149. Soldiers For Their Class: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Soldiers
For Their Class
These buried seeds
sent up no more than stunted shoots until the late nineteenth century, when skillfully induced mass
immigration — cheap Catholic labor by the boatload — triggered a perceived need for emergency social action
on an
Anglican model. At that moment, casting
about for a blueprint of order in the disturbing period of mass immigration, the new industrial and
commercial elites discarded existing American models: the tentative intellectual meritocracy of the
Unitarians, the rude nepotism of the
Presbyterians, the libertarian democracy of the General Baptists, the
proud
communitarianism of Congregationalists and Quakers, the religiously
centered communities of the
pietists; all had to give way since all were both local and particular forms. None could accommodate a general
habit of rule from afar very well. None was able to maintain tight enough class discipline.
Congregationalists were closest to this
ideal, but even they had radically weakened their own theological
discipline with the Half-Way
Covenant and then thoroughly liberalized themselves in the Second Great Awakening after 1795. None of these
forms would do as a universal blueprint of stable government.
Only one acceptable discipline had for
centuries proven itself under fire, able to bend diverse, distant, and hostile peoples to its organization,
and that was the Anglican
Communion. In India, Africa, Asia, Canada, wherever the British flag
flew, it had been capable of the
hard decisions necessary to maintain a subordinated order and protect the privileges which accrue to those who
manage the subordinate classes.
Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell cast a great deal of light
on the Anglican temper in their
book Preparing For Power: America 's Elite Boarding Schools, particularly
the turn-of-the-century period,
which saw the creation of almost all of the 289 boarding schools that matter:
The difference between a public school
and an elite private school is, in one sense, the difference between factory and club. Public schools are
evaluated on how good a product
they turn out, and the measure of quality control is inevitably an
achievement score of some kind..
..[but] to compare public and private schools in terms of output really
misses the point. 2
Cookson and Persell,
searching for reasons to explain the need for total institutions to train the young, concluded: "The
shared ordeal of the prep rites of passage create bonds of loyalty that differences in
background cannot unravel."
Collective identity
forged in prep schools becomes the basis of upper-class solidarity and consciousness, but sharing alone will
not preserve or enhance a class's interest. As a group, members must be willing to exercise their power:
The preservation of privilege requires
the exercise of power, and those who exercise it cannot be too squeamish about the injuries that any ensuing
conflict imposes on the losers.
...The founders of the schools recognized that unless their sons and grandsons
were willing to take up the
struggle for the preservation of their class interests, privilege would slip from the hands of the elite and
eventually power would pass to either a competing elite or to a rising underclass.
Private school
students are enlisted as soldiers for their class, like Viking rowers,
tough, loyal to each other,
"ready to take command without self-doubt." Cookson and Persell say currently, "Boarding schools
were not founded to produce Hamlets, but Dukes of Wellington. The whole point of status seminaries is the
destruction of innocence. ..not its
preservation."
I hope this illuminates those esoteric
membership requirements of the Daughters a bit. Whatever your personal outlook on such matters, you need to
take seriously the creation of
over a hundred new hereditary associations, associations with all the birthmarks
of secret societies, which
gestated and came to term in the decades froml870 to 1900 (or just outside that narrow compass), each
designed that it might in a perfectly orderly, fair way, free of any emotional bias, exclude all unwanted
breeding stock by the application
of hereditary screening and at the same time concentrate biological and
social excellence. In the same
time frame, five of the Seven Sisters — the female Ivy League — opened
their doors for the first time,
concentrating the future motherhood of a new race for its class inoculation.
2.
"The inner ring of these schools, which sets the standard for the rest,
includes these eighteen: Groton, St. Paul's, Deerfield, Gunnery, Choate, Middlesex, Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss,
St. George's, Kent, Hill, Episcopal High (not Episcopal Prep!), Andover,
Exeter, Culver Military, Milton
Academy, St. Marks, Woodberry Forest, and perhaps one or two more. About
52 percent of the elite boarding schools are connected with the Episcopal Church and 5 percent with the
Quaker faith.
Organizing Caste
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