199. The
Cult Of Forced Schooling: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Cult Of Forced Schooling
The most candid account of the changeover from old-style
American free market schooling to
the laboratory variety we have under the close eye of
society's managers is
a book long out of print. But the
author was famous enough in his day that a yearly lecture at Harvard is named after him, so with
a bit of effort on your part, and perhaps a kind word to your local librarian, in due time you should be able
to find a hair-raising account of
the school transformation written by one of the insiders. The book in question
bears the soporific title
Principles of Secondary Education. Published in 1918 near the end of the great school revolution, Principles
offers a unique account of the project written through the eyes of an important revolutionary. Any
lingering doubts you may have about
the purposes of government schooling should be put to rest by Alexander
Inglis. The principal purpose of the vast enterprise was to place control
of the new social and economic
machinery out of reach of the mob. 2
The great social
engineers were confronted by the formidable challenge of working their magic in a democracy, least efficient
and most unpredictable of political forms. School was designed to neutralize as much as possible any risk of
being blind-sided by the
democratic will. Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., writing of his grandfather
Senator Aldrich, one of the
principal architects of the Federal Reserve System which had come into being
while Inglis'
cohort built the schools — and whose intent was much the same, to remove economic machinery from public
interference — caught the attitude of the builders perfectly in his book Old Money . Grandfather, he writes,
believed that history, evolution,
and a saving grace found their best advocates in him and in men like him,
in his family and in families like
his, down to the close of time. But the price of his privilege, the senator knew, "was vigilance —
vigilance, above all, against the resentment of those who never could emerge." Once in
Paris, Senator Aldrich saw two men "of the middle or lower class," as he described
them, drinking absinthe in a cafe. That evening back at his hotel he wrote these words: "As I
looked upon their dull wild stupor I wondered what dreams were evolved from the depths of the bitter glass.
Multiply that scene and you have
the possibility of the wildest revolution or the most terrible
outrages."
Alexander Inglis,
author of Principles of Secondary Education, was of Aldrich's class. He wrote that the new schools were
being expressly created to serve a command economy and command society, one in which the controlling coalition
would be drawn from important
institutional stakeholders in the future. According to Inglis, the first function of schooling is adjustive,
establishing fixed habits of reaction to authority. This prepares the young to accept whatever
management dictates when they are grown.
Second is the diagnostic function. School determines each student's
"proper" social role,
logging it mathematically on cumulative records to justify the next
function, sorting . Individuals
are to be trained only so far as their likely destination in the social
machine, not one step beyond.
Conformity is the fourth function. Kids are to be made alike, not from any passion for egalitarianism,
but so future behavior will be predictable, in service to market and political research. Next
is the hygienic function. This has nothing to do with individual health, only the health of the
"race." This is polite code for saying that school should accelerate Darwinian natural selection by
tagging the unfit so clearly they
drop from the reproduction sweepstakes. And last is the propaedutic
function, a fancy word meaning
that a small fraction of kids will slowly be trained to take over management of the system, guardians of
a population deliberately dumbed down and
rendered childlike in order that government and economic life can be
managed with a minimum of hassle.
And there you have the formula: adjustment, diagnosis, sorting, conformity, racial hygiene, and
continuity. This is the man for whom an honor lecture in education at Harvard is named.
According to James Bryant Conant, another progressive aristocrat from whom I first learned of Inglis in a
perfectly frightening book called The
Child, The Parent, and the State (1949), the school transformation had
been ordered by "certain
industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the
industrial process."
Conant is a school name that resonates
through the central third of the twentieth century. He was president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. His book The
American High School Today (1959),
was one of the important springs that pushed secondary schools to gigantic size in the 1960s and forced
consolidation of many small school districts into larger ones. He began his career as a poison gas
specialist in WWI, a task assigned only to young men whose family lineage could be trusted. Other notable way
stations on his path being that of
an inner circle executive in the top secret atomic bomb project during WWII,
and a stint as
U.S. High Commissioner for Germany during the military occupation after
1945. From Lewisite gas to nuclear
explosions (or high schools), Conant delivered.
In his book Conant
brusquely acknowledges that conversion of old-style American education into Prussian-style schooling
was done as a coup de main, but his greater motive in 1959 was to speak directly to men and women of his
own class who were beginning to
believe the new school procedure might be unsuited to human needs, that experience dictated a return to older institutional
pluralistic ways. No, Conant fairly
shouts, the clock cannot be turned back! "Clearly, the total
process is irreversible."
Severe consequences would certainly follow the break-up of this
carefully contrived
behavioral-training machine: "A successful counterrevolution...
would require reorientation of a
complex social pattern. Only a person bereft of reason would undertake [it]."
Reading Conant is like overhearing a
private conversation not meant for you yet fraught with the greatest personal significance. To Conant, school
was a triumph of Anglo/Germanic
pragmatism, a pinnacle of the social technocrat's problem-solving art. One task it performed with brilliance
was to sharply curtail the American entrepreneurial spirit, a mission undertaken on perfectly sensible grounds,
at least from a management
perspective. As long as capital investments were at the mercy of
millions of self-reliant, resourceful
young entrepreneurs running about with a gleam in their eye, who would commit the huge flows of capital needed
to continually tool and retool the
commercial/industrial/financial machine? As long as the entire
population could become producers,
young people were loose cannon crashing around a storm-tossed deck, threatening to destroy the corporate
ship. Confined, however, to employee status, they became suitable ballast upon which a dependable domestic
market could be erected.
How to mute competition in the
generation of tomorrow? That was the cutting-edge question. In his take-no-prisoners style acquired mixing
poison gas and building atomic
bombs, Conant tells us candidly the answer "was in the process of
formulation" as early as the
1890s. By 1905 the nation obeyed this clarion call coast to coast: "Keep
all youth in school full time
through grade twelve." All youth, including those most unwilling to
be there and those certain to take
vengeance on their jailers.
President Conant was
quick to acknowledge that "practical-minded" kids paid a heavy price from enforced confinement. But
there it was — nothing could be done. It was a worthy trade-off. I suspect he was being disingenuous. Any
mind sophisticated enough to calculate
a way to short-circuit entrepreneurial energy, and ideology-driven enough to
be willing to do that in service
to a corporate takeover of the economy, must also be shrewd enough to foresee the destructive side
effects of having an angry and tough-minded band of student-captives remain in school with the docile. The
net effect was to nearly eradicate
the intellectual possibilities of school instruction.
Did Conant understand the catastrophe he
helped induce? I think he did. He would
dispute my judgment, of course, that it was a catastrophe. One of his
close friends was another highly
placed schoolman, Ellwood P. Cubberley, the Stanford Education dean. Cubberley had himself
written about the blow to serious classwork caused by early experiments in forcing universal school
attendance. So it wasn't as if the destruction of academic integrity came as any surprise to insiders.
Cubberley's house history of
American education refers directly to this episode, although in somewhat
elliptical prose. First published
in 1919, it was republished in 1934, the same year Conant took office at Harvard. The two men talked and wrote
to one another. Both knew the score. Yet for all his candor, it isn't hard to understand Conant's reticence
about discussing this procedure.
It's one thing to announce that children have to do involuntary duty for
the state, quite another to
describe the why and how of the matter in explicit detail.
Another prominent
Harvard professor, Robert Ulich, wrote in his own book, Philosophy of Education (1961): "[We are
producing] more and more people who will be dissatisfied because the artificially prolonged time
of formal schooling will arouse in them hopes which society cannot fulfill.... These men and women will
form the avant-garde of the
disgruntled. It is no exaggeration to say [people like these] were
responsible for World War
II." Although Ulich is parroting Toynbee here, whose Study of History was
a standard reference of
speculative history for decades, the idea that serious intellectual schooling of a universal nature would
be a sword pointed at the established order, has been an idea common in the West since at least the Tudors,
and one openly discussed from 1890
onwards.
Thus I was less surprised than I might
have been to open Walter Kotschnig's
Unemployment in the Learned Professions (1937), which I purchased for
fifty cents off a blanket on the
street in front of Columbia University from a college graduate down on his luck, to find myself listening to an
argument attributing the rise of Nazism directly to the expansion of German university
enrollment after WWI. For Germany, this had been a short-term solution to postwar unemployment, like the G.I.
Bill, but according to Kotschnig,
the policy created a mob of well-educated people with a chip on their shoulder because there was no work — a
situation which led swiftly downhill for the Weimar republic.
A whole new way to look at schooling
from this management perspective emerges, a perspective which is the furthest thing from cynical. Of
course there are implications for
our contemporary situation. Much of our own 50 to 60 percent
post-secondary college enrollment
should be seen as a temporary solution to the otherwise awesome reality
that two-thirds of all work in the
United States is now part-time or short-term employment. In a highly centralized corporate
workplace that's becoming ever more so with no end in sight, all jobs are sucked like debris in a tornado into
four hierarchical funnels of vast
proportions: corporate, governmental, institutional, and professional.
Once work is preempted in this
monopoly fashion, fear of too many smart people is legitimate, hard to exaggerate. If you let people learn too
much, they might kill you. Or so history and Senator Aldrich would have us believe.
Once privy to ideas like those
entertained by Inglis, Conant, Ulich, and Kotschnig, most contemporary public school debate
becomes nonsense. If we do not address philosophies and policies which sentence the largest portion of our
people to lives devoid of meaning, then we might be better off not discussing
school at all. A Trilateral Commission Report of 1974, Crisis of Democracy, offered with some urgency this
advice: "A program is
necessary to lower the job expectations of those who receive a college
education. " (emphasis added)
During the quarter-century separating this managerial proposition from the Millennium, such a program was
launched — for reasons we now turn to the historian Arnold Toynbee to illuminate.
2 A Harvard professor with a Teachers
College Ph.D., Inglis descended from a long line of famous Anglicans. One of
his ancestors, assistant Rector of
Trinity Church when the Revolution began, in 1777 fled the onrushing Republic;
another wrote a refutation of Tom Paine's Common Sense, that one was made the first Bishop of Nova Scotia in
1787; and a third, Sir John Inglis, commanded the British forces at
Lucknow during the famous siege by
the Sepoy mutineers in 1857. Is the Inglis bloodline germane to his work as a
school pioneer? YouTl have to decide
that for yourself.
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