171.Therapy
As Curriculum: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Therapy
As Curriculum
To
say that various psychologies dominate modern schooling is hardly to plow
new ground. The tough thing to do is to
show how that happened and why — and how the
project progresses to its unseen goals. The Atlantic Monthly had this to
say
in April 1993:
...schools have turned to therapeutic
remediation. A growing proportion of many school budgets is devoted to counseling and other
psychological services. The curriculum is
becoming more therapeutic: children are taking courses in self-esteem,
conflict resolution, and aggression management.
Parental advisory groups are conscientiously
debating alternative approaches to traditional school discipline,
ranging from teacher training in
mediation to the introduction of metal detectors and security guards in
the schools. Schools are increasingly
becoming emergency rooms of the emotions,
devoted. ..to repairing hearts. What we are seeing. ...is the
psychologization of American
education.
Two years before I ran across that
Atlantic broadside, I encountered a different analysis in the financial magazine Forbes. I was
surprised to discover Forbes had correctly
tracked the closest inspiration for school psychologizing, both its aims
and its techniques, to the pedagogy of
China and the Soviet Union. Not similar practices and programs, mind you, identical ones. The great initial link
with Russia, I knew, had been from the
Wundtian Ivan Pavlov, but the Chinese connection was news to me. I was
unaware then of John Dewey's tenure
there in the 1920s, and had given no thought, for that reason, to its possible significance:
The
techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely
used in psychological conditioning
programs imposed on school children. These include emotional shock and desensitization,
psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative
cross-examination of the individual's underlying moral values by psychological rather than
rational means. These techniques are not
confined to separate courses or programs. ..they are not isolated
idiosyncracies of particular teachers. They
are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that
sell such curricula to administrators and
teach the techniques to teachers. Some packages even include
instructions on how to deal with parents
and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be
discussed in group sessions, and through role-
playing assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing
programs in China under Mao.
The Forbes writer, Thomas Sowell, perhaps
invoking the slave states in part to rouse the
reader's capitalist dander, could hardly have been aware himself how
carefully industrial and institutional
interest had seeded Russia, China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands with the doctrine of psychological schooling long ago,
nearly at the beginning of the century, and
in Japan's case even before that. All along we have harvested these
experimental growths in foreign soil for
what they seem to prove about people-shaping.
For
example, the current push for School-to-Work deep mines specific practices of
the former Soviet Union, even to the
point of using identical language from Soviet texts. School-to-Work was a project installed in Russia
by Americans in the 1920s to test the
advice of the nineteenth-century Swiss aristocrat von Fellenberg that
manual labor should be combined with
academic schooling. Fellenberg's doctrine was a short-lived fad in this country in the 1830s, but ever after it had a
place in the mind of certain men of affairs and
social theorists. The opportunity afforded by Russia's chaos after WWI
seemed too promising to pass up.
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