology Of Subjection: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archve.org
The
Technology Of Subjection
Administrative
Utopias are a peculiar kind of dreaming by those in power, driven by an urge to arrange the lives of others,
organizing them for production, combat, or detention. The operating principles of administrative Utopia are
hierarchy, discipline, regimentation,
strict order, rational
planning, a geometrical environment, a production
line, a cellblock, and a form of welfarism.
Government schools and some private schools pass such parameters with flying colors. In one sense, administrative
Utopias are laboratories for
exploring the technology of subjection and as such belong to a precise subdivision
of pornographic art: total
surveillance and total control of the helpless. The aim and mode of administrative Utopia is to bestow
order and assistance on an unwilling population: to provide its clothing and food. To schedule it. In a masterpiece
of cosmic misjudgment, the
phrenologist George Combe wrote Horace Mann on November 14, 1843:
The Prussian and Saxon governments by means of their schools
and their just laws and rational
public administration are doing a good deal to bring their people into a
rational and moral condition. It
is pretty obvious to thinking men that a few years more of this cultivation will lead to the
development of free institutions in Germany.
Earlier that year, on
May 21, 1843, Mann had written to Combe: "I want to find out what are the results, as well as the
workings of the famous Prussian system." Just three years earlier, with the election of Marcus
Morton as governor of Massachusetts, a serious challenge had been presented to Mann and to his Board of
Education and the air of
Prussianism surrounding it and its manufacturer/politician friends. A
House committee was directed to
look into the new Board of Education and its plan to undertake a teachers college with $10,000 put up by
industrialist Edmund Dwight. Four days after its assignment, the majority reported out a bill to kill the
board! Discontinue the Normal
School experiment, it said, and give Dwight his money back:
If then the Board has any actual power, it is a dangerous
power, touching directly upon the
rights and duties of the Legislature; if it has no power, why continue its
existence at an annual expense to
the commonwealth?
But the House
committee did more; it warned explicitly that this board, dominated by a Unitarian majority of 7-5 (although
Unitarians comprised less than 1 percent of the state), really wanted to install a Prussian system of
education in Massachusetts, to put "a monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary in every respect
to the true spirit of our
democratical institutions." The vote of the House on this was the
single greatest victory of Mann's
political career, one for which he and his wealthy friends called in every
favor they were owed. The result
was 245 votes to continue, 1 82 votes to discontinue, and so the House voted to overturn the
recommendations of its own committee. A 32-vote swing might have given us a much different twentieth century than
the one we saw.
Although Mann's own letters and diaries
are replete with attacks on orthodox religionists as enemies of government schooling, an examination of the
positive vote reveals that from
the outset the orthodox churches were among Mann's staunchest allies. Mann
had general support from
Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist clergymen. At this early stage they were completely unaware of
the doom secular schooling would spell out for their denominations. They had been seduced into believing
school was a necessary insurance
policy to deal with incoming waves of Catholic immigration from Ireland
and Germany, the cheap labor army
which as early as 1830 had been talked about in business circles and eagerly anticipated as an
answer to America's production problems.
The reason Germany, and not England,
provided the original model for America's essay into compulsion schooling may be that Mann, while in
Britain, had had a shocking
experience in English class snobbery which left him reeling. Boston
Common, he wrote, with its rows of
mottled sycamore trees, gravel walks, and frog ponds was downright embarrassing compared with any number
of stately English private grounds furnished with stag and deer, fine arboretums of botanical specimens
from faraway lands, marble floors
better than the table tops at home, portraits, tapestries, giant gold-frame
mirrors. The ballroom in the
Bulfmch house in Boston would be a butler's pantry in England, he wrote. When Mann visited Stafford House
of the Duke of Cumberland, he went into
culture shock:
Convicts on treadmills
provide the energy to pump water for fountains. I have seen equipages, palaces, and the regalia of
royalty side by side with beggary, squalidness, and degradation in which the very features of humanity were
almost lost in those of the brute.
For this great
distinction between the stratified orders of society, Mann held the
Anglican church to blame.
"Give me America with all its rawness and want. We have aristocracy enough at home and here I trace its
foundations." Shocked from his English experience, Mann virtually willed that Prussian
schools would provide him with answers, says his biographer Jonathan Messerli.
Mann arrived in
Prussia when its schools were closed for vacation. He toured empty classrooms, spoke with authorities,
interviewed vacationing schoolmasters, and read piles of dusty official reports. Yet from this nonexperience he
claimed to come away with a strong
sense of the professional competence of Prussian teachers! All
"admirably qualified and full
of animation!" His wife Mary, of the famous Peabodys, wrote home: "We have not seen a teacher with a
book in his hand in all Prussia; no, not one!" (emphasis added) This wasn't surprising, for they hardly saw
teachers at all.
Equally impressive, he wrote, was the
wonderful obedience of children; these German kinder had "innate respect for superior years."
The German teacher corps? "The finest collection of men I have ever seen — full of intelligence,
dignity, benevolence, kindness and
bearing...." Never, says Mann, did he witness "an instance of
harshness and severity. All is
kind, encouraging, animating, sympathizing." On the basis of imagining
this miraculous vision of exactly
the Prussia he wanted to see, Mann made a special plea for changes in the teaching of reading. He
criticized the standard American practice of beginning with the alphabet and moving to syllables, urging
his readers to consider the
superior merit of teaching entire words from the beginning. "I am
satisfied," he said, "our
greatest error in teaching lies in beginning with the
alphabet."
The heart of Mann's
most famous Report to the Boston School Committee, the legendary Seventh, rings a familiar theme in
American affairs. It seems even then we were falling behind! This time, behind the Prussians in education. In
order to catch up, it was
mandatory to create a professional corps of teachers and a systematic
curriculum, just as the Prussians
had. Mann fervently implored the board to accept his prescription... while there was still time! The note of
hysteria is a drum roll sounding throughout Mann's entire career; together with the
vilification of his opponents, it constitutes much of Mann's spiritual signature.
That fall, the
Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools published its 150-page rebuttal of Mann's Report. It attacked
the normal schools proposal as a vehicle for propaganda for Mann's "hot bed theories, in which the
projectors have disregarded
experience and observation." It belittled his advocacy of
phrenology and charged Mann with
attempting to excite the prejudices of the ignorant. Its second attack was
against the teacher-centered
nonbook presentations of Prussian classrooms, insisting the psychological result of these was to
break student potential "for forming the habit of independent and individual
effort." The third attack was against the "word method" in teaching reading, and in defense of the
traditional alphabet method. Lastly, it attacked Mann's belief that interest was a better motivator to
learning than discipline: "Duty
should come first and pleasure should grow out of the discharge of
it." Thus was framed a
profound conflict between the old world of the Puritans and the new
psychological strategy of the
Germans.
The
German/American Reichsbank
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