200.
Disinherited Men And Women: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Disinherited
Men And Women
In
the chapter "Schism in the Body Social" from his monumental Study of
History, Toynbee calls our attention to
some dynamics of Western imperial success over the past four centuries which have important
implications for the
way state schooling is
conducted. As major victories were registered, he tells us, "many
diverse contingents of disinherited men
and women" were subjected to "the ordeal of being enrolled in
the Western internal proletariat."
Between 1850 and 1950 "the manpower of no less than ten disintegrating civilizations [was]
conscripted into the Western body social" and underwent "a process of
standardization" which blurred or wiped out "the characteristic features by which these heterogeneous masses
were once distinguished from one
another."
Under his mannerly academic diction runs a
river of insight explaining the paradox of forced schooling. It can allow no pilgrim way
because it aims at leveling the turbulent
singularity of youth, by a process of standardization, into featureless
components of a universal mass mind and
character. Nor, says Toynbee, has the victorious Western political state been content to prey upon its
own kind:
It has also rounded up almost all the
surviving primitive societies; and while some of these, like the Tasmanians and most of the
North American Indian tribes have died of
shock, others, like the Negroes of Tropical Africa, have managed to
survive and set the Niger flowing into
the Hudson and the Congo into the Mississippi — just as other activities of the same Western monster have
set the Yangtse flowing into the Straits of
Malaca.
Not only have Darwin's
"disfavored" races been so manhandled, but the free domestic populations of these countries have also been
"uprooted from the countryside and chevied
into the towns" in preparation for a strategic replacement of
small-scale mixed farming by mass
production specialized agriculture whose crops are produced by the modern analogue of "plantation
slavery."
England was first to commodify agricultural
products so intensely, "uprooting its own
free peasantry for the economic profit of an oligarchy by turning
plowland into pasture and common land
into enclosures." This state-driven push away from the independent farms of yeomen reduced that class to
"white trash" (in Toynbee's colorful idiom), and this disquieting social initiative was
powerfully augmented by a pull from the urban
industrial revolution also being engineered at the same time.
Handicrafts were replaced by output from
coal-driven machines. During the agonizing transition, owners of the new mechanical technology created another new
technology of social control through
abundant use of police, spies, sabotage, propaganda, and legislation to
hasten the passing of the old ways of
moral relationship.
Try hard to visualize through all this
milling grief of "beaten peoples" and "disinherited men and women," not their agony but the
perplexity of the corporate state. What is a
modern scientific state, having transcended the principles of Christian
life, to do with its masses once they
have been "degraded to the ranks of a proletariat," like so much detritus, and then further rendered
superfluous by a stream of inventions? Even more today than yesterday, this is America's
problem.
The question is all too real. It raises
the grim spectre of revolution which public policy seeks to push away through schooling. What
can anyone do with human flotsam in a
crowded world that scorns their labor and scorns their companionship?
Set them to watching television? From a
scientific perspective, people management isn't all that different from dealing with industrial waste.
At bottom, moral principle has little to do
with it. Dispositions are mainly matters of possibility and technique.
Here is the secret of scientific life
which refuses to stay hidden amidst the hollow moral rhetoric of
scientific schooling.
Toynbee's observation that most
inhabitants of a modern state are in a condition of disinheritance, and hence dangerous, calls
for what he terms "creative solutions." One creative solution is to establish work for
some of the dangerous classes by setting them to guard the rest. This guardian class is then
privileged a little to compensate it for playing the dirty kapo role against the others.
Toynbee is eloquent about the function of
bureaucrats in serving the creative minorities
which manage society. Creative minorities always manage complex
societies, according to Toynbee, but the
dominant minorities which comprise modern social leadership are the degenerate descendants of this originally
creative group. Dominant minorities manage the
rest by conscription of all into a massive two-tier proletariat. The
guiding protection is a mechanism to
ensure these proletariats don't learn much lest they become
"demoniac." This is the
unsuspected function which school tolerance of bad behavior serves — in
both school and society. The great
majority of proles are kept away from what history refers to as education. This can be done inexpensively
by leading children from ambitious exercises
in reading, writing, declamation, self-discipline, and from significant
practical experience in making things
work. It really is that simple, and it needn't be done forever. Even a few years of control at the beginning
of childhood will often suffice to set a
lifetime stamp.
Toynbee, and by extension the entire
cultivated leadership class he represented, was
unable to see any other alternative to this stupefaction course because,
as he hastened to assure us,
"the religion of the masses" is violence. There is no other choice
possible to responsible governors who
accept the melancholy conclusion that peasants are indeed revolting. The only proles Toynbee could find
in the historical record who managed to
extricate themselves from a fatal coarseness did so by escaping their
proletarian circumstances first. But if
this were allowed for all, who would clean toilets?
You
might expect such an observation would lead inevitably to some profound consideration of the astounding crimes of
conquest and domination which create
uprooted, landless classes in the first place — England's crimes against
Ireland, India, China, and any number of
other places being good examples. But a greater principle intervenes. According to certain sophisticated
theory, you can't operate a modern
economy without an underclass to control wage inflation; in spite of
bell- curve theory, a mass doesn't
subordinate itself without some judicious assistance.
In
his glorious Republic, which may have started it all, Plato causes Socrates to
inform Glaucon and Adeimantus,
twenty-four hundred years ago, that they can't loll on couches eating grapes while others sweat to provide those
grapes without first creating a fearsome
security state to protect themselves from the commonality. It would
appear that long ago some people
realized that a substantial moral trade-off would be required to create
ease for a fraction of the whole, while
the balance of the whole, served that ease. Once that kind of privilege became the goal of
Toynbee's creative minority, once high culture was defined as a sanctuary against evolutionary
reversion, certain horrors institutionalized
themselves.
The
clearest escape route from tidal recurrence of caste madness is a society bred
to argue, one trained to challenge. A
mentally active people might be expected to recognize that the prizes of massification — freedom
from labors like toilet cleaning, a life of endless consumption (and reflection upon future
consumption) — aren't really worth very much.
The fashioning of mass society isn't any chemical precondition of human
progress. It's just as likely to be a
signal that the last act of history is underway.
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