191.
Psychopathic Programming: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Psychopathic
Programming
I could regale you with mountains of
statistics to illustrate the damage schools cause. I could bring before your attention a line of case studies to
illustrate the mutilation of
specific individuals — even those who have been
apparently privileged as
its "gifted and
talented." 3 What would that prove? You've heard those stories,
read these figures before until
you went numb from the assault on common sense. School can't be that bad, you say. You survived,
didn't you? Or did you? Review what you learned there. Has it made a crucial difference for good in your
life? Don't answer. I know it hasn't. You surrendered twelve years of your life because you had no choice. You
paid your dues, I paid mine. But
who collected those dues?
In 191 1, a prominent German
sociologist, Robert Michel, warned in his book Political Parties that the size and prosperity of
modern bureaucracies had given them
unprecedented ability to buy friends. In this way they shield themselves
against internal reform and make
themselves impervious to outside reform. Across this great epoch of bureaucracy, Michel's
warning has been strikingly borne out. Where school is concerned we have lived through six major periods
of crisis since its beginning, zones of social turmoil where outsiders have demanded the state change the
way it provides for the schooling
of children. 4 Each crisis can be used as a stepping stone leading us back to
the original wrong path we took at
the beginnings.
All alleged reforms have left schooling
exactly in the shape they found it, except bigger, richer, politically stronger. And morally and intellectually
worse by the standards of the
common American village of yesteryear which still lives in our hearts.
Many people of conscience only
defend institutional schooling because they can't imagine what would happen without any schools, especially
what might happen to the poor. This
compassionate and articulate contingent has consistently been fronted by
the real engineers of schooling,
skillfully used as shock troops to support the cumulative destruction of American working-class
and peasant culture, a destruction largely effected through schooling.
Psychopathic programming is incapable of
change. It lacks moral dimension or ethical mind beyond the pragmatic. Institutional morality is always
public relations; once
institutional machinery of sufficient size and complexity is built, a
logical movement commences that is
internally aimed toward subordination and eventual elimination of all ethical mandates. Even if quality
personnel are stationed on the parapets in the first generation of new institutional existence, that original
vigilance will flag as pioneers give
way to time-servers. The only reliable defense against this is to keep
institutions weak and dispersed,
even if that means sacrificing efficiency and holding them on a very short leash.
Michel wrote in Political Parties that
the primary mission of all institutional managers (including school managers) is to cause their institution to
grow in power, in number of
employees, in autonomy from public oversight, and in rewards for key
personnel. The primary mission is
never, of course, the publicly announced one. Whether we are talking about bureaucracies assigned to wage war,
deliver mail, or educate children, there is no difference.
In the course of things,
this rationalization isn't a straight line matter. There can be pullbacks in the face of criticism, for
example. But examined over time, movement
toward rationalizing operations is always unidirectional, public outrage
against the immoral effects of
this is buffered by purchased political friendships, by seemingly neutral public authorities who always
find it prudent to argue for delay, in confidence the heat will cool. In this way momentum is spent, public
attention diverted, until the next
upwelling of outrage. These strategies of opinion management are taught
calmly through elite graduate
university training in the best schools here, as was true in Prussia. Corporate bureaucracies, including
those in the so-called public sphere, know how to wear out critics. There is no malicious intent, only a
striving for efficiency.
Something has been happening in America
since the end of WWII, accelerating since the flight of Sputnik and the invasion of Vietnam. A massive
effort is underway to link centrally organized control of jobs with
centrally organized administration of schooling. This would be an American equivalent of the Chinese
"Dangan" — linking a personal file begun in kindergarten (recording academic performance,
attitudes, behavioral
characteristics, medical records, and other personal data) with all work
opportunities. In China the Dangan
can't be escaped. It is part of a web of social controls that ensures stability of the social order; justice
has nothing to do with it. The Dangan is coming to the United States under cover of skillfully
engineered changes in medicine, employment, education, social service, etc., seemingly remote from one
another. In fact, the pieces are
being coordinated through an interlink between foundations, grant-making
government departments, corporate
public relations, key universities, and similar agencies out of public view.
This American Dangan will begin with
longer school days and years, with more public resources devoted to institutional schooling, with more job
opportunities in the school field,
more emphasis on standardized testing, more national examinations, plus
hitherto unheard of developments
like national teaching licenses, national curricula, national goals, national standards, and with the
great dream of corporate America since 1900, School-to- Work legislation organizing the youth of America
into precocious work battalions. A
Dangan by its nature is always psychopathic. It buries its mistakes.
3
What I would never do is to argue that the damage to human potential is
adequately caught in the rise or
fall of SAT scores or any other standardized measure because these
markers are too unreliable — besides being far too prone to strategic manipulation. The New York Times of
March 9, 2003, reported in an article by Sara Rimer that Harvard rejects four
valedictorians out of every five,
quoting that school's director of admissions as saying: "To get in
[Harvard], you have to present some real distinction..." A distinction which, apparently, 80 Percent of
"top" students lack.
4 Different addictive readers of
school histories might tally eight crises or five, so the stab at
specificity shouldn't be
taken too seriously by any reader. What it is meant to indicate is that careful
immersion in pedagogical history will reveal, even to the most skeptical, that mass schooling has been in nearly
constant crisis since its inception. There never was a golden age of mass schooling, nor can there ever be.
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