98. Managerial Utopia: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
98. Managerial
Utopia
In an
angry letter to the Atlantic Monthly (January 1998), Walter Greene, of
Hatboro, Pennsylvania, protested the
"myth of our failing schools," as he called it, on these grounds:
We
just happen to have the world's most productive work force, the largest
economy, the highest material standard
of living, more Nobel prizes than the rest of the world combined, the best system of higher
education, the best high-tech medicine, and the
strongest military. These things could not have been accomplished with
second-rate systems of education.
On
the contrary, the surprising truth is they could not have been accomplished to
the degree they have been without
second-rate systems of education. But here it is, writ plain, the crux of an unbearable paradox posed by
scientifically efficient schooling. It works.
School, as we have it, does build national wealth, it does lead to
endless scientific advances. Where is
Greene's misstep? It lies in the equation of material prosperity and power with education when our affluence is
built on schooling (and on entrepreneurial
freedom, too, of course, for those libertarian enough to seize it). A
century of relentless agit-prop has
thrown us off the scent. The truth is that America's unprecedented global power and spectacular material wealth are a direct
product of a third-rate educational
system, upon whose inefficiency in developing intellect and character
they depend. If we educated better we
could not sustain the corporate Utopia we have made. Schools build national wealth by tearing down personal
sovereignty, morality, and family life. It was a trade-off.
This contradiction is not unknown at the top,
but it is never spoken aloud as part of the
national school debate. Unacknowledged, it has been able to make its way
among us undisturbed by protest. E.P.
Thompson's classic, The Making of the English Working Class, is an eye-opening introduction to this
bittersweet truth about "productive" workforces and national riches. When a
Colorado coalminer testified before authorities in 1871 that eight hours underground was long
enough for any man because "he has no time
to improve his intellect if he works more," the coaldigger could
hardly have realized his very deficiency
was value added to the market equation.
What the nineteenth century in the coal-rich
nations pointed toward was building
infrastructure for managerial Utopia, a kind of society in which
unelected functional specialists make
all the decisions that matter. Formal periods of indoctrination and canonical books of instruction limit these
specialists in their choices. The idea of
managerial science is to embed managers so securely in abstract
regulation and procedure that the fixed
purpose of the endeavor becomes manager-proof.
Managerial Utopias take tremendous effort to
build. England's version of this political
form was a millennium in the building. Such governance is costly to
maintain because it wastes huge amounts
of human time on a principle akin to the old warning that the Devil finds work for idle hands; it employs large
numbers of incompetent and indifferent
managers in positions of responsibility on the theory that loyalty is
more important than ability to do the
job. I watched this philosophy in action in public schools for thirty
years.
Ordinary people have a nasty habit of
consciously and unconsciously sabotaging
managerial Utopias, quietly trashing in whole or part the wishes of
managers. To thwart these tendencies,
expensive vigilance is the watchword of large systems, and the security aspect of managerial Utopia has to be paid
for. Where did this money originally come
from? The answer was from a surplus provided by coal, steam, steel,
chemicals, and conquest. It was more
than sufficient to pay for a mass school experiment. Society didn't slowly evolve to make way for a coal-based
economy. It was forcibly made over in
double time like Prussians marching to battle Napoleon at Waterloo. An
entirely successful way of life was
forcibly ushered out.
Before anything could be modern, the damnable
past had to be uprooted with its village
culture, tight families, pious population, and independent livelihoods.
Only a state religion had the power to
do this — England and Germany were evidence of that — but America lacked one. A military establishment
had power to do it, too. France, under the
Directorate and Napoleon, was the most recent example of what physical
force could accomplish in remaking the
social order, but military power was still too dispersed and unreliable in America to employ it
consistently against citizens.
As
the established Protestant religion schismed and broke apart, however, America
came into possession of something that
would serve in its place — a kaleidoscope of Utopian cults and a tradition of Utopian exhortation,
a full palette of roving experts and teachers,
Sunday schools, lyceums, pulpits, and Chautauquas. It was a propitious
time and place in which to aim for
long-range management of public opinion through the Utopian schooling vehicle Plato had described and that modern
Prussia was actually using.
It
takes no great insight or intelligence to see that the health of a centralized
economy built around dense
concentrations of economic power and a close business alliance with government can't tolerate any considerable
degree of intellectual schooling. This is no
vain hypothesis. The recent French Revolution was widely regarded as the
work of a horde of underemployed
intellectuals, the American uprising more of the same. As the nineteenth century wore on, the Hungarian and
Italian revolutions were both financed and
partially planned from the United States using cells of marginal
intellectuals, third sons, and other
malcontents as a volunteer fifth column in advance of the revolutionary moment back home. Ample precedent to fear the
educated was there; it was recognized
that historical precedent identified thoughtful schooling as a dangerous
blessing.
The Positive Method
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