149. Soldiers For Their Class: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Soldiers
For Their Class
These buried seeds sent up no more than
stunted shoots until the late nineteenth century, when skillfully induced mass immigration —
cheap Catholic labor by the boatload —
triggered a perceived need for emergency social action on an Anglican
model. At that moment, casting about for
a blueprint of order in the disturbing period of mass immigration, the new industrial and
commercial elites discarded existing American
models: the tentative intellectual meritocracy of the Unitarians, the
rude nepotism of the Presbyterians, the
libertarian democracy of the General Baptists, the proud communitarianism of
Congregationalists and Quakers, the religiously centered communities of the pietists; all had to give way since all were both local and particular forms. None could accommodate a general habit of rule from afar very well. None was able to maintain tight enough class discipline. Congregationalists were closest to this ideal, but even they had radically weakened their own theological discipline with the Half-Way Covenant and then thoroughly liberalized themselves in the Second Great Awakening after 1795. None of these forms would do as a universal blueprint of stable government.
Congregationalists and Quakers, the religiously centered communities of the pietists; all had to give way since all were both local and particular forms. None could accommodate a general habit of rule from afar very well. None was able to maintain tight enough class discipline. Congregationalists were closest to this ideal, but even they had radically weakened their own theological discipline with the Half-Way Covenant and then thoroughly liberalized themselves in the Second Great Awakening after 1795. None of these forms would do as a universal blueprint of stable government.
Only one acceptable discipline had for
centuries proven itself under fire, able to bend diverse, distant, and hostile peoples to its
organization, and that was the Anglican
Communion. In India, Africa, Asia, Canada, wherever the British flag
flew, it had been capable of the hard
decisions necessary to maintain a subordinated order and protect the privileges which accrue to those who manage
the subordinate classes.
Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell cast a
great deal of light on the Anglican temper in
their book Preparing For Power: America 's Elite Boarding Schools,
particularly the turn-of-the-century
period, which saw the creation of almost all of the 289 boarding schools that matter:
The
difference between a public school and an elite private school is, in one
sense, the difference between factory
and club. Public schools are evaluated on how good a product they turn out, and the measure of quality
control is inevitably an achievement score of
some kind.. ..[but] to compare public and private schools in terms of
output really misses the point. 2
Cookson and Persell, searching for reasons
to explain the need for total institutions to
train the young, concluded: "The shared ordeal of the prep rites of
passage create bonds of loyalty that
differences in background cannot unravel."
Collective identity forged in prep schools
becomes the basis of upper-class solidarity and
consciousness, but sharing alone will not preserve or enhance a class's
interest. As a group, members must be
willing to exercise their power:
The
preservation of privilege requires the exercise of power, and those who
exercise it cannot be too squeamish
about the injuries that any ensuing conflict imposes on the losers. ...The founders of the schools
recognized that unless their sons and grandsons were willing to take up the struggle for the
preservation of their class interests, privilege would slip from the hands of the elite and
eventually power would pass to either a competing elite or to a rising underclass.
Private school students are enlisted as
soldiers for their class, like Viking rowers, tough, loyal to each other, "ready to take
command without self-doubt." Cookson and Persell say currently, "Boarding schools were
not founded to produce Hamlets, but Dukes of
Wellington. The whole point of status seminaries is the destruction of
innocence. ..not its
preservation."
I hope
this illuminates those esoteric membership requirements of the Daughters a
bit. Whatever your personal outlook on
such matters, you need to take seriously the creation of over a hundred new hereditary
associations, associations with all the birthmarks of secret societies, which gestated and came to
term in the decades froml870 to 1900 (or
just outside that narrow compass), each designed that it might in a
perfectly orderly, fair way, free of any
emotional bias, exclude all unwanted breeding stock by the application of hereditary screening and at the same time
concentrate biological and social excellence.
In the same time frame, five of the Seven Sisters — the female Ivy League
— opened their doors for the first time,
concentrating the future motherhood of a new race for its class inoculation.
2.
"The inner ring of these schools, which sets the standard for the rest,
includes these eighteen: Groton, St. Paul's, Deerfield, Gunnery, Choate, Middlesex, Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss, St.
George's, Kent, Hill, Episcopal High (not Episcopal Prep!), Andover, Exeter,
Culver Military, Milton Academy, St.
Marks, Woodberry Forest, and perhaps one or two more. About 52 percent of the
elite boarding schools are connected with the
Episcopal Church and 5 percent with the Quaker faith.
Organizing Caste
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