224 Deregulating Opportunity: The Underground History of Amercian
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Deregulating
Opportunity
When I finished, Mr. Rodgers briefly took me to
task for having seemed to include in the
indictment the high-tech group at Cypress. Later I learned that he had
challenged Washington to stop
government subsidies to the Valley on the
grounds that such tampering destroyed the very principle
that provided it with energy — open competition and risk-taking. Thinking about his criticism on the road
home, I accepted the justice of
his complaint against me and, as penance, thought about the significance
of what he had said.
A century ago mass production began to
stifle the individualism which was the real American Dream. Big business, big government, and big labor
couldn't deal with individuals but
only with people in bulk. Now computers seem to be shifting the balance of power from collective entities like
corporations back to people. The cult of individual effort is found all over Silicon Valley, standing in sharp
contrast to leadership practices
based on high SAT scores, elite college degrees, and sponsorship by
prominent patrons.
The Valley judges people on their
tangible contributions rather than on sex, seniority, old-school ties, club memberships, or family. About half the
millionaires in my Cypress
audience had been foreign-born, not rich at all just a few years
earlier. Many new Internet firms
are headed by people in their mid-twenties who never wear a suit except to
costume parties. Six thousand
high- tech firms exist there in a nonstop entrepreneurial environment, the world's best example
of Adam Smith's competitive capitalism.
Companies are mostly small, personal, and fast on their feet.
Traditional organization men are
nowhere to be seen; they are a luxury none can afford and still remain competitive. Company mortality is high
but so is the startup rate for new firms; when unsuccessful companies die their people and resources are
recycled somewhere else.
Information technology people seek to
create an economy close to the model capitalism in Adam Smith's mind, a model which assumes the world to be
composed not of childish and
incompetent masses, but of individuals who can be trusted to pursue their
own interests competently — if
they are first given access to accurate information and then left relatively free of interference to make
something of it. The Internet advances Smith's case dramatically 1 . Computerization is pushing political
debate in a libertarian direction,
linking markets to the necessary personal freedoms which markets need to
work, threatening countries that
fail to follow this course of streamlining government with disaster. At least this was true before
the great tech-wreck of 2001-2002.
It can only be a
matter of time before America rides on the back of the computer age into a new form of educational schooling
once called for by Adam Smith, that and a general reincorporation of children back into the greater social
body from which they were excised
a century and more ago will cure the problem of modern schooling. We can't afford to waste the resources young
lives represent much longer. Nobody's that rich. Nor is anybody smart enough to marshal those resources and use
them most efficiently. Individuals
have to do that for themselves.
On October 30, 1999,
The Economist printed a warning that decision-making was being dispersed around global networks of
individuals that fall beyond the control of national governments and nothing could be done about it.
"Innovation is now so fast and furious that big organizations increasingly look like dinosaurs
while wired individuals race past
them." That critique encompasses the problem of modern schooling,
which cannot educate for fear the
social order will explode. Yet the Siliconizing of the industrial world is up-ending hierarchies based on a few
knowing inside information and a mass knowing relatively less in descending layers, right on down to
schoolchildren given propaganda
and fairy tales in place of knowledge.
The full significance
of what Adam Smith saw several centuries ago is hardly well understood today, even among those who
claim to be his descendants. He saw that human potential, once educated, was beyond the reach of any system
of analysis to comprehend or
predict, or of any system of regulation to enhance. Fixed orders of social
hierarchy and economic destiny are
barricades put up to stem the surprising human inventiveness which would surely turn the world inside out
if unleashed; they secure privilege by holding individuals in place.
Smith saw that over
time wealth would follow the release of constraints on human inventiveness and imagination. The
larger the group invited to play, the more spectacular the results. For all the ignorance and
untrustworthiness in the world, he correctly perceived that the overwhelming majority of human beings
could indeed be trusted to act in
a way that over time is good for all. The only kind of education this system
needs to be efficient is
intellectual schooling for all, schooling to enlarge the imagination and strengthen the natural abilities to
analyze, experiment, and communicate. Bringing the young up in somebody else's grand socialization scheme, or
bringing them up to play a fixed
role in the existing economy and society, and nothing more, is like setting
fire to a fortune and burning it
up because you don't understand money.
Smith would recognize our current public
schools as the same kind of indoctrination project for the masses, albeit infinitely subtler, that the
Hindus employed for centuries, a
project whose attention is directed to the stability of the social order
through constraint of opportunity.
What a hideous waste! he might exclaim.
The great achievement of Wealth of
Nations resides in its conviction and demonstration that people individually do best for everyone when they do
best for themselves, when they
aren't commanded too much or protected against the consequences of their
own folly. As long as we have a
free market and a free society, Smith trusts us to be able to manage any problems that appear. It's
only when we vest authority and the problem- solving ability in a few that we become caught in a trap of
our own making. The wild world of
Silicon Valley mavericks and their outriggers is a hint of a dynamic America
to come where responsibility,
trust, and great expectations are once again given to the young as they were in Ben Franklin's
day. That is how we will break out of the school trap. Ask yourself where and how these Silicon kids really
learned what they know. The answer
isn't found in memorizing a script.
1. 'i
say this in the face of the technology disasters in global stock markets which
have wiped out trillions of dollars of capital, pension funds, and peoples' savings. Promoters and
manipulators of stock prices live in a world only tenuously connected to the
dynamics of invention, a world whose
attitude is drawn from the ruthless pragmatism of the Old Norse religion
strained through the ethical vacuum of Darwinism. The tech bust should teach us something about
the dark side of the human spirit, but it can say little about the positive
aspects of flesh-and -blood
technical enterprise or the innate democracy of the working societies it
generates.
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