18.Oriental
Pedagogy: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
Oriental
Pedagogy
The ideal of a leveling Oriental
pedagogy expressed through government schooling was promoted by Jacobin orators of the French National
Convention in the early 1790s, the
commencement years of our own republic. The notion of
forced schooling
was irresistible to French
radicals, an enthusiasm whose foundation had been laid in preceding centuries by Utopian writers
like Harrington {Oceania), More {Utopia), Bacon {New Atlantis), Campanella {City of the Sun), and in other
speculative fantasy embracing the
fate of children. Cultivating a collective social organism was considered
the ingredient missing from feudal
society, an ingredient which would allow the West the harmony and stability of the East.
Utopian schooling never about learning
in the traditional sense; it's about the
transformation of human nature. The core of the difference between
Occident and Orient lies in the
power relationship between privileged and ordinary, and in respective
outlooks on human nature. In the
West, a metaphorical table is spread by society; the student decides how much to eat; in the East,
the teacher makes that decision. The Chinese character for school shows a passive child with adult hands
pouring knowledge into his empty
head.
To mandate outcomes
centrally would be a major step in the destruction of Western identity. Management by objectives,
whatever those objectives might be, is a technique of corporate subordination, not of education. Like Alfred's,
Charlemagne's awareness of Asia
was sharpened in mortal combat. He was the first secular Western potentate to
beat the drum for secular
schooling. It was easy to ignore Plato's gloomy forecast that however attractive Utopia appears in
imagination, human nature will not live easily with the degree of synthetic constraint it requires.
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