157. The Machine Gun Builds Hotchkiss: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Machine Gun Builds Hotchkiss
The widow of the man who perfected the
machine gun founded the Hotchkiss School; a
Lowell and a Forbes funded Middlesex; the DuPonts were the patrons of
Kent; St. George's was underwritten by
the Brown family whose name graces Brown University; Choate looked to the Mellon family for
generous checks; J. P. Morgan
was behind Groton. Over 90 percent of the great American private boarding schools issued from that short period just after Herbert Spencer's American visit in 1882 and just before the indirect edict to the National Education Association that it must play ball with the de- intellectualization of public schooling, or it would be abandoned by America's business leadership.
was behind Groton. Over 90 percent of the great American private boarding schools issued from that short period just after Herbert Spencer's American visit in 1882 and just before the indirect edict to the National Education Association that it must play ball with the de- intellectualization of public schooling, or it would be abandoned by America's business leadership.
Elite private boarding schools were an
important cornerstone in the foundation of a
permanent American upper class whose children were to be socialized for
power. They were great schools for the
Great Race, intended to forge a collective identity among children of privilege, training them to be
bankers, financiers, partners in law firms,
corporate directors, negotiators of international treaties and contracts,
patrons of the arts, philanthropists,
directors of welfare organizations, members of advisory panels, government elites, and business elites.
Michael Useem's post-WWII study showed that
just thirteen elite boarding schools
educated 10 percent of all the directors of large American business
corporations, and 15 percent of all the
directors who held three or more directorships. These schools collectively graduated fewer than one
thousand students a year. More spectacular
pedagogy than that is hard to imagine.
In
England, the pioneer feminist Victoria Woodhull published The Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit. And in the
States, Edward A. Ross, trained in Germany — University of Wisconsin pioneer of American sociology — was
writing The Old World in the New, saying
that "beaten members of beaten breeds" would destroy us unless placed
under control. They were
"subhuman." Ross was joined by virtually every leading social scientist of his generation in warning about
the ill effects of blood pollution: Richard Ely, William Z. Ripley, Richard Mayo Smith, John
R. Commons, Davis Dewey, Franklin
Giddings, and many more. None disagreed with Ross. Morons were multiplying.
The government had to be made aware of
the biological consequences of social policy.
But
while beaten members of beaten breeds had to be zipped up tight in isolation,
ward schools and neighborhoods of their
own, watched over by social gospelers, settlement houses, and social workers trained in the
new social science, a new American social
dimension was being created from scratch in which the best people could
associate freely, could rear children
properly, could reap rewards they deserved as the most advanced class on the evolutionary tree. That was not
only justice, it was prudent preparation for an
even better biological future.
The way the new shadow society, a universe
parallel to the one everyone else could see,
had to operate after it had first constructed for itself a theory of
establishment and a theology of caste,
was by creating a new social structure, corporate in nature, in which man was progressively defined by those with
whom he affiliated, his synthetic,
associational tribe — not by his independent talents and
accomplishments. If these affiliations
were only local, then status was correspondingly diminished; the trick was
to progressively graduate to memberships
which had regional, national, or even
international status, and this associational prestige would then be
transferred to the individual. What a
perfect way of keeping out the riffraff and porch monkeys this would prove to be!
It was no idle boast, nor was the
statement a simple expression of snobbery, when John Lupton, director of development at the Choate
School in Wallingford, Connecticut, said,
"There is no door in this entire country that cannot be opened by a
Choate graduate. I can go anywhere in
this country and anywhere there's a man I want to see... I can find a Choate man to open that door for me,"
The crucial variables in identifying the right
people in the new exclusionary America no longer included high-profile
expressions of superiority. What they
did include were: 1) Membership in the right metropolitan clubs. 2) An address in the right neighborhoods. 3)
A degree from the right college. 4) A
membership in the right country club. 5) Attendance at the right summer
resorts. 6) Attendance at the right
churches. 7) Passage through the right private schools. 8) An invitation to the right hereditary
association. 9) Involvement in the right charities. 10) Trusteeships, boards, advisory councils. 1 1)
The right marriages, alliances, a social
register listing. 12) Money, manners, style, physical beauty, health,
conversation.
I've made no attempt to enter subtleties of
gradation, only to indicate how the ephors
behind public schooling and virtually all significant decision-making in
modern American society created, quite
self-consciously, a well-regulated world within a world for themselves. Provision was made to allow
some movement up from other classes.
Clubs, for instance, were also agencies for assimilating men of talent
and their families into an upper-class
way of life and social organization.
If we are unwilling to face how very
far-reaching the effects of this American
establishment are to schoolchildren, there is just no good way to think
about school reform. 5 Darwin's
evolutionary racism, Galton's mathematical racism, Maine's anthropological racism, Anglican theological
racism/classism, all are deeply embedded in
the structure of mass schooling and the economy it serves. They cannot
he extirpated by rational discussion;
these viruses are carried by institutional structures not amenable to social discussion.
5 NeIson W. Aldrich, grandson of Senator
Aldrich of Rhode Island, who was one of the principal architectsof the Federal
Reserve system, put it this way in his
book Old Money: "Membership in this patriciate brought with it much
besides wealth, of course: complete domination of all educational and cultural institutions,
ownership and control of the news media [and a variety of other assets]."
Direct and indirect domination of the
forced schooling mechanism by the patriciate has never been adequately explored,
perhaps owing to its ownership of both the tools of research (in the colleges) and the tools of
dissemination (in the media).
Fountains Of Business Wealth
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