114.The Fabian Spirit: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Fabian Spirit
To
speak of scientific management in school and society without crediting the
influence of the Fabians would do great
disservice to truth, but the nature of Fabianism is so complex it raises questions this essay cannot
answer. To deal with the Fabians in a brief
compass as I'm going to do is to deal necessarily in simplifications in
order to see a little how this charming
group of scholars,
writers, heirs, heiresses, scientists, philosophers, bombazines, gazebos, trust-fund babies, and successful men and women of affairs became the most potent force in the creation of the modern welfare state, distributors of its characteristically dumbed-down version of schooling. Yet pointing only to this often frivolous organization's eccentricity would be to disrespect the incredible accomplishments of Beatrice Webb and her associates, and their decisive effort on schooling. Mrs. Webb is the only woman ever deemed worthy of burial in Westminster Abbey.
writers, heirs, heiresses, scientists, philosophers, bombazines, gazebos, trust-fund babies, and successful men and women of affairs became the most potent force in the creation of the modern welfare state, distributors of its characteristically dumbed-down version of schooling. Yet pointing only to this often frivolous organization's eccentricity would be to disrespect the incredible accomplishments of Beatrice Webb and her associates, and their decisive effort on schooling. Mrs. Webb is the only woman ever deemed worthy of burial in Westminster Abbey.
What nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and
Muggletonians hoped to be in reordering
the triumvirate of society, school, and family, twentieth-century
Fabians actually were. Although far from
the only potent organization working behind the scenes to radically reshape domestic and international life, it
would not be too far out of line to call the
twentieth century the Fabian century. One thing is certain: the direction
of modern schooling for the bottom 90
percent of our society has followed a largely Fabian design — and the puzzling security and prestige
enjoyed at the moment by those who speak of
"globalism" and "multiculturalism" are a direct
result of heed paid earlier to Fabian
prophecies that a welfare state, followed by an intense focus on
internationalism, would be the mechanism
elevating corporate society over political society, and a necessary precursor to Utopia. Fabian theory is the Das
Kapital of financial capitalism.
Fabianism always floated above simplistic
politics, seeking to preempt both sides. The
British Labour Party and its post- WWII welfare state are Fabianism made
visible. This is well understood; not so
easily comprehended are signs of an aristocratic temper — like this little anti-meritocractic Fabian gem
found in a report of the British College of
Surgeons:
Medicine would lose immeasurably if the
proportion of such students [from upper-class
and upper-middle-class homes] were to be reduced in favour of precocious
children who qualify for subsidies
[i.e., scholarship students].
Even though meritocracy is their reliable
cover, social stratification was always the
Fabian's real trump suit. Entitlements are another Fabian insertion into
the social fabric, even though the idea
antedates them, of course.
To
realize the tremendous task Fabians originally assigned themselves (a
significant part of which was given to
schooling to perform), we need to reflect again on Darwin's shattering books, The Origin of Species
(1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), each
arguing in its own way that far from being blank slates, children are
written upon indelibly by their race of
origin, some "favored" in Darwin's language, some not. A powerful public relations initiative of
recent years has attempted to separate Darwin from "social Darwinism," but it cannot
be done because Darwin himself is the prototypical social Darwinist. Both books taken together
issued a license for liberal upper classes to
justify forced schooling. From an evolutionary perspective, schools are
the indoctrination phase of a gigantic
breeding experiment. Working-class fantasies of
"self-improvement" were
dismissed from the start as sentimentality that evolutionary theory had no
place for.
What Darwin accomplished with his books
was a freeing of discussion from the narrow
straitj acket it had worn when society was considered a matter of
internal associations and relationships.
Darwin made it possible to consider political affairs as a prime
instrument of social evolution. Here was
a pivotal moment in Western thought, a changing of the guard in which secular purpose replaced
religious purpose, long before trashed by the
Enlightenment.
For the poor, the working classes, and
middle classes in the American sense, 7 this change in outlook, lauded by the most influential
minds of the nineteenth century, was a
catastrophe of titanic proportions, especially for government
schoolchildren. Children could no longer
simply be parents' darlings. Many were (biologically) a racial menace. The rest had to be thought of as soldiers in
genetic combat, the moral equivalent of war.
For all but a relative handful of favored families, aspiration was off
the board as a scientific
proposition.
For
governments, children could no longer be considered individuals but were
regarded as categories, rungs on a
biological ladder. Evolutionary science pronounced the majority useless mouths waiting for nature to dispense
with entirely. Nature (as expressed through
her human agents) was to be understood not as cruel or oppressive but
beautifully, functionally purposeful — a
neo-pagan perspective to be reflected in the organization and administration of schools.
Three distinct and conflicting tendencies
competed in the nineteenth-century theory of
society: first was the empirical tendency stemming from John Locke and
David Hume which led to that outlook on
the study of society we call pragmatism, and eventually to behavioristic psychology; the second line
descended from Immanuel Kant, Hegel,
Savigny, and others and led to the organic theory of the modern state,
the preferred metaphor of Fabians (and
many later systems theorists); the third outlook comes to us out of Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, Bentham,
the Mills, and leads almost directly to the
utilitarian state of Marxist socialism. Each of these postures was
savagely assailed over time by the
development of academic Darwinism. After Darwin, Utopia as a human- friendly place dies an agonizing death. The
last conception of Utopia after Darwin which
isn't some kind of hellish nightmare is William Morris' News from
Nowhere.
With only niggling reservations, the
Fabian brain trust had no difficulty employing force to shape recalcitrant individuals, groups,
and organizations. Force in the absence of
divine injunctions is a tool to be employed unsentimentally. Fabian
George Bernard Shaw established the
principle wittily in 1920 when he said that under a Fabian future government:
You would not be allowed to be poor. You
would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught,
and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you
have not character and industry, you
might possibly be executed in a kindly manner.
- The Intelligent Woman 's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
Fabianism came into existence around the year
1884, taking its name from Roman general
Fabius Cunctator 8 who preserved the Roman state by defeating Hannibal, chipping away at Hannibal's patience and will
to win by avoiding combat. Darwin was
the weird holy man Fabians adored, the man who gave them their
principle, a theory inspirationally
equal to god-theory, around which a new organization of society could be justified.
Society, after Darwin, was incontrovertibly
about good breeding. That was the only true
goal it had, or scientifically could have. Before Darwin, the view of
historical development which fit best
with Anglo/ American tradition was a conception of individual rights independent of any theory
of reciprocal obligations to the State; the duty of leaders was to Society, not to Government,
a crucial distinction in perfect harmony
with the teachings of Reformation Christianity, which extended to all
believers a conception of individual
duty, individual responsibility, and a free will right to decide for oneself beyond any claims of states. John
Calvin proclaimed in his Institutes that through natural law, the judgment of conscience alone
was able to distinguish between justice and
injustice. It's hard for secular minds to face, but the powerful
freedoms of the West, unmatched by any
other society at any other time, are rooted deeply in a religion so radical, so demanding it revolts the modern
temper.
For Protestant Christians, salvation was
uniquely a matter between God and the
individual. The mind of northern Europe had for centuries been fixed on
the task of winning liberties for the
individual against the State. Notable individual freedoms were taken from the State beginning symbolically
at Runnemede' in 1215. By 1859, six and a
half centuries later, in the Age of Darwin, individual rights were
everywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world
understood to transcend theories of obligation to the State. Herbert Spencer embodies this attitude, albeit
ambiguously. For Spencer, Darwinian evolution
promised rights only to the strong. It is well to keep in mind that his
brief for liberty masks a rigorously
exclusionary philosophy, particularly when he sounds most like Thomas Paine. The first and second amendments
of our own constitution illustrate just
how far this freedom process could carry. Say what you please before God
and Man; protect yourself with a gun if
need be from government interference.
Spencer was the reigning British philosopher
from 1870 to 1900. In the Westminster
Review of January 1860, he wrote: "The welfare of citizens cannot
rightly be sacrificed to some supposed
benefit of the State, the State is to be maintained solely for the benefit
of citizens. 10 The corporate life in
society must be subservient to the lives of its parts, instead of the lives of the parts being subservient
to the corporate life." Spencer had an even greater vogue in America, influencing every
intellectual from Walt Whitman to John
Dewey and becoming the darling of corporate business. Early in 1882 a
grand dinner was held in his honor by
the great and powerful who gathered to hear scientific proof of Anglo-Saxon fitness for rule — and a brief
for moral relativism. This dinner and its
implications set the standard for twentieth-century management, including
the management of schooling. A clear
appraisal of the fateful meal and its resonance is given in E. Digby Baltzell's The Protestant
Establishment, a well-bred look at the resurgence of the Anglican outlook in America.
This attitude constituted a violent
contradiction of German strong-state, state-as-first- parent doctrine which held that interests of
the individual as individual are without
significance. But derogation of individual rights was entirely
consistent with Darwinian science. The
German authoritarian preference received an invigorating restorative with Darwin's advent. Natural selection, the
operational principle of Darwinism, was held to
reach individuals only indirectly — through the action of society. Hence
society becomes a natural subject for
regulation and intervention by the State.
To
illustrate how reverberant a drum the innocent-sounding locution "natural
selection" 11 can really be,
translated into social practice, try to imagine how denial of black dignities and rights and the corresponding degradation
of black family relationships in America
because of this denial, might well be reckoned an evolutionarily
/wszYzve course, in Darwinian terms. By
discouraging Negro breeding, eventually the numbers of this most disfavored race would diminish. The state not
only had a vested interest in becoming an
active agent of evolution, it could not help but become one,
willy-nilly. Fabians set out to write
a sensible evolutionary agenda when they entered the political arena. Once
this biopolitical connection is
recognized, the past, present, and future of this seemingly bumbling movement takes on a formidable
coherence. Under the dottiness, lovability,
intelligence, high social position, and genuine goodness of some of
their works, the system held out as
humanitarian by Fabians is grotesquely deceptive; in reality, Fabian compassion masks a real aloofness to
humanity. It is purely an intellectual project in scientific management.
Thomas Davidson's History of Education
seen through this lens transmutes in front of
our eyes from the harmlessly addled excursion into romantic futurism it
seems to be into a manual of frightening
strategic goals and tactical methods. Fabians emerged in the first years of the twentieth century as great
champions of social efficiency in the name of the evolutionary destiny of the race. This
infused a powerful secular theology into the
movement, allowing its members to revel privately in an ennobling
destiny. The Fabian program spread
quickly through the best colleges and universities under many different names, multiplying its de facto membership
among young men and women blissfully
unaware of their induction. They were only being modern. H.G. Wells
called it "the open
conspiracy" in an essay bearing the same title, and worth your time
to track down.
As
the movement developed, Fabians became aristocratic friends of other
social- efficiency vanguards like
Taylorism or allies of the Methodist social gospel crowd of liberal Christian religionists busy
substituting Works for Faith in one of the most
noteworthy religious reversals of all time. Especially, they became
friends and advisors of industrialists
and financiers, travelers in the same direction. This cross-fertilization occurred naturally, not out of petty motives
of profit, but because by Fabian lights
evolution had progressed furthest among the international business and
banking classes!
These laughing gentry were impressively
effective at whatever they turned their hands to because they understood principles of social
leverage. Kitty Muggeridge writes:
If
you want to pinpoint the moment in time when the very first foundation of the
Welfare State was laid, a reasonable
date to choose would be the last fortnight of November in 1905 when Beatrice Webb was appointed to the
Royal Commission on the Poor Law, and
she convinced her protege, Albert Beveridge, to join a committee for
dealing with employment.
During Mrs. Webb's tenure on the Royal
Commission, she laid down the first blueprint
of cradle-to-grave social security to eradicate poverty "without
toppling the whole social
structure." She lived to see Beveridge promulgate her major ideas
in the historic Beveridge Report, from
which they were brought to life in post- WWII Britain and the United States.
Fabian practitioners developed Hegelian
principles which they co-taught alongside
Morgan bankers and other important financial allies over the first half
of the twentieth century. One insightful
Hegelianism was that to push ideas efficiently it was necessary first to co-opt both political Left and
political Right. Adversarial politics — competition — was a loser's game. 12 By infiltrating all
major media, by continual low-intensity
propaganda, by massive changes in group orientations (accomplished
through principles developed in the
psychological- warfare bureaus of the military), and with the ability, using government intelligence agents and
press contacts, to induce a succession of crises, they accomplished that astonishing feat.
7. In the British sense, middle classes are a
buffer protecting elites from the poor; our own statistical income-based
designation leads to a more eclectic
composition, and to somewhat less predictability of attitudes and values.
8.'The
origins are disputed but it was an offshoot of Thomas Davidson's Utopian group
in New York, "The Fellowship of the New Life" — an American export to Britain, not the other way
around. The reader should be warned I use the term "Fabian" more
indiscriminately with less concern for
actual affiliation through the rest of the book than I do here. Fabianism was a
Zeitgeist as well as a literal association, and thousands of twentieth-century influentials have been
Fabians who might be uncomfortable around its flesh and blood adherents, or who
would be puzzled by the label.
9.
The spelling preferred by baronial descendants of the actual event. See Chapter
Twelve.
10.
Contrast this with John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country cando for
you but what you can do foryour country" Inaugural of 1960 which measured the distance we had retreated
since the Civil War. It's useful to remember, however, that Spencer reserved
these feelings only for the Elect.
11.
In 1900, Sidney Sherwood of Johns Hopkins University joined a host of prominent
organizations and men like Andrew Carnegie in declaring the emergence of the corporate system as the
highest stage in evolution. Sherwood suggested the modern corporation's
historic task was to sort out
"genius," to get rid of "the weak." This elimination is
"the real function of the trust," and the formation of monopoly
control is "natural selection of
the highest order. " Try to imagine how this outlook played out in
corporate schooling.
l2
The most dramatic example of abandoning competition and replacing it with
cooperation was the breath-taking monopolization of first the nation's, then the world's oil supply by
Standard Oil under the personal direction of John D. Rockefeller Sr. Rockefeller
despised the competitive marketplace, as
did his fellow titans of finance and industry, J. P. Morgan and Andrew
Carnegie. Rockefeller's negotiating team
was instructed to accommodate any company willing to enter his cartel,
to destroy any that resisted.
The
Open Conspiracy
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