170.Cleaning The Canvas: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Cleaning
The Canvas
Traditional
education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is
written somewhere within the human being,
awaiting dross to be removed before a true image shines forth. Schooling, on the other hand,
seeks a way to make
mind and character
blank, so others may chisel the destiny thereon.
Karl Popper's book The Open Society and Its
Enemies reveals with great clarity how old
the idea of tabula rasa (erroneously attributed to John Locke) actually
is. In writing of Plato's great Utopia,
The Republic, Popper shows Socrates telling auditors: "They will take as their canvas a city and the
characters of men, and they will, first of all, make their canvas clean — by no means an easy matter....
They will not start work on a city nor on an
individual unless they are given a clean canvas, or have cleaned it
themselves." (emphasis added)
Popper continues:
In the same spirit, Plato says in The
Statesman of the royal rulers who rule in accordance with the royal science of statesmanship:
"Whether they happen to rule by law or without law, over willing or unwilling subjects;...
whether they purge the state for its good by
killing or banishing some of its citizens — as long as they proceed
according to science. ..this form of
government must be declared the only one that is right." This is what canvas-cleaning means. He must eradicate
existing institutions and traditions. He
must purify, purge, expel, banish and kill.
Canvas-cleaning frees the individual of all
responsibility. Morality is voided, replaced by
reinforcement schedules. In their most enlightened form, theories of a
therapeutic community are those in which
only positive reinforcements are prescribed.
The therapeutic community is as close as
your nearest public school. In the article
"Teacher as Therapist" (footnote, pages 270-271), a glimpse of
Emile programmed on a national scale is
available. Its innocently garrulous author paints a landscape of therapy, openly identifying schools as behavioral
training centers whose positive and negative
reinforcement schedules are planned cooperatively in advance, and each
teacher is a therapist. Here everything
is planned down to the smallest "minimal recognition," nothing is accidental. Planned smiles or
"stern looks," spontaneity is a weed to be exterminated — you will remember the
injunction to draw smiling faces on every paper, "even at the high school
level."
An
important support girder of therapeutic community is a conviction that social
order can be maintained by inducing
students to depend emotionally on the approval of teachers. Horace Mann was thoroughly familiar
with this principle. Here are Mann's
words on the matter:
When a difficult question has been put to
a child, the Teacher approaches with a mingled
look of concern and encouragement [even minimal recognition requires
planning, here you have a primer of instructional text]; he
stands before him, the light and shade of hope
and fear alternately crossing his countenance. If the little wrestler
triumphs, the Teacher felicitates him
upon his success; perhaps seizes and shakes him by the hand in token congratulation; and when the difficulty has
been formidable and the effort triumphant, I
have seen Teacher catch up the child and embrace him, as though he were
not able to contain his joy.. .and all
this done so naturally and so unaffectedly as to excite no other feeling in the residue of the children than a
desire, by the same means, to win the same
caresses, (emphasis added)
Children were to be "loved into
submission; controlled with gestures, glances, tones of voice as if they were sensitive
machinery." What this passes for today is humanistic education, but the term has virtually the
same magnitude of disconnect from the historical humanism of the Erasmus/DeFeltre stripe
(which honored the mind and truly free choice)
as modern schooling is disconnected from any common understanding of the
word education.
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