34. The Dangan: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Dangan
In the first decades of the twentieth
century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous
academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of
Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P.
Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and
financed by major corporate and financial
allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided
to bend
government schooling to the service of
business and the political state — as it had been done a century before in Prussia.
Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening
this way: "The nature of the national
need must determine the character of the education provided."
National need, of course, depends upon
point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department
of Superintendence that what school served
was an "effective use of capital" through which our
"unprecedented wealth-producing
power has been gained." When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left
and Right, pronouncements like this mark
the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the
new economy.
It's important to keep in mind that no harm
was meant by any designers or managers of
this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it,
working progressively as capitalism
itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of
many persuasions, linked together mainly by
their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions
standing in the way of progress. Far
beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea
capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.
The
entire academic community here and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized
by this time and to this contingent
school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary destiny. In Thorndike's memorable words,
conditions for controlled selective breeding
had to be set up before the new American industrial proletariat
"took things into their own
hands."
America was a frustrating petri dish in
which to cultivate a managerial revolution,
however, because of its historic freedom traditions. But thanks to the
patronage of important men and
institutions, a group of academics were enabled to visit mainland China to launch a modernization project known
as the "New Thought Tide." Dewey
himself lived in China for two years where pedagogical theories were
inculcated in the Young Turk elements,
then tested on a bewildered population which had recently been stripped of its ancient form of governance. A
similar process was embedded in the new
Russian state during the 1920s.
While American public opinion was unaware of
this undertaking, some big-city school
superintendents were wise to the fact that they were part of a global
experiment. Listen to H.B. Wilson,
superintendent of the Topeka schools:
The
introduction of the American school into the Orient has broken up 40 centuries
of conservatism. It has given us a new
China, a new Japan, and is working marked progress in Turkey and the Philippines.
The schools. ..are in a position to
determine the lines of progress.
{Motivation of School Work,\9\6)
Thoughts like this don't spring full-blown from
the heads of men like Dr. Wilson of
Topeka. They have to be planted there.
The Western-inspired and Western-financed
Chinese revolution, following hard on the
heels of the last desperate attempt by China to prevent the British
government traffic in narcotic drugs
there, placed that ancient province in a favorable state of anarchy for laboratory tests of mind-alteration
technology. Out of this period rose a Chinese universal tracking procedure called "The
Dangan," a continuous lifelong personnel file exposing every student's intimate life history from
birth through school and onwards. The Dangan
constituted the ultimate overthrow of privacy. Today, nobody works in
China without a Dangan.
By
the mid-1960s preliminary work on an American Dangan was underway as information reservoirs attached to the school
institution began to store personal
information. A new class of expert like Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie
Endowments quietly began to urge
collection of personal data from students and its unification in computer code to enhance cross-referencing.
Surreptitious data gathering was justified by Tyler as "the moral right of institutions."
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