29. Extending Childhood: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

29. Extending Childhood: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Extending Childhood  

     From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had  nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand  purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of  finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong,  centralized political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of  the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable  time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against  immigrants in the greatest displacement of people in history, social managers of  schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave  before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed  disclosure:   

     We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger  class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to  perform specific difficult manual tasks.  

     Byl917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a  group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of  this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the  University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote  Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal  of subordination."  

     At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America.  Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be extinquished, at least among the common  population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for  equipment weren't conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves  as employees competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had  once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents.  

     Only by a massive psychological campaign could the menace of overproduction in  America be contained. That's what important men and academics called it. The ability of  Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed. Certain writings of  Alexander Inglis carry a hint of schooling's role in this ultimately successful project to  curb the tendency of little people to compete with big companies. From 1880 to 1930,  overproduction became a controlling metaphor among the managerial classes, and this  idea would have a profound influence on the development of mass schooling.  

     I know how difficult it is for most of us who mow our lawns and walk our dogs to  comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to  dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition of Ellwood P.  Cubberley's Public Education in the United States is explicit about what happened and  why. As Cubberley puts it:     It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the  contrary, all recent thinking... [is] opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of  organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor.  

     The statement occurs in a section of Public Education called "A New Lengthening of the  Period of Dependence," in which Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory  system" has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and  education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village  industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-  scale production with its extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering march of  machinery"), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing. 

      Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed  to stand in the way of progress. According to Cubberley, with "much ridicule from the  public press" the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in  purpose and "a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad." That last  mysterious reference to a new psychology is to practices of dumbed-down schooling  common to England, Germany, and France, the three major world coal-powers (other  than the United States), each of which had already converted its common population into  an industrial proletariat.  

      Arthur Calhoun's 1919 Social History of the Family notified the nation's academics what  was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of Utopian writers was coming  true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He  offered a significant forecast, that in time we could expect to see public education  "designed to check the mating of the unfit." Three years later, Mayor John F. Hylan of  New York said in a public speech that the schools had been seized as an octopus would  seize prey, by "an invisible government." He was referring specifically to certain actions  of the Rockefeller Foundation and other corporate interests in New York City which  preceded the school riots of 1917.  

     The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling as well as for the stock market. In  1928, a well-regarded volume called A Sociological Philosophy of Education claimed, "It  is the business of teachers to run not merely schools but the world." A year later, the  famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers  College, announced, "Academic subjects are of little value." William Kirkpatrick, his  colleague at Teachers College, boasted in Education and the Social Crisis that the whole  tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.