222. The Planetary Management Corporation: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

222. The Planetary Management Corporation: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Planetary Management Corporation 

   Who governs? To what degree may rule be exercised arbitrarily? These are political  questions of forced schooling. In a free society contention is liberty's friend. Conflict  extended indefinitely is our personal guarantee there will always be a way out of being  suffocated by the will of another.    

     In a free society, the power situation must always be kept fluid, even though a high price  in inefficiency, instability, and frustration is paid by the ruling group or coalition for that  fluidity. As long as liberty is cherished beyond efficiency, the price will be paid. It is only  a short leap to deduce the political crime of mass forced schooling: it amputates the  argument and replaces it with engineered consensus. Once such a peace-making  apparatus is built, its interior drive to self-preservation and growth will organize its line  and staff personnel around a single-minded logic of orthodoxy. But that orthodoxy will  always be committed to the service of the economy, not to the interests of its nominal  clientele. 

      The New York Times of January 18, 2001, had this to say on Page A22 about the  economic politics of schooling: "Education aid is distributed through at least 55 different  formulas so technical only a select few can pretend to understand them." What explains  this: Accident? Stupidity? No, neither: "The school formulas are incomprehensible in  order to disguise how the system really works" — an explanation attributed by the Times  to an "influential" politician, otherwise unidentified. 

      As schooling encroaches further and further into family and personal life, monopolizing  the development of mind and character, children become human resources at the disposal  of whatever form of governance is dominant at the moment. That confers a huge  advantage on the leadership of the moment, allowing it to successfully reproduce itself,  foreclosing the strength of its competitors. Schooling becomes what is the ultimate form  of subsidy for corporate and status welfare, a destroyer of the free market. 

      Without opposition made possible by the education (rather than schooling) of children, a  Planetary Management Corporation is our certain destiny — and just as certain to be  followed sometime after its birth by a dissolution into chaos, the fate of all empires. Our  school tragedies are an early warning of something inherent in the laws of human  thermodynamics. Chaos increases steadily in closed systems cut off from the outside,  overorganization precipitates disorganization. Where the developing consciousness of  children cries out for jazz, what it gets instead is a scale exercise.