182. Codes Of Meaning: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Codes Of Meaning
This unique moral chronicle led to
an everyday behavioral code which worked so well that in a matter of centuries it became the dominant
perspective of Europe, and soon it
made inroads into every belief system across the planet. But the sheer
extent of its success caused it to run afoul of
three other competing systems for producing meaning, each of which held common people in contempt or worse.
These competing codes viewed Christianity antagonistically because
of its power to liberate ordinary people from the bondage of fear and envy. Those competing codes of meaning gave us formal
schooling, public and private. The
first competitor, the aristocratic code, comes out of pagan traditions.
It is still the philosophy taught
in upper-class boarding schools like Middlesex and Gunnery, and through home training and particular
class institutions. Its operating principles are leadership, sportsmanship, courage, disdain for hardship,
team play, self-sacrifice (for the
team), and devotion to duty — as noble traditions define duty. The
boardrooms of certain global
corporations are one of the great preserves of this exclusive but
universally attractive pagan
attitude.
The second code in competition with
Christianity was taken from the practice of great commercial civilizations like the Hanseatic League of
medieval times or the society of
Holland in the seventeenth century. This behavioral code makes security,
comfort, health, and wealth the
central purpose of life. The main thrust of this kind of seeking is
radically anti-Christian, but the
contradiction isn't obvious when the two come into contact because commercial cultures emphasize
peaceful coexistence, tolerance, cooperation, and pragmatism. They reject the value of pain, and take
principled behavior with a grain of
salt, everything being relative to security and prosperity. Pragmatism
is the watchword.
The wealth that a commercial
perspective delivers produced a dilemma for Puritan society to wrestle with, since the intense neo-Christianity
of Puritanism was yoked to an
equal intensity of business acumen, a talent for commercial transaction.
In the Calvinist vein, this
contradiction was resolved by declaring wealth a reliable sign of God's
favor, as poverty was a sign of
His condemnation. Both pagan and mercantile ethical codes operated behind a facade of
Christianity during the Christian era, weakening the gospel religion, while at the same time
profiting from it and paying lip service to it. Proponents of these different frames called
themselves Christians but did not live like Christians, rejecting certain tenets of
Christianity we've just examined, those which interfered with personal gain. Yet in both cases, the
life maps these competing theories tried to substitute were not, ultimately, satisfying enough
to stop the spreading influence of Christian vision.
Stated more directly, these competing moral codes were unable to deliver
sufficient tangible day-to-day
meaning to compete against the religious prescription of a simple life, managed with dignity and love,
and with acceptance of the demands of work, self- control, and moral choice, together with the inevitability
of tragedy, aging, and death.
Neither the pagan outlook nor the commercial philosophy was equal to
overthrowing their unworldly
rival. Because the commercial code lacked sufficient magic and mystery, and the aristocratic code, which had
those things, froze out the majority from enjoying them, it fell to yet a third scheme for organizing meaning
to eventually cause the major
sabotage of spiritual life.
I refer to the form of practical magic we
call Science. Kept rigorously and strictly subordinate to human needs, science is an undeniably
valuable way to negotiate the
physical world. But the human tendency has always been to break loose
from these constraints and to try
to explain the purpose of life. Instead of remaining merely a useful description of how things work, great
synthesizing theories like Big Bang or Natural Selection purport to explain the origin of the universe or
how life best progresses. Yet by
their nature, these things are beyond proof or disproof. Few laymen
understand that the synthesizing
theories of Science are religious revelations in disguise.
In the years around the beginning of the
twentieth century, the scientific outlook as a substitute religion took command of compulsion schools and
began to work to eradicate any
transcendental curriculum in school. This happened in stages. First was the
passage of compulsion school
legislation and invention of the factory school (isolated from family and community), appearing in
conjunction with the extermination of the one-room school. That job had been largely accomplished by 1900. The
second stage was introduction of
hierarchical layers of school management and government selected and regulated teaching staff. That job was
complete by 1930. The third stage comprised socialization of the school into a world of
"classes" and de-individualized individuals who looked to school authorities for leadership instead of
to their own parents and churches.
This was accomplished by 1960. The fourth and last stage (so far) was the psychologizing of the classroom, a
process begun full scale in 1960, which, with the advent of national standardized testing, outcomes-based
education, Title I legislation,
School-to-Work legislation, etc., was accelerating as the last century
came to a close.
All these incremental changes are
ambitious designs to control how children think, feel, and behave. There had been signs of
this intention two centuries earlier, but without long- term confinement of children to great
warehouses, the amount of isolation and mind- control needed to successfully introduce civil religion
through schooling just wasn't
available.
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