168. Programming The Empty Child: The Underground
History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Programming
The Empty Child
To
get an act of faith this unlikely off the ground there had to be some more
potent vision than Skinner could
provide, some evidence more compelling than reinforcement schedule data to inspire men of affairs to back the
project. There
had to be foundational visions for the scientific quest. One will have to stand
for all, and the one I've selected for
examination is among the most horrifyingly influential books ever to
issue from a human pen, a rival in every
way to Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management. The author was Jean Jacques Rousseau. The book, Emile,
published in 1762. Whether Rousseau had given his own five children away to the
foundling home before or after he wrote it, I can't say for sure. Before, I'm told.
Emile is a detailed account of the total
transformation of a boy of ten under the precisely calculated behavioral ministrations of a
psychological schoolmaster. Rousseau showed
the world how to write on the empty child Locke had fathered; he
supplied means by which Locke's potent
image could be converted to methodology. It took only a quarter century for Germans to catch on to the
pick-and-shovel utility of dreamy Rousseau, only a little longer for Americans and English to
do the same. Once Rousseau was fully
digested, the temptation to see society's children as human resources
proved irresistible to those nations
which had gone furthest in developing the mineral resource, coal, and its useful spirits, heat and steam.
Rousseau's influence over pedagogy began when
empty child explanations of human nature
came to dominate. With emotional religion, village life, local elites, and
American tradition reeling from hammer
blows of mass immigration, the nation was broadly transformed at the beginning of the twentieth
century without much conscious public
awareness of what was happening.
One
blueprint for the great transformation was Emile, an attempt to reestablish
Eden using a procedure Rousseau called
"negative education." Before the book gets to protagonist Emile, we are treated to this
instructive vignette of an anonymous student:
The
poor child lets himself be taken away, he turned to look backward with regret,
fell silent, and departed, his eyes
swollen with tears he dared not shed and his heavy heart with the sigh he dared not exhale.
Thus
is the student victim led to the schoolmaster. What happens next is reassurance
that such a scene will never claim
Emile:
Oh you [spoken to Emile] who have nothing
similar to fear; you, for whom no time of
life is a time of constraint or boredom; you, who look forward to the
day without disquiet and to the night
without impatience — come, my happy and good natured pupil, come and console us."
Look at Rousseau's scene closely. Overlook
its sexual innuendo and you notice the
effusion is couched entirely in negatives. The teacher has no positive
expectations at all; he promises an
absence of pain, boredom, and ill-temper, just what Prozac delivers. Emile 's instructor says the boy likes him
because he knows "he will never be a long time without distraction" and because
"we never depend on each other."
This idea of negation is striking. Nobody
owes anybody anything; obligation and duty are
illusions. Emile isn't happy; he's "the opposite of the unhappy
child." Emile will learn "to
commit himself to the habit of not contracting any habits." He will
have no passionately held commitments,
no outside interests, no enthusiasms, and no significant relationships other than with the tutor. He must void his
memory of everything but the immediate
moment, as children raised in adoption and foster care are prone to do.
He is to feel, not think. He is to be
emptied in preparation for his initiation as a mindless article of nature.
The
similarity of all this to a drugged state dawns on the critical reader. Emile
is to find negative freedom — freedom
from attachment, freedom from danger, freedom from duty and responsibility, etc. But Rousseau
scrupulously avoids a question anybody might ask: What is this freedom for? What is its
point?
9.The
creepy tone of this authorial voice reminded me of a similar modern voice used
by a district school psychologist for the Londonderry, New Hampshire, public schools writing in an
Education Week article, "Teacher as Therapist" (October 1995): "Welcome. ...We get a good feeling on
entering this classroom.... M&M's for every correct math problem [aren't
necessary]. A smile, on the other hand,
a "Good Job!" or a pat on the back may be effective and all that is
necessary. Smiling faces on papers (even at the high-level) with special recognition at the end of the week
for the students with the most faces. ..can be powerful.... By setting
appropriate expectations within a system
of positive recognition and negative consequences, teachers become
therapists."
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