222. The Planetary Management Corporation: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Planetary Management Corporation
Who governs? To what degree may rule be exercised
arbitrarily? These are political questions of forced schooling. In a free society contention
is liberty's friend. Conflict
extended indefinitely is our personal guarantee there
will always be a
way out of being suffocated by the
will of another.
In a free society,
the power situation must always be kept fluid, even though a high price in inefficiency, instability, and
frustration is paid by the ruling group or coalition for that fluidity. As long as liberty is
cherished beyond efficiency, the price will be paid. It is only a short leap to deduce the political
crime of mass forced schooling: it amputates the argument and replaces it with engineered consensus. Once
such a peace-making apparatus is
built, its interior drive to self-preservation and growth will organize its line and staff personnel around a
single-minded logic of orthodoxy. But that orthodoxy will always be committed to the service of
the economy, not to the interests of its nominal clientele.
The New York Times of January 18, 2001,
had this to say on Page A22 about the
economic politics of schooling: "Education aid is distributed
through at least 55 different
formulas so technical only a select few can pretend to understand
them." What explains this:
Accident? Stupidity? No, neither: "The school formulas are
incomprehensible in order to
disguise how the system really works" — an explanation attributed by the
Times to an
"influential" politician, otherwise unidentified.
As schooling encroaches further and
further into family and personal life, monopolizing the development of mind and character, children become human
resources at the disposal of
whatever form of governance is dominant at the moment. That confers a huge advantage on the leadership of the
moment, allowing it to successfully reproduce itself, foreclosing the strength of its competitors. Schooling
becomes what is the ultimate form
of subsidy for corporate and status welfare, a destroyer of the free
market.
Without opposition made possible by the
education (rather than schooling) of children, a Planetary Management Corporation is our certain destiny —
and just as certain to be followed
sometime after its birth by a dissolution into chaos, the fate of all empires.
Our school tragedies are an early
warning of something inherent in the laws of human thermodynamics. Chaos increases steadily in closed systems
cut off from the outside,
overorganization precipitates disorganization. Where the developing
consciousness of children cries
out for jazz, what it gets instead is a scale exercise.
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