187.
Religion And Rationality: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Religion
And Rationality
The
Supreme Court Ever son ruling of 1 947 established the principle that America
would have no truck with spirits. There
was no mention that the previous 150 years of American judicial history passed without any other
court finding this well-hidden meaning in the
Constitution. But even if we grant the ruling is sincere, an expression
of the rational principle behind modern
leadership, we would be justified in challenging Everson because of the grotesque record laid down over
the past fifty years of spiritless schooling.
Dis-spirited schooling
has been tested and found fully wanting. I think that's partially because it denies the metaphysical reality recognized by men and women worldwide, today and in every age.
has been tested and found fully wanting. I think that's partially because it denies the metaphysical reality recognized by men and women worldwide, today and in every age.
It
is ironic from a contrarian viewpoint that the most prestigious scientific
position in the world today is surely
heading up the human genome project, and that project, as I write, is in the hands of a born-again Christian.
Corporations are lined up all the way to China
to make fortunes out of genetic manipulation. The director of that
project is a man named Dr. Francis S.
Collins, who, according to The New York Times, personally recognizes religion as the most important reality in his
life. Collins was reared in an agnostic home
in western Virginia where he was homeschooled by his outspoken, radical
mother who stretched the school law in a
number of ways to give him an education. While in medical school, he came to the conclusion that he
would become a born-again Christian because
the decision was "intellectually inescapable." And he has
maintained that faith energetically ever
since, a decision that makes his professional colleagues very uncomfortable.
The difficulty with rational thought,
however valuable a tool it certainly is, is that it misses the deepest properties of human
nature: our feelings of loneliness and
incompletion, our sense of sin, our need to love, our longing after
immortality. Let me illustrate how
rational thinking preempts terrain where it has no business and makes a wretched mess of human affairs. After this,
you can tell your grandchildren that you
actually heard someone at the onset of the twenty- first century
challenging Galileo's heliocentric
theory.
In
materially evidentiary terms, the sun is at the center of the solar system, not
the earth, and the solar system itself is
lost in the endless immensity of space. I suppose most of you believe that; how could you not? And yet,
as far as we scientifically know to date,
only planet Earth looks as if it were designed with people in mind. I
know that Carl Sagan said we'll find
millions of populated planets eventually, but right now there's only hard evidence of one. As far as we know, you
can't go anyplace but earth and stay alive
for long. So as of 2000, earth is clearly the whole of the human
universe. I want to push this a little
farther, however, so stick with me.
Planet Earth is most definitely not the center
of your personal life. It's merely a
background which floats in and out of conscious thought. The truth is
that both psychologically and
spiritually you are the center of the solar system and the universe. Don't be modest or try to hide the fact. The
minute you deny what I just said, you're in
full flight from the responsibility this personal centrality entails: to
make things better for the rest of us
who are on the periphery of your consciousness.
When you deny your own centrality, you
necessarily lose some trust in yourself to move
mountains. As your self-trust wanes — and school is there to drill you
in distrusting yourself (what else do you
think it means to wait for teacher to tell you what to do?) — you lose some self-respect. Without full
self-respect, you can hardly love yourself very
much because we can't really love those we don't respect (except,
curiously enough, by an act of faith).
When you can't trust or even like yourself very much, you're in a much worse predicament than you may realize,
because those things are a precondition to
sustaining loving relationships with other people and with the world
outside.
Think of it this way: you must be convinced of
your own worth before you ask for the
love of another or else the bargain will be unsound. You'll be trading
discounted merchandise unless both of
you are similarly disadvantaged and perhaps even then your relationship will disintegrate.
The trouble with Galileo's way is that
it's a partial truth. It's right about the relations of dead matter; it's wrong about the geography
of the spirit. Schools can only teach
Galileo's victory over the Church; they can't afford to harbor children
who command personal power. So the
subtlety of the analysis that you and I just went through about the way religion confers power has to be foregone.
Galileo's Tightness is only a tiny part of a
real education; his blindness is much more to the point. The goal of
real education is to bring us to a place
where we take full responsibility for our own lives. In that quest, Galileo is only one more fact of limited
human consequence.
The ancient religious question of free
will marks the real difference between schooling and education. Education is conceived in
Western history as a road to knowing yourself ,
and through that knowledge, arriving at a further understanding of
community, relationships, jeopardy,
living nature, and inanimate matter. But none of those things has any particular meaning until you see what
they lead up to, finally being infill command
of the spectacular gift of free will: a force completely beyond the
power of science to understand.
With the tool of free will, anyone can forge a
personal purpose. Free will allows infinite
numbers of human stories to be written in which a personal you is the
main character. The sciences, on the
other hand, hard or soft, assume that purpose and free will are hogwash; given enough data, everything will
be seen as explainable, predetermined, and
predictable.
Schooling is an instrument to disseminate this
bleak and sterile vision of a blind-chance
universe. When schooling displaced education in the United States just
about a century ago, a deterministic
world could be imposed by discipline. We entrap children simply by ignoring the universal human awareness that
there is something dreadfully important
beyond the rational. We cause children to mistrust themselves so
severely they come to depend on
cost-benefit analyses for everything. We teach them to scorn faith so comprehensively that buying things and feeling
good become the point of their lives.
The Soviet empire did this brilliantly for
a little over seventy years. Its surveillance
capability was total. It maintained dossiers on each human unit, logged
every deviation, and assigned a
mathematical value so that citizens could be ranked against each other. Does that sound familiar? It schooled every
child in a fashion prescribed by the best
psychological experts. It strictly controlled the rewards of work to
ensure compliance, and it developed a
punishment system unheard of in its comprehensiveness.
The
Soviet Union lasted one lifetime. Our softer form of spiritual suffocation has
already been in place for two. The
neglected genius of the West, neglected by the forced schooling institution as deliberate policy,
resides in its historical collection of spiritual doctrines which grant dignity and
responsibility to ordinary individuals, not elites.
I
have the greatest respect for every other religious tradition in the world, but
not one of them has ever done this or
attempted to do this. Western religion correctly identified problems no one can escape, problems for
which there are no material solutions,
problems you can't elude with money, intellect, charm, politics, or
powerful connections. It said also that
these problems were, paradoxically, fundamental to human happiness. Serious problems necessary to our happiness?
That's some perverse doom, I know you'll
agree. The question is what to do about it.
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