190. The
Game Is Crooked: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
The
Game Is Crooked
Hannah Arendt's analysis of the remarkable
banality of Nazi-era organizational character
calls attention to its excessive orderliness, unfailing courtesy, neat
files, schedules for everything,
efficient supply procedures, and the dullness and emotional poverty of
Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the
destruction of many lives without any particular malice. He even liked Jews. That he was part of a
company dedicated to the conversion of
animate into inanimate on a wholesale basis wasn't his fault. It was
just a job. His rational
duty was to do his best at it. Unless mankind is allowed to possess some peculiar godlike dignity, a soul perhaps, Eichmann had a right to say to his critics — what difference between what I do and the slaughter of British beef to prevent mad cow disease? Nothing personal. Is it a shortage of people that makes you so angry?
duty was to do his best at it. Unless mankind is allowed to possess some peculiar godlike dignity, a soul perhaps, Eichmann had a right to say to his critics — what difference between what I do and the slaughter of British beef to prevent mad cow disease? Nothing personal. Is it a shortage of people that makes you so angry?
That's the real point, isn't it? Once a
mission is defined with pure objectivity,
psychopathic procedure makes perfect sense. If men and women can think
about genocide that way, you can
understand why merely screwing up children wouldn't trouble the sleep of school administrators.
Their job isn 't about children; it's about
systems maintenance. The school institution has always had a strong
shadow mission to refute the irrefutable
fact that all kids want to learn to be their best and strongest selves. They don't need to be forced to do this.
School is a tour deforce designed to
recreate human nature around a different premise, constructing proof that most kids don't want
to learn because they are biologically
defective. School succeeds in this private aim only by failing in its
public mission; that's the knuckle-ball
school critics always miss. Only a delicate blend of abject failures, midrange failures, and minor failures mixed
together with a topping of success
guarantees the ongoing health of the school enterprise. School is as
good an illustration of the work of
natural selection in institutional life as we have. The only drawback is,
the game is crooked. Like an undertaker
who murders to boost business or a glazier who
breaks glass in the stillness of the night 2 to stimulate trade, schools
create the problems they seem to exist
to solve.
2 This particular form of rational psychopathy
has been an epidemic in the Northeast for decades, and it has struck my own
life more than once. Some think that
auto-glass installers send agents through lines of parked cars late at night to
crack their windshields on the sensible supposition that in a trade without many practitioners, a
decent proportion of new work will go to the creators of the need. Or perhaps
the entire guild underwrites the trade,
who knows?
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