189.An Arena Of Dishonesty: The Underground History
of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Fifteen
The
Psychopathology of Everyday Schooling
In
1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in
20 factories. She found that 412 of them
would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school. — Helen Todd, "Why Children Work,"
McClure's Magazine (April 1913)
In
one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth... were asked if they
would return full-time to school if they
were paid about the same wages as they earned at work; only 16 said they would. — David Tyack, Managers of Virtue (1982)
189. An Arena Of Dishonesty
I
remember clearly the last school where I worked, on the wealthy Upper West Side
of Manhattan. An attractive atmosphere
of good-natured dishonesty was the lingua franca of corridor and classroom, a grace caused oddly
enough by the school's unwritten policy of
cutting unruly children all the slack they could use.
Student terrorists, muggers, sexual predators,
and thieves, including two of my own
pupils who had just robbed a neighborhood grocery of $300 and had been
apprehended coming back to class, were
regularly returned to their lessons after a brief lecture from the principal. All received the same mercy.
There was no such thing as being held to
account at my school. This behavioral strategy — leveling good, bad,
ugly into one undifferentiated lumpenproletariat
1 — may seem odd or morally repugnant in conventional terms, but it constituted masterful
psychological management from the perspective of enlightened pedagogy. What this policy served
and served well was to prioritize order
and harmony above justice or academic development.
Once you know the code, the procedure is
an old one. It can hardly be called radical
politics except by the terminally innocent. If you spend a few hours
with Erving Goffman's work on the
management of institutions, you discover that the strongest inmates in an asylum and the asylum's
management have a bond; they need each other.
This isn't cynical. It's a price that must be paid for the benefits of
mega-institutions. The vast Civil War
prison camp of Andersonville couldn't have operated without active cooperation from its more dangerous inmates;
so too, Dachau; so it is in school. Erving
Goffman taught us all we need to know about the real grease which makes
institutional wheels turn.
A tacit hands-off policy pays impressive
dividends. In the case of my school, those
dividends were reflected in the neighborhood newspaper's customary
reference to the place as "The West
Side's Best-Kept Secret." This was supposed to mean that private school conditions obtained inside the
building, civility was honored, the battlefield aspect of other schools with large minority
populations was missing. And it was true. The tone of the place was as good as could be found in
Community School District 3. It was as if
by withdrawing every expectation from the rowdy, their affability rose
in inverse proportion.
Not long after my transfer into this
school I came into home room one morning to
discover Jack, a handsome young fellow of thirteen, running a crap game
in the back of the room, a funny looking
cigarette in his mouth. "Hey, Jack, knock it off," I snapped, and like the surprisingly courteous boy he
was, he did. But a little while later there was
Jack undressing a girl fairly conspicuously in the same corner, and this
time when I intervened harshly he was
slow to comply. A second order got no better results. "If I have to waste time on this junk again, Jack, you can
cool your heels in the principal's office," I said
Jack looked disappointed in me. He spoke
frankly as if we were both men of the same
world, "Look, Gatto," he told me in a low, pleasant voice so
as not to embarrass me, "it won't do
any good. Save yourself the trouble. That lady will wink at me, hold me
there for eight minutes — I've timed her
before — and dump me back here. Why make trouble for yourself?" He was right. Eight
minutes.
How
could such a policy produce hallway decorum and relative quiet in classrooms,
you may ask? Well, look at it this way:
it's tailor-made to be nonconfrontational with
dangerous kids. True, it spreads terror and bewilderment among their
victims, but, happy or unhappy, the weak
are no problem for school managers; long experience with natural selection at my school had caused unfortunates
to adapt, in Darwinian fashion, to their
role as prey. Like edible animals they continued to the water hole in
spite of every indignity awaiting. That
hands-off modus vivendi extended to every operation. Only once in four years did I hear any teacher make an
indirect reference to what was happening.
One day I heard a lady remark offhandedly to a friend, "It's like
we signed the last Indian treaty here:
you leave us alone; we leave you alone."
It's not hard to see that, besides its beneficial
immediate effect, this pragmatic policy has
a powerful training function, too. Through it an army of young witnesses
to officially sanctioned bad conduct
learn how little value good conduct has. They learn pragmatism. Part of its silent testimony is that the
strong will always successfully suppress the weak, so the weak learn to endure. They learn that
appeals to authority are full of risk, so they
don't make them often. They learn what they need in order to be foot
soldiers in a mass army.
Psychopathic. An overheated word to
characterize successful, pragmatic solutions to the control of institutional chaos. Isn't this
process a cheap and effective way to keep student entropy in check at the cost of no more than
a little grief on the part of some dumb
animals? Is it really psychopathic or only strategic sophistication? My
principal, let's call her Lulu to
protect the guilty, once explained at a public meeting there was little
she could do about the unfortunate past
and present of these kids, and she acknowledged they probably didn't have bright prospects for
the future — but while they were here they
would know she cared about them, no one would be unduly hassled. Nobody
in the audience took what she said to be
insincere, nor do I think it was. She believed what she said.
Psychopathic. The word summons up flashing
eyes and floating hair, men hiding gasoline
bombs under their coats in crowded subway cars on the way to Merrill
Lynch for revenge. But set aside any lurid
pictures you may associate with the term. I'm using it as a label to describe people without
consciences, nothing more. Psychopaths and
sociopaths are often our charming and intelligent roommates in
corporations and institutions. They
mimic perfectly the necessary protective coloration of compassion and concern, they mimic human discourse. Yet
underneath that surface disguise they are
circuit boards of scientific rationality, pure expressions of
pragmatism.
All
large bureaucracies, public or private, are psychopathic to the degree they are
well- managed. It's a genuine paradox,
but time to face the truth of it. Corporate policies like downsizing and environmental degradation,
which reduce the quality of life for enormous
numbers of people, make perfectly rational sense as devices to reach
profitability. Even could it be proven
that the theory of homo economicus has a long-range moral component in which, as is sometimes argued in policy
circles, the pain of the moment leads
inevitably to a better tomorrow for those who survive — the thing would
still be psychopathic. An older America
would have had little hesitation labeling it as Evil. I've reached for the term psychopathic in place of
Evil in deference to modern antipathies.
The whole matter is in harmony with classic evolutionary theory and
theological notions of limited
salvation. I find that congruence interesting.
The
sensationalistic charge that all large corporations, including school
corporations, are psychopathic becomes
less inflammatory if you admit the obvious first, that all such entities are nonhuman. Forget the human
beings who populate corporate structures. Sure,
some of them sabotage corporate integrity from time to time and behave
like human beings, but never
consistently, and never for long, for if that were the story, corporate coherence would be impossible, as it often is
in Third World countries. Now at least you
see where I'm coming from in categorizing the institutional corporation
of school as psychopathic. Moral codes
don't drive school decision-making. That means School sometimes decides to ignore your wimpy kid
being beaten up for his lunch money in
order to oil some greater wheels. School has no tear ducts with which to
weep.
1. Except
for a small fraction of Gifted and Talented Honors kids sequestered in a remote
corner of the third floor, who followed different protocols, although a good deal less
different than they knew.
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