71. De-Moralizing School Procedure: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
De-Moralizing
School Procedure
But a
strange thing happened as more and more children were drawn into the net, a
crisis of an unexpected sort. At first
those primitive one-room and two-room compulsion schools — even the large new secondary
schools like Philadelphia's Central High —
poured out large numbers of trained, disciplined intellects. Government
schoolteachers in those early days chose
overwhelmingly
to emulate standards of private academies, and to a remarkable degree they succeeded in
unwittingly sabotaging the hierarchical plan being moved on line. Without a carefully trained
administrative staff (and most American
schools had no administrators), it proved impossible to impose the
dumbing-down process 1 promised by the
German prototype. In addition, right through the 1920s, a skilled apprenticeship alternative was active
in the United States, traditional training that
still honored our national mythology of success.
Ironically, the first crisis provoked by
the new school institution was taking its rhetorical mandate too seriously. From it poured an
abundance of intellectually trained minds at
exactly the moment when the national economy of independent livelihoods
and democratic workplaces was giving way
to professionally managed, accountant-driven
hierarchical corporations which needed no such people. The typical
graduate of a one- room school
represented a force antithetical to the logic of corporate life, a cohort inclined to judge leadership on its merit,
one reluctant to confer authority on mere titles. 2
Immediate action was called for. Cubberley's
celebratory history doesn't examine
motives, but does uneasily record forceful steps taken just inside the
new century to nip the career of
intellectual schooling for the masses in the bud, replacing it with a
different goal: the forging of
"well-adjusted" citizens.
Since 1900, and due more to the activity
of persons concerned with social legislation and those interested in improving the moral
welfare of children than to educators themselves, there has been a general revision of the
compulsory education laws of our States and the
enactment of much new child- welfare... and anti-child-labor
legislation. ...These laws have brought
into the schools not only the truant and the incorrigible, who under
former conditions either left early or
were expelled, but also many children... who have no aptitude for book learning and many
children of inferior mental qualities who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedures.
...Our schools have come to contain many
children who. ..become a nuisance in the school and tend to demoralize
school procedure. [emphasis added]
We're not going to get much closer to
running face-to-face into the true believers and the self-interested parties who imposed forced
schooling than in Cubberley's mysterious
"persons concerned with social legislation." At about the time
Cubberley refers to, Walter Jessup,
president of the University of Iowa, was publicly complaining, "Now
America demands we educate the whole....
It is a much more difficult problem to teach all children than to teach those who want to
learn." Common sense should tell
you it isn't "difficult" to teach children who don't want to learn. It's impossible.
Common sense should tell you
"America" was demanding nothing
of the sort. But somebody most certainly was insisting on universal
indoctrination in class subordination.
The forced attendance of children who want to be elsewhere, learning in a different way, meant the short happy career
of academic public schooling was
deliberately foreclosed, with "democracy" used as the excuse.
The new inclusive pedagogy effectively
doomed the bulk of American children.
What you should take away from this is the
deliberate introduction of children who
"demoralize school procedure," children who were accommodated
prior to this legislation in a number of
other productive (and by no means inferior) forms of training, just as Benjamin Franklin had been. Richard
Hofstadter and other social historians have
mistakenly accepted at face value official claims that "democratic
tradition" — the will of the people
— imposed this anti-intellectual diet on the classroom. Democracy had
nothing to do with it.
What we are up against is a strategic project
supported by an uneasy coalition of elites,
each with its own private goals in mind for the common institution.
Among those goals was the urge to go to
war against diversity, to impose orthodoxy on heterodox society. For an important clue to how this was accomplished
we return to Cubberley:
The school reorganized its teaching along
lines dictated by the new psychology of
instruction which had come to us from abroad.... Beginning about 1880 to
1885 our schools began to experience a
new but steady change in purpose [though] it is only since about 1900 that any marked and rapid changes
have set in.
The new psychology of instruction cited
here is the new experimental psychology of
Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig, which dismissed the very existence of mind as
an epiphenomenon. Children were complex
machines, capable of infinite "adjustments." Here was the beginning of that new and
unexpected genus of schooling which Bailyn said
"troubled well-disposed, high-minded people," and which
elevated a new class of technocrat like
Cubberley and Dewey to national prominence. The intention to sell schooling as a substitute for faith is caught
clearly in Cubberley's observation: "However much we may have lost interest in the old
problems of faith and religion, the American
people have come to believe thoroughly in education." New subjects
replaced "the old limited book
subject curriculum, both elementary and secondary."
This was done despite the objections of
many teachers and citizens, and much ridicule
from the public press. Many spoke sneeringly of the new subjects.
Cubberley provides an accurate account of the
prospective new City on the Hill for which
"public education" was to be a prelude, a City which rose
hurriedly after the failed populist
revolt of 1896 frightened industrial leaders. I've selected six excerpts
from Cubberley's celebrated History
which allow you to see, through an insider's eyes, the game that was afoot a century ago as U.S.
school training was being fitted for its German
uniform. (All emphasis in the list that follows is my own):
1 . The Spanish-American War of 1898 served
to awaken us as a nation... It revealed
to us something of the position we should be called on to occupy in
world affairs....
2. For the two decades following.... the
specialization of labor and the introduction
of labor-saving machinery tookplace to an extent before unknown.... The
national and state government were
called upon to do many things for the benefit of the people never attempted before.
3. Since 1898, education has awakened a
public interest before unknown....
Everywhere state educational commissions and city school surveys
have evidenced a new critical
attitude.... Much new educational legislation has been enacted; permission has been changed to
obligation; minimum requirements have
been laid down by the States in many new directions; and new subjects
of instruction have been added by the
law. Courses of study have been entirely made
over and new types of textbooks have appeared A complete new system
of industrial education, national in
scope, has been developed.
4. New normal schools have been founded
and higher requirements have been
ordered for those desiring to teach. College departments of education
have increased from eleven in 1891 to
something like five hundred today [1919] .
Private gifts to colleges and universities have exceeded anything known
before in any land. School taxes have
been increased, old school funds more carefully
guarded, and new constitutional provisions as to education have been
added.
5 . Compulsory education has begun to be a
reality, and child-labor laws to be
enforced.
6. A new interest in child-welfare and
child-hygiene has arisen, evidencing
commendable desire to look after the bodies as well as the minds of
children....
Here in a brief progression is one window
on the problem of modern schooling. It set out
to build a new social order at the beginning of the twentieth century
(and by 1970 had succeeded beyond all
expectations), but in the process it crippled the democratic experiment of America, disenfranchising
ordinary people, dividing families, creating
wholesale dependencies, grotesquely extending childhoods. It emptied
people of full humanity in order to
convert them into human resources.
1 It
was not really until the period around 1914 that sufficient teacher training
facilities, regulated texts,controlled
certification, uniform testing, stratified administrative cadres, and a
sufficiently alienated public allowed
the new age of schooling to tentatively begin.
2 In
conservative political theory dating back to Thucydides, meritocracy is seen as
a box of trouble. It creates such a
competitive flux that no society can remain orderly and loyal to its governors
because the governors can't guarantee
preferment in licensing, appointments, grants, etc., in return.
Meritocratic successes, having earned
their place, are notoriously disrespectful. The most infamous meritocrat of
history was Alcibiades, who ruined
Athens, a cautionary name known to every elite college class, debating
society, lyceum, or official pulpit in
America. William Torrey Harris
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