219. Magic At Work: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Magic
At Work
Magic in one form or another had always appealed to
professional school authorities as
the means to manage students. Horace Mann, as you know, dedicated his
entire Sixth Report to a paean in
praise of phrenology, the "science" of
reading head bumps, and every major schoolman from Mann to G.
Stanley Hall and John Dewey was a serious
phrenologist — long after the craze had vanished from upper-class
drawing rooms and salons. That
should tell you something important about the inner itches of these men, I think. The quest for certainty in a confusing
new land without rules was as much the
religion of our founding schoolmen as searching one's family for signs
of reprobation had been for Puritans. But modern
schoolmen needed a scientific cast over their religiosity, times having changed.
Early educational psychologists
scientized the practice of manipulation behind a common expression of modern pedagogy —
"motivation." Book after book advised pedagogues how to "motivate" charges
with technical advice based on an underlying premise that young people did not want to learn and
had to be tricked into it, a premise which on the face of common experience was absurd. As the significance of
Bernays' arguments penetrated the
high command of government and industry, so too did manipulation become sine qua non in classroom
teaching, the standard by which teacher quality was measured.
But the methods of
Bernays or of educational psychologists like Dewey, Munsterberg, Judd, Hall, Cattell, Terman, Thorndike,
Goddard, and Watson which so radically
transformed the shape of twentieth-century schooling are about indoctrination strategies — building and using
psychological tools to create compliant children. If nature hadn't cooperated by actually making
empty children, then schooling would have to do the job. And yet, for what grand purpose children had to be
emptied, not many knew. For those
without religious training or ignorant of the evolutionary sciences, it made
only the bleakest sort of sense.
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