99.The Positive Method: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Positive Method
Most
of the anti-intellectual shift in schooling the young was determined by the
attitudes and needs of prominent businessmen.
The first exhibit for your perusal is the U.S. Bureau of Education's Circular of Information for
April 1872, which centers around what it calls
the "problem of educational schooling." With whose interests
in mind did the bureau view education as a problem? The
amazing
answer is: from a big business perspective.
By 1872, this still feeble arm of the federal government is seen filled
with concern for large industrial employers
at a time when those were still a modest fraction of the total economy.
According to this Circular of Information,
"inculcating knowledge" teaches workers to be able to "perceive and calculate their
grievances," thus making them "more redoubtable foes" in labor struggles. Indeed, this
was one important reason for Thomas Jefferson's
own tentative support of a system of universal schooling, but something
had been lost between Monticello and the
Capital. "Such an enabling is bound to retard the growth of industry," continues the Circular. There
is nothing ambiguous about that statement at all, and the writer is correct, of course.
Sixteen years later (1888), we can trace
the growth in this attitude from the much more
candid language in the Report of the Senate Committee on Education. Its
gigantic bulk might be summarized in
this single sentence taken from page 1,382:
We
believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late
years manifesting itself among the
laboring classes.
Once we acknowledge that planned economies
of nation or corporation are systems with
their own operating integrity, quite sensibly antagonistic to the risks
educated minds pose, much of formal
schooling's role in the transformation that came is predictable. If education is indeed "one of the principal
causes of discontent," it performs that
subversive function innocently by developing intellect and character in
such a way as to resist absorption into
impersonal systems: Here is the crux of the difference between education and schooling — the former turns on
independence, knowledge, ability,
comprehension, and integrity; the latter upon obedience.
In
The Empire of Business (1902), Andrew Carnegie, author of the Homestead
siege which destroyed the steelworkers
union, inveighs against "teachings which serve to imbue [children] with false ideas."
From a transatlantic business perspective, education taught what was socially and economically
useless, transmitting bad attitudes which
turned students against the ripening scheme of centralized national
management. Carnegie's new empire
demanded that old-fashioned character be schooled out of children in a hurry. It would be a large
mistake to assume this new empire of business of which Carnegie boasts was only a new face on
old style greed. While it did take away
liberty and sovereignty, it put forth serious intellectual arguments for
doing so. Ordinary people were promised
what Walter Greene's outraged letter quoted earlier at the beginning of this chapter tells you they got:
the best space program, the best high-tech
medicine, the strongest military, the highest material standard of
living. These things could not have been
accomplished without a kind of forced schooling that terminated most independent livelihoods. That was the
price paid for a gusher of easy prosperity.
To
understand this paradox better requires some insight into what inspired such
certainty among the architects of modern
schooling that this disruption would work to produce material prosperity. Their faith that wealth
would inevitably follow the social
mechanization of the population is founded on a magnificent insight of
Francis Bacon's, set down in startlingly
clear prose back in the early seventeenth century. Thanks to the patronage of John Stuart Mill, by the
mid-nineteenth century, the seeds that Bacon
planted grew into the cult of scientific positivism, a movement we
associate today with the name of a
Frenchman, Auguste Comte. It's hard to overestimate the influence positivism had on the formation of mass
schooling and on the shaping of an international corporate economy made possible by coal.
Positivism holds that if proper procedures are
honored, then scientific marvels and
inventions follow automatically. If you weigh and measure and count and
categorize slowly and patiently,
retaining the microscopic bits of data which can be confirmed, rejecting those that cannot, on and on and on
and on, then genius and talent are almost
irrelevant — improvements will present themselves regularly in an
endless progression despite any fall-off
in creative power. Advances in power and control are mainly a function of the amount of money spent, the
quantity of manpower employed, and correct
methodology.
Mankind can be freed from the tyranny of
intelligence by faithful obedience to system!
This is a shattering pronouncement, one made all the more difficult to
resist because it seems to work. Even
today, its full significance isn't widely understood, nor is the implacable enmity it demands toward any
spiritual view of humanity.
In
the positivist method, the managerial classes of the late nineteenth century,
including their Progressive progeny in
the social management game, knew they had a mill to grind perpetual profits — financial, intellectual,
and social. Since innovations in production and
organization are a principal engine of social change, and since positive
science has the power to produce such
innovations without end, then even during the launch of our era of scientific management it had to be clear to
its architects that nonstop social turbulence
would be a daily companion of exercising this power. This is what the
closet philosophy of bionomics was there
to explain. It preached that the evolutionarily advanced would alone be able to tolerate the psychic
chaos — as for the rest, the fate of Cro-Magnon man and the Neanderthal were history's answer.
And the circularity of this convenient
proposition was lost on its authors.
Faced with the problem of dangerous
educated adults, what could be more natural than a factory to produce safely stupefied children?
You've already seen that the positive system
has only limited regard for brainy people, so nothing is lost
productively in dumbing down and
leveling the mass population, even providing a dose of the same for
"gifted and talented"
children. And much can be gained in social efficiency. What motive could
be more "humane" than the wish
to defuse the social dynamite positive science was endlessly casting off as a byproduct of its
success?
To understand all this you have to be
willing to see there is no known way to stop the social mutilation positive science leaves in
its wake. Society must forcibly be adapted to
accept its own continuing disintegration as a natural and inevitable
thing, and taught to recognize its own
resistance as a form of pathology to be expunged. Once an economic system becomes dependent on positive science,
it can't allow any form of education to
take root which might interrupt the constant accumulation of
observations which produce the next
scientific advance.
In
simple terms, what ordinary people call religious truth, liberty, free will,
family values, the idea that life is not
centrally about consumption or good physical health or getting rich — all these have to be strangled in the
cause of progress. What inures the positivistic
soul to the agony it inflicts on others is its righteous certainty that
these bad times will pass. Evolution
will breed out of existence unfortunates who can't tolerate this
discipline.
This is the sacred narrative of modernity, its
substitute for the message of the Nazarene.
History will end in Chautauqua. School is a means to this end.
Plato's Guardians
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