176. What
Is Sanity?: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
What
Is Sanity?
What we today call the science of child development grew out
of the ambition of G. Stanley
Hall, Wundt's first assistant at Leipzig, Dewey's mentor at Hopkins, and a
man with a titanic ego. Hall
inserted the word "adolescence" into
the American vocabulary in 1904. If you wonder what happened to
this class before they were so labeled, you can reflect on the experience of Washington, Franklin, Farragut,
and Carnegie, who couldn't spare
the time to be children any longer than necessary. Hall, a fantastic pitchman,
laid the groundwork for a host of
special disciplines from child development to mental testing.
Hall told all who
listened that the education of the child was the most important task of the race, our primary mission, and the
new science of psychology could swiftly transform the race into what it should be. Hall may never have done a
single worthwhile scientific
experiment in his life but he understood that Americans could be sold a
sizzle without the steak. Thanks
in large measure to Hall's trumpet, an edifice of child development rose out of the funding of psychological
laboratories in the early 1900s during the famous Red Scare period.
In 1924, the Child Welfare Institute
opened at Teachers College, underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. Another was opened in 1927 at the
University of California. Generous
donations for the study of all phases of child growth and development
poured into the hands of
researchers from the largest foundations. Thirty- five years later, during what might be thought of as the
nation's fourth Red Scare, the moment the Soviets beat America into space, the U.S. Education
Office presided over a comprehensive infiltration of teacher training and schools." Judiciously applied
funds and arm-twisting made certain
these staging areas would pay proper attention to the psychological
aspect of schooling.
Dewey, Hall, Thorndike, Cattell,
Goddard, Russell, and all the other intellectual step- children of Wundt and the homeless mind
he stood for, set out to change the conception of what constitutes education. They got powerful assistance
from great industrial foundations
and their house universities like Teachers College. Under the direction of James Earl Russell, president (and head
of the psychology department), Teachers College came to boast training where "psychology stands
first." Wherever Columbia graduates
went this view went with them.
The brand-new profession of psychiatry
flocked to the banner of this new philosophy of psychological indoctrination as a proper government
activity, perhaps sensing that
business and status could flow from the connection if it were
authoritatively established. In
1927, Ralph Truitt, head of the then embryonic Division of Child Guidance
Clinics for the Psychiatric Association,
wrote that "the school should be the focus of the attack."
The White House
appeared in the picture like a guardian angel watching over the efforts this frail infant was making to stand.
In 1930, twelve hundred child development
"experts" were invited to the White House Conference on Child
Health and Protection, an event
with no precedent. One primary focus of attendees was the role
"failure" played as a
principal source of children's problems. The echo of Rousseau was unmistakable.
No attempt was made to examine how
regularly prominent Americans like Washington or successful businessmen like Carnegie had surmounted early
failure. Instead, a plan to
eliminate failure structurally from formal schooling was considered and
endorsed — failure could be
eliminated if schools were converted into laboratories of life adjustment and intellectual standards were
muted.
By 1948, the concept of collective (as
opposed to individual) mental health was
introduced at an international meeting in Britain to discuss the use of
schools as an instrument to
promote mental health. But what was mental health? What did a fully sane man or woman look like? Out of this
conference in the U.K. two psychiatrists, J.R. Rees and G. Brock Chisholm, leveraged a profitable new
organization for themselves — the
World Federation for Mental Health. It claimed expertise in preventative
measures and pinpointed the
training of children as the proper point of attack:
The training of
children is making a thousand neurotics for every one psychiatrists can hope to help with psychotherapy.
Chisholm knew what caused the problem in
childhood; he knew how to fix it, too:
The only lowest
common denominator of all civilizations and the only psychological force capable of producing these
perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong.
Shakespeare and the Vikings had been
right; there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. Morality was the problem. With WWII behind us
and everything adrift, a perfect
opportunity to rebuild social life in school and elsewhere — on a new
amoral, scientific logic — was
presenting itself:
We have swallowed all manner of
poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our
priests, our newspapers.... The
results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis
and inability to enjoy living....
If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must
be psychiatrists who take the
original responsibility.
Old Norse pragmatism, the philosophy
most likely to succeed among upper-crust thinkers in the northeastern United States, was reasserting itself as
global psychiatry.
The next advance in
pedagogy was the initiative of a newly formed governmental body, the National Institutes of Mental
Health (NIMH). In 1950, it arranged the White House Conference on Education to warn that a psychological
time-bomb was ticking inside the
schools. An epidemic of mental insufficiency was said to be loose among
Americans, imperiling the advances
that industry and the arts had given America. Barbarians were already through the gates and among us
13. 'The
story of the BSTEP document and the Delphi Technique, two elements in this
initiative, is told in Beverly
Eakman's Educating for the New World Order, by a former Department of Justice
employee. The book offers an
accessible, if somewhat breathless, passage into the shadow world of intrigue
and corporate shenanigans behind
the scenes of schooling. Also worth a look (and better edited) is Eakman's
Cloning of the American Mind.
Whatever you think of her research, Miss Eakman rums over some rocks you will
find useful.
No comments:
Post a Comment