3. The New Individualism: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

3. The New Individualism: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org  

 

   The little essay went off in March and I forgot it. Somewhere along the way I must have  gotten a note saying it would be published at the editor's discretion, but if so, it was  quickly forgotten in the press of turbulent feelings that accompanied my own internal  struggle. Finally, on July 5, 1991, 1 swallowed hard and quit. Twenty days later the  Journal published the piece. A week later I was studying invitations to speak at NASA  Space Center, the Western White House, the Nashville Center for the Arts, Columbia  Graduate Business School, the Colorado Librarian's Convention, Apple Computer, and  the financial control board of United Technologies Corporation. Nine years later, still  enveloped in the orbit of compulsion schooling, I had spoken 750 times in fifty states and  seven foreign

countries. I had no agent and never advertised, but a lot of people made an  effort to find me. It was as if parents were starving for someone to tell them the truth.   

 

      My hunch is it wasn't so much what I was saying  that kept the lecture round unfolding, but that a  teacher was speaking out at all and the curious fact  that I represented nobody except myself. In the  great school debate, this is unheard of. Every single  voice allowed regular access to the national podium  is the mouthpiece of some association, corporation,  university, agency, or institutionalized cause. The  poles of debate blocked out by these ritualized,  figurehead voices are extremely narrow. Each has a  stake in continuing forced schooling much as it is.    

 

      As I traveled, I discovered a universal hunger, often unvoiced, to be free of managed  debate. A desire to be given untainted information. Nobody seemed to have maps of  where this thing had come from or why it acted as it did, but the ability to smell a rat was  alive and well all over America. 

 

      Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed  happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed  village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as  irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through  particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs,  but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever  subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All  this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.   

 

      Dewey called this transformation "the new individualism." When I stepped into the job of  schoolteacher in 1961, the new individualism was sitting in the driver's seat all over     urban America, a far cry from my own school days on the Monongahela when the Lone  Ranger, not Sesame Street, was our nation's teacher, and school things weren't nearly so  oppressive. But gradually they became something else in the euphoric times following  WWII. Easy money and easy travel provided welcome relief from wartime austerity, the  advent of television, the new nonstop theater, offered easy laughs, effortless  entertainment. Thus preoccupied, Americans failed to notice the deliberate conversion of  formal education that was taking place, a transformation that would turn school into an  instrument of the leviathan state. Who made that happen and why is part of the story I  have to tell.