139. The
Poison Of Democracy: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Poison Of Democracy
The spring used to classify the U.S.
population in an unprecedented and very radical way as WWI. Prior to the war, eugenicists
evaluated racial and national groups by comparing numbers of one group or another on
"lists of distinction," 8 but they had no way of penetrating the secret inner spaces of
consciousness. On the verge of the world war the new social discipline of psychology,
struggling to attain a status of hard science, claimed to be able to change all that. It boasted of
a power to go deep into the hidden regions of
the brain. The new techno-miracle of the day was the invention of a
mysterious "intelligence
test," an "IQ" score which allegedly could place secrets of
intellectual power at the
disposal of managerial science.
disposal of managerial science.
The just assembled American army of WWI
was soon subject to mass intelligence
measurement under the direction of Robert M. Yerkes, president of the
American Physiological Association, an
organization recently invented by Wundtian protege G. Stanley Hall. Results published after the war
showed remarkable correlation with similar
tests on American school children. While Yerkes was reporting these
findings to the National Academy of
Sciences, famous psychologist Dr. William McDougall was summarizing the civilian studies for the
general public in his book, Is America Safe for
Democracy? Latins and Slavs in fair mental competition scored
significantly lower than native whites,
he said. How, then, could they be given a vote equal to white men?
McDougall claimed that hard data
unmistakably revealed that a racial interpretation of history was the correct one. In his bookyl
Study of American Intelligence, psychologist
Carl Brigham concluded in 1923 that "the intellectual superiority
of our Nordic group over Alpine,
Mediterranean and Negro groups has been demonstrated."
After 1922, racism was a truth of science.
Word quickly spread into every corner of
Europe; but particularly in defeated Germany, ancient Teutonic barrier
against Slavic incursion, these new
truths were enthusiastically discussed. General agreement confirmed Nordic superiority. The popular writer
Kenneth Roberts {Northwest Passage) took up the
cry. One of America's foremost novelists, he lectured American book
dealers from the pages of the specialist
journal Bookman that "the Alpine school of fiction" spread the poison of democracy through the whole
culture. School texts were appropriately adjusted. Roberts identified himself, as you may
already have guessed, as 100 percent Nordic.
Now intelligence tests were huckstered in
school district after school district; fortunes accrued to well-placed pedagogical leaders and
their political allies. Every child would
now be given a magical number ranking it scientifically in the great
race of life. School grades might vary
according to the whim of teachers, but IQ scores were unvarying, an emotionless badge of biological honor or
shame, marking innate, almost unchanging
ability. Millions of tests administered annually to primary and
secondary students would prove the
"value rank" of the American peoples. Mental ages were dutifully
entered on permanent record cards with
as much assurance as Horace Mann, Barnas Sears,
WilliamTorrey Harris, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall had accepted skull
maps drawn by their favorite
phrenologists.
Every day science seemed to make it
clearer and clearer that forcing everyone to fit the Anglo-Saxon mold was indeed doing humanity a
mighty favor. If children couldn't be
biologically Anglo/Nordic, they could be so acculturated at least partly
that way, through regular drill. After
all, hadn't psychology proven how malleable human nature was? Henry Fairfield Osborn stepped forward from
his duties at the American Museum of
Natural History to announce portentously that Christopher Columbus —
always a choking point (as a Latin) for
America's cultural leadership — was actually Nordic.
8 An invention of Galton.
The
American Protective League
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