93. The Technology Of Subjection: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archve.org
The
Technology Of Subjection
Administrative Utopias are a peculiar kind
of dreaming by those in power, driven by an
urge to arrange the lives of others, organizing them for production,
combat, or detention. The operating
principles of administrative Utopia are hierarchy, discipline,
regimentation, strict order, rational
planning, a geometrical environment, a production line, a cellblock, and a form of welfarism. Government schools
and some private schools pass such
parameters with flying colors. In one sense, administrative Utopias are
laboratories for exploring the
technology of subjection and as such belong to a precise subdivision of pornographic art: total surveillance and
total control of the helpless. The aim and mode of administrative Utopia is to bestow order and
assistance on an unwilling population: to
provide its clothing and food. To schedule it. In a masterpiece of
cosmic misjudgment, the phrenologist
George Combe wrote Horace Mann on November 14, 1843:
The
Prussian and Saxon governments by means of their schools and their just laws
and rational public administration are
doing a good deal to bring their people into a rational and moral condition. It is pretty obvious to
thinking men that a few years more of this
cultivation will lead to the development of free institutions in
Germany.
Earlier that year, on May 21, 1843, Mann
had written to Combe: "I want to find out what are the results, as well as the workings of
the famous Prussian system." Just three years earlier, with the election of Marcus Morton as
governor of Massachusetts, a serious
challenge had been presented to Mann and to his Board of Education and
the air of Prussianism surrounding it
and its manufacturer/politician friends. A House committee was directed to look into the new Board of
Education and its plan to undertake a teachers
college with $10,000 put up by industrialist Edmund Dwight. Four days
after its assignment, the majority
reported out a bill to kill the board! Discontinue the Normal School experiment, it said, and give Dwight
his money back:
If
then the Board has any actual power, it is a dangerous power, touching directly
upon the rights and duties of the
Legislature; if it has no power, why continue its existence at an annual expense to the commonwealth?
But the House committee did more; it
warned explicitly that this board, dominated by a Unitarian majority of 7-5 (although
Unitarians comprised less than 1 percent of the
state), really wanted to install a Prussian system of education in
Massachusetts, to put "a monopoly
of power in a few hands, contrary in every respect to the true spirit of
our democratical institutions." The
vote of the House on this was the single greatest victory of Mann's political career, one for which he
and his wealthy friends called in every favor
they were owed. The result was 245 votes to continue, 1 82 votes to
discontinue, and so the House voted to
overturn the recommendations of its own committee. A 32-vote swing might have given us a much different
twentieth century than the one we saw.
Although Mann's own letters and diaries are
replete with attacks on orthodox religionists
as enemies of government schooling, an examination of the positive vote
reveals that from the outset the
orthodox churches were among Mann's staunchest allies. Mann had general support from Congregational,
Presbyterian, and Baptist clergymen. At this early stage they were completely unaware of the
doom secular schooling would spell out for
their denominations. They had been seduced into believing school was a
necessary insurance policy to deal with
incoming waves of Catholic immigration from Ireland and Germany, the cheap labor army which as early
as 1830 had been talked about in business
circles and eagerly anticipated as an answer to America's production
problems.
The
reason Germany, and not England, provided the original model for America's
essay into compulsion schooling may be
that Mann, while in Britain, had had a shocking
experience in English class snobbery which left him reeling. Boston
Common, he wrote, with its rows of
mottled sycamore trees, gravel walks, and frog ponds was downright embarrassing compared with any number of
stately English private grounds furnished
with stag and deer, fine arboretums of botanical specimens from faraway
lands, marble floors better than the
table tops at home, portraits, tapestries, giant gold-frame mirrors. The ballroom in the Bulfmch house in Boston
would be a butler's pantry in England, he
wrote. When Mann visited Stafford House of the Duke of Cumberland, he
went into culture shock:
Convicts on treadmills provide the energy
to pump water for fountains. I have seen
equipages, palaces, and the regalia of royalty side by side with
beggary, squalidness, and degradation in
which the very features of humanity were almost lost in those of the
brute.
For this great distinction between the
stratified orders of society, Mann held the Anglican church to blame. "Give me America with
all its rawness and want. We have aristocracy
enough at home and here I trace its foundations." Shocked from his
English experience, Mann virtually
willed that Prussian schools would provide him with answers, says his biographer Jonathan Messerli.
Mann arrived in Prussia when its schools
were closed for vacation. He toured empty
classrooms, spoke with authorities, interviewed vacationing
schoolmasters, and read piles of dusty
official reports. Yet from this nonexperience he claimed to come away with
a strong sense of the professional competence
of Prussian teachers! All "admirably
qualified and full of animation!" His wife Mary, of the famous
Peabodys, wrote home: "We have not
seen a teacher with a book in his hand in all Prussia; no, not one!" (emphasis added) This wasn't surprising, for
they hardly saw teachers at all.
Equally impressive, he wrote, was the
wonderful obedience of children; these German
kinder had "innate respect for superior years." The German
teacher corps? "The finest
collection of men I have ever seen — full of intelligence, dignity,
benevolence, kindness and
bearing...." Never, says Mann, did he witness "an instance of
harshness and severity. All is kind,
encouraging, animating, sympathizing." On the basis of imagining this miraculous vision of exactly the Prussia he
wanted to see, Mann made a special plea for
changes in the teaching of reading. He criticized the standard American
practice of beginning with the alphabet
and moving to syllables, urging his readers to consider the superior merit of teaching entire words from
the beginning. "I am satisfied," he said, "our greatest error in teaching lies in beginning
with the alphabet."
The heart of Mann's most famous Report to
the Boston School Committee, the legendary
Seventh, rings a familiar theme in American affairs. It seems even then
we were falling behind! This time,
behind the Prussians in education. In order to catch up, it was mandatory to create a professional corps of
teachers and a systematic curriculum, just as
the Prussians had. Mann fervently implored the board to accept his
prescription... while there was still
time! The note of hysteria is a drum roll sounding throughout Mann's entire career; together with the
vilification of his opponents, it constitutes much of Mann's spiritual signature.
That fall, the Association of Masters of
the Boston Public Schools published its 150-page rebuttal of Mann's Report. It attacked the
normal schools proposal as a vehicle for
propaganda for Mann's "hot bed theories, in which the projectors
have disregarded experience and
observation." It belittled his advocacy of phrenology and charged
Mann with attempting to excite the
prejudices of the ignorant. Its second attack was against the teacher-centered nonbook presentations of Prussian
classrooms, insisting the psychological
result of these was to break student potential "for forming the habit
of independent and individual
effort." The third attack was against the "word method" in teaching reading, and in defense of the
traditional alphabet method. Lastly, it attacked Mann's belief that interest was a better
motivator to learning than discipline: "Duty should come first and pleasure should grow
out of the discharge of it." Thus was framed a profound conflict between the old world of
the Puritans and the new psychological
strategy of the Germans.
The
German/American Reichsbank
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