31.Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

31.Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

31. Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword

 

  Thirty-odd years later, between 1967 and 1974, teacher training in the United States was  covertly revamped through coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations,  select universities, global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies, all  coordinated through the U.S. Office of Education and through key state education  departments like those in California, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York.   

     Important milestones of the transformation were: 1) an extensive government exercise in  futurology called Designing Education for the Future, 2) the Behavioral Science Teacher  Education Project, and 3) Benjamin Bloom's multivolume Taxonomy of Educational  Objectives, an enormous manual of over a thousand pages which, in time, impacted every  school in America. While other documents exist, these three are appropriate touchstones  of the whole, serving to make clear the nature of the project underway.  

     Take them one by one and savor each. Designing Education, produced by the Education  Department, redefined the term "education" after the Prussian fashion as "a means to  achieve important economic and social goals of a national character." State education  agencies would henceforth act as on-site federal enforcers, ensuring the compliance of  local schools with central directives. Each state education department was assigned the  task of becoming "an agent of change" and advised to "lose its independent identity as  well as its authority," in order to "form a partnership with the federal government." 

      The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project,  outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967. If you ever want to hunt     this thing down, it bears the U.S. Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-  320424-4042 (BIO). The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators — nothing  less than "impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in which "few  will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which "each  individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables  employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct  or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that "chemical experimentation"  on minors would be normal procedure in this post- 1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing  of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced  schooling.  

     The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one "in which  a small elite" will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will  largely disappear. Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their  classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and  so ignorant they need to be controlled and regulated for society's good. Under such a  logical regime, school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to  think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is  at least one of its functions. 

      Post-modern schooling, we are told, is to focus on "pleasure cultivation" and on "other  attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world." Thus the socialization classroom  of the century's beginning — itself a radical departure from schooling for mental and  character development — can be seen to have evolved by 1967 into a full-scale laboratory  for psychological experimentation. 

      School conversion was assisted powerfully by a curious phenomenon of the middle to  late 1960s, a tremendous rise in school violence and general school chaos which followed  a policy declaration (which seems to have occurred nationwide) that the disciplining of  children must henceforth mimic the "due process" practice of the court system. Teachers  and administrators were suddenly stripped of any effective ability to keep order in  schools since the due process apparatus, of necessity a slow, deliberate matter, is  completely inadequate to the continual outbreaks of childish mischief all schools  experience.  

     Now, without the time-honored ad hoc armory of disciplinary tactics to fall back on,  disorder spiraled out of control, passing from the realm of annoyance into more  dangerous terrain entirely as word surged through student bodies that teacher hands were  tied. And each outrageous event that reached the attention of the local press served as an  advertisement for expert prescriptions. Who had ever seen kids behave this way? Time to  surrender community involvement to the management of experts; time also for  emergency measures like special education and Ritalin. During this entire period, lasting  five to seven years, outside agencies like the Ford Foundation exercised the right to  supervise whether "children's rights" were being given due attention, fanning the flames  hotter even long after trouble had become virtually unmanageable.   

      The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, published at the peak of this  violence, informed teacher-training colleges that under such circumstances, teachers had  to be trained as therapists; they must translate prescriptions of social psychology into  "practical action" in the classroom. As curriculum had been redefined, so teaching  followed suit. 

      Third in the series of new gospel texts was Bloom's Taxonomy, in his own words, "a tool  to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some unit of  instruction." Using methods of behavioral psychology, children would learn proper  thoughts, feelings, and actions, and have their improper attitudes brought from home  "remediated."  

     In all stages of the school experiment, testing was essential to localize the child's mental  state on an official rating scale. Bloom's epic spawned important descendant forms:  Mastery Learning, Outcomes-Based Education, and School to Work government-  business collaborations. Each classified individuals for the convenience of social  managers and businesses, each offered data useful in controlling the mind and  movements of the young, mapping the next adult generation. But for what purpose? Why  was this being done? 

 

 

32. Bad Character As A Management Tool