117. Regulating Lives Like Machinery: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Regulating
Lives Like Machinery
The
real explanation for this sudden gulf between NEA policies in 1893 and 1911
had nothing to do with intervening
feedback from teachers, principals, or superintendents about what schools needed; rather, it
signaled titanic forces
gathering outside the closed universe of schooling with the intention of
altering this nation's economy, politics, social relationships, future direction, and
eventually the terms of its national existence, using schools as instruments in the work.
Schoolmen were never invited to the policy
table at which momentous decisions were
made. When Ellwood P. Cubberley began tentatively to raise his voice in
protest against radical changes being
forced upon schools (in his history of education), particularly the sudden enforcement of compulsory attendance
laws which brought amazing disruption
into the heretofore well-mannered school world, he quickly pulled back
without naming the community leaders —
as he called them — who gave the actual orders. This evidence of impotence documents the pedagogue status of
even the most elevated titans of schooling
like Cubberley. You can find this reference and others like it in Public
Education in the United States.
Scientific management was about to merge
with systematic schooling in the United
States; it preferred to steal in silently on little cat's feet, but nobody
ever questioned the right of businessmen
to impose a business philosophy to tamper with children's lives. On the cantilever principle of interlocking
directorates pioneered by Morgan interests,
scientific school management flowed into other institutional domains of
American life, too. According to Taylor,
application of mechanical power to production could be generalized into every arena of national
life, even to the pulpit, certainly to schools. This would bring about a realization that people's
lives could be regulated very much like
machinery, without sentiment. Any expenditure of time and energy
demanded rationalization, whether
first-grader or coalminer, behavior should be mathematically accounted for following the new statistical
procedures of Galton and Karl Pearson.
The scientific management movement was
backed by many international bankers and
industrialists. In 1905, the vice president of the National City Bank of
New York, Frank Vanderlip, made his way
to the speaker's podium at the National Education Association's annual convention to say:
I am firmly convinced the economic success
of Germany can be encompassed in a single
word — schoolmaster. From the economic point of view the school system
of Germany stands unparalleled.
German schools were psychologically
managed, ours must be, too. People of substance
stood, they thought, on the verge of an ultimate secret. How to write
upon the empty slates of empty
children's minds in the dawning era of scientific management. What they would write there was a program to make dwarf
and fractional human beings, people
crippled by implanted urges and habits beyond their understanding, men
and women who cry out to be
managed.
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