212. A Quality Education: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
A
Quality Education
The
mantra of "a quality education," was an invention of the real-estate
industry in the first decade after the
end of WWII, or at least that business was the chief distributor of the deceptively destructive notion. The cry
of quality education became the spearhead of
a bold and complex scheme to increase the supply of real-estate
product-by dissolving the small-farm
belts which surrounded cities in those days and converting the farm fields into housing
plots. The U.S. government was a major partner in this undertaking, which serves as a useful illustration of how byzantine a reality schooling at the hands of a political state must always be. Government had its own motives, as you'll soon see.
plots. The U.S. government was a major partner in this undertaking, which serves as a useful illustration of how byzantine a reality schooling at the hands of a political state must always be. Government had its own motives, as you'll soon see.
The
partnership came about in this fashion. Long before the war's end-during the
Teddy Rossevelt administration, in fact,
as closely as I can figure-a seldom spoken of policy idea had taken root which directed the U.S.
government to create a centralization of the
national food supply as a tool of efficient political management. Since
Prussia's social- class system was not
available to organize this process, it would be done through successively corporatizing American
agriculture, with strong government assistance
through legislation, subsidies, selective purchasing, and indirect
advocacy. The small farm family and its
children were too formidable an obstacle to efficient governance to be allowed to continue in their independent ways
unchecked.
The
mechanism hit upon to terminate wholesale the little farms was a series of fantastically accelerated school tax
increases whose collective effort over time could not be borne by farmers operating only slightly
above the subsistence level. Popular support
for these taxes among non-farmers was achieved by a long-term propaganda
campaign which radically redefined good
education to include football stadiums with lights, band uniforms, huge cafeterias, bus systems large
enough to meet the needs of a small city
though used only a couple hours a day, costly standardized testing, and
many similar additions which once would
surely have appalled ordinary citizens with both their high cost-and bizarre irrelevance.
Yet, in an Alice-in-Wonderland twist, high
cost was the very point: without high cost
there would be no need for new taxes; without taxes no leverage to force
small farms onto the housing market, and
more importantly, no augmentation of institutional schooling's ability to serve the purposes of
social engineering.
Between 1945 and 1965 school taxes had risen
only 12 percent nationally, on average,
but over the next ten years they more than doubled, and between 1977 and
1993 they tripled from this new
high-altitude base! This six-fold increase over three short decades broke small farmers in large numbers, dumping
more than a million small farms onto the
housing market. Although completely unheard of in the well-mannered and
well- controlled journalistic
"debate" about public schooling, this adventure in commanding a society and an economy was a decisive turning
point in the strange career of post-WWII
public education. For years it was unheard of to think of a school board
without at least one member representing
real estate interests, usually the loudest voice demanding "quality education".
The
rootless people who accumulated on this once productive farmland offered little resistance to further centralization of
school governance, although the farmers they
replaced surely would have. As commuters, what interested them most was
that schools become places of feeding,
recreation, socialization, health care, and life counseling for their children. It was the Prussian formula
reborn in late twentieth century America, a
formula which allowed displacement of social management into the right
hands. Thus is institutional schooling
always more than it seems.
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