The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from
archive.org
Obstacles
On The Road To Centralization
Three
major obstacles stood in the way of the great goal of using American schools
to realize a scientifically programmed
society. The first was the fact that American
schooling was locally controlled. In 1930, when the massive socializing
scheme was swinging into high gear,
helped substantially by an
attention-absorbing depression, this nation still had 144,102 local school boards.
17 At least 1.1 million elected citizens of local stature made decisions for this country's
schools out of their wisdom and experience. Out
of 70 million adults between the ages of thirty and sixty- five, one in
every sixty-three was on a school board
(thirty years earlier, the figure had been one in twenty). Contrast either ratio with today's figure of one in five thousand.
The first task of scientifically managed
schooling was to transfer management from a
citizen yeomanry to a professional elite under the camouflage of
consolidation for economy's sake. By
1932, the number of school districts was down to 127,300; by 1937 to 1 19,018; by 1950 to 83,719; by 1960 to
40,520; by 1970 to 18,000; by 1990 to 15,361.
Citizen oversight was slowly squeezed out of the school institution,
replaced by homogeneous managerial
oversight, managers screened and trained, watched, loyalty- checked by Columbia, Stanford, Chicago,
the Cleveland Conference, and similar
organizations with private agendas for public schooling.
The
second obstacle to an ideological takeover of schools was the historic
influence of teachers as role models.
Old-fashioned teachers had a disturbing proclivity to stress development of intellect through difficult
reading, heavy writing assignments, and intense
discussion. The problem of proud and independent teachers was harder to
solve than the reading problem. As late
as 1930 there were still 149,400 one-room/one-teacher schools in America, places not only cheap to operate
but successful at developing tough-minded,
independent thinkers. Most of the rest of our schools were small and
administrator- free, too. The idea of
principals who did not teach came very late in the school game in most places. The fantastic notion of a parasitic
army of assistant principals, coordinators, and
all the rest of the various familiar specialists of institutional
schooling didn't exist at all until
1905, except in the speculations of teacher college dreamers.
Two solutions were proposed around 1903 to
suppress teacher influence and make
instruction teacher-proof. The first was to grow a heretofore unknown
administrative hierarchy of nonteaching
principals, assistant principals, subject coordinators and the rest, to drop the teacher's status rank. And if
degrading teacher status proved inadequate,
another weapon, the standardized test, was soon to be available. By
displacing the judgmental function from
a visible teacher to a remote bastion of educational scientists somewhere, no mere classroom person could
stray very far from approved texts without
falling test scores among his or her students signaling the presence of
such a deviant. 18 Both these
initiatives were underway as WWI ended.
The third obstacle to effective
centralization of management was the intimate
neighborhood context of most American schools, one where school
procedures could never escape organic
oversight by parents and other local interests. Not a good venue from which to orchestrate the undermining of
traditional society. James Bryant Conant,
one of the inventors of the poison gas, Lewisite, and by then chairman
of a key Carnegie commission, reported
in an ongoing national news story after the Sputnik moment that it was the small size of our schools causing the
problem. Only large schools, said Conant,
could have faculty and facilities large enough to cover the math and
science we (presumably) lacked and
Russia (presumably) had. The bigger the better.
In
one bold stroke the American factory school of Lancaster days was reborn. Here
a de- intellectualized Prussian-style
curriculum could reign undetected. From 1960 to 1990, while student population was increasing 61
percent, the number of school administrators
grew 342 percent. In constant dollars, costs shot up 331 percent, and
teachers, who had fallen from 95 percent
of all school personnel in 1915 to 70 percent in 1950, now fell still further, down and down until recently they
comprised less than 50 percent of the jobs in
the school game. School had become an employment project, the largest
hiring hall in the world, bigger than
agriculture, bigger than armies.
One other significant set of numbers
parallels the absolute growth in the power and
expense of government schooling, but inversely. In 1960, when these
gigantic child welfare agencies
called schools were just setting out on their enhanced mission, 85 percent of African American children in New
York were from intact, two-parent
households. In 1990 in New York City, with the school budget drawing
$9,300 a kid for its social welfare
definition of education, that number dropped below 30 percent. School and the social work bureaucracies had done
their work well, fashioning what looked to be
a permanent underclass, one stripped of its possibility of escape,
turned against itself. Scientific
management had proven its value, although what that was obviously depended on one's perspective.
1 'Down from 355,000 in 1900. ls None of this apparatus of checks and
balances ever worked exactly as intended. A degraded, demoralized teaching
staff (and even many demoralized
administrators) lacks interest or even energy to police the system effectively.
Gross abuses are legion, the custom almost
everywhere; records are changed, numbers regularly falsified. A common
habit in my day was to fill out phony lunch forms en masse to make schools eligible for Title I monies. The
chief legal officer for the state of California told me in Sacramento a few
years ago that his state was unable to
effectively monitor the compulsory attendance laws, a truth I can vouch for
from firsthand experience.
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