197. Two
Social Revolutions Become One: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Sixteen
A
Conspiracy Against Ourselves
A
lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education
without being given any corresponding
outlet for its trained abilities
was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and
the National Socialist Party in Germany. The
demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was
generated out of this intellectual
proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self- improvement were not sufficient — Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History
Solve this problem and school will heal
itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They
know they are devalued in classes and grades, 1
that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric
of caring contradicts what school
procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The
problem is structural. School has been built to
serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies.
Kids know this instinctively. How should
they feel about it? How should we?
As
soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble
figuring out why, in the nature of
things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make
most children dumb, allowing only a few to
escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and
social organization. When you start with
such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to
maintain themselves, any mystery
dissipates — these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not
conspiracies of people against people,
although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the
needs of the human spirit. It is a war of
mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms
that only require human architects to
get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see
that an intricately subordinated
industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of
millions of self-reliant, resourceful
readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one
the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in
the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be
accommodated usefully, but not in a
concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral
fervor some years back, the Ford Motor
Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in
Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring
employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford
removed its requirements and began to hire
school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The
hype that education is essential to
robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its
artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers,
whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand
other useful human enterprises — no outlet except corporate work or
fringe slots on the periphery of things.
Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of
a host of laws and regulations put on
the books to control the dangerous products of
imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command
system.
Before
you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or
your principles against the assault of
blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate
with a set of abstract principles and rules
which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is
what institutional schooling is, an
abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the
stuff of madness to a system; in systems-
logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the
only way they could be much improved is
to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start
of the twentieth century as part of a vast,
intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions
were overhauled to work together in
harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a
shared upper-class culture for its
coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science,
law, instruction, and mathematically
derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end
of the nineteenth century, he created a
business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of
government, the subsystem of schooling,
and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each
increment was rationally defensible. But the
net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America,
strong families, individual liberty, and
a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
A
huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we
still pay in the quality of our
existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the
American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social
system. But spare yourself the agony of
thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational
transaction, the very epitome of
rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men — but
with decisive help from ordinary
citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of
leaders, becoming consumers in place of
producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring
conspiracy, one which required no
criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic
security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire
against their own children, consigning
them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory
schooling.
1. The
labels, themselves, are an affront to decency. Who besides a degraded rabble
would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is
compulsory.
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