215. Natural Selection: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Natural
Selection
In
1895, the National Education Association announced that school science
courses should be reorganized to teach
evolution not as theory but as fact. Biology textbooks began to present evolution to secondary
schools and colleges with an extraordinary
aggressiveness:
We do not know of any competent naturalist
who has any hesitation in accepting the
general doctrine. (Yale University Press, 1895)
There is no rival hypothesis to evolution,
except the out-worn and completely
refuted one of special creation, now retained only by the ignorant, dogmatic, and the prejudiced. (Macmillan Publishers, 1895)
refuted one of special creation, now retained only by the ignorant, dogmatic, and the prejudiced. (Macmillan Publishers, 1895)
What evolution has to do with the
macropolitics of schooling becomes clear if you
consider that both are concerned with what should be encouraged to
thrive, and what should be helped to
perish. Evolutionary theory made all the difference in how systematic schooling was internally arranged. Too much
effort wasn't wasted on hopeless trash, and
the good stock was separated from the common. With justification.
Global entrepreneurs such as John D.
Rockefeller Sr. and Andrew Carnegie found natural selection to be a perfect explanation for
their laissez-faire economic principles. To
Rockefeller, for instance, "the growth of large business is merely
survival of the fittest"; savage
business practices aren 't evil, "merely the working out of a law of
nature and a law of God." According
to Herbert Spencer, nothing escaped evolution's power: "every single organism" or institution evolved,
religions evolved, economies evolved; evolution
exposed democratic theory for the childish fantasy it really was.
But
among common men and women in America who still believed in special
creation and democracy, the perception
spread that a new political order was strip-mining their uniquely American common rights and liberties
like so much coal. In the waning years of
the nineteenth century, social unrest was the most crucial problem
confronting the security of ambitious
new industrial elites. When the myths of George Washington and Tom Paine were flushed down the memory hole
of schooling, and the personal call to
duty of Christianity was — to use Macmillan's word —
"refuted," a long-range dilemma
emerged with no easy solution: no attractive social narrative remained
from which to draw meaning. Hedonism, so
essential to business success, had a social downside whose dimensions were difficult to predict. And the
scientific story, in spite of prodigious labor
expended in its behalf, left the unfortunate impression that life was
only a goofy accident devoid of any
greater significance.
The Darwinian/Galtonian evolutionary script
wrote the everyday citizen completely out
of the story. It had to be faced that there was no room at the policy
table for common citizens, yet thanks to
the dangerous power vested in the American electorate through its national founding documents, the full bite of
a democratic society stood as a latent threat
to the would-be scientific ruling classes. Into this late
nineteenth-century industrialization,
immigrant confusion of national strikes and violence, breakaway urbanization, proletarianized labor, and
political corruption, two ideas surfaced to offer an apparently sensible path through the maze.
Each was a highly sophisticated social
technology.
One
was the movement called Fabian socialism and its various fellow-traveling outriggers. The other was a kind of academic
echo of Fabianism called "the theory of
democratic elites" — offering a strange kind of democracy-lite
which operated
"democratically" without needing any direct popular
authorization. Democratic elitism had,
in fact, been the mock representational model of ancient Sparta. Its modern
analogue retained the husk of democratic
institutions while stifling the real voice of the people by depriving its elected spokesmen of any
effective power, reducing the role of legislatures to a choice between competing expert
conceptions.
In its modern form, the theory of
democratic elitism comes partly from John Stuart Mill, partly from the work of Italian intellectuals
Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca,
especially from the latter's essay of 1896, translated into English as
The Ruling Class: Elements of a Science
of Politics,'' a book vital to understanding twentieth-century schooling. The way to make a political regime
stable across the centuries had eluded
every wise man of history, but Mosca found the key: elites must
deliberately and selectively feed on the
brains and vitality of the lesser classes.
Identified early enough inside the laboratory
of government schooling, the best leadership
of these classes could be uprooted and transplanted into ruling class
society, reinvigorating the blood stock
of the overclass: Count Dracula in education department drag. This genetic harvesting would deliver
the best formula for social harmony. Potential
future leaders among the underclasses would be targeted early in
schooling, then weaned from any
misguided loyalty to their own group, using incentives. Far from prying
eyes, their minds would be conditioned
in special "gifted" classes.
While this process of vetting went on, school
would also be used to train most of us in
our role in traditional status hierarchies. Class rankings, specialized
tracking, daily habituation to payoffs
and punishments, and other means would accomplish the trick. Those elected for advancement would be drawn
bit by bit into identification with the
upper crust and with its ways of dress, speech, expectation, etc. They
would come in this fashion to look upon
their group of origin as evolutionarily retarded — a brilliant imaginative coup.
It
was profound advice, providing a social justification for the expense and
trouble of the mass confinement
schooling experiment, which had still not been fully launched at the time Mosca wrote his essay. While it was one
thing to suggest, as Darwin did, that
natural selection would improve the breed, one thing to say with Sir
Henry Maine that the destiny of the
Great Race would be advanced, one thing to say with the episcopal religions that God's will would thereby be
done; some more down-to-earth surety had to
be offered to an emerging superclass of industrialists and international
bankers. Now such a surety was at hand
in Mosca's guarantee of social stability.
The
theory of democratic elites, together with the promising new German mind
sciences, provided all the tools needed
to press ahead with the school experiment. Mosca's ideas were an academic hit across the recently
Germanized university spectrum of America, a
watchword in Germanized corporate boardrooms and private men's clubs. By
the start of WWI, the familiar Common
School idea survived only in the imagination of America's middle and working classes. In actual school
practice it had given way to thoroughly
regulated and tracked assemblages geared tightly to the clock, managed
by layered hierarchies and all
schematized into rigid class rankings. Class-reproduction was "scientifically" locked in place by
standardized test scores, calibrated to the decimal. Objections were overridden by pointing to the
"facts" of the matter. From its inception, evolutionary racism guided the
forced-schooling car, test scores its communiques offered to the public as evidence of obedience to a
higher.
The theory of democratic elites provided a
way for plutocracy hide inside the skin of
democracy, to have ordinary people represented by the best selected by
the best. Here was Orwellian Newspeak of
a very high order. Since the commons could not be trusted to select the best from amongst itself, the
community of quality would have to do it for
them, backstage, concealing (in the interests of social efficiency but
also from humane motives) the full
reality of the radical political transformation. America was whisked off stage and replaced by a political imposter,
anglicized in its attitudes.
Walter Lippmann, among many, picked up these
notes sounded by Mosca and augmented by
the important American Fabian Herbert Croly in his book The Promise of American Life (1909). Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive
platform of 1912 was heavily larded with
Croly/Mosca substance, an outlook demanding the public step back and let
experts make the important decisions so
the promise of American life could be realized. With these precepts in mind, Lippmann produced his own
pair of influential books, Public Opinion
(1922), followed by The Phantom Public (1925).
Public Opinion called for severe restrictions
on public debate. The historic American
argument was "a defect of democracy." It was impossible, said
Lippmann, for the public even to know
what its own best interests were. The public was hopelessly childish; it
had to be cared for. Schools would have
to teach children that the old ideal of active,
participatory citizenship was biologically impossible. Decisions in
complex industrial society had to be
made by "invisible experts acting through government officials" for
the good of all.
The proper thing to do, said Lippmann, was
give the public a "fairy tale" explanation, something to sustain it emotionally, as we
tell a bedtime story to infants. Later, as he saw the effects of his advice unfold, Lippmann
would repudiate them, but that's another story.
The common public would have to be neutralized in the name of democracy
for this expert society, this new
republic based on sciences of human behavior to work. In this new world it wouldn't do to have shoemakers
and hairdressers mucking about while
important people built the future. In the state institution of forced
schooling it would be better in the long
run if children learned little or nothing in the short run. America was coming full circle to its British/Germanic
and episcopal beginnings.
In
the Mosca/Croly/Lippmann redefinition of democracy, common people traded their right to be heard on policy matters in
exchange for being taken care of. It was the
mother's bargain with her infants. The enormous training project called
School, proceeding in deliberate
stages across the twentieth century as opportunity presented itself and traveling at the speed of
electronics as the century ended, had as its purpose creation of an automatic social order which
could be managed by unreachable national
and international elites. It was a new type of flexible social
organization capable of being driven in
any direction at any time without the need to overcome interference.
By the end of WWI, the labor market and
much state/municipal contracting in America
was effectively controlled by Fabian-minded administrators, selected by
Fabian-minded university placement
rings, all nourished by rich contracts garnered with the assistance of political clubs. Whether any of these
actually had any connection to the Fabian brain trust (few did) was irrelevant. The atmosphere of
schooling was saturated with its disciplined
notions of Utopia.
Another natural force was at work as well.
With each passing decade, there accumulated
more reasons to defend schools exactly as they were, not on ideological
grounds at all but as a jobs project and
a contract-distribution station. Millions had a financial stake in keeping schools as they were. The true
philosophical and economic focus of the thing
needed be known only to a handful of well-positioned social engineers in
universities, foundations, and private
associations. The thing ran on momentum now. The reach of schooling grew longer without any special
effort. Secondary school enrollment went from
15 percent of the population in 1910 to 40 percent in 1930, to 90
percent in 1960, and to blanket coverage
by 1970. Almost every alternative to a well-schooled destiny was squeezed out, show business careers being a
notable exception for the thoughtful to
contemplate.
With this development, the job pool
established by institutional schooling became the leading single source of work in the United
States, the very heart of the economy in small
cities, towns, and villages. In this way school became a major
foundation for local elites, directly
and indirectly, through contract and hiring powers. All over America
school became the core of local
economies while, ironically, at the same time local minds and local customs were being rigorously barred from
the policy table of American life. The
money served as an effective incentive to self-destruct.
Local schools and school boards began to
behave as foreign intelligence bodies implanted
in the cells of a host creature, parasitic growths on local life,
remote-controlled from state and federal
offices which dissolved local integrity by overriding its imperatives. Managers of this simulated "local"
schooling descended on towns out of Stanford,
Chicago, or Columbia Teachers almost on a status and income level with
the ranking local leadership. As the
century wore on, even the lowliest pedagogues were surprised to find themselves near the top of local wage
scales.
By the 1970s, schools were plunged
headlong into a political campaign to redefine
national purpose as international purpose, and to formally redefine Democracy
as the ritual democracy allowed by
democratic elites. Control of schooling by then was so dispersed that power could hardly be located
at all in the hands of local administrators
and school boards. The world designed by Plato and Thomas Hobbes had
become reality. If you could not
locate power you could not tamper with it. Local control passed into the realm of fiction as distantly prepared
instruction entered schooling from state and federal agencies; the inner reality was that it had
not been prepared even there but in colleges,
foundations, corporations, and also — a noteworthy new development — in
the offices of various United Nations
agencies.
6.
Mosca's answer to the problem of political stability can be read clearly in the
blatantly anti-democratic first edition of this often revised and reprinted classic. (Later editions are
subtler with the central message concealed somewhat in metaphor. ) The rarely
encountered 1 923 edition had great
influence on Walter Lippmann's post-WWI generation, and the triumphant final
version of 1939, which is easiest to locate, on
Roosevelt's.
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