170.Cleaning The Canvas: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Cleaning
The Canvas
Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in
nature, individual destiny is written
somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a
true image shines forth.
Schooling, on the other hand, seeks a way to make
mind and character blank, so others may chisel the destiny
thereon.
Karl Popper's book The Open Society and
Its Enemies reveals with great clarity how old the idea of tabula rasa (erroneously attributed to John
Locke) actually is. In writing of
Plato's great Utopia, The Republic, Popper shows Socrates telling
auditors: "They will take as
their canvas a city and the characters of men, and they will, first of all,
make their canvas clean — by no
means an easy matter.... They will not start work on a city nor on an individual unless they are given a
clean canvas, or have cleaned it themselves." (emphasis added) Popper continues:
In the same spirit,
Plato says in The Statesman of the royal rulers who rule in accordance with the royal science of
statesmanship: "Whether they happen to rule by law or without law, over willing or unwilling
subjects;... whether they purge the state for its good by killing or banishing some of its
citizens — as long as they proceed according to science. ..this form of government must be declared the only
one that is right." This is
what canvas-cleaning means. He must eradicate existing institutions and
traditions. He must purify, purge,
expel, banish and kill.
Canvas-cleaning frees the individual of
all responsibility. Morality is voided, replaced by reinforcement schedules. In their most enlightened form,
theories of a therapeutic
community are those in which only positive reinforcements are
prescribed.
The therapeutic
community is as close as your nearest public school. In the article "Teacher as Therapist"
(footnote, pages 270-271), a glimpse of Emile programmed on a national scale is available. Its
innocently garrulous author paints a landscape of therapy, openly identifying schools as
behavioral training centers whose positive and negative reinforcement schedules are planned
cooperatively in advance, and each teacher is a therapist. Here everything is planned down to the smallest
"minimal recognition,"
nothing is accidental. Planned smiles or "stern looks,"
spontaneity is a weed to be
exterminated — you will remember the injunction to draw smiling faces on
every paper, "even at the
high school level."
An important support girder of
therapeutic community is a conviction that social order can be maintained by inducing students
to depend emotionally on the approval of
teachers. Horace Mann was thoroughly familiar with this principle. Here
are Mann's words on the
matter:
When a difficult
question has been put to a child, the Teacher approaches with a mingled look of concern and encouragement [even
minimal recognition requires planning, here you
have a primer of instructional text]; he stands before him, the light and shade
of hope and fear alternately
crossing his countenance. If the little wrestler triumphs, the Teacher felicitates him upon his success;
perhaps seizes and shakes him by the hand in token congratulation; and when the difficulty has been formidable
and the effort triumphant, I have
seen Teacher catch up the child and embrace him, as though he were not able
to contain his joy.. .and all this
done so naturally and so unaffectedly as to excite no other feeling in the residue of the children
than a desire, by the same means, to win the same caresses, (emphasis added)
Children were to be
"loved into submission; controlled with gestures, glances, tones of voice as if they were sensitive
machinery." What this passes for today is humanistic education, but the term has virtually
the same magnitude of disconnect from the historical humanism of the Erasmus/DeFeltre stripe (which honored the
mind and truly free choice) as
modern schooling is disconnected from any common understanding of the word education.
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