65.Teachers College Maintains The Planet: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

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

Columbia's Institute for Learning Technologies, a bureau at Teachers College, this

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

customary institutional gas. Seconds later I learned, with some shock, that
Teachers

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