3. The
New Individualism: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
The
little essay went off in March and I forgot it. Somewhere along the way I must
have gotten a note saying it would be
published at the editor's discretion, but if so, it was quickly forgotten in the press of turbulent
feelings that accompanied my own internal
struggle. Finally, on July 5, 1991, 1 swallowed hard and quit. Twenty
days later the Journal published the
piece. A week later I was studying invitations to speak at NASA Space Center, the Western White House, the
Nashville Center for the Arts, Columbia Graduate Business School, the Colorado Librarian's Convention, Apple Computer, and the financial control board of United Technologies Corporation. Nine years later, still enveloped in the orbit of compulsion schooling, I had spoken 750 times in fifty states and seven foreign countries. I had no agent and never advertised, but a lot of people made an effort to find me. It was as if parents were starving for someone to tell them the truth.
Nashville Center for the Arts, Columbia Graduate Business School, the Colorado Librarian's Convention, Apple Computer, and the financial control board of United Technologies Corporation. Nine years later, still enveloped in the orbit of compulsion schooling, I had spoken 750 times in fifty states and seven foreign countries. I had no agent and never advertised, but a lot of people made an effort to find me. It was as if parents were starving for someone to tell them the truth.
My
hunch is it wasn't so much what I was saying
that kept the lecture round unfolding, but that a teacher was speaking out at all and the
curious fact that I represented nobody
except myself. In the great school
debate, this is unheard of. Every single
voice allowed regular access to the national podium is the mouthpiece of some association,
corporation, university, agency, or
institutionalized cause. The poles of
debate blocked out by these ritualized,
figurehead voices are extremely narrow. Each has a stake in continuing forced schooling much as
it is.
As
I traveled, I discovered a universal hunger, often unvoiced, to be free of
managed debate. A desire to be given
untainted information. Nobody seemed to have maps of where this thing had come from or why it
acted as it did, but the ability to smell a rat was alive and well all over America.
Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset
of the twentieth century has indeed
happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a
centrally managed village, an agora made
up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by
having collective agencies speak through
particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in
human affairs, but the net effect is to
reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is
turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All
this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of
forced schooling.
Dewey called this transformation "the new
individualism." When I stepped into the job of schoolteacher in 1961, the new individualism
was sitting in the driver's seat all over
urban America, a far cry from my own school days on the Monongahela when
the Lone Ranger, not Sesame Street, was
our nation's teacher, and school things weren't nearly so oppressive. But gradually they became
something else in the euphoric times following
WWII. Easy money and easy travel provided welcome relief from wartime
austerity, the advent of television, the
new nonstop theater, offered easy laughs, effortless entertainment. Thus preoccupied, Americans
failed to notice the deliberate conversion of
formal education that was taking place, a transformation that would turn
school into an instrument of the
leviathan state. Who made that happen and why is part of the story I have to tell.
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