4. School As Religion: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
School
As Religion
Nothing about school is what it seems, not
even boredom. To show you what I mean is
the burden of this long essay. My book represents a try at arranging my
own thoughts in order to figure out what
fifty years of classroom confinement (as student and teacher) add up to for me. You'll encounter a great deal
of speculative history here. This is a personal
investigation of why school is a dangerous place. It's not so much that
anyone there sets out to hurt children;
more that all of us associated with the institution are stuck like flies in the same great web your kids are. We buzz frantically to cover our own panic but have little power to help smaller flies.
more that all of us associated with the institution are stuck like flies in the same great web your kids are. We buzz frantically to cover our own panic but have little power to help smaller flies.
Looking backward on a thirty-year teaching
career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I
can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth
institutionalized; I can't believe that
centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination
and sorting machine, robbing people of
their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.
School is a religion. Without
understanding the holy mission aspect you're certain to misperceive what takes place as a result of
human stupidity or venality or even class
warfare. All are present in the equation, it's just that none of these
matter very much — even without them
school would move in the same direction. Dewey's Pedagogic Creed statement of 1 897 gives you a clue to the
Zeitgeist:
Every teacher should realize he is a
social servant set apart for the maintenance of
the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In
this way the teacher is always the
prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.
What is "proper" social order?
What does "right" social growth look like? If you don't know you're like me, not like John Dewey who
did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who
did, too.
Somehow out of the industrial confusion
which followed the Civil War, powerful men
and dreamers became certain what kind of social order America needed,
one very like the British system we had
escaped a hundred years earlier. This realization didn't arise as a product of public debate as it should have in
a democracy, but as a distillation of private discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original
American charter but that didn't disturb
them. They had a stupendous goal in mind — the rationalization of
everything. The end of unpredictable
history; its transformation into dependable order.
From mid-century onwards certain Utopian
schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play, following
roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in
the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be reached in
stages, was an orderly, scientifically
managed society, one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic
tradition. After that, human breeding, the
evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal
institutionalized formal forced
schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well
into what had traditionally been early
adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced
age. Maturity was to be retarded.
During the post-Civil War period,
childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very
old children. It was called adolescence, a
phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of
young people didn't stop at the beginning
of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of
school leaving set higher and higher. The
greatest victory for this Utopian project was making school the only
avenue to certain occupations. The
intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn't unusual to find graduate
students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.
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