65.Teachers College Maintains The
Planet: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from
archive.org
Teachers
College Maintains The Planet
A
beautiful example of true belief in action crossed my desk recently from the
alumni
magazine
of my own alma mater, Columbia University. Written by the director of
mailing
informed graduates that the education division now regarded itself as bound by
"a
contract with posterity." Something in the tone warned me against
dismissing this as
College
felt obligated to take a commanding role in "maintaining the planet."
The next
extension
of this strange idea was even more pointed. Teachers College now interpreted
its
mandate, I was told, as one compelling it "to distribute itself all over
the world and to
teach
every day, 24 hours a day."
To
gain perspective, try to imagine the University of Berlin undertaking to
distribute
itself
among the fifty American states, to be present in this foreign land twenty-
four hours
a
day, swimming in the minds of Mormon children in Utah and Baptist children in
Georgia.
Any university intending to become global like some nanny creature spawned in
Bacon's
ghastly Utopia, New Atlantis, is no longer simply in the business of education.
Columbia
Teachers College had become an aggressive evangelist by its own
announcement,
an institution of true belief selling an unfathomable doctrine. I held its
declaration
in my hand for a while after I read it. Thinking.
Let
me underline what you just heard. Picture some U.N. thought police dragging
reluctant
Serbs to a loudspeaker to listen to Teachers College rant. Most of us have no
frame
of reference in which to fit such a picture. Narcosis in the face of true
belief is a
principal
reason the disease progressed so far through the medium of forced schooling
without
provoking much major opposition. Only after a million homeschooling families
and
an equal number of religiously oriented private-school families emerged from
their
sleep
to reclaim their children from the government in the 1970s and 1980s, in direct
response
to an epoch of flagrant social experimentation in government schools, did true
belief
find ruts in its road.
Columbia,
where I took an undergraduate degree, is the last agency I would want
maintaining
my planet. For decades it was a major New York slumlord indifferent to
maintaining
its own neighborhood, a territory much smaller than the globe. Columbia has
been
a legendary bad neighbor to the community for the forty years I've lived near
my
alma
mater. So much for its qualifications as Planetary Guardian. Its second boast is
even
more
ominous — I mean that goal of intervening in mental life "all over the
world,"
teaching
"every day, 24 hours a day." Teaching what? Shouldn't we ask? Our
trouble in
recognizing
true belief is that it wears a reasonable face in modern times.
A
Lofty, Somewhat Inhuman Vision
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