179. The
Problem Of God: The Underground History of Amerccan Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Fourteen
Absolute Absolution
The leading principle of Utopian religion is
the repudiation of the doctrine of Original
Sin. — H.G. Wells, A Modern
Utopia (1905)
Everything
functions as if death did not exist. Nobody takes it into account; it is suppressed everywhere. ...We now seem
possessed by he Promethean desire to cure death. — Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
Education
is the modern world's temporal religion...
— Bob Chase, president,
National Education Association, NEA TODAY, April 1997
National Education Association, NEA TODAY, April 1997
179. The Problem Of God
The problem of God has always been a
central question of Western intellectual life. The flight from this heritage is our best
evidence that school is a project having little to do with education as the West defined it for
thousands of years. It's difficult to imagine
anyone who lacks an understanding of Western spirituality regarding
himself as educated. And yet, American
schools have been forbidden to enter this arena even in a token way since 1947.
In spite of the irony that initial
Protestant church support is the only reason we have American compulsion schools at all, the rug
was pulled out from beneath the churches
quite suddenly at the end of the nineteenth century, under the pretext
that it was the only way to keep
Catholicism out of the schools. When the second shoe dropped with the Everson decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in
1947, God was pitched out of school on
His ear entirely.
Before we go forward we need to go back. The
transformation businessmen wrought in
the idea of education at the end of the nineteenth century and the early
decades of the twentieth is the familiar
system we have today. Max Otto argued in his intriguing book- length essay Science and the Moral Life
(1949) that a philosophical revolution had been
pulled off by businessmen under everybody's nose. Otto described what most
college graduates still don't know —
that the traditional economy, where wants regulate what is produced, is dead. The new economy depends
upon creating demand for whatever stuff
machinery, fossil fuel, and industrialized imagination can produce. When
this reversal was concluded,
consumption, once only one detail among many in people's lives, became the most important end. Great consumers are
heroes to a machine society; the frugal,
villains.
In such a universe, schools have no choice
but to participate. Supporting the economic
system became the second important mission of mass schooling's
existence, but in doing so, materiality
found itself at war with an older family of spiritual interests. In the
general society going about its business,
it wasn't easy to see this contest clearly — to recognize that great corporations which provided
employment, endowed universities, museums,
schools, and churches, and which exercised a powerful voice on important
issues of the day — actually had a
life-and-death stake in the formation of correct psychological attitudes among children.
It was nature, not conspiracy, Otto wrote,
that drove businessmen "to devote themselves to something besides business." It was
only natural "they should try to control education and to supplant religion as a definer of
ideals." The class of businessmen who operated on a national and international basis, having
estranged themselves from considerations of
nation, culture, and tradition, having virtually freed themselves from
competitive risk because they owned the
legislative and judicial processes, now turned their attention to cosmic themes of social management.
In this fashion, minister gave way to
schoolteacher, schoolteacher became pedagogus
under direction of the controllers of work.
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