177.
Bending The Student To Reality: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Bending
The Student To Reality
Twice before, attempts had been made to
tell the story of an Armageddon ahead if the government penny-pinched on the funding of psychological
services. First was the great
feeble-mindedness panic which preceded and spanned the WWI
period, word
was spread from academic centers
that feeble-mindedness was rampant among Americans.
The "moron!"
"imbecile!" and "idiot!" insults which ricocheted around my
elementary school in the early
1940s were one legacy of this premature marketing campaign. During WWII, this drive to convince keepers of
the purse that the general population was a body needing permanent care was helped powerfully by a diffusion
of British psychological warfare
bureau reports stating that the majority of common British soldiers were
mentally deficient. Now that
notion (and its implied corrective, buying protection from psychologists) made inroads on American
managerial consciousness, producing monies to further study the retarded contingent among us.
Reading the text "Proceedings of
the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth," we learn that school has
"responsibility to detect mental disabilities which have escaped parental or pre-school
observation." Another huge duty it had was the need to "initiate all necessary health
services through various agencies." Still another, to provide "counseling services for
all individuals at all age levels."
The classic line in the entire massive
document is, "Not only does the child need to be treated but those around him also need help." A
hospital society was needed to care for all the morons, idiots, and mental
defectives science had discovered lurking among the sane. It would need school as its diagnostic clinic and
principal referral service. Western
religious teaching — that nobody can escape personal responsibility —
was chased from the field by
Wundt's minimalist outlook on human nature as mechanism. A complex process was then set in motion which could not
fail to need forced instruction to complete itself.
The NIMH used the deliberations of the
1950 conference to secure government funding for an enormous five-year study of the mental health of the
nation, a study conducted by the
very people whose careers would be enhanced by any official determination that
the nation faced grave problems
from its morons and other defectives. Can you guess what the final document said?
"Action for
Mental Health" proposed that school curriculum "be designed to bend
the student to the realities of
society." It should be "designed to promote mental health as an instrument for social progress,"
and as a means of "altering culture."
What factors inhibit mental health that
are directly in the hands of school authorities to change? Just these: expectations that children should be
held responsible for their actions,
expectations that it is important for all children to develop
intelligence, the misperceived
need to assign some public stigma when children lagged behind a common
standard. New protocols were
issued, sanctions followed. The network of teachers colleges, state education departments, supervisory
associations, grant-making bodies, and national media inoculated the learning system with these ideas, and
local managers grew fearful of
punishment for opposition.
In 1962, an NIMH-sponsored report,
"The Role of Schools in Mental Health," stated unambiguously, "Education does not
mean teaching people to know." (emphasis added) What then? "It means teaching them to behave as they do
not behave," a clear echo of the
Rockefeller Foundation's "dream" from an earlier part of the
century (See page 45). Schools
were behavioral engineering plants; what remained was to convince kids and parents there was no place to hide.
The report was featured at the 1962
Governor's Conference, appearing along with a proclamation calling on all states to fund these new school
programs and use every state
agency to further the work. Provisions were discussed to overturn
resistance on the part of parents;
tough cases, it was advised, could be subjected to multiple pressures
around the clock until they
stopped resisting. Meanwhile, alarming statistics were circulated about the rapid growth of mental
illness within society.
The watershed moment when modern
schooling swept all competition from the field was the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in
1965 (ESEA). The Act allocated
substantial federal funds to psychological and psychiatric programs in
school, opening the door to a full
palette of "interventions" by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, agencies, and various
specialists. All were invited to use the schoolhouse as a satellite office, in urban ghettos, as
a primary office. Now it was the law.
Along the way to this
milestone, important way stations were reached beyond the scope of this book to list. The strand I've
shown is only one of many in the tapestry. The psychological goals of this project and the quality of mind
in back of them are caught fairly
in the keynote address to the 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar
in Boulder, Colorado, delivered by
Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce. This quote appears to have been edited out of printed transcripts of the
talk, but was reported by
newspapers in actual attendance:
Every child in America
entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to
our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being,
and toward the sovereignty of this
nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick
children well — by creating the
international child of the future.
Perhaps it's only a fortuitous
coincidence that in the ongoing psychologization of schools from 1903 onwards, the single most
prominent thread — the nearly universal prescription for better-ment offered by every agency, analyst, and
spokesperson for mental health —
has been the end of competition in every aspect of training and the
substitution of cooperation and
intergroup, interpersonal harmony. In Utopia, everyone has a fixed place. Envy and ambition are unwelcome, at
least among the common classes. The prescription should sound familiar, we've encountered it before as the
marching orders of the Prussian
volksschulen. Unfortunately we know only too well how that Pestalozzian
story ended.
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