18.Oriental Pedagogy: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

18.Oriental Pedagogy: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Oriental Pedagogy

 

  The ideal of a leveling Oriental pedagogy expressed through government schooling was  promoted by Jacobin orators of the French National Convention in the early 1790s, the  commencement years of our own republic. The notion of forced schooling was  irresistible to French radicals, an enthusiasm whose foundation had been laid in  preceding centuries by Utopian writers like Harrington {Oceania), More {Utopia), Bacon  {New Atlantis), Campanella {City of the Sun), and in other speculative fantasy embracing  the fate of children. Cultivating a collective social organism was considered the  ingredient missing from feudal society, an ingredient which would allow the West the  harmony and stability of the East. 

 

      Utopian schooling never about learning in the traditional sense; it's about the  transformation of human nature. The core of the difference between Occident and Orient  lies in the power relationship between privileged and ordinary, and in respective outlooks  on human nature. In the West, a metaphorical table is spread by society; the student  decides how much to eat; in the East, the teacher makes that decision. The Chinese  character for school shows a passive child with adult hands pouring knowledge into his  empty head.  

 

     To mandate outcomes centrally would be a major step in the destruction of Western  identity. Management by objectives, whatever those objectives might be, is a technique  of corporate subordination, not of education. Like Alfred's, Charlemagne's awareness of  Asia was sharpened in mortal combat. He was the first secular Western potentate to beat  the drum for secular schooling. It was easy to ignore Plato's gloomy forecast that  however attractive Utopia appears in imagination, human nature will not live easily with  the degree of synthetic constraint it requires.