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An American Affidavit

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

34. The Dangan: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org


34. The Dangan: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org


The Dangan  

     In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous  academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia  Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an  ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial  allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend


 government schooling to the service of business and the political state — as it had been  done a century before in Prussia. 

      Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: "The nature of the national  need must determine the character of the education provided." National need, of course,  depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by  specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served  was an "effective use of capital" through which our "unprecedented wealth-producing  power has been gained." When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right,  pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been  transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.   

      It's important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of  this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working  progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind  school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by  their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of  progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there  existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and  firing the blood of zealots. 

      The entire academic community here and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by  this time and to this contingent school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary  destiny. In Thorndike's memorable words, conditions for controlled selective breeding  had to be set up before the new American industrial proletariat "took things into their  own hands."  

     America was a frustrating petri dish in which to cultivate a managerial revolution,  however, because of its historic freedom traditions. But thanks to the patronage of  important men and institutions, a group of academics were enabled to visit mainland  China to launch a modernization project known as the "New Thought Tide." Dewey  himself lived in China for two years where pedagogical theories were inculcated in the  Young Turk elements, then tested on a bewildered population which had recently been  stripped of its ancient form of governance. A similar process was embedded in the new  Russian state during the 1920s. 

      While American public opinion was unaware of this undertaking, some big-city school  superintendents were wise to the fact that they were part of a global experiment. Listen to  H.B. Wilson, superintendent of the Topeka schools: 

    The introduction of the American school into the Orient has broken up 40 centuries of  conservatism. It has given us a new China, a new Japan, and is working marked progress  in Turkey and the Philippines.

     The schools. ..are in a position to determine the lines of  progress. {Motivation of School Work,\9\6)  

    Thoughts like this don't spring full-blown from the heads of men like Dr. Wilson of  Topeka. They have to be planted there.  

     The Western-inspired and Western-financed Chinese revolution, following hard on the  heels of the last desperate attempt by China to prevent the British government traffic in  narcotic drugs there, placed that ancient province in a favorable state of anarchy for  laboratory tests of mind-alteration technology. Out of this period rose a Chinese universal  tracking procedure called "The Dangan," a continuous lifelong personnel file exposing  every student's intimate life history from birth through school and onwards. The Dangan  constituted the ultimate overthrow of privacy. Today, nobody works in China without a  Dangan.   

      By the mid-1960s preliminary work on an American Dangan was underway as  information reservoirs attached to the school institution began to store personal  information. A new class of expert like Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie Endowments quietly  began to urge collection of personal data from students and its unification in computer  code to enhance cross-referencing. Surreptitious data gathering was justified by Tyler as  "the moral right of institutions." 




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