188. The
Illusion Of Punishment: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Illusion Of Punishment
What
Western spirituality says is paradoxical — rather than avoiding these
hardships, it asks you to embrace them.
It taught the counter-intuitive response that willing acceptance of these burdens was the only way to a good,
full life, the only way to inner peace.
Bending your head in obedience, it will be raised up strong, brave,
indomitable, and wise. Now let me go
through the list of penalties from this perspective.
About labor, the religious voice says that
work is the only avenue to
genuine self-respect. Work develops independence, self-reliance, resourcefulness. Work itself is a value, above a paycheck, above praise, above accomplishment. Work produces a spiritual reward unknown to the reinforcement schedules of behavioral psychologists like B.F. Skinner, but if you tackle it gladly, without resentment or avoidance, whether you're digging a ditch or building a skyscraper, you'll find the key to yourself in work. If the secular aversion to work is a thing to be rationalized as schools do, requiring only minimal effort from children, a horrifying problem is created for our entire society, one that thus far has proven incurable. I refer to the psychological, social, and spiritual anxieties that arise when people have no useful work to do. Phony work, no matter how well paid or praised, causes such great emotional distortions that the major efforts of our civilization will soon go into solving them, with no hint of any answer in sight.
genuine self-respect. Work develops independence, self-reliance, resourcefulness. Work itself is a value, above a paycheck, above praise, above accomplishment. Work produces a spiritual reward unknown to the reinforcement schedules of behavioral psychologists like B.F. Skinner, but if you tackle it gladly, without resentment or avoidance, whether you're digging a ditch or building a skyscraper, you'll find the key to yourself in work. If the secular aversion to work is a thing to be rationalized as schools do, requiring only minimal effort from children, a horrifying problem is created for our entire society, one that thus far has proven incurable. I refer to the psychological, social, and spiritual anxieties that arise when people have no useful work to do. Phony work, no matter how well paid or praised, causes such great emotional distortions that the major efforts of our civilization will soon go into solving them, with no hint of any answer in sight.
In
the economy we have allowed to evolve, the real political dilemma everywhere
is keeping people occupied. Jobs have to
be invented by government agencies and
corporations. Both employ millions and millions of people for which they
have no real use. It's an inside secret
among top-echelon management that should you need to cause a rise in stock value, this can be engineered
by eliminating thousands of "useless" jobs; that is done regularly and, I would presume,
cynically.
Young men and women during their
brightest, most energetic years are kept from
working or from being a part of the general society. This is done to
keep them from aggravating this delicate
work situation, either by working too eagerly, as kids are prone to do, or by inventing their own work, which
could cause shocks throughout the
economy. This violation of the injunction to work, which Western
spirituality imposed, has backed us into
a corner from which no authority has any idea how to extricate us. We cannot afford to let too many children really
learn to work, as Amish children do, for fear
they will discover its great secret: work isn't a curse, but a salvation.
About the second penalty, pain, Western
spirituality has regarded pain as a friend
because it forces attention off things of this world and puts it
squarely back on the center of the
universe, yourself. Pain and distress in all forms are ways we learn
self-control (among other valuable
lessons), but the siren call of sensuality lures us to court physical satisfactions and to despise pain as a
spoiler of pleasure. Western spirituality teaches that pain is a road to self-knowledge, self-knowledge
a road to trusting yourself. Without
trust, you can't like yourself; without liking yourself, how can you
feel capable of giving love?
About the third penalty, good and evil,
Western spirituality demands you write your own
script through the world. In a spiritual being, everything is morally
charged, nothing neutral. Choosing is a
daily burden, but one which makes literally everything a big deal.
I
heard second hand, recently, about a woman who said to her mother about an
affair she was conducting openly,
despite the protest of her husband and in full knowledge of her six-year-old daughter, "It's no big
deal." That's what she said to her mother. But if infidelity, divorce, and the shattering of
innocence in a child isn't a big deal, then what could ever be? By intensifying our moral
sense, we constantly feel the exhilaration of
being alive in a universe where everything is a big deal.
To
have much of a life, you must bring as many choices as you can out of preprogrammed mode and under the conscious
command of your will. The bigger the life
you seek, the less anything can be made automatic, as if you were only a
piece of machinery. And because every
choice has moral dimension, it will incline toward one or the other pole of that classic dichotomy:
good and evil.
Despite extenuating circumstances — and they
are legion — the accumulating record of our
choices marks us as worthy or unworthy people. Even if nobody else is
aware how accounts stand, deep inside yourself
the running balance will vitally affect your ability to trust, to love, to gain peace and wisdom from
relationships and community.
And
finally, aging and death. In the Western spiritual tradition, which grew out of
a belief in original sin, the focus was
primarily on the lesson that nothing in this world is more than illusion. This is only a stage on
some longer journey we do not fully
understand. To fall in love with your physical beauty or your wealth,
your health, or your power to experience
good feelings is to kid yourself because they will be taken away. A ninety- four- year-old aunt of mine with a
Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and a
woman I love dearly, said to me tearfully after the death of her
husband, who had left her in comfortable
circumstances, "They don't let you win. There is no way to win."
She
had lived her life in the camp of science, honorably observing all its rules
of rationality, but at his passing,
science was useless to her. The Western spiritual tradition would reply, "Of course you can win.
Everyone can win. And if you think you can't, then you're playing the wrong game." The only
thing that gives our time on earth any deep
significance is that none of this will last. Only that temporality gives
our relationships any urgency. If you
were indestructible, what a curse! How could it possibly matter whether you did anything today or next
year or in the next hundred years, learned
anything, loved anybody? There would always be time for anything and
everything. What would be the big deal
about anything?
Everyone has known the experience of
having had a surfeit of candy, company, or even
money, so that no individual purchase involves real choice because real
choice always closes the door on other
choices. I know that we would all like to have endless amounts of money, but the truth is, too much money
wipes out our pleasure in choosing since we
can now choose everything. That's what Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius
discovered for himself in his
reflections about what really matters — the Meditations, one of the great classics in Western history. He discovered
none of the important things was for sale. If
you don't believe an emperor would feel this way, read the
Meditations.
Too much time, like too much money, can
hang heavily on our hands as well. Look at the
millions of bored schoolchildren. They know what I mean. The corrective
for this boredom is a full spiritual
awareness that time is finite. As you spend time on one thing, you lose forever the chance to spend it on
something else. Time is always a big deal.
Science can't help with time. In fact,
living scientifically so as not to waste time,
becoming one of those poor souls who never goes anywhere without a list,
is the best guarantee your life will be
eaten up by errands and that none of those errands will ever become the big deal you desperately need to
finally love yourself. The list of things to do
will go ever onward and onward. The best lives are full of contemplation,
full of solitude, full of
self-examination, full of private, personal attempts to engage the
metaphysical mystery of existence, to
create an inner life.
We make the best of our limited time by
alternating effort with reflection, and I mean
reflection completely free of the get-something motive. Whenever I see a
kid daydreaming in school, I'm careful
never to shock the reverie out of existence.
Buddha is reputed to have said, "Do
nothing. Time is too precious to waste." If that advice seems impossible in the world
described on the evening news, reflect on the
awesome fact that in spite of hype, you still live on a planet where 67
percent of the world's entire population
has never made or received a single phone call and where the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County live
prosperous lives virtually free of crime, of
divorce, or of children who go beyond the eighth grade in school. Yet
not a single one has a college degree, a
tractor to plow with, a telephone in the house, or is on welfare.
If
I seem to have stepped away from original sin with these facts, it is not so.
Until you acknowledge that the factual
contents of your mind upon which you base decisions have been inserted there by others whose motives
you cannot fully understand, you will never
come to appreciate the neglected genius of Western spirituality which
teaches that you are the center of the
universe. And that the most important things worth knowing are innate in you already. They cannot be learned
through schooling. They are self-taught
through the burdens of having to work, having to sort out right from
wrong, having to check your appetites,
and having to age and die.
The effect of this formula on world
history has been titanic. It brought every citizen in the West a mandate to be sovereign, a concept
which we still have not learned to use wisely,
but which offers the potential for such wisdom. Western spirituality
granted every single individual a
purpose for being alive, a purpose independent of mass behavioral prescriptions, money, experts, schools, and
governments. It conferred significance on
every aspect of relationship and community. It carried inside its ideas
the seeds of a self- activating
curriculum which gives meaning to time, and imposes the duty of
compassion, even for enemies, on
believers.
In
Western spirituality, everyone counts. It offers a basic, matter-of-fact set of
practical guidelines, street lamps for
the village of your life. Nobody has to wander aimlessly in the universe of Western spirituality. What
constitutes a meaningful life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility,
acceptance of aging and loss, preparation for
death. In this neglected genius of the West, no teacher or guru does the
work for you. You do it for yourself.
It's time to teach these things to our children once again.
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