134. The
Struggle for Homogeneity: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Eleven: The Crunch
The thesis I venture to submit to you is
as follows: That during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have
progressively removed from the curriculum
of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic
state; That the schools
and colleges have, therefore, been
sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the
society in which they must live; That deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated
Western men no longer possess in the form
and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises,
the rationale, the logic, the method,
the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization; That the
prevailing education is destined, if it
continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying
it. I realize quite well that this
thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and
here is a prima facie case for entering this
indictment.
—
Walter Lippmann, speaking before the Association for the Advancement of
Science, December 29, 1940
134.
The Struggle For Homogeneity
In 1882, an Atlantic Monthly writer
predicted a coming struggle for preservation of the American social order. European immigrants
were polarizing the country, upsetting the
"homogeneity on which free government must rest." That idea of
a necessary homogeneity made it certain
that all lanes out of the 1880s led to orthodoxy on a national scale. There was to be an official American
highway, its roadbed built from police
manuals and schoolteacher training texts. Citizens would now be graded
against the official standard, up to the
highest mark, "100 percent American."
In the thirty years between 1890 and 1920,
the original idea of America as a
cosmopolitan association of peoples, each with its own integrity, gave
way to urgent calls for national unity.
Even before WWI added its own shrill hysterics to the national project of regimentation, new social agencies were in
full cry on every front, aggressively taking
the battle of Americanization to millions of bewildered immigrants and
their children.
The
elite-managed "birth-control" movement, which culminated one hundred
years later in the legalization of
abortion, became visible and active during this period, annually distributing millions of pieces of literature
aimed at controlling lower-class breeding
instincts, an urgent priority on the national elitist agenda. Malthus,
Darwin, Galton, and Pearson became
secular saints at the Lawrence and Sheffield Scientific Schools at Harvard and Yale. Judge Ben Lindsey of the
Denver Children's Court, flogging easy
access to pornography as an indirect form of sterilization for
underclass men, was a different tile in
the same mosaic, as was institutional adoption. The planned parenthood movement, in our day swollen to billion
dollar corporate status, was one side of a coin
whose obverse was the prospering abortion, birth control, and adoption
industries. In those crucial years, a
sudden host of licensing acts closed down employment in a wide range of lucrative work — rationing the right
to practice trades much as kings and queens
of England had done. Work was distributed to favored groups and
individuals who were willing to satisfy screening
commissions that they met qualifications often unrelated to the actual work. Licensing suddenly became an
important factor in economic life, just as
it had been in royal England. This professionalization movement endowed
favored colleges and institutes, text
publishers, testing agencies, clothing manufacturers, and other allies with virtual sinecures.
Professional schools — even for bus drivers
and detectives — imposed the chastening
discipline of elaborate formal procedures, expensive and time-consuming
"training," on what had once
been areas of relatively free-form career design. And medicine, law, architecture, engineering, pharmacology — the
blue-ribbon work licenses — were suddenly
rigorously monitored, rationed by political fortune. Immigrants were
often excluded from meeting these
qualification demands, and many middle-class immigrants with a successful history of professional practice
back in Europe were plunged into destitution,
their families disintegrating under the artificial stresses. Others,
like my own family, scrambled to abandon
their home culture as far as possible in a go-along-with-the-crowd response to danger.
One of the hardest things for any
present-day reader to grasp about this era was the brazenness of the regimentation. Scientific
management was in its most enthusiastic
public phase then, monumentally zealous, maddingly smug. The state lay
under effective control of a relatively
small number of powerful families freed by the Darwinian religion from ethical obligation to a democratic
national agenda, or even to its familiar
republican/libertarian antithesis. Yet those antagonists comprised the
bedrock antinomies of our once
revolutionary public order, and without the eternal argument they provoked, there was no recognizable America.
No comments:
Post a Comment