29. Extending Childhood: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Extending
Childhood
From the beginning, there was purpose
behind forced schooling, purpose which had
nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead,
this grand purpose was forged out of
what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was
thought to need; that, and what a strong,
centralized political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the
first decade of the twentieth century as
a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of
official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people in history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:
official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people in history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:
We want one class to have a liberal
education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of
a liberal education and fit themselves to
perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Byl917, the major administrative jobs in
American schooling were under the control of a
group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education
Trust." The first meeting of this
trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford,
the University of Chicago, and the
National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in
1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."
At first, the primary target was the
tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be
extinquished, at least among the common
population, the immense capital investments that mass production
industry required for equipment weren't
conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of
management. Not as Franklin or Edison had
once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents.
Only by a massive psychological campaign
could the menace of overproduction in
America be contained. That's what important men and academics called it.
The ability of Americans to think as
independent producers had to be curtailed. Certain writings of Alexander Inglis carry a hint of schooling's
role in this ultimately successful project to
curb the tendency of little people to compete with big companies. From
1880 to 1930, overproduction became a
controlling metaphor among the managerial classes, and this idea would have a profound influence on the
development of mass schooling.
I know how difficult it is for most of us
who mow our lawns and walk our dogs to
comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone
that it began to dominate compulsion
schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley's Public Education in the United
States is explicit about what happened and
why. As Cubberley puts it: It
has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor.
On the contrary, all recent thinking...
[is] opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the
nation have set against child labor.
The statement occurs in a section of
Public Education called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which
Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory system" has made extended childhood
necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave.
With the breakdown of home and village
industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the
apprenticeship system by large- scale
production with its extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering
march of machinery"), an army of
workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.
Furthermore, modern industry needs such
workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed
to stand in the way of progress. According to Cubberley, with "much
ridicule from the public press" the
old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of
instruction which came to us from abroad." That last mysterious reference to a new psychology is
to practices of dumbed-down schooling
common to England, Germany, and France, the three major world
coal-powers (other than the United
States), each of which had already converted its common population into an industrial proletariat.
Arthur Calhoun's 1919 Social History of
the Family notified the nation's academics what
was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of Utopian writers
was coming true, the child was passing
from its family "into the custody of community experts." He offered a significant forecast, that in time
we could expect to see public education
"designed to check the mating of the unfit." Three years
later, Mayor John F. Hylan of New York
said in a public speech that the schools had been seized as an octopus
would seize prey, by "an invisible
government." He was referring specifically to certain actions of the Rockefeller Foundation and other
corporate interests in New York City which
preceded the school riots of 1917.
The 1920s were a boom period for forced
schooling as well as for the stock market. In
1928, a well-regarded volume called A Sociological Philosophy of
Education claimed, "It is the
business of teachers to run not merely schools but the world." A year
later, the famous creator of educational
psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced, "Academic subjects
are of little value." William Kirkpatrick, his colleague at Teachers College, boasted in
Education and the Social Crisis that the whole
tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.
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