116. An
Everlasting Faith: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
An
Everlasting Faith
Fabianism
was a principal force and inspiration behind all major school legislation of
the first half of the twentieth century.
And it will doubtless continue to be in the twenty- first. It will help us understand Fabian influence
to look at the first Fabian-authored
consideration of public schooling, the most talked-about education book
of 1900, Thomas Davidson's peculiar and
fantastic History of Education.
The Dictionary of American Biography
describes Davidson as a naturalized Scot,
American since 1867, and a follower of William Torrey Harris, federal
Commissioner of Education — the most
influential Hegelian in North America. Davidson was also first president of the Fabian Society in England, a
fact not thought worthy of preservation in
the biographical dictionary, but otherwise easy enough to confirm. This
news is also absent from Pelling's
America and The British Left, although Davidson is credited there with "usurping" the Fabians.
In
his important monograph "Education in the Forming of American
Society," Bernard Bailyn, as you'll
recall, said anyone bold enough to venture a history of American schooling would have to explain the sharp
disjunction separating these local institutions
as they existed from 1620 to 1890 from the massification which followed
afterwards. In presenting his case,
Bailyn had cause to compare "two notable books" on the subject which both appeared in 1900. One was
Davidson's, the other Edward Eggleston's.
Eggleston's Transit of Civilization Bailyn
calls "a remarkably imaginative effort to
analyze the original investment from which has developed Anglo-Saxon
culture in America by probing the
complex states of knowing and thinking, of feeling and passion of the seventeenth century colonists."
The opening words of Eggleston's book, said
Bailyn, make clear the central position of education in early America.
Bailyn calls Transit "one of the
subtlest and most original books ever written on the subject" and
"a seminal work," but he notes
how quickly it was "laid aside by American intelligentsia as an oddity, irrelevant to the interests of the
group then firmly shaping the historical study
of American education."
For that group, the book of books was
Davidson's History of Education. William James
called its author a "knight-errant of the intellectual life,"
an "exuberant polymath." Bailyn
agrees that Davidson's "was a remarkable book":
Davidson starts with "The Rise of
Intelligence" when "man first rose above the brute." Then he trots briskly through "ancient
Turanian," Semitic, and Aryan education, picks up speed on "civic education" in
Judaea, Greece, and Rome, gallops swiftly across Hellenistic, Alexandrian, Patristic, and
Muslim education; leaps magnificently over the
thorny barriers of scholasticism, the mediaeval universities,
Renaissance, Reformation, and
Counter-Reformation, and then plunges wildly through the remaining five
centuries in sixty- four pages
flat.
It was less the frantic scope than the
purpose of this strange philosophical essay that distinguished it in the eyes of an
influential group of writers. Its purpose was to dignify a newly self-conscious profession called
Education. Its argument, a heady distillation of conclusions from Social Darwinism, claimed
that modern education was a cosmic force
leading mankind to full realization of itself. Davidson's preface puts
the intellectual core of Fabianism on
center stage:
My endeavor has been to present education
as the last and highest form of evolution....
By placing education in relation to the whole process of evolution, as
its highest form, I have hoped to impart
to it a dignity which it could hardly otherwise receive or claim... when it is recognized to be the
highest phase of the world-process. "World
process" here is an echo of Kant and Hegel, and for the teacher to
be the chief agent in that process, both
it and he assumes a very different aspect.
Here is the intellectual and emotional
antecedent of "creation spirituality," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's assertion that evolution has
become a spiritual inevitability in our time.
Suddenly mere schooling found itself elevated from its petty, despised
position on the periphery of the known
universe into an intimate involvement in the cosmic destiny of man, a master key too important to be left to
parents. By 1906, Paul Monroe of Teachers
College could write in his Text-book in the History of Education that
knowledge of the "purpose of
education" was to supply the teacher with "fundamentals of an
everlasting faith as broad as human
nature and as deep as the life of the race."
This History of Education, according to
Bailyn, "came to be taught as an introductory course, a form of initiation, in every normal
school, department of education, and teachers
college in the country":
The story had to be got straight. And so a
few of the more imaginative of that energetic
and able group of men concerned with mapping overall progress of
"scientific" education, though
not otherwise historians, took over the management of the historical work
in education. With great virtuosity they
drew up what became the patristic literature of a powerful academic ecclesia. The official history of education: grew in almost total isolation from the
major influences and shaping minds of twentieth- century historiography; and its isolation
proved to be self-intensifying: the more
parochial the subject became, the less capable it was of attracting the
kinds of scholars who could give it
broad relevance and bring it back into the public domain. It soon displayed the exaggeration of weakness and
extravagance of emphasis that are the typical
results of sustained inbreeding.
These "educational missionaries"
spoke of schools as if they were monasteries. By limiting the idea of education to formal
school instruction, the public gradually lost sight of what the real thing was. The questions
these specialists disputed were as irrelevant to real people as the disputes of medieval
divines; there was about their writing a
condescension for public concerns, for them "the whole range of
education had become an instrument of
deliberate social purpose." (emphasis added) After 1910, divergence between what various publics expected would
happen, in government schools and what
the rapidly expanding school establishment intended to make happen
opened a deep gulf between home and
school, ordinary citizen and policymaker.
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