37. Bionomics: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Bionomics
The
crude power and resources to make twentieth-century forced schooling happen as
it did came from large
corporations and the federal government, from powerful, lone- established families, and from the
universities, now swollen with recruits from the declining Protestant ministry and from once-clerical
families. All this is easy enough to
trace once you know it's there. But the soul of the thing was far more
complex, an amalgam of ancient
religious doctrine, Utopian philosophy, and European/Asiatic strong- state politics mixed together and
distilled. The great facade behind which this was happening was a new enlightenment: scientific scholarship in
league with German research values
brought to America in the last half of the nineteenth century. Modern German tradition always assigned
universities the primary task of directly serving industry and the political state, but that was a radical
contradiction of American tradition
to serve the individual and the family.
Indiana University
provides a sharp insight into the kind of science-fictional consciousness developing outside the
mostly irrelevant debate conducted in the press about schooling, a debate proceeding on early nineteenth
century lines. By 1900, a special
discipline existed at Indiana for elite students, Bionomics. Invitees were
hand- picked by college president
David Starr Jordan, who created and taught the course. It dealt with the why and how of producing
a new evolutionary ruling class, although that characterization, suggesting as it does kings, dukes, and
princes, is somewhat misleading.
In the new scientific era dawning, the ruling class were those managers
trained in the goals and
procedures of new systems. Jordan did so well at Bionomics he was soon invited into the major leagues of
university existence, (an invitation extended personally by rail tycoon Leland Stanford) to
become first president of Stanford University, a school inspired by Andrew Carnegie's famous
"Gospel of Wealth" essay. Jordan remained president of Stanford for thirty years.
Bionomics acquired
its direct link with forced schooling in a fortuitous fashion. When he left Indiana, Jordan eventually reached
back to get his star Bionomics protege, Ellwood P. Cubberley, to become dean of Teacher Education at
Stanford. In this heady position,
young Cubberley made himself a reigning aristocrat of the new
institution. He wrote a history of
American schooling which became the standard of the school business for
the next fifty years; he assembled
a national syndicate which controlled administrative posts from coast to coast.
Cubberley was the man to see, the kingmaker in American school life until its pattern was set in
stone.
Did the abstract and rather arcane
discipline of Bionomics have any effect on real life? Well, consider this: the first formal legislation making
forced sterilization a legal act on
planet Earth was passed, not in Germany or Japan, but in the American
state of Indiana, a law which
became official in the famous 1927 Supreme Court test case Buck vs. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the
majority opinion allowing seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck to be sterilized against her will to prevent her
"degenerate offspring," in
Holmes' words, from being born. Twenty years after the momentous
decision, in the trial of German
doctors at Nuremberg, Nazi physicians testified that their precedents were American — aimed at combating racial
degeneracy. The German name for forced
sterilization was "the Indiana Procedure."
To say this
bionomical spirit infected public schooling is only to say birds fly. Once
you know it's there, the principle
jumps out at you from behind every school bush. It suffused public discourse in many areas where it
had claimed superior insight. Walter Lippmann, in 1922, demanded "severe restrictions on public
debate," in light of the allegedly
enormous number of feeble-minded Americans. The old ideal of
participatory democracy was
insane, according to Lippmann.
The theme of
scientifically controlled breeding interacted in a complex way with the
old Prussian ideal of a logical
society run by experts loyal to the state. It also echoed the idea of British state religion and political
society that God Himself had appointed the social classes. What gradually began to emerge from this was a
Darwinian caste-based American
version of institutional schooling remote-controlled at long distance, administered through a growing army of
hired hands, layered into intricate pedagogical hierarchies on the old Roman principle of divide and
conquer. Meanwhile, in the larger
world, assisted mightily by intense concentration of ownership in the
new electronic media, developments
moved swiftly also.
In 1928, Edward L. Bernays, godfather of
the new craft of spin control we call "public relations," told the readers of his book Crystallizing
Public Opinion that "invisible
power" was now in control of every aspect of American life.
Democracy, said Bernays, was only
a front for skillful wire-pulling. The necessary know-how to pull these crucial wires was available for sale to
businessmen and policy people. Public imagination was controlled by shaping the minds of schoolchildren.
By 1944, a repudiation of Jefferson's
idea that mankind had natural rights was resonating in every corner of academic life. Any professor who expected
free money from foundations,
corporations, or government agencies had to play the scientific management string on his lute. In 1961, the
concept of the political state as the sovereign principle surfaced dramatically in John F.
Kennedy's famous inaugural address in which his national audience was lectured, "Ask not what your
country can do for you, but what you
can do for your country."
Thirty-five years
later, Kennedy's lofty Romanized rhetoric and metaphor were replaced by the tough-talking wise guy idiom of
Time, instructing its readers in a 1996 cover story that "Democracy is in the worst interest of national
goals." As Time reporters put it, "The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the
street to interfere in its
management." Democracy was deemed a system for losers.
To a public
desensitized to its rights and possibilities, frozen out of the national
debate, to a public whose fate was
in the hands of experts, the secret was in the open for those who could read entrails: the original
American ideals had been repudiated by their guardians. School was best seen from this new
perspective as the critical terminal on a production line to create a Utopia resembling EPCOT Center, but with
one important bionomical
limitation: it wasn't intended for everyone, at least not for very long,
this Utopia.
Out of Johns Hopkins in 1996 came this
chilling news:
The American
economy has grown massively since the mid 1960s, but
workers'
real spendable wages are no higher
than they were 30
years ago.
That from a book
called Fat and Mean, about the significance of corporate downsizing. During the boom economy of the 1980s
and 1990s, purchasing power rose for 20 percent of the population and actually declined 13 percent for the
other four-fifths. Indeed, after
inflation was factored in, purchasing power of a working couple in 1995
was only 8 percent greater than
for a single working man in 1905; this steep decline in common prosperity over ninety years forced
both parents from home and deposited kids in the management systems of daycare, extended schooling, and
commercial entertainment. Despite
the century-long harangue that schooling was the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred —
wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century's end than at its beginning.
I don't mean to be inflammatory, but
it's as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger;
ruined formal religion with its
hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing
children into classes and setting
them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in
the hands of a fraction of the national community. Waking Up Angry
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