139. The Poison Of Democracy: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

139. The Poison Of Democracy: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

The Poison Of Democracy  

 

     The spring used to classify the U.S. population in an unprecedented and very radical way  as WWI. Prior to the war, eugenicists evaluated racial and national groups by comparing  numbers of one group or another on "lists of distinction," 8 but they had no way of  penetrating the secret inner spaces of consciousness. On the verge of the world war the  new social discipline of psychology, struggling to attain a status of hard science, claimed  to be able to change all that. It boasted of a power to go deep into the hidden regions of  the brain. The new techno-miracle of the day was the invention of a mysterious  "intelligence test," an "IQ" score which allegedly could place secrets of intellectual power  at the disposal of managerial science.  

 

     The just assembled American army of WWI was soon subject to mass intelligence  measurement under the direction of Robert M. Yerkes, president of the American  Physiological Association, an organization recently invented by Wundtian protege G.  Stanley Hall. Results published after the war showed remarkable correlation with similar  tests on American school children. While Yerkes was reporting these findings to the  National Academy of Sciences, famous psychologist Dr. William McDougall was     summarizing the civilian studies for the general public in his book, Is America Safe for  Democracy? Latins and Slavs in fair mental competition scored significantly lower than  native whites, he said. How, then, could they be given a vote equal to white men?  

 

     McDougall claimed that hard data unmistakably revealed that a racial interpretation of  history was the correct one. In his bookyl Study of American Intelligence, psychologist  Carl Brigham concluded in 1923 that "the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group  over Alpine, Mediterranean and Negro groups has been demonstrated." 

 

      After 1922, racism was a truth of science. Word quickly spread into every corner of  Europe; but particularly in defeated Germany, ancient Teutonic barrier against Slavic  incursion, these new truths were enthusiastically discussed. General agreement confirmed  Nordic superiority. The popular writer Kenneth Roberts {Northwest Passage) took up the  cry. One of America's foremost novelists, he lectured American book dealers from the  pages of the specialist journal Bookman that "the Alpine school of fiction" spread the  poison of democracy through the whole culture. School texts were appropriately adjusted.  Roberts identified himself, as you may already have guessed, as 100 percent Nordic.  

 

     Now intelligence tests were huckstered in school district after school district; fortunes  accrued to well-placed pedagogical leaders and their political allies. Every child would  now be given a magical number ranking it scientifically in the great race of life. School  grades might vary according to the whim of teachers, but IQ scores were unvarying, an  emotionless badge of biological honor or shame, marking innate, almost unchanging  ability. Millions of tests administered annually to primary and secondary students would  prove the "value rank" of the American peoples. Mental ages were dutifully entered on  permanent record cards with as much assurance as Horace Mann, Barnas Sears,  WilliamTorrey Harris, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall had accepted skull maps drawn  by their favorite phrenologists.  

 

     Every day science seemed to make it clearer and clearer that forcing everyone to fit the  Anglo-Saxon mold was indeed doing humanity a mighty favor. If children couldn't be  biologically Anglo/Nordic, they could be so acculturated at least partly that way, through  regular drill. After all, hadn't psychology proven how malleable human nature was?  Henry Fairfield Osborn stepped forward from his duties at the American Museum of  Natural History to announce portentously that Christopher Columbus — always a choking  point (as a Latin) for America's cultural leadership — was actually Nordic. 

 

 

 8 An invention of Galton.  

 

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