219. Magic At Work: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Magic
At Work
Magic
in one form or another had always appealed to professional school authorities
as the means to manage students. Horace
Mann, as you know, dedicated his entire Sixth
Report to a paean in praise of phrenology, the "science" of
reading head bumps, and every major
schoolman from Mann to G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey was a serious phrenologist — long after the craze had
vanished from upper-class drawing rooms and
salons. That should tell you something important
about the inner itches of these men, I think. The quest for certainty in a confusing new land without rules was as much the religion of our founding schoolmen as searching one's family for signs of reprobation had been for Puritans. But modern schoolmen needed a scientific cast over their religiosity, times having changed.
about the inner itches of these men, I think. The quest for certainty in a confusing new land without rules was as much the religion of our founding schoolmen as searching one's family for signs of reprobation had been for Puritans. But modern schoolmen needed a scientific cast over their religiosity, times having changed.
Early educational psychologists scientized the
practice of manipulation behind a common
expression of modern pedagogy — "motivation." Book after book
advised pedagogues how to
"motivate" charges with technical advice based on an underlying
premise that young people did not want
to learn and had to be tricked into it, a premise which on the face of common experience was absurd. As the
significance of Bernays' arguments
penetrated the high command of government and industry, so too did
manipulation become sine qua non in
classroom teaching, the standard by which teacher quality was measured.
But the methods of Bernays or of
educational psychologists like Dewey, Munsterberg, Judd, Hall, Cattell, Terman, Thorndike,
Goddard, and Watson which so radically
transformed the shape of twentieth-century schooling are about indoctrination strategies — building and using psychological
tools to create compliant children. If nature
hadn't cooperated by actually making empty children, then schooling
would have to do the job. And yet, for
what grand purpose children had to be emptied, not many knew. For those without religious training or ignorant
of the evolutionary sciences, it made only the
bleakest sort of sense.
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