63. Munsterberg And His Disciples: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
CHAPTER
FIVE
True Believers And The Unspeakable
Chautauqua
A
very small group of young psychologists around the turn of the century were
able to create and market a system for
measuring human talent that has permeated American institutions of learning and influenced such
fundamental social concepts as democracy,
sanity, justice, welfare, reproductive rights, and economic progress. In
creating, owning, and advertising this
social technology the testers created themselves as professionals.
—
Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in
the
History of Intelligence Testing
History of Intelligence Testing
I
have undertaken to get at the facts from the point of view of the business men
— citizens of the community who, after
all, pay the bills and, therefore, have a right to say what they shall have in their schools.
—
Charles H. Thurber, from an address at the Annual Meeting of the National
Education Association, July 9, 1897
The self-interested have had a large hand
conceiving and executing twentieth-century
schooling, yet once that's said, self-interest isn't enough to explain
the zeal in confining other people's
children in rooms, locked away from the world, the infernal zeal which, like a toadstool, keeps forcing its way to
the surface in this business. Among millions of
normal human beings professionally associated with the school adventure,
a small band of true believers has been
loose from the beginning, brothers and sisters whose eyes gleam in the dark, whose heartbeat quickens
at the prospect of acting as "change agents" for a purpose beyond self-interest.
For
true believers, children are test animals. The strongest belt in the engine of
schooling is the strand of true belief.
True believers can be located by their rhetoric; it reveals a scale of philosophical imagination which
involves plans for you and me. All you need
know about Mr. Laszlo, whose timeless faith song is cited in the front
of this book (xiii), is that the
"we" he joins himself to, the "masters who manipulate,"
doesn't really include the rest of us,
except as objects of the exercise. Here is a true believer in full gallop. School history is crammed with wild-eyed
orators, lurking just behind the lit stage. Like Hugo Munsterberg.
Munsterberg was one of the people who was
in on the birth of twentieth-century mass
schooling. In 1892, a recent emigre to America from Wilhelm Wundt's
laboratory of physiological psychology
at Leipzig, in Saxony, he was a Harvard Professor of Psychology. Munsterberg taught his students
to look at schools as social laboratories
suitable for testing theory, not as aggregates of young people pursuing
their own purposes. The St. Louis
Exposition of 1904 showcased his ideas for academicians all over the world, and the popular press made
his notions familiar to upper middle classes
horrified by the unfamiliar family ways of immigrants, eager to find
ways to separate immigrant children from
those alien practices of their parents.
Munsterberg's particular obsession lay in
quantifying the mental and physical powers of
the population for central government files, so policymakers could
manage the nation's "human
resources" efficiently. His students became leaders of the
"standardization" crusade in
America. Munsterberg was convinced that racial differences could be
reduced to numbers, equally convinced it
was his sacred duty to the Aryan race to do so.
Aryanism crackled like static electricity across the surface of American
university life in those days, its
implications part of every corporate board game and government bureau initiative.
One of Munsterberg's favorite disciples,
Lillian Wald, became a powerful advocate of
medical incursions into public schools. The famous progressive social
reformer wrote in 1905: "It is
difficult to place a limit upon the service which medical inspection
should perform," 1 continuing,
"Is it not logical to conclude that physical development. ..should so far as possible be demanded?" One year later,
immigrant public schools in Manhattan
began performing tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies in school without
notifying parents. The New York Times
(June 29, 1906) reported that "Frantic Italians" — many armed with stilettos — "stormed"
three schools, attacking teachers and dragging children from the clutches of the true believers into
whose hands they had fallen. Think of the
conscience which would ascribe to itself the right to operate on
children at official discretion and you
will know beyond a doubt what a true believer smells like.
Even a cursory study of the history of the
school institution turns up true belief in rich
abundance. In a famous book, The Proper Study of Mankind (1948), paid
for by the Carnegie Corporation of New
York and the Russell Sage Foundation, the favorite principle of true believers since Plato makes
an appearance: "A society could be
completely made over in something like 15 years, the time it takes to
inculcate a new culture into a rising
group of youngsters." Despite the spirit of profound violence hovering over such seemingly bloodless,
abstract formulas, this is indeed the will-o-the- wisp pursued throughout the twentieth century
in forced schooling — not intellectual
development, not character development, but the inculcation of a new
synthetic culture in children, one
designed to condition its subjects to a continual adjusting of their lives
by unseen authorities.
It's true that numerically, only a small
fraction of those who direct institutional schooling are actively aware of its ideological bent,
but we need to see that without consistent
generalship from that knowledgeable group in guiding things, the
evolution of schooling would long ago
have lost its coherence, degenerating into battles between swarms of economic and political interests fighting
over the treasure-house that hermetic pedagogy
represents. One of the hardest things to understand is that true
believers — dedicated ideologues — are
useful to all interests in the school stew by providing a salutary continuity to the enterprise.
Because of the predictable greed embedded in
this culture, some overarching "guardian" vision, one indifferent to material gain,
seems necessary to prevent marketplace chaos.
True believers referee the school game, establishing its goals, rules,
penalties; they negotiate and compromise
with other stakeholders. And strangely enough, above all else, they can be trusted to continue being their
predictable, dedicated, selfless selves.
Pragmatic stakeholders need them to keep the game alive; true believers
need pragmatists as cover. Consider this
impossibly melodramatic if you must. I know myself that parts of my story sound like leaves torn from Ragtime.
But from start to finish this is a tale of true
believers and how by playing on their pipes they took all the children
away.
1
Forced medical inspection had been a prominent social theme in northern Germany
since at least 1750. The Prototype Is
A Schoolteacher
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