31.Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
31. Participatory
Democracy Put To The Sword
Thirty-odd years later, between 1967 and
1974, teacher training in the United States was
covertly revamped through coordinated efforts of a small number of
private foundations, select
universities, global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies,
all coordinated through the U.S. Office
of Education and through key state education
departments like those in California, Texas,
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
New York.
Important milestones of the transformation
were: 1) an extensive government exercise in
futurology called Designing Education for the Future, 2) the Behavioral
Science Teacher Education Project, and
3) Benjamin Bloom's multivolume Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, an enormous manual of over a
thousand pages which, in time, impacted every
school in America. While other documents exist, these three are
appropriate touchstones of the whole,
serving to make clear the nature of the project underway.
Take them one by one and savor each.
Designing Education, produced by the Education
Department, redefined the term "education" after the Prussian fashion
as "a means to achieve important
economic and social goals of a national character." State education agencies would henceforth act as on-site
federal enforcers, ensuring the compliance of
local schools with central directives. Each state education department
was assigned the task of becoming
"an agent of change" and advised to "lose its independent
identity as well as its authority,"
in order to "form a partnership with the federal government."
The
second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education
Project, outlined teaching reforms to be
forced on the country after 1967. If you ever want to hunt this thing down, it bears the U.S. Office
of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-
320424-4042 (BIO). The document sets out clearly the intentions of its
creators — nothing less than
"impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in
which "few will be able to maintain
control over their opinions," an America in which "each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose
identification number" which enables
employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to
expose them to direct or subliminal
influence when necessary. Readers learned that "chemical
experimentation" on minors would be
normal procedure in this post- 1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which
now accompany the practice of forced
schooling.
The Behavioral Science Teacher Education
Project identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will control all
important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear. Children are made to see,
through school experiences, that their
classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of
self-discipline, and so ignorant they
need to be controlled and regulated for society's good. Under such a logical regime, school terror can only be
regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to
think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human
inadequacy, but that is at least one of
its functions.
Post-modern schooling, we are told, is to
focus on "pleasure cultivation" and on "other attitudes and skills compatible with a
non-work world." Thus the socialization classroom of the century's beginning — itself a radical
departure from schooling for mental and
character development — can be seen to have evolved by 1967 into a
full-scale laboratory for psychological
experimentation.
School conversion was assisted powerfully by a
curious phenomenon of the middle to late
1960s, a tremendous rise in school violence and general school chaos which
followed a policy declaration (which
seems to have occurred nationwide) that the disciplining of children must henceforth mimic the "due
process" practice of the court system. Teachers and administrators were suddenly stripped of
any effective ability to keep order in
schools since the due process apparatus, of necessity a slow, deliberate
matter, is completely inadequate to the
continual outbreaks of childish mischief all schools experience.
Now, without the time-honored ad hoc
armory of disciplinary tactics to fall back on,
disorder spiraled out of control, passing from the realm of annoyance
into more dangerous terrain entirely as
word surged through student bodies that teacher hands were tied. And each outrageous event that reached
the attention of the local press served as an
advertisement for expert prescriptions. Who had ever seen kids behave
this way? Time to surrender community
involvement to the management of experts; time also for emergency measures like special education and
Ritalin. During this entire period, lasting
five to seven years, outside agencies like the Ford Foundation exercised
the right to supervise whether "children's
rights" were being given due attention, fanning the flames hotter even long after trouble had become
virtually unmanageable.
The
Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, published at the peak of
this violence, informed teacher-training
colleges that under such circumstances, teachers had to be trained as therapists; they must
translate prescriptions of social psychology into "practical action" in the
classroom. As curriculum had been redefined, so teaching followed suit.
Third in the series of new gospel texts was
Bloom's Taxonomy, in his own words, "a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act,
think, or feel as the result of some unit of
instruction." Using methods of behavioral psychology, children
would learn proper thoughts, feelings,
and actions, and have their improper attitudes brought from home "remediated."
In all stages of the school experiment,
testing was essential to localize the child's mental state on an official rating scale. Bloom's epic
spawned important descendant forms:
Mastery Learning, Outcomes-Based Education, and School to Work
government- business collaborations.
Each classified individuals for the convenience of social managers and businesses, each offered data
useful in controlling the mind and
movements of the young, mapping the next adult generation. But for what
purpose? Why was this being done?
32. Bad Character As A
Management Tool
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