227 Autonomous Technology: The Underground History of Amercian Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Autonomous
Technology
The simple truth is there is no way to control
this massive corporate/school thing from
the human end. It has to be broken up. It has become a piece of
autonomous technology. Its leadership is
bankrupt in ideas. Merchants are merchants, not moral leaders or political ones. It surely is a sign of
retrogression, not advance, that we have forgotten what the world's peoples knew forever. A
merchant has the same right to offer his opinion as I do, but it makes little sense
for people who buy and sell soap and cigarettes
to tell you how to raise your kid or what to believe in. No more sense
than it does for a pedagogue to do the
same. How would a huckster who pushes toothpaste, a joker who vends cigarettes, or a video dream peddler
know anything about leading nations or raising
children correctly? Are these to be the Washingtons, Jacksons, and
Lincolns of the twenty-first
century?
The
timeless core of Western tradition, which only the cowardly and corrupt would
wish to surrender, shows that we can't
grow into the truth of our own nature without local traditions and values at the center of
things. We do not do well as human beings in those abstract associations for material advantage
favored by merchants called networks, or in
megalithic systems, whether governmental, institutional, or corporate.
In his book An Open Life, Joseph
Campbell put his finger on the heart of the matter:
[It is] an Oriental model. One of the typical
things of the Orient is that any criticism
disqualifies you for the guru's instruction. Well in heaven's name, is
that appropriate for a Western mind?
It's simply a transferring of your submission to a childhood father onto a father for your adulthood. Which means
you're not growing up.... The thing about the
guru in the West is that he represents an alien principle, namely, that
you don't follow your own path, you
follow a given path. And that's totally contrary to the Western spirit! Our spirituality is of the individual quest,
individual realization — authenticity in your
own life out of your own center, (emphasis added)
Mario Savio, the 1960s campus radical, stood
once on the steps of Sproul Hall, Berkeley,
and screamed: There is a time
when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part; you can't
even passively take part, and you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon
all the apparatus and you've got to make
it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you are free the machine will be
prevented from working at all.
Limiting the power of government, in order
to liberate the individual, was the great
American revolutionary insight. Too much cooperation, avoiding conflict
from ordinary people, these things
aren't acceptable in America although they may suit China, Indonesia, Britain, or Germany just fine. In
America the absence of conflict is a sign of
regression toward a global mean, hardly progress by our lights if you've
seen much of the governance of the rest
of the world where common people are crushed like annoying insects if they argue.
Carl Schurz, the German immigrant, said
upon seeing America for the first time in 1848,
"Here you can see how slightly a people needs to be governed."
What it will take to break collectively
out of this trap is a change in the nature of forced schooling, one which
alters the balance of power between
societies and systems in favor of societies again. We need once more to debate angrily the purpose of
public education. The power of elites to set
the agenda for public schooling has to be challenged, an agenda which
includes totalitarian labeling of the
ordinary population, unwarranted official prerogatives, and near total control of work. Until such a
change happens, we need to individually withhold excessive allegiance from any and all forms
of abstract, remotely displaced, political and
economic leadership; we need to trust ourselves and our children to
remake the future locally, demand that
intellectual and character development once again be the mission of schools; we need to smash the government
monopoly over the upbringing of our young
by forcing it to compete for funds whose commitments should rest largely
on the judgment of parents and local
associations. Where argument, court action, foot-dragging, and polite subversion can't derail this
judgment, then we must find the courage to be
saboteurs, as the maquis did in occupied France during WWII.
It
isn't difficult, someone once said, to imagine young Bill Clinton sitting at
the feet of his favorite old professor,
Dr. Carroll Quigley of Georgetown. As Quigley approached death, he came back to Georgetown one last
time in 1976 to deliver the Oscar Iden
Lecture Series. The Quigley of the Iden lectures said many things which
anticipate the argument of my own book.
His words often turn to the modern predicament, the sense of impending doom many of us feel:
The
fundamental, all-pervasive cause of world instability is the destruction
of communities by the commercialization
of all human relationships and the resulting
neuroses and psychoses. ..another cause of today's instability is that
we now have a society.... which is
totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of
credit and banking, and the corporation. These
are free to political controls and social responsibility, ...The only
element of production they are concerned
with is the one they can control: capital.
Quigley alludes to a startling ultimate
solution to our problems with school and with
much else in our now state-obsessed lives, a drawing of critical
awareness:
...out of the Dark Age that followed the
collapse of the Carolingian Empire came the
most magnificent thing. ..the recognition that people can have a society
without having a state. In other words,
this experience wiped out the assumption that is found throughout Classical Antiquity, except among unorthodox
and heretical thinkers, that the state and
the society are identical, and therefore you can desire nothing more
than to be a citizen, (emphasis
added)
A
society without a state. If the only value hard reading had was to be able to
tune in on minds like Quigley's, minds
free of fetters, sharp axes with which to strike off chains, that alone would be reason enough to put such
reading at the heart of a new kind of
schooling which might strongly resemble the education America offered
150 years ago — a movement to ennoble
common people, freeing them from the clutches of masters, experts, and those terrifying true believers
whose eyes gleam in the dark. Quigley thought
such a transformation was inevitable:
Now
I come to my last statement... I'm not personally pessimistic. The final result
will be that the American people will
ultimately... opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed
people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it
is a great life — although I would assume that
many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out
will take a long time, but notice: we
are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large
scale basis.... People are also copping out by
refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what's going on in the
world, and by increasing emphasis on the
growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods.... When Rome fell, the
Christian answer was, "Create our own communities."
We
shall do that again. When we want better families, better neighbors, better
friends, and better schools we shall
turn our backs on national and global systems, on expert experts and specialist specialties and begin
to make our own schools one by one, far from
the reach of systems.
Did
you know that Lear of Lear Jet fame was a dropout? Pierre Cardin, Liz
Claiborne, the founder of McDonald's,
the founder of Wendy 's, Ben Franklin, one in every fifteen American millionaires?
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