180. Spirits Are Dangerous: The Underground History
of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Spirits
Are Dangerous
The net effect of
holding children in confinement for twelve years without honor paid to the spirit is a compelling
demonstration that the State considers the Western spiritual tradition dangerous, subversive. And of
course it is.
School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a
class structure, an intricate system
of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous
low level of discontent upon which
mass production and finance rely.
Once the mechanism is
identified, its dynamics aren't hard to understand. Spiritually contented people are dangerous for a
variety of reasons. They don't make reliable servants because they won't jump at every command. They test
what is requested against a code
of moral principle. Those who are spiritually secure can't easily be driven
to sacrifice family relations.
Corporate and financial capitalism are hardly possible on any massive scale once a population finds
its spiritual center.
For a society like
ours to work, we need to feel that something is fundamentally wrong when we can't continually "do
better" — expand our farms and businesses, win a raise, take exotic vacations. This is the way
our loan/repayment cycle — the credit economy — is sustained. The human tendency to simply enjoy work and
camaraderie among workers is
turned into a race to outdo colleagues, to climb employment ladders.
Ambition is a trigger of corporate
life and at the same time an acid that dissolves communities. By spreading contentment on the cheap,
spirituality was a danger to the new economy's natural growth principle. So in a sense it was rational
self-interest, not conspiracy, that
drove enlightened men to agree in their sporting places, drawing rooms,
and clubs that religious activity
would have to be dampened down.
What they couldn't see is that through
substitution of schooling for Bible religion, they were sawing through two of the four main social supports of
Western civilization. Think of
your dining room table; it was like breaking two of its legs off, replacing one
with a tall stack of dishes and
one with a large dog. The top of the table would look the same covered in cloth but it wouldn't be a
good bet to get you through dinner. A century earlier, Hamilton and Jefferson had speculated whether it
might be possible to replace
religion with a civil substitute. The heady ideas of the French
Revolution were on everybody's
lips. A civil substitute built on expanding the humble grassroots
institution of schooling might
well free leaders from the divided loyalty religion imposes. Could an ethical system based on law produce the
same quality of human society as a moral system based on divine inspiration? Jefferson was skeptical.
Despite his fears, the experiment
was soon to be tried.
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