175. Napoleon Of Mind Science: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Napoleon
Of Mind Science
William James wrote in 1879: [Wundt] aims on being a Napoleon....
Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo. ...cut him up like a worm and each fragment crawls.
...you can't kill him.
From his laboratory in upper Saxony near
the Prussian border, Wundt wrote 53,735
published pages in the sixty-eight years between 1853 and 1920, words
which sculpted modern schooling, from a
disorderly attempt to heighten human promise in individuals or to glorify God's creation, into mandated
psychological indoctrination.
Wundt's childhood was unrelieved by fun.
He never played. He had no friends. He failed
to find love in his family. From this austere forge, a Ph.D. emerged
humorless, indefatigable, and
aggressive. At his end he returned to the earth childless. Wundt is the senior psychologist in the history of
psychology, says Boring: "Before him there was psychology but no psychologists, only
philosophers."
Coming out of the physiological tradition
of psychophysics in Germany, Wundt followed
the path of de La Mettrie, Condillac, and Descartes in France who
argued, each in his own way, that what
we think of as personality is only a collection of physiological facts. Humanity is an illusion.
Wundt had a huge advantage over the
mechanists before him. For him the time was right, all religious and romantic opposition in
disarray, bewildered by the rapid onset of
machinery into society. Over in England, Darwin's brilliant cousin
Francis Galton was vigorously promoting
mathematical prediction into the status of a successful cult. In one short decade, bastions of a more ancient scholarly
edifice were overrun by number
crunchers. A bleak future suddenly loomed for men who remained
unconvinced that any transcendental
power was locked up in quantification of nature and humankind.
The Pythagorean brotherhood was reseating
itself inexorably in this great age of Wundt,
the two in harmony as both contributed heavily to the centralization of
things and to the tidal wave of
scientific racism which drowned the university world for decades, culminating in the racial science station
maintained on the old Astor estate in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, by Carnegie interests
until the events of September 1939, caused it
to quietly close its doors. 12 Even at the beginning of the marriage of
scholarship and statistics, its
principals saw little need to broaden their investigations into real life,
an ominous foreshadowing of the
eugenical outlook that followed.
A
friendless, loveless, childless male German calling himself a psychologist set
out, I think, to prove his human condition
didn't matter because feelings were only an
aberration. His premises and methodology were imported into an expanding
American system of child confinement and
through that system disseminated to administrators, teachers, counselors, collegians, and the
national consciousness.
As
Germany became the intellectuals' darling of the moment at the end of the
nineteenth century, a long-dead German
philosopher, Kant's successor at the University of Berlin, Johann Herbart, enjoyed a vogue in school-intoxicated
America. "Herbartianism" is
probably the first of a long line of pseudoscientific enthusiasms to
sweep the halls of pedagogy. A good
German, Herbart laid out with precision the famous Herbartian Five- Step Program, not a dance but a psychologized
teacher training program. By 1895, there
was a National Herbartian Society to spread the good news, enrolling the
likes of Nicholas Murray Butler of
Columbia and John Dewey. Herbart was finally laid to rest sometime before WWI when Dewey's interest
cooled, but his passage was a harbinger of
many Herbart-oid enthusiasms to follow as a regular procession of
educational gurus rose and fell with the
fashion of the moment. The Moorish dance of scientific pedagogy accelerated its tempo relentlessly, and arms,
legs, heads, perspiration, cries of venereal
delight, and some anguish, too, mingled in the hypnotic whirl of
laboratory dervishes. By 1910, Dewey was
substituting his own five steps for Herbart's in a book called How We Think. Few who read it noticed that a case
was being made that we don't actually think at
all. Thinking was only an elusive kind of problem-solving behavior,
called into being by dedicated activity;
otherwise we are mindless.
l2 America's academic romance with
scientific racism, which led directly to mass sterilization experiments in this country, has been widely studied in
Europe but is still little known even among the college-trained population here. An entire study can be made
of the penetration of this notion — that the makeup of the species is and ought to be controllable by an
elite — into every aspect of American school where it remains to this day. I would urge any reader with
time and inclination to explore this matter to get Daniel J. Kevles' In The Name of Eugenics where a thorough
account and a thorough source bibliography are set down. This essay offers a disturbing discussion which
should open your eyes to how ideas flow through modem society and inevitably are translated into
schooling. Dr. Kevles is on the history faculty at California Institute of Technology. Oddly enough, on December 11, 1998, the New
York Times front page carried news that an organization in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, had
deciphered the full genetic code of a microscopic round worm, a landmark achievement. The president of the
National Academy of Sciences is quoted as saying, "In the last 10 years we have come to realize humans are
more like worms than we ever imagined." Whether the Cold Spring Harbor facility which announced this
has any connection with the former racial science station, I do not know.
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