116. An Everlasting Faith: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

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.