157. The Machine Gun Builds Hotchkiss: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Machine Gun Builds Hotchkiss
The widow of the man who
perfected the machine gun founded the Hotchkiss School; a Lowell and a Forbes funded Middlesex;
the DuPonts were the patrons of Kent; St.
George's was underwritten by the Brown family whose name graces Brown
University; Choate looked to the
Mellon family for generous checks; J. P. Morgan was behind Groton. Over 90 percent of the great
American private boarding schools issued from that short period just after Herbert Spencer's American visit in
1882 and just before the indirect
edict to the National Education Association that it must play ball with the
de- intellectualization of public
schooling, or it would be abandoned by America's business leadership.
Elite private
boarding schools were an important cornerstone in the foundation of a permanent American upper class whose
children were to be socialized for power. They were great schools for the Great Race, intended to forge a
collective identity among children
of privilege, training them to be bankers, financiers, partners in law
firms, corporate directors,
negotiators of international treaties and contracts, patrons of the arts, philanthropists, directors of welfare
organizations, members of advisory panels, government elites, and business elites.
Michael Useem's post-WWII study showed
that just thirteen elite boarding schools
educated 10 percent of all the directors of large American business
corporations, and 15 percent of
all the directors who held three or more directorships. These schools collectively graduated fewer than one
thousand students a year. More spectacular pedagogy than that is hard to imagine.
In England, the pioneer feminist
Victoria Woodhull published The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit. And in the States, Edward A. Ross, trained in
Germany — University of Wisconsin
pioneer of American sociology — was writing The Old World in the New, saying that "beaten members of
beaten breeds" would destroy us unless placed under control. They were
"subhuman." Ross was joined by virtually every leading social scientist of his generation in warning
about the ill effects of blood pollution: Richard Ely, William Z. Ripley, Richard Mayo Smith,
John R. Commons, Davis Dewey, Franklin
Giddings, and many more. None disagreed with Ross. Morons were
multiplying. The government had to
be made aware of the biological consequences of social policy.
But while beaten members of beaten
breeds had to be zipped up tight in isolation, ward schools and neighborhoods of their own, watched over by
social gospelers, settlement houses, and social workers trained in the
new social science, a new American social
dimension was being created from scratch in which the best people could
associate freely, could rear
children properly, could reap rewards they deserved as the most advanced class on the evolutionary tree. That
was not only justice, it was prudent preparation for an even better biological future.
The way the new
shadow society, a universe parallel to the one everyone else could see, had to operate after it had first
constructed for itself a theory of establishment and a theology of caste, was by creating a
new social structure, corporate in nature, in which man was progressively defined by those with whom he
affiliated, his synthetic,
associational tribe — not by his independent talents and
accomplishments. If these
affiliations were only local, then status was correspondingly
diminished; the trick was to
progressively graduate to memberships which had regional, national, or
even international status, and
this associational prestige would then be transferred to the individual. What a perfect way of
keeping out the riffraff and porch monkeys this would prove to be!
It was no idle boast,
nor was the statement a simple expression of snobbery, when John Lupton, director of development at the
Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, said, "There is no door in this entire country that cannot be
opened by a Choate graduate. I can
go anywhere in this country and anywhere there's a man I want to see...
I can find a Choate man to open
that door for me," The crucial variables in identifying the right people in the new exclusionary America
no longer included high-profile expressions of superiority. What they did include were: 1) Membership in
the right metropolitan clubs. 2)
An address in the right neighborhoods. 3) A degree from the right college. 4)
A membership in the right country
club. 5) Attendance at the right summer resorts. 6) Attendance at the right churches. 7) Passage through the
right private schools. 8) An
invitation to the right hereditary association. 9) Involvement in the
right charities. 10) Trusteeships,
boards, advisory councils. 1 1) The right marriages, alliances, a social register listing. 12) Money, manners,
style, physical beauty, health, conversation.
I've made no attempt to enter subtleties
of gradation, only to indicate how the ephors behind public schooling and virtually all significant
decision-making in modern American
society created, quite self-consciously, a well-regulated world within a
world for themselves. Provision
was made to allow some movement up from other classes. Clubs, for instance, were also agencies
for assimilating men of talent and their families into an upper-class way of life and social
organization.
If we are unwilling
to face how very far-reaching the effects of this American establishment are to schoolchildren,
there is just no good way to think about school reform. 5 Darwin's evolutionary racism, Galton's
mathematical racism, Maine's
anthropological racism, Anglican theological racism/classism, all are
deeply embedded in the structure
of mass schooling and the economy it serves. They cannot he extirpated by rational discussion; these viruses are
carried by institutional structures not amenable to social discussion.
5 NeIson W. Aldrich, grandson of
Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island, who was one of the principal architectsof the
Federal Reserve system, put it
this way in his book Old Money: "Membership in this patriciate
brought with it much besides wealth, of course: complete domination of all educational and cultural institutions,
ownership and control of the news media [and a variety of other assets]."
Direct and indirect domination of
the forced schooling mechanism by the patriciate has never been adequately explored,
perhaps owing to its ownership of both the tools of research (in the colleges) and the tools of dissemination
(in the media).
Fountains Of Business Wealth
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