6. The
New Dumbness: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Ordinary people send their children to school
to get smart, but what modern schooling
teaches is dumbness. It's a religious idea gone out of control. You
don't have to accept that, though, to
realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won't ask
you to
take that on faith. Be patient. I'll let
a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global
financial success in just a little
while. Be patient.
Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple
ignorance; now it is transformed from
ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity
like "gifted and talented,"
"mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is
rationed for the good of a system of
order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with
substantial doses of commercially prepared
disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a
reflection on the phenomenon, warned us
that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects
of schooling because they are promised
more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly: Critical judgment disappears altogether, for
in no way can there ever be collective
critical
judgment. ...The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his
thoughts to the entire complex of values
and prejudices established by
propaganda. With regard to political
situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...
the word of experts.
The
new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow
by multiple pressures to conform imposed
by the outside world on their usually
lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because
their degrees and licenses say they do.
They remain so convinced until an
unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate
downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their
incomplete humanity, their stillborn
adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure
has filled the twentieth century with evil.
Ellul puts it this way:
The individual has no chance to exercise
his judgment either on principal
questions or on their implication; this
leads to the atrophy of a faculty not
comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions. ..Once personal judgment and
critical faculties have disappeared or
have atrophied, they will not simply
reappear when propaganda is
suppressed... years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such
faculties. The propagandee, if deprived
of one propaganda, will immediately
adopt another, this will spare him the
agony of finding himself vis a vis some event
without a ready-made opinion.
Once the best children are broken to such
a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming
dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family
once wrote that her dream was to be
"a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think
for themselves or ever be at rest for very
long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence
in many ways easily exploitable by their
knowledgeable elders.
According to all official analysis,
dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be
called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind
that governs modern society. According to
official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of
what you and I call mental life:
creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying
the three highest positions on Bloom's
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to
experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly
dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice to this
social coup which revived the English
class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and
talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social
order.
If you believe nothing can be done for the
dumb except kindness, because it's biology
(the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined
the dumb because they are bad people
(the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that
it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies from
the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature's way of
providing someone to clean your toilet
(the pragmatic elitist model); or that it's evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe
any of the various explanations given for the
position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be
forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy
is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The
shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to
tending to them will seem incredible to
you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Once the dumb are wished into existence,
they serve valuable functions: as a
danger to themselves and others they have to be
watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To
idealists they represent a challenge,
reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual
children require paid attention from
millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another.
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