234 The Squeeze: The Underground History of Amercian
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Squeeze
Of
course when you cheat people good you start to worry about your victims
getting even. David Gordon's 1996 book
Fa? and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working
Americans and the Myth of Managerial Downsizing catches the spirit of
the national guilty conscience this
way:
Can't trust your workers when left to
their own devices? Peer over their shoulders. Watch behind their backs. Record their movements.
Monitor them. Supervise them. Boss them.
Above all else, don't leave them alone. As one recent study observed,
"American companies tend, fundamentally,
to mistrust workers, whether they are salaried employees or blue collar workers."
And
American schools tend, fundamentally, to mistrust students. One way to deal
with danger from the middle and bottom
of the evolutionary order is to buy off the people's natural leaders. Instead of killing Zapata,
smart money deals Zapata in for his share.
We've seen this principle as it downloaded into "gifted and
talented" classrooms from the lofty
abstractions of Pareto and Mosca. Now it's time to regard those de-fanged
"gifted" children grown up,
waiting at the trough like the others. What do they in their turn have to teach anyone?
David Gordon says 13 percent of U.S.
nonfarm workers are managerial and
administrative. That's one boss for every seven and a half workers! And
the percentage of nonteaching school personnel
is twice that. Compare those numbers to a
manager/worker ratio of 4.2 percent in Japan, 3.9 percent in Germany,
2.6 percent in Sweden. Since 1947, when
the employment-hierarchy egg laid during the American Civil War finally hatched after incubating for a
century, the number of managers and
supervisors in America has exploded 360 percent (if only titled ones are
counted) and at least twice that if de
facto administrators — like teachers without teaching programs — are added in. All this entails a massive income
shift from men and women who produce
things to managers and supervisors who do not.
What does this add up to in human terms? Well,
for one thing, if our managerial burden
was held to the Japanese ratio, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20
million production level jobs could be
paid for. That would mean the end of unemployment. Totally. An economy arranged as ours is could not
tolerate such a condition, I understand. Let me
disabuse you next of any silly notion the pain of downsizing is being
spread out by an even-handed political
management, touching comfortable and hard-pressed alike. While it is true, as James Fallows says, that the
media pay disproportionate attention to
downsizing toward the top rungs of the occupational hierarchy, the
sobering facts are these: from 1991 to
1996 the percentage of managers among nonfarm employees rose about 12 percent. For each fat cat kicked off
the gravy train, 1.12 new ones climbed
aboard. All this is evidence not of generosity, I think, but of a
growing fear of ordinary people.
Is
this all just more of the same scare talk you've heard until you're sick of it?
I don't know; what do you make of these
figures? From 1790 until 1930 America incarcerated 50 people for every 100,000 in the
population; for 140 years the ratio held steady. Then suddenly the figure doubled between 1930 and
1940. The Depression, you say? Maybe,
but there had been depressions before, and anyway, by 1960 it doubled
again to 200 per 100,000. The shock of
WWII could have caused that, but there had been wars before. Between 1960 and 1970 the figure jogged
higher once again to 300 per 100,000. And 400
per 100,000 by 1980. And near 500 per 100,000 where it hovers at the new
century's beginning.
Has this escalation anything to do in a
family way with the odd remark attributed by a
national magazine to Marine Major Craig Tucker, of Ft. Leavenworth's
Battle Command Training Program, that
"a time may come when the military may have to go domestic"? I guess that's what he was taught at Ft.
Leavenworth.
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