180. Spirits Are Dangerous: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

180. Spirits Are Dangerous: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Spirits Are Dangerous  

     The net effect of holding children in confinement for twelve years without honor paid to  the spirit is a compelling demonstration that the State considers the Western spiritual  tradition dangerous, subversive. And of course it is.

School is about creating loyalty to  certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system  of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of  discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.   

     Once the mechanism is identified, its dynamics aren't hard to understand. Spiritually  contented people are dangerous for a variety of reasons. They don't make reliable  servants because they won't jump at every command. They test what is requested against  a code of moral principle. Those who are spiritually secure can't easily be driven to  sacrifice family relations. Corporate and financial capitalism are hardly possible on any  massive scale once a population finds its spiritual center.  

     For a society like ours to work, we need to feel that something is fundamentally wrong  when we can't continually "do better" — expand our farms and businesses, win a raise,  take exotic vacations. This is the way our loan/repayment cycle — the credit economy — is  sustained. The human tendency to simply enjoy work and camaraderie among workers is  turned into a race to outdo colleagues, to climb employment ladders. Ambition is a  trigger of corporate life and at the same time an acid that dissolves communities. By  spreading contentment on the cheap, spirituality was a danger to the new economy's  natural growth principle. So in a sense it was rational self-interest, not conspiracy, that  drove enlightened men to agree in their sporting places, drawing rooms, and clubs that  religious activity would have to be dampened down.   

      What they couldn't see is that through substitution of schooling for Bible religion, they  were sawing through two of the four main social supports of Western civilization. Think  of your dining room table; it was like breaking two of its legs off, replacing one with a  tall stack of dishes and one with a large dog. The top of the table would look the same  covered in cloth but it wouldn't be a good bet to get you through dinner. A century  earlier, Hamilton and Jefferson had speculated whether it might be possible to replace  religion with a civil substitute. The heady ideas of the French Revolution were on  everybody's lips. A civil substitute built on expanding the humble grassroots institution  of schooling might well free leaders from the divided loyalty religion imposes. Could an  ethical system based on law produce the same quality of human society as a moral system  based on divine inspiration? Jefferson was skeptical. Despite his fears, the experiment  was soon to be tried.