171.Therapy
As Curriculum: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Therapy
As Curriculum
To say that various psychologies dominate modern
schooling is hardly to plow new
ground. The tough thing to do is to show how that happened and why — and
how the project progresses to its
unseen goals. The Atlantic Monthly had this to say
in April 1993:
...schools have
turned to therapeutic remediation. A growing proportion of many school budgets is devoted to counseling and
other psychological services. The curriculum is becoming more therapeutic: children are taking courses in
self-esteem, conflict resolution,
and aggression management. Parental advisory groups are conscientiously debating alternative approaches to
traditional school discipline, ranging from teacher training in mediation to the introduction of metal detectors
and security guards in the
schools. Schools are increasingly becoming emergency rooms of the
emotions, devoted. ..to repairing
hearts. What we are seeing. ...is the psychologization of American education.
Two years before I
ran across that Atlantic broadside, I encountered a different analysis in the financial magazine Forbes. I was
surprised to discover Forbes had correctly tracked the closest inspiration for school psychologizing,
both its aims and its techniques,
to the pedagogy of China and the Soviet Union. Not similar practices and
programs, mind you, identical
ones. The great initial link with Russia, I knew, had been from the Wundtian Ivan Pavlov, but the Chinese
connection was news to me. I was unaware then of John Dewey's tenure there in the 1920s, and had given no
thought, for that reason, to its
possible significance:
The techniques of brainwashing developed
in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school
children. These include emotional
shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of
support, stripping away defenses,
manipulative cross-examination of the individual's underlying moral values by psychological rather
than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs.
..they are not isolated idiosyncracies of
particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other
educational materials in programs
packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers. Some
packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away
psychological defenses can be done
through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions,
and through role- playing
assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao.
The Forbes writer,
Thomas Sowell, perhaps invoking the slave states in part to rouse the reader's capitalist dander, could
hardly have been aware himself how carefully industrial and institutional interest had seeded
Russia, China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands with the doctrine of psychological schooling
long ago, nearly at the beginning of the century, and in Japan's case even before that. All along we have
harvested these experimental growths
in foreign soil for what they seem to prove about people-shaping.
For example, the current push for
School-to-Work deep mines specific practices of the former Soviet Union, even to the point of using identical
language from Soviet texts.
School-to-Work was a project installed in Russia by Americans in the
1920s to test the advice of the
nineteenth-century Swiss aristocrat von Fellenberg that manual labor
should be combined with academic
schooling. Fellenberg's doctrine was a short-lived fad in this country in the 1830s, but ever after it
had a place in the mind of certain men of affairs and social theorists. The opportunity afforded by Russia's chaos
after WWI seemed too promising to
pass up.
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