220. The Culture Of Big Business: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Culture Of Big Business
Between
1890 and 1930, the culture of big business took over the culture of public education, establishing scientific management
and corporate style as the predominant
imperative. Although linkages between business and education elites were
complex, the goals and values of business
established the rules by which both played. And while schools proved unwilling to dare influencing
business, the reverse was far from true.
Businessmen dominated the political movement
in schools to abolish the system of local
control through wards nearly universal at the end of the nineteenth
century. Along with professionals,
businessmen served disproportionately on new streamlined school boards. Business language permeated the corridors of
school management. Businessmen and their
wives were the political force behind Froebelian kindergartens which
removed young children from family
influence, and they were behind vocational schooling, which left no romantic dreams for ordinary
children.
The
National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Foundation, the
Ad Council, the Business Roundtable, and
other business-relevant private associations
publicized the need for school change, told the public how children
should act, what they should honor, what
behaviors would be rewarded. A steadily lengthening school year led to an extended career ladder, specialization,
and a credential-oriented society. School
people were assigned the role of bringing about a conflict-free world by
teaching indirectly that the preemption
of work by corporations and professions (later by government) was right, proper, and
"scientific."
The
Irish historian and philosopher W.E.H. Lecky, in his history of European
rationalism, {Rationalism in Europe),
predicted that temptations posed by a forced assemblage of children would prove in the end too strong to
resist, powerful interests would inevitably
manipulate schooling to serve their own agendas:
The opinions of ninety-nine persons out of
every hundred are formed mainly by
education, and a Government can decide in whose hands the national
education is to be placed, what subjects
it is to comprise, and what principles it is to convey.
"If all paths of honor and
wealth" are monopolized, said Lecky, the powerful motive of self-interest will be enough to bring most
students to heel:
The simple fact of annexing certain
penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite
opinions, while it will undoubtedly make many
hypocrites, will also make many converts. — Rationalism in Europe (1883)
Once a system of reward and punishment is set
up and broadcast by frequent public
examples of its power in action, the nature of argument is almost
predetermined, although subjects of such
a regimen may be "entirely unconscious of the source of their
opinions." Once the doctrine of
"exclusive salvation" for the cooperative (and damnation for the critic) is clearly established, rulers will
never be seriously questioned, thought Lecky.
By
1899 William H. Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, descendant of
the man for whom the Baldwin locomotive
was named, demonstrated how well the school
lesson had been learned and how forcible could be its application. Baldwin
was a member of the Peabody/
Rockefeller/Carnegie "Southern Education Board," self- appointed to bring the benefits of Northern
schooling to the war-ravaged South. Although
in the beginning of its career freed blacks were treated to the same
type of rigorous, classically oriented
schooling we would call "liberal" today — meaning one designed
to liberate the judgment from prejudice
and ignorance — as time passed it began to seem
impolitic to so treat blacks as equals. It alienated important elements
in the Southern white community who were
more important fish for the Northern school net to land. Thus a decision was made to jettison equality as a
goal and make labor-value the most
important determinant of which way each group would be schooled.
There is perhaps no more naked statement
of the political uses of schooling on record
than Baldwin's official word about "The Present Problem of Negro
Education," delivered before the
Capon Springs Conference on Southern Education (1899):
Know that it is a crime for any teacher, white
or black, to educate the Negro for positions
which are not open to him.
Important liberals like Edgar Gardner
Murphy (whose descendants are still active in
American schooling) and other leading progressive humanists hastened to
agree with Baldwin. In David Tyack's
analysis, these men sought to develop an applied technology of school decision-making similar to
technologies of production and management then
transforming the bureaucratized corporate economy. This technology
reflected evolutionary presuppositions,
rooting its values in supposed evolutionary laws. Ideals could be hierarchically arranged and pinned
down on a scale of races, classes, sexes, and
historical stages grounded allegedly in nature itself.
According to James Russell, for thirty years
dean of Teachers College, the purpose was to
equip teachers and administrators for "missionary service."
What we are looking to discover through
building this new institution, said Russell, is "the modern
significance of the old doctrines of
original sin and salvation by grace — to bring forth works meet for repentance." '(emphasis added)
Teachers College, Stanford, Chicago, Johns
Hopkins, Wisconsin, Michigan, Yale, etc.,
were the West Points of the Educational Trust, men like Ellwood P.
Cubberley its generals. Cubberley, also
writer and editor of Houghton Mifflin's education series, the largest and most successful set of
professional books published for school people in the first half of the twentieth century,
legitimized by his influence the new reforms of
vocational guidance, "junior" high schools, hygiene programs,
and more. The book series gave him great
power to shape the new science of education, making him a fortune. Its effects on school management were vast.
Cubberley wrote, "One bright child may
easily be worth more to national life than
thousands of low mentality." He taught influential schoolmen that
genetic endowment explained success and
failure in the social order and taught thousands of politicians the same lesson as well. Cubberley was one of a
small band of leaders who invented
professional school administration as an occupation, and professional
school administration created the tracking
system so that different grades of evolutionary raw material could be processed in different ways
— one of many innovations science and
business efficiency seemed to demand. In doing so, a strong class system
possessing nearly the strength of a caste
system was created, with important political implications for every American child.
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