198.The Fear Of Common Intelligence: The Underground
History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Fear Of Common Intelligence
The fear of common people learning too
much is a recurrent theme in state records around the world. The founder of the Chinese state, the
Emperor Ts'in
She Hwang-ti, burned
the work of the philosophers for fear their ideas would poison his own plans.
The Caliph Umar of Syria wrote
instructions to destroy the perhaps apocryphal library at Alexandria, using this airtight
syllogism:
If these writings of the Greeks agree
with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious and ought
to be destroyed.*
Literary bonfires in
Nazi Germany are often invoked as a vivid symbol of the deepest barbarism of the twentieth century, but
extensive press coverage ended the book burning by stirring public uneasiness worldwide. Much more effective
have been those silent blast
furnaces used by public library systems and great American universities to
dispose of 3 million excess books
annually because of a shortage of shelf space. Why aren't they given to schools?
There are other ways
to burn books without matches. Consider the great leap forward undertaken in the modern Turkish state
under Kemal Ataturk. Unlike Hitler, who burned only some of the past, Ataturk burned it all without fire by
radically changing the Turkish
national alphabet so that all the vital writings of the past were entombed
in an obsolete symbol system. Not
a single Turk voted to have this done, yet all accepted it.
From 1929 on, all
books and newspapers were printed in the new alphabet. All documents were composed in it. All
schoolchildren were instructed in it and no other. The classics of Persia, Arabia, and Turkey vanished without
a trace for the next generation.
Obliterate the national memory bound up in history and literature, sift carefully what can be translated, and
you open a gulf between old and young, past and present, which can't be bridged, rendering children
vulnerable to any form of synthetic
lore authorities deem advisable.
Turkish
experimentation is echoed today in mainland China where a fifth of the population of the planet is cut off
from the long past of Chinese literature and philosophy, one of the very few significant bodies
of thought on the human record. The method being used is a radical simplification of the characters of the
language which will have, in the
fullness of time, the same effect as burning books, putting them
effectively out of reach. Lord
Lindsay of Birker, a professor at Yenching University outside Beijing where
I recently went to see for myself
the effects of Westernization on the young Chinese elite, says the generation educated entirely in
simplified characters will have difficulty reading anything published in China before the late 1950s.
First, said Plato,
wipe the slate clean.
There are many ways
to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for
serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that
students become disgusted with
reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken
speech. We have done that, too.
One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words
in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do — forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers
should be building pictures of
their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be
expanding. In this we are the
world's master.
Samuel Johnson entered a note into his
diary several hundred years ago about the
powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the
time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his
"infinite delight" with Spenser's Faerie Queen — an epic poem
that treats moral values
allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his
pleasure with its "Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses." Cowley
was twelve at the time. It couldn't have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it's beyond the reach of
many elite college graduates
today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened.
"Frank had a dog. His name
was Spot." That happened.
This quotation is from John Draper's
History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion. Draper, an excellent
scholar, took the story from one
Abulpharagius, a writer composing his story six stories after the burning of
Alexandria's library. But no earlier writers confirm Abulpharagius' account and the known character of Umar (of
Medina, not Syria!) is quite liberal — for instance, he opened the holy places
of Jerusalem to all sects, Hebrew,
Christian, or whatever — and inconsistent with such a statement. Furthermore,
the reverence for learning in early
Islam would all by itself bring this alleged statement by the head of
the Muslim empire into question. So, while the anti-rationalist logic is
still flawless, it might be well
to consider what group(s) had something to gain by spinning history this way.
Official history seems to be saturated
with such machinations, hence the need for underground histories ... of
everything!
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