8. Author's Note: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Author's
Note
With conspiracy so close to the surface
of the American imagination and American
reality, I can only approach with trepidation the task of discouraging
you in advance from thinking my
book the chronicle of some vast diabolical conspiracy to seize all our children for the personal ends of a small,
elite
minority.
Don't get me wrong, American schooling
has been replete with chicanery from its very beginnings.* Indeed, it isn't difficult to find various conspirators
boasting in public about what they
pulled off. But if you take that tack you'll miss the real horror of
what I'm trying to describe, that
what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society
laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway —
without the legions of venal,
half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I'm
correct, we're in a much worse
position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.
If you obsess about
conspiracy, what you'll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully
concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these
institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we're in, it won't be by removing some
bad guys and replacing them with good guys.
Who are the villains,
really, but ourselves? People can change, but systems cannot without losing their structural
integrity. Even Henry Ford, a Jew-baiter of such colossal proportions he was lionized by Adolf
Hitler in Mein Kampf, made a public apology and denied to his death he had ever intended to hurt Jews — a
too strict interpretation of
Darwin made him do it! The great industrialists who gave us modern
compulsion schooling inevitably
found their own principles subordinated to systems-purposes, just as happened to the rest of us.
Take Andrew Carnegie,
the bobbin boy, who would certainly have been as appalled as the rest of us at the order to fire on
strikers at his Homestead plant. But the system he helped to create was committed to pushing men until they
reacted violently or dropped dead.
It was called "the Iron Law of Wages." Once his colleagues were
interested in the principles of
the Iron Law, they could only see the courage and defiance of the Homestead strikers as an opportunity to
provoke a crisis which would allow the steel union to be broken with state militia and public funds.
Crushing opposition is the obligatory
scene in the industrial drama, whatever it takes, and no matter how much individual industrial leaders like
Carnegie might be reluctant to do so.
My worry was
about finding a prominent ally to help me present this idea that inhuman anthropology is what we confront in our
institutional schools, not conspiracy. The hunt paid off with the discovery of an analysis of the Ludlow
Massacre by Walter Lippmann in the
New Republic of January 30, 1915. Following the Rockefeller slaughter of up
to forty-seven, mostly women and
children, in the tent camp of striking miners at Ludlow, Colorado, a congressional investigation
was held which put John D. Rockefeller Jr. on the defensive. Rockefeller agents had employed armored cars,
machine guns, and fire bombs in
his name. As Lippmann tells it, Rockefeller was charged with having the only authority to authorize such a massacre,
but also with too much indifference to what his underlings were up to. "Clearly," said the
industrial magnate, "both cannot be true."
As Lippmann recognized, this paradox is
the worm at the core of all colossal power. Both indeed could be true. For ten years Rockefeller hadn't even
seen this property; what he knew
of it came in reports from his managers he scarcely could have read along
with mountains of similar reports
coming to his desk each day. He was compelled to rely on the word of others. Drawing an analogy
between Rockefeller and the czar of Russia, Lippmann wrote that nobody believed the czar himself performed
the many despotic acts he was
accused of; everyone knew a bureaucracy did so in his name. But most failed
to push that knowledge to its
inevitable conclusion: If the czar tried to change what was customary he would be undermined by his
subordinates. He had no defense against this happening because it was in the best interests of all the
divisions of the bureaucracy,
including the army, that it — not the czar — continue to be in charge of
things. The czar was a prisoner of
his own subjects. In Lippmann 's words:
This seemed to be the
predicament of Mr. Rockefeller. I
should not believe he personally hired
thugs or wanted them hired. It seems far more true to say that his impersonal and
half-understood power has
delegated itself into unsocial forms, that it has assumed a life of its own which he is almost powerless to control.... His
intellectual helplessness was the
amazing part of his testimony. Here was a
man who represented wealth probably without parallel in history, the successor to a father who has, with justice, been called the high
priest of capitalism.... Yet he
talked about himself on the
commonplace moral assumptions of a small businessman.
The Rockefeller
Foundation has been instrumental through the century just passed (along with a few others) in giving us the
schools we have. It imported the German research model into college life, elevated service to business and
government as the goal of higher
education, not teaching. And Rockefeller- financed University of Chicago
and Columbia Teachers College have
been among the most energetic actors in the lower school tragedy. There is more, too, but none of it
means the Rockefeller family "masterminded" the school institution, or even that his
foundation or his colleges did. All became in time submerged in the system they did so much
to create, almost helpless to slow its
momentum even had they so desired.
Despite its title,
Underground History isn't a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a
personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is
important to our understanding;
it's a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The burden of an essay is to reveal its author so
candidly and thoroughly that the reader comes fully awake. You are about to spend twenty- five to
thirty hours with the mind of a schoolteacher, but the relationship we should have isn't one of teacher to
pupil but rather that of two people
in conversation. I'll offer ideas and a theory to explain things and you
bring your own experience to bear
on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read with this goal before you and I promise
your money's worth. It isn't important whether we agree on every detail.
A brief word on
sources. I've identified all quotations and paraphrases and given the origin of many (not all) individual
facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of too many trees, I've avoided extensive
footnoting. So much here is my personal take on things that it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels
that way: of minor value to those
who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even
maddening, to those who do not.
This is a workshop of
solutions as well as an attempt to frame the problem clearly, but be warned: they are perversely sprinkled
around like raisins in a pudding, nowhere grouped neatly as if to help you study for a test — except for a
short list at the very end. The advice
there is practical, but strictly limited to the world of compulsion
schooling as it currently exists,
not to the greater goal of understanding how education occurs or is prevented.
The best advice in this book is
scattered throughout and indirect, you'll have to work to extract it. It begins with the very
first sentence of the book where I remind you that what is right for systems is often wrong for
human beings. Translated into a recommendation, that means that to avoid the revenge of Bianca, we must be
prepared to insult systems for the
convenience of humanity, not the other way around. END
*For instance, for those of you who believe in testing, school
superintendents as a class are virtually the stupidest people to pass through
a graduate college program,
ranking fifty-one points below the elementary school teachers they normally
"supervice," (on the Graduate Record Examination), abd about eighty points below secondary-school
teachers, while teachers themselves as an aggregate finish seventeenth of twenty occupational groups surveyed.
The reader is of course at liberty to believe this happened accidentally, or
that the moon is composed of blue,
not green, cheese as is popularly believed. It's also possible to take this
anomaly as conclusive evidence of the irrelevance of standardized testing. Your choice.
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