182. Codes Of Meaning: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Codes Of Meaning
This
unique moral chronicle led to an everyday behavioral code which worked so
well that in a matter of centuries it became
the dominant perspective of Europe, and soon it
made inroads into every belief system across the planet. But the sheer
extent of its success caused it to run afoul of three other
competing systems for producing meaning,
each of which held common people in contempt or worse.
These
competing codes viewed Christianity
antagonistically because of its power to liberate ordinary people from the bondage of fear and envy. Those competing codes of meaning gave us
formal schooling, public and private. The
first competitor, the aristocratic code, comes out of pagan traditions.
It is still the philosophy taught in
upper-class boarding schools like Middlesex and Gunnery, and through home training and particular class
institutions. Its operating principles are
leadership, sportsmanship, courage, disdain for hardship, team play,
self-sacrifice (for the team), and
devotion to duty — as noble traditions define duty. The boardrooms of
certain global corporations are one of
the great preserves of this exclusive but universally attractive pagan attitude.
The
second code in competition with Christianity was taken from the practice of
great commercial civilizations like the
Hanseatic League of medieval times or the society of Holland in the seventeenth century. This
behavioral code makes security, comfort, health, and wealth the central purpose of life. The
main thrust of this kind of seeking is radically anti-Christian, but the contradiction isn't
obvious when the two come into contact
because commercial cultures emphasize peaceful coexistence, tolerance,
cooperation, and pragmatism. They reject
the value of pain, and take principled behavior with a grain of salt, everything being relative to security
and prosperity. Pragmatism is the watchword.
The
wealth that a commercial perspective delivers produced a dilemma for
Puritan society to wrestle with, since
the intense neo-Christianity of Puritanism was yoked to an equal intensity of business acumen, a talent
for commercial transaction. In the Calvinist
vein, this contradiction was resolved by declaring wealth a reliable
sign of God's favor, as poverty was a
sign of His condemnation. Both pagan and mercantile ethical codes operated behind a facade of Christianity
during the Christian era, weakening the gospel
religion, while at the same time profiting from it and paying lip
service to it. Proponents of these
different frames called themselves Christians but did not live like
Christians, rejecting certain tenets of
Christianity we've just examined, those which interfered with personal gain. Yet in both cases, the life
maps these competing theories tried to substitute were not, ultimately, satisfying enough to
stop the spreading influence of Christian
vision. Stated more directly,
these competing moral codes were unable to deliver sufficient tangible day-to-day meaning to compete
against the religious prescription of a simple
life, managed with dignity and love, and with acceptance of the demands
of work, self- control, and moral
choice, together with the inevitability of tragedy, aging, and death. Neither the pagan outlook nor the commercial
philosophy was equal to overthrowing
their unworldly rival. Because the commercial code lacked sufficient
magic and mystery, and the aristocratic
code, which had those things, froze out the majority from enjoying them, it fell to yet a third scheme for
organizing meaning to eventually cause the major sabotage of spiritual life.
I
refer to the form of practical magic we call Science. Kept rigorously and
strictly subordinate to human needs,
science is an undeniably valuable way to negotiate the physical world. But the human tendency has
always been to break loose from these
constraints and to try to explain the purpose of life. Instead of
remaining merely a useful description of
how things work, great synthesizing theories like Big Bang or Natural Selection purport to explain the origin of
the universe or how life best progresses. Yet by their nature, these things are beyond proof
or disproof. Few laymen understand that the
synthesizing theories of Science are religious revelations in
disguise.
In the
years around the beginning of the twentieth century, the scientific outlook as
a substitute religion took command of
compulsion schools and began to work to eradicate any transcendental curriculum in school. This
happened in stages. First was the passage
of compulsion school legislation and invention of the factory school
(isolated from family and community), appearing
in conjunction with the extermination of the one-room school. That job had been largely
accomplished by 1900. The second stage was
introduction of hierarchical layers of school management and government
selected and regulated teaching staff. That
job was complete by 1930. The third stage comprised socialization of the school into a world of
"classes" and de-individualized individuals who looked to school authorities for
leadership instead of to their own parents and
churches. This was accomplished by 1960. The fourth and last stage (so
far) was the psychologizing of the
classroom, a process begun full scale in 1960, which, with the advent of national standardized testing,
outcomes-based education, Title I legislation,
School-to-Work legislation, etc., was accelerating as the last century
came to a close.
All
these incremental changes are ambitious designs to control how children think,
feel, and behave. There had been signs
of this intention two centuries earlier, but without long- term confinement of children to great
warehouses, the amount of isolation and mind-
control needed to successfully introduce civil religion through
schooling just wasn't available.
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