37. Bionomics: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Bionomics
The
crude power and resources to make twentieth-century forced schooling happen as
it did came from large corporations and
the federal government, from powerful, lone-
established families, and from the universities, now swollen with
recruits from the declining Protestant
ministry and from once-clerical families. All this is easy enough to trace once you know it's there. But the soul
of the thing was far more complex, an
amalgam of ancient religious
doctrine, Utopian philosophy, and European/Asiatic strong- state politics mixed together and distilled. The great facade behind which this was happening was a new enlightenment: scientific scholarship in league with German research values brought to America in the last half of the nineteenth century. Modern German tradition always assigned universities the primary task of directly serving industry and the political state, but that was a radical contradiction of American tradition to serve the individual and the family.
doctrine, Utopian philosophy, and European/Asiatic strong- state politics mixed together and distilled. The great facade behind which this was happening was a new enlightenment: scientific scholarship in league with German research values brought to America in the last half of the nineteenth century. Modern German tradition always assigned universities the primary task of directly serving industry and the political state, but that was a radical contradiction of American tradition to serve the individual and the family.
Indiana University provides a sharp
insight into the kind of science-fictional
consciousness developing outside the mostly irrelevant debate conducted
in the press about schooling, a debate
proceeding on early nineteenth century lines. By 1900, a special discipline existed at Indiana for
elite students, Bionomics. Invitees were hand-
picked by college president David Starr Jordan, who created and taught
the course. It dealt with the why and
how of producing a new evolutionary ruling class, although that characterization, suggesting as it does
kings, dukes, and princes, is somewhat misleading. In the new scientific era dawning, the ruling
class were those managers trained in the
goals and procedures of new systems. Jordan did so well at Bionomics he
was soon invited into the major leagues
of university existence, (an invitation extended personally by rail tycoon Leland Stanford) to become
first president of Stanford University, a school inspired by Andrew Carnegie's famous
"Gospel of Wealth" essay. Jordan remained president of Stanford for thirty years.
Bionomics acquired its direct link with
forced schooling in a fortuitous fashion. When he left Indiana, Jordan eventually reached back
to get his star Bionomics protege, Ellwood
P. Cubberley, to become dean of Teacher Education at Stanford. In this
heady position, young Cubberley made
himself a reigning aristocrat of the new institution. He wrote a history of American schooling which became
the standard of the school business for the
next fifty years; he assembled a national syndicate which controlled
administrative posts from coast to
coast. Cubberley was the man to see, the kingmaker in American school life until its pattern was set in stone.
Did
the abstract and rather arcane discipline of Bionomics have any effect on real
life? Well, consider this: the first
formal legislation making forced sterilization a legal act on planet Earth was passed, not in Germany or
Japan, but in the American state of Indiana, a
law which became official in the famous 1927 Supreme Court test case
Buck vs. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes wrote the majority opinion allowing seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck to be sterilized against her will
to prevent her "degenerate offspring," in Holmes' words, from being born. Twenty years
after the momentous decision, in the trial
of German doctors at Nuremberg, Nazi physicians testified that their
precedents were American — aimed at
combating racial degeneracy. The German name for forced sterilization was "the Indiana
Procedure."
To say this bionomical spirit infected
public schooling is only to say birds fly. Once you know it's there, the principle jumps out at
you from behind every school bush. It suffused
public discourse in many areas where it had claimed superior insight.
Walter Lippmann, in 1922, demanded
"severe restrictions on public debate," in light of the
allegedly enormous number of feeble-minded
Americans. The old ideal of participatory democracy was insane, according to Lippmann.
The theme of scientifically controlled
breeding interacted in a complex way with the old Prussian ideal of a logical society run by
experts loyal to the state. It also echoed the idea of British state religion and political
society that God Himself had appointed the social classes. What gradually began to emerge from
this was a Darwinian caste-based
American version of institutional schooling remote-controlled at long
distance, administered through a growing
army of hired hands, layered into intricate pedagogical hierarchies on the old Roman principle of
divide and conquer. Meanwhile, in the larger
world, assisted mightily by intense concentration of ownership in the
new electronic media, developments moved
swiftly also.
In
1928, Edward L. Bernays, godfather of the new craft of spin control we call
"public relations," told the
readers of his book Crystallizing Public Opinion that "invisible power" was now in control of every
aspect of American life. Democracy, said Bernays, was only a front for skillful wire-pulling.
The necessary know-how to pull these crucial
wires was available for sale to businessmen and policy people. Public
imagination was controlled by shaping
the minds of schoolchildren.
By
1944, a repudiation of Jefferson's idea that mankind had natural rights was
resonating in every corner of academic
life. Any professor who expected free money from foundations, corporations, or government
agencies had to play the scientific management
string on his lute. In 1961, the concept of the political state as the
sovereign principle surfaced dramatically
in John F. Kennedy's famous inaugural address in which his national audience was lectured, "Ask not
what your country can do for you, but what you
can do for your country."
Thirty-five years later, Kennedy's lofty
Romanized rhetoric and metaphor were replaced
by the tough-talking wise guy idiom of Time, instructing its readers in
a 1996 cover story that "Democracy
is in the worst interest of national goals." As Time reporters put it,
"The modern world is too complex to
allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management." Democracy was deemed a system
for losers.
To a public desensitized to its rights and
possibilities, frozen out of the national debate, to a public whose fate was in the hands of
experts, the secret was in the open for those who could read entrails: the original American ideals
had been repudiated by their guardians.
School was best seen from this new perspective as the critical terminal
on a production line to create a Utopia
resembling EPCOT Center, but with one important bionomical limitation: it wasn't intended for everyone,
at least not for very long, this Utopia.
Out
of Johns Hopkins in 1996 came this chilling news:
The American economy has grown massively
since the mid 1960s, but
workers' real spendable wages are no higher than they were
30
years ago.
That from a book called Fat and Mean,
about the significance of corporate downsizing.
During the boom economy of the 1980s and 1990s, purchasing power rose
for 20 percent of the population and
actually declined 13 percent for the other four-fifths. Indeed, after inflation was factored in, purchasing power
of a working couple in 1995 was only 8
percent greater than for a single working man in 1905; this steep
decline in common prosperity over ninety
years forced both parents from home and deposited kids in the management systems of daycare, extended
schooling, and commercial entertainment.
Despite the century-long harangue that schooling was the cure for
unevenly spread wealth, exactly the
reverse occurred — wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century's end than at its beginning.
I
don't mean to be inflammatory, but it's as if government schooling made
people dumber, not brighter; made
families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class
structure in stone by dividing children into
classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an
alarming concentration of wealth and
power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. Waking Up Angry
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