189.An Arena Of Dishonesty: The Underground History
of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Fifteen
The
Psychopathology of Everyday Schooling
In 1909 a factory inspector did an
informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in
the terrible
conditions of the
factories than return to school. — Helen Todd, "Why Children Work," McClure's
Magazine (April 1913)
In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example,
8,000 youth... were asked if they would
return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as
they earned at work; only 16 said
they would. — David Tyack, Managers of Virtue (1982)
189. An Arena Of Dishonesty
I remember clearly the last school where
I worked, on the wealthy Upper West Side of Manhattan. An attractive atmosphere of good-natured
dishonesty was the lingua franca of
corridor and classroom, a grace caused oddly enough by the school's
unwritten policy of cutting unruly
children all the slack they could use.
Student terrorists, muggers, sexual
predators, and thieves, including two of my own pupils who had just robbed a neighborhood grocery of $300
and had been apprehended coming
back to class, were regularly returned to their lessons after a brief lecture
from the principal. All received
the same mercy. There was no such thing as being held to account at my school. This behavioral
strategy — leveling good, bad, ugly into one undifferentiated lumpenproletariat 1 — may seem odd or
morally repugnant in conventional
terms, but it constituted masterful psychological management from the
perspective of enlightened
pedagogy. What this policy served and served well was to prioritize order and harmony above justice or academic
development.
Once you know the
code, the procedure is an old one. It can hardly be called radical politics except by the terminally
innocent. If you spend a few hours with Erving Goffman's work on the management of institutions, you
discover that the strongest
inmates in an asylum and the asylum's management have a bond; they need
each other. This isn't cynical.
It's a price that must be paid for the benefits of mega-institutions. The vast Civil War prison camp of Andersonville
couldn't have operated without active
cooperation from its more dangerous inmates; so too, Dachau; so it is in
school. Erving Goffman taught us
all we need to know about the real grease which makes institutional wheels turn.
A tacit hands-off
policy pays impressive dividends. In the case of my school, those dividends were reflected in the
neighborhood newspaper's customary reference to the place as "The West Side's Best-Kept Secret." This
was supposed to mean that private school conditions obtained inside the
building, civility was honored, the battlefield aspect of other schools with large minority
populations was missing. And it was true. The tone of the place was as good as could be found in Community
School District 3. It was as if by
withdrawing every expectation from the rowdy, their affability rose in
inverse proportion.
Not long after my
transfer into this school I came into home room one morning to discover Jack, a handsome young fellow
of thirteen, running a crap game in the back of the room, a funny looking cigarette in his mouth. "Hey,
Jack, knock it off," I snapped,
and like the surprisingly courteous boy he was, he did. But a little
while later there was Jack
undressing a girl fairly conspicuously in the same corner, and this time when
I intervened harshly he was slow
to comply. A second order got no better results. "If I have to waste time on this junk again, Jack,
you can cool your heels in the principal's office," I said
Jack looked disappointed
in me. He spoke frankly as if we were both men of the same world, "Look, Gatto," he told
me in a low, pleasant voice so as not to embarrass me, "it won't do any good. Save yourself the
trouble. That lady will wink at me, hold me there for eight minutes — I've timed her before — and dump me back
here. Why make trouble for
yourself?" He was right. Eight minutes.
How could such a policy produce hallway
decorum and relative quiet in classrooms, you may ask? Well, look at it this way: it's tailor-made to be
nonconfrontational with dangerous
kids. True, it spreads terror and bewilderment among their victims, but,
happy or unhappy, the weak are no
problem for school managers; long experience with natural selection at my school had caused unfortunates
to adapt, in Darwinian fashion, to their
role as prey. Like edible animals they continued to the water hole in
spite of every indignity awaiting.
That hands-off modus vivendi extended to every operation. Only once in four years did I hear any teacher
make an indirect reference to what was happening. One day I heard a lady remark offhandedly to a friend,
"It's like we signed the last Indian
treaty here: you leave us alone; we leave you alone."
It's not hard to see
that, besides its beneficial immediate effect, this pragmatic policy has a powerful training function, too.
Through it an army of young witnesses to officially sanctioned bad conduct learn how little value good conduct
has. They learn pragmatism. Part
of its silent testimony is that the strong will always successfully suppress
the weak, so the weak learn to
endure. They learn that appeals to authority are full of risk, so they don't make them often. They learn what
they need in order to be foot soldiers in a mass army.
Psychopathic. An overheated word to
characterize successful, pragmatic solutions to the control of institutional chaos. Isn't this process a cheap
and effective way to keep student
entropy in check at the cost of no more than a little grief on the part
of some dumb animals? Is it really
psychopathic or only strategic sophistication? My principal, let's call her Lulu to protect the guilty, once
explained at a public meeting there was little she could do about the unfortunate past and present of these
kids, and she acknowledged they probably didn't have bright prospects for
the future — but while they were here they would know she cared about them, no one would be unduly
hassled. Nobody in the audience
took what she said to be insincere, nor do I think it was. She believed what
she said.
Psychopathic. The
word summons up flashing eyes and floating hair, men hiding gasoline bombs under their coats in crowded
subway cars on the way to Merrill Lynch for revenge. But set aside any lurid pictures you may associate
with the term. I'm using it as a
label to describe people without consciences, nothing more. Psychopaths
and sociopaths are often our charming
and intelligent roommates in corporations and institutions. They mimic perfectly the necessary protective
coloration of compassion and
concern, they mimic human discourse. Yet underneath that surface
disguise they are circuit boards
of scientific rationality, pure expressions of pragmatism.
All large bureaucracies, public or
private, are psychopathic to the degree they are well- managed. It's a genuine paradox, but
time to face the truth of it. Corporate policies like downsizing and environmental degradation, which reduce the
quality of life for enormous
numbers of people, make perfectly rational sense as devices to reach
profitability. Even could it be
proven that the theory of homo economicus has a long-range moral component in which, as is sometimes argued in
policy circles, the pain of the moment leads inevitably to a better tomorrow for those who survive — the
thing would still be psychopathic.
An older America would have had little hesitation labeling it as Evil.
I've reached for the term
psychopathic in place of Evil in deference to modern antipathies. The whole matter is in harmony with
classic evolutionary theory and theological notions of limited salvation. I find that congruence
interesting.
The sensationalistic charge that all
large corporations, including school corporations, are psychopathic becomes less inflammatory
if you admit the obvious first, that all such entities are nonhuman. Forget the human beings who populate
corporate structures. Sure, some of
them sabotage corporate integrity from time to time and behave like human beings, but never consistently, and
never for long, for if that were the story, corporate coherence would be impossible, as it often is in Third World
countries. Now at least you see
where I'm coming from in categorizing the institutional corporation of school
as psychopathic. Moral codes don't
drive school decision-making. That means School sometimes decides to ignore your wimpy kid being beaten up
for his lunch money in order to
oil some greater wheels. School has no tear ducts with which to weep.
1. Except
for a small fraction of Gifted and Talented Honors kids sequestered in a remote
corner of the third floor, who followed different protocols, although a good deal less different than they
knew.
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