6. The New Dumbness: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

6. The New Dumbness: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org    

 Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling  teaches is dumbness. It's a religious idea gone out of control. You don't have to accept  that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart  people who understand too much. I won't ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I'll let  a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in  just a little while. Be patient.   

      Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed
from  ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and  talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the  good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are  indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared  disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes. 

      Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us  that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling  because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:   Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no  way can there ever be collective

     critical  judgment. ...The individual can no longer judge for  himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts  to the entire complex of values and prejudices  established by propaganda. With regard to political  situations, he is given ready-made value judgments  invested with the power of the truth by... the word of  experts. 

      The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and  upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple  pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their  usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they  are certain they must know something because their  degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so  convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate  downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness  upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity,  their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of  incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil. 

      Ellul puts it this way:  

     The individual has no chance to exercise his  judgment either on principal questions or on their  implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not  comfortably exercised under [the best of]  conditions. ..Once personal judgment and critical  faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they  will not simply reappear when propaganda is  suppressed... years of intellectual and spiritual  education would be needed to restore such faculties.  The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda,      will immediately adopt another, this will spare him  the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event  without a ready-made opinion.  

     Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming  dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote  that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids  dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very  long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways  easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.  

     According to all official analysis, dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a  great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a  term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to  official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call  mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the  three highest positions on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small  a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly  dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice to this social coup  which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been  rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey  means by "proper" social order.  

     If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology  (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because  they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved  moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies from  the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature's way of providing  someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it's evidence of bad  karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the  position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a  vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder  us in our beds. 

      The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient  numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem  incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first  had to be imagined; it isn't real.  

     Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable  functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be  watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized,  ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a  challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you  want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid      attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or  another.