197. Two
Social Revolutions Become One: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Sixteen
A
Conspiracy Against Ourselves
A lower middle class which has
received secondary or even university education without being given any corresponding outlet
for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the
National
Socialist Party in Germany. The
demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was
generated out of this intellectual
proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self- improvement were not sufficient — Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of
History
Solve this problem and school will heal
itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are
devalued in classes and grades, 1
that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric
of caring contradicts what school
procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The
problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions,
and agencies. Kids know this
instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit
of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and
those private schools which
imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing
only a few to escape the trap. The
problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such
pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain
themselves, any mystery dissipates
— these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of
people against people, although
circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against
the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social
mechanisms that only require human
architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down
to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for
hundreds of millions of self-reliant,
resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian,
entrepreneurially based economy of
confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number
of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy
like our own. Where on earth would
they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford
Motor Company opened the world's
most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50
percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its
requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well
in four to twelve weeks. The hype that
education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our
economy has no adequate outlet of
expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft
workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises — no outlet except corporate
work or fringe slots on the periphery
of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run
afoul of a host of laws and
regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely
tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of
effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery,
you have to stop conspiring
against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract
principles and rules which, by its
nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what
institutional schooling is, an
abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values
are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems- logic the schools we have are already the schools the system
needs; the only way they could be
much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way
they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution
in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was
to be an improvement on the
British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for
its coherence. Ours would be
subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When
Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the
nineteenth century, he created a
business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of
government, the subsystem of
schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial.
Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town,
small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't
aware they were trading for a
regular corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business
and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up
was the prospect of being able to
read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to
train them for their role in the
new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It
was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a
group of honorable men, all honorable men — but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us
as we gradually lost touch with
the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in
place of producers, rendered us
incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The
real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became
like children in a conspiracy
against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own
children, consigning them over and
over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.
1. The
labels, themselves, are an affront to decency. Who besides a degraded rabble
would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is
compulsory.
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