181.
Foundations Of The Western Outlook: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Foundations
Of The Western Outlook
We will never fully understand American
schools until we think long and hard about
religion. Whether you are Buddhist, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Baptist,
Confucian, Catholic, Protestant,
agnostic, or atheist, this is a hunt for important threads in the tapestry overlooked by secular academic exegesis. More
specifically, our quest is for insights of
Protestant Christian dissent which have been buried for at least a
century, insights which I hope will
cause you to
look at schools in a different way.
look at schools in a different way.
To find out what School seeks to replace,
we have to uncover the four pillars which hold
up Western society. Two come from the Nordic rim of Europe: the first, a
unique belief in the sovereign rights of
the individual; the second, what we have come to call scientific vision. Everywhere else but in the West,
individual and family were submerged in one or
another collective system. Only here were the chips bet on liberty of
individual conscience.
The ambition to know everything appears in
history in the stories of the Old Norse god
Odin, god of Mind and god of Family Destruction, too. No other mythology
than the Norse puts pride of intellect
together with a license to pry so at the center of things. Science presumes absolute license. Nothing
can be forbidden. Science and individualism
are the two secular foundations of Western outlook. Our other two supports for social meaning
are religious and moral. Both originate in the
south of Europe. From this graft of North and South comes the most
important intellectual synthesis so far
seen on this planet, Western civilization. One of these Mediterranean legs is a specific moral code
coming out of the Decalogue, of Judaism
working through the Gospels of Christianity. The rules are these:
1 . Love, care for, and help others.
2.
Bear witness to the good.
3.
Respect your parents and ancestors.
4.
Respect the mysteries; know your place in them.
5.
Don't envy.
6.
Don't lie or bear false witness.
7.
Don't steal.
8.
Don't kill.
9.
Don't betray your mate.
The fourth and most difficult leg comes
from a Christian interpretation of Genesis. It is constituted out of a willing acceptance of
certain penalties incurred by eating from the
Tree of Knowledge against God's command. The Original Sin. For
disobedience, Adam, Eve, and their
descendants were sentenced to four punishments.
The first was labor. There was no need to
work in Eden, but after the Expulsion, we had
to care for ourselves. The second penalty was pain. There was no pain in
Eden, but now our weak nature was
subject to being led astray, to feeling pain, even from natural acts like childbirth, whether we were good people
or bad people. Third was the two-edged
free will penalty, including the right to choose Evil which would now
lurk everywhere. Recall that in Eden
there was exactly one wrong thing to do, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Now we would have to endure the
stress of constant moral armament against
a thousand temptations or of surrendering to sin. Last and most
important, the term of human life would
be strictly limited. Nobody would escape death. The more you have in wealth, family, community, and friends, the
more you are tempted to curse God as you
witness yourself day by day losing physical strength, beauty, energy —
eventually losing everything.
Before the sixteenth century, the orthodox
Christian view was that human nature was
equal to carrying this burden. It was weak, but capable of finding
strength through faith. This doctrine of
inescapable sin, and redemption through personal choice, carries a map of meaning through which to organize one's
entire life. Face the inevitable in a spirit of
humility and you are saved. This lesser-known side of the Christian
curriculum, the one generated out of
Original Sin, lacked a Cecil B. DeMille to illustrate its value, but once aware, lives could draw strength and purpose
from it.
What I'm calling the Christian curriculum
assigns specific duties to men and women. No
other system of meaning anywhere, at any time in history, has shown a
record of power and endurance like this
one, continuously enlarging its influence over all mankind (not just Christians), because it speaks directly
to ordinary people without the mediation of
elites or priesthoods.
Superficially, you might argue that the
success of the West is the result of its guns being better. But really, Western civilization
flourished because our story of hope is superior to any other.
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