98. Managerial Utopia: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

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. 

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