163.
Elasticity: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
Elasticity
Among structural engineers, the terms
plastic and elastic describe propensities of material; these are concepts which can also be brought to
bear on the question whether human
nature is built out of accidents of experience or
whether there is some divine
inner spark in all of us that
makes each person unique and self-determining. As you decide, the schools which march forward from your
decision are predestined. Immanuel Kant thought both conditions possible, a
strong, continuous effort of will tipping the balance.
In structural
engineering, implications of the original builder/creator's decision are inescapable; constructions like bridges
and skyscrapers do have an inner nature given them by the materials chosen and the shapes imposed, an
integrity long experience has
allowed us to profile. The structure will defend this integrity,
resisting wind stress, for
example, which threatens to change its shape permanently.
When stress increases dangerously as it
would in a hurricane, the building material becomes elastic, surrendering part of its integrity
temporarily to protect the rest,
compromising to save its total character in the long run. When the wind
abates the urge to resume the
original shape becomes dominant and the bridge or building relaxes back to normal. A human analogy is that we
remember who we are in school even when coerced to act like somebody else. In engineering, this integrity of
memory is called elastic behavior.
Actors practice deliberate elasticity and the Chechens or the Hmong
express remarkable group
elasticity. After violent stresses abate, they remember who they are.
But another road exists. To end
unbearable stress, material has a choice of surrendering its memory. Under continued stress,
material can become plastic, losing its elasticity and changing its shape permanently. Watch
your own kids as their schooling progresses. Are they like Chechens with a fierce personal integrity and an
inner resilience? Or under the
stress of the social laboratory of schooling, have they become plastic
over time, kids you hardly
recognize, kids who've lost their original integrity?
In
the collapse of a bridge or building in high wind, a decisive turning point is
reached when the structure
abandons its nature and becomes plastic. Trained observers can tell when elasticity is fading because prior
to the moment of collapse, the structure cannot regain its original shape. It loses its spirit, taking on
new and unexpected shapes in a
struggle to resist further change. When this happens it is wordlessly
crying HELP ME! HELP ME! just as
so many kids did in all the schools in which I ever taught.
The most important task I assigned
myself as a schoolteacher was helping kids regain their integrity, but I lost many, their desperate,
last-ditch resistance giving way, their
integrity shattering before my horrified eyes. Look back in memory at
your kids before first grade, then
fast forward to seventh. Have they disintegrated into warring fragments divided against themselves? Don't
believe anyone who tells you that's natural human development.
If there are no absolutes, as
pragmatists like Dewey assert, then human nature must be plastic. Then the spirit can be
successfully deformed from its original shape and will have no sanctuary in which to resist
institutional stamping. The Deweys further assert that human nature processed this way is able
to perform efficiently what is asked of it later on by society. Escaping our original identity will actually
improve most of us, they say. This
is the basic hypothesis ofutopia-building, that the structure
ofpersonhood can be broken and
reformed again and again for the better.
Plasticity is the
base on which scientific psychology must stand if it is to be
prescriptive, and if not
prescriptive, who needs it? Finding an aggressive, instrumental psychology associated with schooling is a sure
sign empty-child attitudes aren't far away. The notion of empty children has origins predating
psychology, of course, but the most important engine reshaping American schools into socialization
laboratories, 1 after Wundt, was the
widely publicized work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
who had been a student of Wundt at
Leipzig. Pavlov won the Nobel in 1904, credited with discovering the conditioned reflex whereby systems
of physical function thought to be fixed biologically, like the salivation of dogs, could be rewired
to irrelevant outside stimuli,
like bells ringing.
This had immense influence on the spread
of behavioral psychology into government
agencies and corporate boardrooms, for it seemed to herald the discovery
of master wiring diagrams which
could eventually bring the entire population under control of physiological psychology.
Pavlov became the
most prestigious ally of the behavioral enterprise with his Nobel. His text The Conditioned Reflexes (1926)
provided a sacred document to be waved at
skeptics, and his Russian nationality aided immeasurably, harmonizing
well with the long romance
American intellectuals had with the Soviet Union. Even today Pavlov is a
name to conjure with. Russian
revolutionary experimentation allowed the testing of what was possible to go much further and faster
than could have happened in America and western Europe.
Notions of emptiness turn the pedestrian
problem of basic skills schooling into the complex political question of which outside agencies with
particular agendas to impose will
be allowed to write the curriculum. And there are nuances. For instance, the
old- fashioned idea of an empty
container suggests a hollow to be filled, an approach not unfamiliar to people who went to school
before 1960. But plastic emptiness is a different matter. It might lead to an armory of tricks designed to fix,
distract, and motivate the subject
to cooperate in its own transformation — the new style commonly found in
public schools after 1960. The
newer style has given rise to an intricately elaborated theory of incentives capable of assisting
managers to work their agenda on the managed. Only a few years ago, almost every public-school teacher in the
country had to submit a list of
classroom motivation employed, to be inspected by school managers.
1. The
whole concept of "socialization" has been the subject of a large
library of books and may beconsidered to occupy an honored role as one of the most important ongoing studies
(and debates) in modern history. In shorthand, what socialization is concerned
with from a political standpoint
is the discovery and application of a system of domination which does not
involve physical coercion. Coercion (as Hegel is thought to have proven) will inevitably provoke
the formation of a formidable counter-force, in time overthrowing the coercive
force. The fall of the Soviet
Union might be taken as an object lesson.
Before Hegel, for 250 years along with
other institutions of that society the state church of England was a diligent
student of socialization. The
British landowning class was a great university of understanding how to
proceed adversarially against restive groups without overt signs of intimidation, and the learnings of this
class were transmitted to America. For example, during the second great
enclosure movement which ended in
1875, with half of all British agricultural land in the hands of just two
thousand people, owners maintained social and political control over even the smallest everyday affairs
of the countryside and village. Village halls were usually under control of the
Church of England whose clergy
were certifiably safe, its officials doubling as listening posts among the
population. All accommodations suitable for meetings were under direct or indirect control of the
landed interests. It was almost impossible for any sort of activity to take
place unless it met with the
approval of owners.
Lacking a long tradition of upper-class solidarity, the
United States had to distill lessons from England and elsewhere with a science
of public opinion control whose
ultimate base was the new schools. Still, before schooling could be brought
efficiently to that purpose, much time had to pass during which other initiatives in socialization were
tried. One of these, the control of print sources of information, is
particularly instructive.
After the Rockefeller
disaster in the coal fields of southeastern Colorado in April of 1914, ordinary
counter-publicity was insufficient to stem the tide of attacks on corporate America coming from mass
circulation magazines such as Leslie 's Illustrated Weekly, McClures 's, Everybody 's, Success, Hampton 's,
Collier 's, The Arena, The Masses, and others. A counterattack was launched to
destroy the effectiveness of the
magazines: West Virginia Pulp and Paper bought McClure 's, Butterick Patterns
bought Everybody 's, bankers folded Success by calling in its loans and ordered the editors of
Collier 's to change its editorial policies, the distributor of Arena informed
the publisher that unsold copies
would no longer be returned, and Max Eastman's Masses was doomed by the
passage of legislation enabling the postmaster to remove any publication from the mails at his own
discretion. Through these and similar measures, the press and magazines of the
United States had been fairly
effectively muzzled by 1915 with not a single printing press broken by labor
goons. These midrange steps in the socialization of American society can best be seen as exposing the will to
homogenize at work in this country once the entire economy had been
corporatized.
Emptiness:
The Master Theory
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