102. Coal Gives The Coup De Grace: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

102. Coal Gives The Coup De Grace: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

Coal Gives The Coup De Grace

 

     The democracy which arises unprompted when people are on the same footing was  finished with the coming of coal-fired steam locomotives. Before railroads, production  was decentralized and dispersed among a myriad of local craftspeople. It was production  on a small scale, mostly with local raw materials, by and for local people. Since horse-  drawn vehicles couldn't reliably expect to make thirty miles a day, weather was always a  vital reality in that kind of transport. Mud, snow, flooded creeks, dried-up watercourses  in summer — all were forces turning people inward where they created lives of profound  localness.   

     On the seacoast it was different. There, trading was international, and great trading  families accumulated large stocks of capital, but still production wasn't centralized in  factories. The pressure of idle capital, however, increasingly portended that something  would come along to set this money in motion eventually. Meanwhile, it was a world in  which everyone was a producer of some kind or a trader, entertainer, schoolteacher,  logger, fisherman, butcher, baker, blacksmith, minister. Little producers made the  economic decisions and determined the pace of work. The ultimate customers were  friends and neighbors. 

      As mass production evolved, the job of production was broken into small parts. Instead of  finishing things, a worker would do the same task over and over. Fragmenting work this  way allowed it to be mechanized, which involved an astonishing and unfamiliar control  of time. Human beings now worked at the machine's pace, not the reverse, and the  machine's pace was regulated by a manager who no longer shared the physical task.  Could learning in school be regulated the same way? The idea was too promising not to  have its trial. 

      Workers in mass production work space are jammed closely together in a mockery of  sociability, just as school kids were to be. Division of labor sharply reduced the meaning  of work to employees. Only managers understood completely what was going on. Close  supervision meant radical loss of freedom from what had been known before. Now     knowledge of how to do important work passed out of local possession into the hands of  a few owners and managers. 

      Cheap manufactured goods ruined artisans. And as if in answer to a capitalist's prayers,  population exploded in the coal-producing countries, guaranteeing cheaper and cheaper  labor as the Coal Age progressed. The population of Britain increased only 15 percent  from 1651 to 1800, but it grew thirteen times faster in the next coal century. The  population of Germany rose 300 percent, the United States 1,700 percent. It was as if  having other forms of personal significance stripped from them, people turned to family  building for solace, evidence they were really alive. By 1913, coalmining afforded  employment to one in every ten wage earners in the United States.  

     Completion of the nation's railroad network allowed the rise of business and banking  communities with ties to every whistle-stop and area of opportunity, increasing  concentration of capital into pools and trusts. "The whole country has become a close  neighborhood," said one businessman in 1888. Invention and harnessing of steam power  precipitated the greatest economic revolution of modern times. New forms of power  required large-scale organization and a degree of social coordination and centralized  planning undreamed of in Western societies since the Egypt of Rameses.  

     As the implications of coal penetrated the national imagination, it was seen more and  more by employers that the English class system provided just the efficiency demanded  by the logic of mechanization — everyone to his or her place in the order. The madness of  Jacksonian democracy on the other hand, the irrationality of Southern sectionalism, the  tradition of small entrepreneurialism, all these would have to be overcome. 

      Realization of the end product of a managerial, mass production economic system and an  orderly social system seemed to justify any grief, any suffering. In the 1 840s, British  capitalists, pockets jingling with the royal profits of earlier industrial decades and  reacting against social unrest in Britain and on the Continent, escalated their investments  in the United States, bringing with their crowns, pounds, and shillings, a political  consciousness and social philosophy some Americans thought had been banished forever  from these shores. 

      These new colonizers carried a message that there had to be social solidarity among the  upper classes for capital to work. Financial capital was the master machine that activated  all other machinery. Capital had to be amassed in a few hands to be used well, and  amassing capital wasn't possible unless a great degree of trust permeated the society of  capitalists. That meant living together, sharing the same philosophical beliefs on big  questions, marrying into each other's families, maintaining a distance from ordinary  people who would certainly have to be ill-treated from time to time out of the exigencies  of liberal economics. The greatest service that Edith Wharton and Henry James, William  Dean Howells and a few other writers did for history was to chronicle this withdrawal of  capital into a private world as the linchpin of the new system.   

      For the moment, however, it's only important to see how reciprocal the demands of  industrialization and the demands of class snobbishness really are. It isn't so much that  people gaining wealth began to disdain their ordinary neighbors as it is that such disdain  is an integral part of the wealth-building process. In-group disdain of others builds team  spirit among various wealth seekers. Without such spirit, capital could hardly exist in a  stable form because great centralized businesses and bureaus couldn't survive without a  mutual aid society of interlocking directorates which act effectively to restrain  competition. 

      Whether this process of separation and refinement of human raw material had any  important influence on the shape and purpose of forced schooling, I leave to your own  judgment. It's for you to decide if what Engels termed the contradiction between the  social character of production and its control by a few individuals was magnified in the  United States by the creation of a national managerial class. That happened in a very  short span of time in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 

 

 

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