215. Natural Selection: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Natural
Selection
In 1895, the National Education Association
announced that school science courses
should be reorganized to teach evolution not as theory but as fact.
Biology textbooks
began to present evolution to secondary schools and
colleges with an
extraordinary aggressiveness:
We do not know of any
competent naturalist who has any hesitation in accepting the general doctrine. (Yale University
Press, 1895)
There is no rival
hypothesis to evolution, except the out-worn and completely refuted one of special creation, now retained only
by the ignorant, dogmatic, and the prejudiced. (Macmillan Publishers, 1895)
What evolution has to
do with the macropolitics of schooling becomes clear if you consider that both are concerned with
what should be encouraged to thrive, and what should be helped to perish. Evolutionary theory made all the
difference in how systematic
schooling was internally arranged. Too much effort wasn't wasted on
hopeless trash, and the good stock
was separated from the common. With justification.
Global entrepreneurs such as John D.
Rockefeller Sr. and Andrew Carnegie found natural selection to be a perfect explanation for their
laissez-faire economic principles. To
Rockefeller, for instance, "the growth of large business is merely
survival of the fittest";
savage business practices aren 't evil, "merely the working out of
a law of nature and a law of
God." According to Herbert Spencer, nothing escaped evolution's power:
"every single organism"
or institution evolved, religions evolved, economies evolved; evolution exposed democratic theory for the
childish fantasy it really was.
But among common men and women in
America who still believed in special creation and democracy, the perception spread that a new political
order was strip-mining their
uniquely American common rights and liberties like so much coal. In the waning
years of the nineteenth century,
social unrest was the most crucial problem confronting the security of ambitious new industrial
elites. When the myths of George Washington and Tom Paine were flushed down the memory hole of schooling,
and the personal call to duty of
Christianity was — to use Macmillan's word — "refuted," a long-range
dilemma emerged with no easy
solution: no attractive social narrative remained from which to draw meaning. Hedonism, so essential to
business success, had a social downside whose dimensions were difficult to predict. And the scientific
story, in spite of prodigious labor
expended in its behalf, left the unfortunate impression that life was
only a goofy accident devoid of
any greater significance.
The Darwinian/Galtonian
evolutionary script wrote the everyday citizen completely out of the story. It had to be faced that
there was no room at the policy table for common citizens, yet thanks to the dangerous power vested in the
American electorate through its
national founding documents, the full bite of a democratic society stood
as a latent threat to the would-be
scientific ruling classes. Into this late nineteenth-century industrialization, immigrant confusion
of national strikes and violence, breakaway urbanization, proletarianized labor, and political
corruption, two ideas surfaced to offer
an apparently sensible path through the maze. Each was a highly
sophisticated social
technology.
One was the movement called Fabian
socialism and its various fellow-traveling outriggers. The other was a kind of academic echo of
Fabianism called "the theory of
democratic elites" — offering a strange kind of democracy-lite
which operated
"democratically" without needing any direct popular
authorization. Democratic elitism
had, in fact, been the mock representational model of ancient Sparta.
Its modern analogue retained the
husk of democratic institutions while stifling the real voice of the people
by depriving its elected spokesmen
of any effective power, reducing the role of legislatures to a choice between competing expert
conceptions.
In its modern form,
the theory of democratic elitism comes partly from John Stuart Mill, partly from the work of Italian
intellectuals Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, especially from the latter's essay of 1896, translated into
English as The Ruling Class:
Elements of a Science of Politics,'' a book vital to understanding
twentieth-century schooling. The
way to make a political regime stable across the centuries had eluded every wise man of history, but Mosca
found the key: elites must deliberately and selectively feed on the brains and vitality of the lesser
classes.
Identified early enough inside the
laboratory of government schooling, the best leadership of these classes could be uprooted and
transplanted into ruling class society,
reinvigorating the blood stock of the overclass: Count Dracula in
education department drag. This
genetic harvesting would deliver the best formula for social harmony.
Potential future leaders among the
underclasses would be targeted early in schooling, then weaned from any misguided loyalty to their own
group, using incentives. Far from prying eyes, their minds would be conditioned in special
"gifted" classes.
While this process of vetting went on,
school would also be used to train most of us in our role in traditional status hierarchies. Class rankings,
specialized tracking, daily
habituation to payoffs and punishments, and other means would accomplish
the trick. Those elected for
advancement would be drawn bit by bit into identification with the upper crust and with its ways of dress,
speech, expectation, etc. They would come in this fashion to look upon their group of origin as evolutionarily
retarded — a brilliant imaginative
coup.
It was profound advice, providing a
social justification for the expense and trouble of the mass confinement schooling experiment,
which had still not been fully launched at the time Mosca wrote his essay. While it was one thing to
suggest, as Darwin did, that
natural selection would improve the breed, one thing to say with Sir
Henry Maine that the destiny of
the Great Race would be advanced, one thing to say with the episcopal religions that God's will would thereby
be done; some more down-to-earth surety had to be offered to an emerging superclass of industrialists and
international bankers. Now such a
surety was at hand in Mosca's guarantee of social stability.
The theory of democratic elites, together
with the promising new German mind sciences, provided all the tools needed to press ahead with the school
experiment. Mosca's ideas were an
academic hit across the recently Germanized university spectrum of America,
a watchword in Germanized corporate
boardrooms and private men's clubs. By the start of WWI, the familiar Common School idea
survived only in the imagination of America's middle and working classes. In actual school practice it had
given way to thoroughly regulated
and tracked assemblages geared tightly to the clock, managed by layered hierarchies and all schematized into
rigid class rankings. Class-reproduction was "scientifically" locked in place by standardized
test scores, calibrated to the decimal.
Objections were overridden by pointing to the "facts" of the
matter. From its inception,
evolutionary racism guided the forced-schooling car, test scores its
communiques offered to the public
as evidence of obedience to a higher.
The theory of
democratic elites provided a way for plutocracy hide inside the skin of democracy, to have ordinary people
represented by the best selected by the best. Here was Orwellian Newspeak of a very high order. Since the
commons could not be trusted to
select the best from amongst itself, the community of quality would have
to do it for them, backstage,
concealing (in the interests of social efficiency but also from humane motives) the full reality of the
radical political transformation. America was whisked off stage and replaced by a political
imposter, anglicized in its attitudes.
Walter Lippmann, among many, picked up
these notes sounded by Mosca and augmented by the important American Fabian Herbert Croly in his book
The Promise of American Life
(1909). Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive platform of 1912 was heavily larded
with Croly/Mosca substance, an
outlook demanding the public step back and let experts make the important decisions so the promise
of American life could be realized. With these precepts in mind, Lippmann produced his own pair of
influential books, Public Opinion
(1922), followed by The Phantom Public (1925).
Public Opinion called for severe
restrictions on public debate. The historic American argument was "a defect of democracy." It was
impossible, said Lippmann, for the public
even to know what its own best interests were. The public was hopelessly
childish; it had to be cared for.
Schools would have to teach children that the old ideal of active, participatory citizenship was
biologically impossible. Decisions in complex industrial society had to be made by
"invisible experts acting through government officials" for the good of all.
The proper thing to
do, said Lippmann, was give the public a "fairy tale"
explanation, something to sustain
it emotionally, as we tell a bedtime story to infants. Later, as he saw the effects of his advice unfold,
Lippmann would repudiate them, but that's another story. The common public would have to be
neutralized in the name of democracy for this expert society, this new republic based on sciences of human
behavior to work. In this new
world it wouldn't do to have shoemakers and hairdressers mucking about
while important people built the
future. In the state institution of forced schooling it would be better in the long run if children
learned little or nothing in the short run. America was coming full circle to its
British/Germanic and episcopal beginnings.
In the Mosca/Croly/Lippmann redefinition
of democracy, common people traded their
right to be heard on policy matters in exchange for being taken care of.
It was the mother's bargain with
her infants. The enormous training project called School, proceeding in
deliberate stages across the twentieth century as opportunity presented itself and traveling at the speed of
electronics as the century ended, had as its purpose creation of an automatic social order which could be managed
by unreachable national and
international elites. It was a new type of flexible social organization capable
of being driven in any direction
at any time without the need to overcome interference.
By the end of WWI,
the labor market and much state/municipal contracting in America was effectively controlled by
Fabian-minded administrators, selected by Fabian-minded university placement rings, all
nourished by rich contracts garnered with the assistance of political clubs. Whether any of these
actually had any connection to the Fabian brain trust (few did) was irrelevant. The atmosphere of schooling was
saturated with its disciplined
notions of Utopia.
Another natural force
was at work as well. With each passing decade, there accumulated more reasons to defend schools exactly
as they were, not on ideological grounds at all but as a jobs project and a contract-distribution station.
Millions had a financial stake in
keeping schools as they were. The true philosophical and economic focus
of the thing needed be known only
to a handful of well-positioned social engineers in universities, foundations, and private associations.
The thing ran on momentum now. The reach of schooling grew longer without any special effort. Secondary
school enrollment went from 15
percent of the population in 1910 to 40 percent in 1930, to 90 percent in 1960,
and to blanket coverage by 1970.
Almost every alternative to a well-schooled destiny was squeezed out, show business careers
being a notable exception for the thoughtful to contemplate.
With this
development, the job pool established by institutional schooling became
the leading single source of work
in the United States, the very heart of the economy in small cities, towns, and villages. In this
way school became a major foundation for local elites, directly and indirectly, through
contract and hiring powers. All over America school became the core of local economies while, ironically, at the
same time local minds and local
customs were being rigorously barred from the policy table of American life.
The money served as an effective
incentive to self-destruct.
Local schools and school boards began to
behave as foreign intelligence bodies implanted in the cells of a host creature, parasitic growths on local
life, remote-controlled from state
and federal offices which dissolved local integrity by overriding its
imperatives. Managers of this
simulated "local" schooling descended on towns out of Stanford, Chicago, or Columbia Teachers almost on
a status and income level with the ranking local leadership. As the century wore on, even the lowliest
pedagogues were surprised to find
themselves near the top of local wage scales.
By the 1970s, schools
were plunged headlong into a political campaign to redefine national purpose as international
purpose, and to formally redefine Democracy as the ritual democracy allowed by democratic elites. Control of
schooling by then was so dispersed
that power could hardly be located at all in the hands of local
administrators and school boards.
The world designed by Plato and Thomas Hobbes had become reality. If you could not
locate power you could not tamper with it. Local control passed into the realm of fiction as distantly prepared
instruction entered schooling from state and federal agencies; the inner reality was that it had not been
prepared even there but in colleges,
foundations, corporations, and also — a noteworthy new development — in
the offices of various United
Nations agencies.
6.
Mosca's answer to the problem of political stability can be read clearly in the
blatantly anti-democratic first edition of this often revised and reprinted classic. (Later editions are
subtler with the central message concealed somewhat in metaphor. ) The rarely
encountered 1 923 edition had
great influence on Walter Lippmann's post-WWI generation, and the triumphant
final version of 1939, which is easiest to locate, on Roosevelt's.
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