223. Silicon Valley: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Eighteen
Breaking Out of the Trap We have a choice to make once and for all:
between the empire and the spiritual and
physical salvation of our people. No road for the people will ever be
open unless the government completely
gives up control over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the country into an abyss and it does not know
the way out. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
as quoted by Pravda (1986)
To reform our treatment of the young, we
must force the center of gravity of the school
world to change. In this chapter I'll try to show you what I mean, but
my method will be largely indirect. To
fashion the beginnings of a solution from these materials will require your active engagement in an imaginative
partnership with me, one that shall commence
in Silicon Valley.
I went to Silicon Valley in the middle of
1999 to speak to some computer executives at
Cypress Semiconductor on the general topic of school reform. The fifty
or sixty who showed up to my talk
directly from work were dressed so informally they might easily have been mistaken for pizza delivery men or
taxicab drivers. The CEO of the
corporation, its founder T.J. Rodgers, was similarly turned out. I
didn't recognize him as the same famous
man portrayed on a large photo mural mounted on the wall outside until he introduced me to the audience and the
audience to me. To let me know who my
auditors were, Rodgers said that everyone there was a millionaire, none needed to work for him
because all were self-sufficient and could find
work all over the place simply by walking into a different company. They
worked for Cypress because they wanted
to, just as he did himself and, like him, they were usually hard at it from very early morning until long
after five o'clock. Because they wanted to.
The thesis of my talk was that the history
of forced schooling in America, as elsewhere, is the history of the requirements of business.
School can't be satisfactorily explained by
studying the careers of ideologues like Horace Mann or anyone else. The
problem of American education from a
personal or a family perspective isn't really a problem at all from
the vantage point of big business, big finance, and big government.
What's a problem to me is a solution for
them. An insufficient incentive exists to change things much, otherwise things would change. I learned that
from Adam Smith, Smith turns out to be a
much different sensibility than the priesthood. of corporate apologiests
thinks he is.
Regard it this way: in our present system,
those abstract bignesses are saddled with the
endless responsibility of finding a place for hundreds of millions of
people, and the even more daunting
challenge of creating demand for products and services which, historically viewed, few of us need or want. Because of
this anomaly, a Procrustean discipline
emerges in which the entire population must continually be cut or
stretched to fit the momentary
convenience of the economy. This is a free market only in fantasy; it
seems free because ceaseless
behind-the-scenes efforts maintain the illusion, but its reality is much different. Prodigies of psychological
and political insight and wisdom gathered
painfully over the centuries are refined into principles, taught in
elite colleges, and consecrated in the
service of this colossal tour deforce of appearances.
Let me illustrate. People love to work,
but they must be convinced that work is a kind of curse, that they must arrange the maximum of
leisure and labor-saving devices in their
lives upon which belief many corporations depend; people love to invent
solutions, to be resourceful, to make do
with what they have, but resourcefulness and frugality are criminal behaviors to a mass production
economy, such examples threaten to infect
others with the same fatal sedition; similarly, people love to attach
themselves to favored possessions, even
to grow old and die with them, but such indulgence is dangerous lunacy in a machine economy whose costly
tools are continually renewed by enormous
borrowings; people like to stay put but must be convinced they lead
pinched and barren existences without
travel; people love to walk but the built world is now laid out so they have to drive. Worst of all are those who
yearn for productive, independent livelihoods
like the Amish have, and nearly all free Americans once had. If that
vision spreads, a consumer economy is
sunk. For all these and other reasons, the form of schooling we get is largely a kind of consumer and employee
training. This isn't just incidentally true.
Common sense should tell you it's necessarily so if the economy is to
survive in any recognizable form.
Every principal institution in our culture
is a partner with the particular form of
corporatism which has began to dominate America at the end of WWII. Call
it paternal corporatism, wise elites can
be trained to provide for the rest of us, who will be kept as children. Unlike Plato's Guardians whom they
otherwise resemble, this meritorious elite
is not kept poor but is guaranteed prosperity and status in exchange for
its oversight. An essential feature of
this kind of central management is that the population remain mystified, specialized dependent, and childish.
The school institution is clearly a key
partner in this arrangement: it suppresses the
productive impulse in favor of consumption; it redefines
"work" as a job someone
eventually gives you if you behave; it habituates a large clientele to
sloth, envy, and boredom; and it
accustoms individuals to think of themselves as members of a class with various distinguishing features. More than
anything else, school is about class
consciousness. In addition, it makes intellectual work and creative thinking
appear like distasteful or difficult
labor to most of us. None of this is done to oppress, but because the economy would dissolve into something else if
those attitudes didn't become ingrained in
childhood.
We have evolved a subtly architected,
delicately balanced command economy and class-
based society upon which huge efforts are lavished to make it appear
like something else. The illusion has
been wearing thin for years; that's a principal reason why so many people don't bother to vote. In such a
bargain, the quality of schooling is distinctly
secondary; other values are uppermost. A great many children see through
the fraud in elementary school but lack
the language and education to come to proper terms with their feelings. In this system, a fraction of the
kids are slowly over time let in on a part of this managerial reality because they are intended
to eventually be made into Guardians
themselves, or Guardian's assistants.
School is a place where a comprehensive
social vision is learned. Without a contrary
vision to offer, the term "school reform" is only a misnomer
describing trivial changes. Any large
alteration of forced schooling, which might jeopardize the continuity of workers and customers that the corporate
economy depends upon, is unthinkable without
some radical change in popular perception preceding it. Business/School
partnerships and School-to-Work
legislation aren't positive developments, but they represent the end of any pretense that ordinary children should be
educated. That, in any case, was the burden
of my talk at Cypress.
Deregulating
Opportunity
No comments:
Post a Comment