44. False Premises: The Underground HIstory of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
False
Premises
The
religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the
legendary University of Wisconsin
sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control. Your librarian should be able to
locate a copy for you without much trouble. In
it Ed Ross wrote these words for his prominent
following: "Plans
are underway to replace community,
family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media.... the
State shakes loose from Church, reaches
out to School.... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough." Social Control
revolutionized the discipline of sociology and had powerful effects on the other human sciences:
in social science it guided the direction of
political science, economics, and psychology; in biology it influenced
genetics, eugenics, and psychobiology.
It played a critical role in the conception and design of molecular biology.
There you have it in a nutshell. The whole
problem with modern schooling. It rests on a
nest of false premises. People are not little plastic lumps of dough.
They are not blank tablets as John Locke
said they were, they are not machines as de La Mettrie hoped, not vegetables as Friedrich Froebel, inventor of
kindergartens, hypothesized, not organic
mechanisms as Wilhelm Wundt taught every psychology department in
America at the turn of the century,
nor are they repertoires of behaviors as Watson and Skinner wanted. They are not, as the new crop of systems
thinkers would have it, mystically harmonious
microsystems interlocking with grand macrosystems in a dance of atomic
forces. I don't want to be crazy about
this; locked in a lecture hall or a bull session there's probably no more harm in these theories than reading too
many Italian sonnets all at one sitting. But
when each of these suppositions is sprung free to serve as a foundation
for school experiments, it leads to
frightfully oppressive practices.
One
of the ideas that empty-child thinking led directly to was the notion that
human breeding could be enhanced or
retarded as plant and animal breeding was — by scientific gardeners and husbandmen. Of course, the time
scale over which this was plotted to
happen was quite long. Nobody expected it to be like breeding fruit
flies, but it was a major academic,
governmental, and even military item generously funded until Hitler's proactive program (following America's lead)
grew so embarrassing by 1939 that our
own projects and plans were made more circumspect.
Back at the beginning of the twentieth
century, the monstrously influential Edward
Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College said that school would establish
conditions for "selective breeding
before the masses take things into their own hands." The religious purpose of modern schooling was
embarrassingly evident back when Ross and Thorndike were on center stage, but they were
surrounded by many like-minded friends. Another
major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book
Human Efficiency (1920) that government
schooling was about "the perfect organization of the hive." He said standardized testing was a way to make
lower classes recognize their own inferiority.
Like wearing a dunce cap, it would discourage them from breeding and
having ambition. Goddard was head of the
Psychology Department at Princeton, so imagine the effect he had on the minds of the doctoral candidates
he coached, and there were hundreds. We
didn't leave the religious purpose of modern schooling back in the early
years of the century. In April of 1996,
Al Shanker of the AFT said in his regular New York Times split-page advertisement that every teacher
was really a priest.
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