223. Silicon Valley: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Eighteen
Breaking Out of the
Trap We have a choice to
make once and for all: between the empire and the spiritual and physical salvation of our people. No
road for the people will ever be open unless the government completely gives up control over us or any aspect
of our lives. It has led the
country into an abyss
and it does not know the way out. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as quoted
by Pravda (1986)
To hell with the cheese, let's get out
of this trap! — A mouse
To reform our
treatment of the young, we must force the center of gravity of the school world to change. In this chapter I'll
try to show you what I mean, but my method will be largely indirect. To fashion the beginnings of a solution
from these materials will require
your active engagement in an imaginative partnership with me, one that
shall commence in Silicon
Valley.
I went to Silicon
Valley in the middle of 1999 to speak to some computer executives at Cypress Semiconductor on the general
topic of school reform. The fifty or sixty who showed up to my talk directly from work were dressed so
informally they might easily have
been mistaken for pizza delivery men or taxicab drivers. The CEO of the corporation, its founder T.J. Rodgers,
was similarly turned out. I didn't recognize him as the same famous man portrayed on a large photo mural mounted
on the wall outside until he
introduced me to the audience and the audience to me. To let me know who my auditors were, Rodgers said that
everyone there was a millionaire,
none needed to work for him because all were self-sufficient and could
find work all over the place simply
by walking into a different company. They worked for Cypress because they wanted to, just as he did himself and,
like him, they were usually hard
at it from very early morning until long after five o'clock. Because they
wanted to.
The thesis of my talk
was that the history of forced schooling in America, as elsewhere, is the history of the requirements of
business. School can't be satisfactorily explained by studying the careers of ideologues like Horace Mann or
anyone else. The problem of American
education from a personal or a family perspective isn't really a problem at
all from the vantage point of big business, big finance, and
big government. What's a problem to
me is a solution for them. An insufficient incentive exists to change things
much, otherwise things would
change. I learned that from Adam Smith, Smith turns out to be a much different sensibility than the
priesthood. of corporate apologiests thinks he is.
Regard it this way:
in our present system, those abstract bignesses are saddled with the endless responsibility of finding a
place for hundreds of millions of people, and the even more daunting challenge of creating
demand for products and services which, historically viewed, few of us need or want. Because of this anomaly, a
Procrustean discipline emerges in
which the entire population must continually be cut or stretched to fit
the momentary convenience of the
economy. This is a free market only in fantasy; it seems free because ceaseless behind-the-scenes
efforts maintain the illusion, but its reality is much different. Prodigies of psychological and political
insight and wisdom gathered
painfully over the centuries are refined into principles, taught in
elite colleges, and consecrated in
the service of this colossal tour deforce of appearances.
Let me illustrate.
People love to work, but they must be convinced that work is a kind of curse, that they must arrange the
maximum of leisure and labor-saving devices in their lives upon which belief many corporations depend; people
love to invent solutions, to be
resourceful, to make do with what they have, but resourcefulness and
frugality are criminal behaviors
to a mass production economy, such examples threaten to infect others with the same fatal sedition;
similarly, people love to attach themselves to favored possessions, even to grow old and die
with them, but such indulgence is dangerous lunacy in a machine economy whose costly tools are
continually renewed by enormous
borrowings; people like to stay put but must be convinced they lead
pinched and barren existences
without travel; people love to walk but the built world is now laid out so
they have to drive. Worst of all
are those who yearn for productive, independent livelihoods like the Amish have, and nearly all
free Americans once had. If that vision spreads, a consumer economy is sunk. For all these and other reasons,
the form of schooling we get is
largely a kind of consumer and employee training. This isn't just incidentally
true. Common sense should tell you
it's necessarily so if the economy is to survive in any recognizable form.
Every principal
institution in our culture is a partner with the particular form of corporatism which has began to dominate
America at the end of WWII. Call it paternal corporatism, wise elites can be trained to provide for the
rest of us, who will be kept as
children. Unlike Plato's Guardians whom they otherwise resemble, this
meritorious elite is not kept poor
but is guaranteed prosperity and status in exchange for its oversight. An essential feature of this kind of
central management is that the population remain mystified, specialized dependent, and childish.
The school
institution is clearly a key partner in this arrangement: it suppresses
the productive impulse in favor of
consumption; it redefines "work" as a job someone eventually gives you if you behave; it
habituates a large clientele to sloth, envy, and boredom; and it accustoms individuals to think of themselves
as members of a class with various
distinguishing features. More than anything else, school is about class consciousness. In addition, it makes
intellectual work and creative thinking appear like distasteful or difficult labor to most of us. None of this is
done to oppress, but because the
economy would dissolve into something else if those attitudes didn't
become ingrained in childhood.
We have evolved a
subtly architected, delicately balanced command economy and class- based society upon which huge efforts
are lavished to make it appear like something else. The illusion has been wearing thin for years; that's a
principal reason why so many
people don't bother to vote. In such a bargain, the quality of schooling
is distinctly secondary; other
values are uppermost. A great many children see through the fraud in elementary school but lack the language
and education to come to proper terms with their feelings. In this system, a fraction of the kids are slowly
over time let in on a part of this
managerial reality because they are intended to eventually be made into
Guardians themselves, or
Guardian's assistants.
School is a place
where a comprehensive social vision is learned. Without a contrary vision to offer, the term "school
reform" is only a misnomer describing trivial changes. Any large alteration of forced
schooling, which might jeopardize the continuity of workers and customers that the corporate economy depends
upon, is unthinkable without some
radical change in popular perception preceding it. Business/School partnerships
and School-to-Work legislation
aren't positive developments, but they represent the end of any pretense that ordinary children
should be educated. That, in any case, was the burden of my talk at Cypress.
Deregulating
Opportunity
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