180. Spirits Are Dangerous: The Underground History
of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Spirits
Are Dangerous
The net effect of holding children in
confinement for twelve years without honor paid to the spirit is a compelling demonstration that
the State considers the Western spiritual
tradition dangerous, subversive. And of course it is. School is about
creating loyalty to certain goals and habits,
a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to
manufacture the continuous low level of
discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.
Once the mechanism is identified, its
dynamics aren't hard to understand. Spiritually
contented people are dangerous for a variety of reasons. They don't make
reliable servants because they won't
jump at every command. They test what is requested against a code of moral principle. Those who are
spiritually secure can't easily be driven to
sacrifice family relations. Corporate and financial capitalism are
hardly possible on any massive scale
once a population finds its spiritual center.
For a society like ours to work, we need
to feel that something is fundamentally wrong
when we can't continually "do better" — expand our farms and
businesses, win a raise, take exotic
vacations. This is the way our loan/repayment cycle — the credit economy —
is sustained. The human tendency to
simply enjoy work and camaraderie among workers is turned into a race to outdo colleagues, to
climb employment ladders. Ambition is a
trigger of corporate life and at the same time an acid that dissolves
communities. By spreading contentment on
the cheap, spirituality was a danger to the new economy's natural growth principle. So in a sense it
was rational self-interest, not conspiracy, that drove enlightened men to agree in their
sporting places, drawing rooms, and clubs that
religious activity would have to be dampened down.
What they couldn't see is that through
substitution of schooling for Bible religion, they were sawing through two of the four main
social supports of Western civilization. Think
of your dining room table; it was like breaking two of its legs off,
replacing one with a tall stack of dishes
and one with a large dog. The top of the table would look the same covered in cloth but it wouldn't be a good
bet to get you through dinner. A century
earlier, Hamilton and Jefferson had speculated whether it might be
possible to replace religion with a
civil substitute. The heady ideas of the French Revolution were on everybody's lips. A civil substitute built on
expanding the humble grassroots institution
of schooling might well free leaders from the divided loyalty religion
imposes. Could an ethical system based
on law produce the same quality of human society as a moral system based on divine inspiration? Jefferson was
skeptical. Despite his fears, the experiment
was soon to be tried.
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