191. Psychopathic Programming: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

191. Psychopathic Programming: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Psychopathic Programming 

      I could regale you with mountains of statistics to illustrate the damage schools cause. I  could bring before your attention a line of case studies to illustrate the mutilation of  specific individuals — even those who have been apparently privileged as its "gifted and  talented." 3 What would that prove? You've heard those stories, read these figures before  until you went numb from the assault on common sense. School can't be that bad, you  say. You survived, didn't you? Or did you? Review what you learned there. Has it made a  crucial

difference for good in your life? Don't answer. I know it hasn't. You surrendered  twelve years of your life because you had no choice. You paid your dues, I paid mine.  But who collected those dues? 

      In 191 1, a prominent German sociologist, Robert Michel, warned in his book Political  Parties that the size and prosperity of modern bureaucracies had given them  unprecedented ability to buy friends. In this way they shield themselves against internal  reform and make themselves impervious to outside reform. Across this great epoch of     bureaucracy, Michel's warning has been strikingly borne out. Where school is concerned  we have lived through six major periods of crisis since its beginning, zones of social  turmoil where outsiders have demanded the state change the way it provides for the  schooling of children. 4 Each crisis can be used as a stepping stone leading us back to the  original wrong path we took at the beginnings. 

      All alleged reforms have left schooling exactly in the shape they found it, except bigger,  richer, politically stronger. And morally and intellectually worse by the standards of the  common American village of yesteryear which still lives in our hearts. Many people of  conscience only defend institutional schooling because they can't imagine what would  happen without any schools, especially what might happen to the poor. This  compassionate and articulate contingent has consistently been fronted by the real  engineers of schooling, skillfully used as shock troops to support the cumulative  destruction of American working-class and peasant culture, a destruction largely effected  through schooling. 

      Psychopathic programming is incapable of change. It lacks moral dimension or ethical  mind beyond the pragmatic. Institutional morality is always public relations; once  institutional machinery of sufficient size and complexity is built, a logical movement  commences that is internally aimed toward subordination and eventual elimination of all  ethical mandates. Even if quality personnel are stationed on the parapets in the first  generation of new institutional existence, that original vigilance will flag as pioneers give  way to time-servers. The only reliable defense against this is to keep institutions weak  and dispersed, even if that means sacrificing efficiency and holding them on a very short  leash. 

      Michel wrote in Political Parties that the primary mission of all institutional managers  (including school managers) is to cause their institution to grow in power, in number of  employees, in autonomy from public oversight, and in rewards for key personnel. The  primary mission is never, of course, the publicly announced one. Whether we are talking  about bureaucracies assigned to wage war, deliver mail, or educate children, there is no  difference.  

     In the course of things, this rationalization isn't a straight line matter. There can be  pullbacks in the face of criticism, for example. But examined over time, movement  toward rationalizing operations is always unidirectional, public outrage against the  immoral effects of this is buffered by purchased political friendships, by seemingly  neutral public authorities who always find it prudent to argue for delay, in confidence the  heat will cool. In this way momentum is spent, public attention diverted, until the next  upwelling of outrage. These strategies of opinion management are taught calmly through  elite graduate university training in the best schools here, as was true in Prussia.  Corporate bureaucracies, including those in the so-called public sphere, know how to  wear out critics. There is no malicious intent, only a striving for efficiency. 

      Something has been happening in America since the end of WWII, accelerating since the  flight of Sputnik and the invasion of Vietnam. A massive effort is underway to link     centrally organized control of jobs with centrally organized administration of schooling.  This would be an American equivalent of the Chinese "Dangan" — linking a personal file  begun in kindergarten (recording academic performance, attitudes, behavioral  characteristics, medical records, and other personal data) with all work opportunities. In  China the Dangan can't be escaped. It is part of a web of social controls that ensures  stability of the social order; justice has nothing to do with it. The Dangan is coming to the  United States under cover of skillfully engineered changes in medicine, employment,  education, social service, etc., seemingly remote from one another. In fact, the pieces are  being coordinated through an interlink between foundations, grant-making government  departments, corporate public relations, key universities, and similar agencies out of  public view. 

      This American Dangan will begin with longer school days and years, with more public  resources devoted to institutional schooling, with more job opportunities in the school  field, more emphasis on standardized testing, more national examinations, plus hitherto  unheard of developments like national teaching licenses, national curricula, national  goals, national standards, and with the great dream of corporate America since 1900,  School-to- Work legislation organizing the youth of America into precocious work  battalions. A Dangan by its nature is always psychopathic. It buries its mistakes.

  

3 What I would never do is to argue that the damage to human potential is adequately caught in the rise or   fall of SAT scores or any other standardized measure because these markers are too unreliable — besides being far too prone to strategic  manipulation. The New York Times of March 9, 2003, reported in an article by Sara Rimer that Harvard rejects four valedictorians out of every  five, quoting that school's director of admissions as saying: "To get in [Harvard], you have to present some real distinction..." A distinction  which, apparently, 80 Percent of "top" students lack.  

   4 Different addictive readers of school histories might tally eight crises or five, so the stab at specificity   shouldn't be taken too seriously by any reader. What it is meant to indicate is that careful immersion in pedagogical history will reveal, even to  the most skeptical, that mass schooling has been in nearly constant crisis since its inception. There never was a golden age of mass schooling,  nor can there ever be.