177.
Bending The Student To Reality: The Underground History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Bending
The Student To Reality
Twice before, attempts had been made to tell
the story of an Armageddon ahead if the
government penny-pinched on the funding of psychological services. First
was the great feeble-mindedness panic
which preceded and spanned the WWI period, word was spread from academic centers that feeble-mindedness
was rampant among Americans.
The "moron!"
"imbecile!" and "idiot!" insults which ricocheted around my
elementary school in the early 1940s
were one legacy of this premature marketing campaign. During WWII, this drive to convince keepers of the
purse that the general population was a body
needing permanent care was helped powerfully by a diffusion of British
psychological warfare bureau reports
stating that the majority of common British soldiers were mentally deficient. Now that notion (and its implied
corrective, buying protection from psychologists) made inroads on American
managerial consciousness, producing monies
to further study the retarded contingent among us.
Reading the text "Proceedings of the
Mid-Century White House Conference on Children
and Youth," we learn that school has "responsibility to detect
mental disabilities which have escaped
parental or pre-school observation." Another huge duty it had was the
need to "initiate all necessary
health services through various agencies." Still another, to provide "counseling services for all
individuals at all age levels."
The
classic line in the entire massive document is, "Not only does the child
need to be treated but those around him
also need help." A hospital society was needed to care for all the morons, idiots, and mental
defectives science had discovered lurking among the sane. It would need school as its diagnostic
clinic and principal referral service. Western
religious teaching — that nobody can escape personal responsibility —
was chased from the field by Wundt's
minimalist outlook on human nature as mechanism. A complex process was then set in motion which could not fail
to need forced instruction to complete itself.
The
NIMH used the deliberations of the 1950 conference to secure government
funding for an enormous five-year study
of the mental health of the nation, a study conducted by the very people whose careers would be
enhanced by any official determination that the
nation faced grave problems from its morons and other defectives. Can
you guess what the final document
said?
"Action for Mental Health"
proposed that school curriculum "be designed to bend the student to the realities of society." It
should be "designed to promote mental health as an instrument for social progress," and as
a means of "altering culture."
What factors inhibit mental health that are
directly in the hands of school authorities to
change? Just these: expectations that children should be held
responsible for their actions, expectations
that it is important for all children to develop intelligence, the
misperceived need to assign some public
stigma when children lagged behind a common standard. New protocols were issued, sanctions followed.
The network of teachers colleges, state education departments, supervisory
associations, grant-making bodies, and national
media inoculated the learning system with these ideas, and local
managers grew fearful of punishment for
opposition.
In
1962, an NIMH-sponsored report, "The Role of Schools in Mental
Health," stated unambiguously,
"Education does not mean teaching people to know." (emphasis
added) What then? "It means
teaching them to behave as they do not behave," a clear echo of the Rockefeller Foundation's "dream"
from an earlier part of the century (See page 45). Schools were behavioral engineering plants;
what remained was to convince kids and
parents there was no place to hide.
The
report was featured at the 1962 Governor's Conference, appearing along with
a proclamation calling on all states to
fund these new school programs and use every state agency to further the work. Provisions were
discussed to overturn resistance on the part
of parents; tough cases, it was advised, could be subjected to multiple
pressures around the clock until they
stopped resisting. Meanwhile, alarming statistics were circulated about the rapid growth of mental illness
within society.
The
watershed moment when modern schooling swept all competition from the field
was the passage of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act in 1965 (ESEA). The Act
allocated substantial federal funds to psychological and psychiatric
programs in school, opening the door to
a full palette of "interventions" by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, agencies, and various specialists.
All were invited to use the schoolhouse as a
satellite office, in urban ghettos, as a primary office. Now it was the
law.
Along the way to this milestone, important
way stations were reached beyond the scope
of this book to list. The strand I've shown is only one of many in the
tapestry. The psychological goals of
this project and the quality of mind in back of them are caught fairly in the keynote address to the 1973
Childhood International Education Seminar in
Boulder, Colorado, delivered by Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce.
This quote appears to have been edited
out of printed transcripts of the talk, but was reported by newspapers in actual attendance:
Every child in America entering school at
the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our
founding fathers, toward our elected officials,
toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward
the sovereignty of this nation as a
separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick
children well — by creating the
international child of the future.
Perhaps it's only a fortuitous coincidence
that in the ongoing psychologization of schools
from 1903 onwards, the single most prominent thread — the nearly
universal prescription for better-ment
offered by every agency, analyst, and spokesperson for mental health — has been the end of competition in every
aspect of training and the substitution of
cooperation and intergroup, interpersonal harmony. In Utopia, everyone
has a fixed place. Envy and ambition are
unwelcome, at least among the common classes. The prescription should sound familiar, we've encountered it
before as the marching orders of the Prussian
volksschulen. Unfortunately we know only too well how that Pestalozzian
story ended.
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