200.
Disinherited Men And Women: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Disinherited
Men And Women
In the chapter "Schism in the
Body Social" from his monumental Study of History, Toynbee calls our attention to some
dynamics of Western imperial success over the past four centuries which have important implications for the
way
state schooling is conducted. As major
victories were registered, he tells us, "many diverse contingents of disinherited men and women" were
subjected to "the ordeal of being enrolled in the Western internal proletariat."
Between 1850 and 1950 "the manpower of no less than ten disintegrating civilizations [was]
conscripted into the Western body social" and underwent "a process of
standardization" which blurred or wiped out "the characteristic features by which these heterogeneous
masses were once distinguished from one
another."
Under his mannerly
academic diction runs a river of insight explaining the paradox of forced schooling. It can allow no
pilgrim way because it aims at leveling the turbulent singularity of youth, by a process of standardization, into
featureless components of a
universal mass mind and character. Nor, says Toynbee, has the victorious
Western political state been
content to prey upon its own kind:
It has also rounded
up almost all the surviving primitive societies; and while some of these, like the Tasmanians and most of
the North American Indian tribes have died of shock, others, like the Negroes of Tropical Africa, have
managed to survive and set the
Niger flowing into the Hudson and the Congo into the Mississippi — just
as other activities of the same
Western monster have set the Yangtse flowing into the Straits of Malaca.
Not only have
Darwin's "disfavored" races been so manhandled, but the free
domestic populations of these
countries have also been "uprooted from the countryside and chevied into the towns" in preparation for
a strategic replacement of small-scale mixed farming by mass production specialized agriculture whose crops are
produced by the modern analogue of
"plantation slavery."
England was first to commodify
agricultural products so intensely, "uprooting its own free peasantry for the economic profit
of an oligarchy by turning plowland into pasture and common land into enclosures." This state-driven
push away from the independent farms of yeomen reduced that class to
"white trash" (in Toynbee's colorful idiom), and this disquieting social initiative was
powerfully augmented by a pull from the urban industrial revolution also being engineered at the same
time. Handicrafts were replaced by
output from coal-driven machines. During the agonizing transition, owners of
the new mechanical technology
created another new technology of social control through abundant use of police, spies,
sabotage, propaganda, and legislation to hasten the passing of the old ways of moral
relationship.
Try hard to visualize
through all this milling grief of "beaten peoples" and
"disinherited men and
women," not their agony but the perplexity of the corporate state. What is
a modern scientific state, having
transcended the principles of Christian life, to do with its masses once they have been "degraded
to the ranks of a proletariat," like so much detritus, and then further rendered superfluous by a stream
of inventions? Even more today
than yesterday, this is America's problem.
The question is all
too real. It raises the grim spectre of revolution which public policy seeks to push away through schooling.
What can anyone do with human flotsam in a crowded world that scorns their labor and scorns their
companionship? Set them to
watching television? From a scientific perspective, people management
isn't all that different from
dealing with industrial waste. At bottom, moral principle has little to do with it. Dispositions are mainly
matters of possibility and technique. Here is the secret of scientific life which refuses to stay
hidden amidst the hollow moral rhetoric of scientific schooling.
Toynbee's observation
that most inhabitants of a modern state are in a condition of disinheritance, and hence dangerous,
calls for what he terms "creative solutions." One creative solution is to establish work
for some of the dangerous classes by setting them to guard the rest. This guardian class is then privileged a
little to compensate it for playing
the dirty kapo role against the others.
Toynbee is eloquent
about the function of bureaucrats in serving the creative minorities which manage society. Creative
minorities always manage complex societies, according to Toynbee, but the dominant minorities which comprise
modern social leadership are the
degenerate descendants of this originally creative group. Dominant
minorities manage the rest by
conscription of all into a massive two-tier proletariat. The guiding protection
is a mechanism to ensure these
proletariats don't learn much lest they become "demoniac." This is the unsuspected function which
school tolerance of bad behavior serves — in both school and society. The great majority of proles are kept
away from what history refers to
as education. This can be done inexpensively by leading children from
ambitious exercises in reading,
writing, declamation, self-discipline, and from significant practical experience in making things work. It
really is that simple, and it needn't be done forever. Even a few years of control at the
beginning of childhood will often suffice to set a lifetime stamp.
Toynbee, and by extension the entire
cultivated leadership class he represented, was unable to see any other alternative to this stupefaction
course because, as he hastened to assure us, "the religion of the masses"
is violence. There is no other choice possible to responsible governors who accept the melancholy conclusion
that peasants are indeed
revolting. The only proles Toynbee could find in the historical record
who managed to extricate
themselves from a fatal coarseness did so by escaping their proletarian circumstances first. But if this were
allowed for all, who would clean toilets?
You might expect such an observation
would lead inevitably to some profound
consideration of the astounding crimes of conquest and domination which
create uprooted, landless classes
in the first place — England's crimes against Ireland, India, China, and any number of other places
being good examples. But a greater principle intervenes. According to certain sophisticated theory, you
can't operate a modern economy
without an underclass to control wage inflation; in spite of bell- curve
theory, a mass doesn't subordinate
itself without some judicious assistance.
In his glorious Republic, which may have
started it all, Plato causes Socrates to inform Glaucon and Adeimantus, twenty-four hundred years ago, that
they can't loll on couches eating
grapes while others sweat to provide those grapes without first creating a
fearsome security state to protect
themselves from the commonality. It would appear that long ago some people realized that a substantial
moral trade-off would be required to create ease for a fraction of the whole, while the balance of the whole,
served that ease. Once that kind
of privilege became the goal of Toynbee's creative minority, once high culture
was defined as a sanctuary against
evolutionary reversion, certain horrors institutionalized themselves.
The clearest escape route from tidal
recurrence of caste madness is a society bred to argue, one trained to challenge. A mentally active people
might be expected to recognize
that the prizes of massification — freedom from labors like toilet
cleaning, a life of endless
consumption (and reflection upon future consumption) — aren't really
worth very much. The fashioning of
mass society isn't any chemical precondition of human progress. It's just as likely to be a signal that the
last act of history is underway.
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