176. What
Is Sanity?: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
What
Is Sanity?
What
we today call the science of child development grew out of the ambition of
G. Stanley Hall, Wundt's first assistant
at Leipzig, Dewey's mentor at Hopkins, and a man with a titanic ego. Hall inserted the word
"adolescence" into the American vocabulary in 1904. If you wonder what happened to this
class before they were so labeled, you can
reflect on the experience of Washington, Franklin, Farragut, and
Carnegie, who couldn't spare the time to
be children any longer than necessary. Hall, a fantastic pitchman, laid the groundwork for a host of special
disciplines from child development to mental
testing.
Hall told all who listened that the
education of the child was the most important task of the race, our primary mission, and the new
science of psychology could swiftly transform
the race into what it should be. Hall may never have done a single
worthwhile scientific experiment in his
life but he understood that Americans could be sold a sizzle without the steak. Thanks in large measure to Hall's
trumpet, an edifice of child development rose
out of the funding of psychological laboratories in the early 1900s during
the famous Red Scare period.
In
1924, the Child Welfare Institute opened at Teachers College, underwritten by
the Rockefeller Foundation. Another was
opened in 1927 at the University of California.
Generous donations for the study of all phases of child growth and
development poured into the hands of
researchers from the largest foundations. Thirty- five years later, during what might be thought of as the nation's
fourth Red Scare, the moment the Soviets beat
America into space, the U.S. Education Office presided over a
comprehensive infiltration of teacher
training and schools." Judiciously applied funds and arm-twisting made
certain these staging areas would pay
proper attention to the psychological aspect of schooling.
Dewey,
Hall, Thorndike, Cattell, Goddard, Russell, and all the other intellectual
step- children of Wundt and the homeless
mind he stood for, set out to change the conception of what constitutes education. They got
powerful assistance from great industrial
foundations and their house universities like Teachers College. Under
the direction of James Earl Russell,
president (and head of the psychology department), Teachers College came to boast training where "psychology
stands first." Wherever Columbia graduates
went this view went with them.
The
brand-new profession of psychiatry flocked to the banner of this new philosophy
of psychological indoctrination as a
proper government activity, perhaps sensing that business and status could flow from the
connection if it were authoritatively established. In 1927, Ralph Truitt, head of the then
embryonic Division of Child Guidance Clinics for the Psychiatric Association, wrote that
"the school should be the focus of the attack."
The White House appeared in the picture
like a guardian angel watching over the efforts
this frail infant was making to stand. In 1930, twelve hundred child
development "experts" were
invited to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, an event with no precedent. One primary focus of
attendees was the role "failure" played as a principal source of children's problems.
The echo of Rousseau was unmistakable. No
attempt was made to examine how regularly prominent Americans like
Washington or successful businessmen
like Carnegie had surmounted early failure. Instead, a plan to eliminate failure structurally from formal
schooling was considered and endorsed —
failure could be eliminated if schools were converted into laboratories
of life adjustment and intellectual
standards were muted.
By
1948, the concept of collective (as opposed to individual) mental health
was introduced at an international
meeting in Britain to discuss the use of schools as an instrument to promote mental health. But what
was mental health? What did a fully sane
man or woman look like? Out of this conference in the U.K. two
psychiatrists, J.R. Rees and G. Brock
Chisholm, leveraged a profitable new organization for themselves — the World Federation for Mental Health. It
claimed expertise in preventative measures and
pinpointed the training of children as the proper point of attack:
The training of children is making a
thousand neurotics for every one psychiatrists can hope to help with psychotherapy.
Chisholm
knew what caused the problem in childhood; he knew how to fix it, too:
The only lowest common denominator of all
civilizations and the only psychological
force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of
right and wrong.
Shakespeare and the Vikings had been right;
there's nothing good or bad but thinking
makes it so. Morality was the problem. With WWII behind us and
everything adrift, a perfect opportunity
to rebuild social life in school and elsewhere — on a new amoral, scientific logic — was presenting
itself:
We
have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents,
our Sunday and day school teachers, our
politicians, our priests, our newspapers.... The results, the inevitable results, are
frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living.... If the race is to be freed from
its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original
responsibility.
Old
Norse pragmatism, the philosophy most likely to succeed among upper-crust
thinkers in the northeastern United
States, was reasserting itself as global psychiatry.
The next advance in pedagogy was the
initiative of a newly formed governmental body,
the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). In 1950, it arranged
the White House Conference on Education
to warn that a psychological time-bomb was ticking inside the schools. An epidemic of mental insufficiency
was said to be loose among Americans,
imperiling the advances that industry and the arts had given America.
Barbarians were already through the
gates and among us
13. 'The
story of the BSTEP document and the Delphi Technique, two elements in this
initiative, is told in Beverly Eakman's
Educating for the New World Order, by a former Department of Justice employee.
The book offers an accessible, if
somewhat breathless, passage into the shadow world of intrigue and
corporate shenanigans behind the scenes
of schooling. Also worth a look (and better edited) is Eakman's Cloning of the American Mind. Whatever you think of her
research, Miss Eakman rums over some rocks you will find useful.
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