157. The Machine Gun Builds Hotchkiss: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

157. The Machine Gun Builds Hotchkiss: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

The Machine Gun Builds Hotchkiss  

 

    The widow of the man who perfected the machine gun founded the Hotchkiss School; a  Lowell and a Forbes funded Middlesex; the DuPonts were the patrons of Kent; St.  George's was underwritten by the Brown family whose name graces Brown University;  Choate looked to the Mellon family for generous checks; J. P. Morgan was behind  Groton. Over 90 percent of the great American private boarding schools issued from that  short period just after Herbert Spencer's American visit in 1882 and just before the  indirect edict to the National Education Association that it must play ball with the de-  intellectualization of public schooling, or it would be abandoned by America's business  leadership.  

 

     Elite private boarding schools were an important cornerstone in the foundation of a  permanent American upper class whose children were to be socialized for power. They  were great schools for the Great Race, intended to forge a collective identity among  children of privilege, training them to be bankers, financiers, partners in law firms,  corporate directors, negotiators of international treaties and contracts, patrons of the arts,  philanthropists, directors of welfare organizations, members of advisory panels,  government elites, and business

elites. 

 

      Michael Useem's post-WWII study showed that just thirteen elite boarding schools  educated 10 percent of all the directors of large American business corporations, and 15  percent of all the directors who held three or more directorships. These schools  collectively graduated fewer than one thousand students a year. More spectacular  pedagogy than that is hard to imagine. 

 

      In England, the pioneer feminist Victoria Woodhull published The Rapid Multiplication  of the Unfit. And in the States, Edward A. Ross, trained in Germany — University of  Wisconsin pioneer of American sociology — was writing The Old World in the New,  saying that "beaten members of beaten breeds" would destroy us unless placed under  control. They were "subhuman." Ross was joined by virtually every leading social  scientist of his generation in warning about the ill effects of blood pollution: Richard Ely,  William Z. Ripley, Richard Mayo Smith, John R. Commons, Davis Dewey, Franklin  Giddings, and many more. None disagreed with Ross. Morons were multiplying. The  government had to be made aware of the biological consequences of social policy. 

 

      But while beaten members of beaten breeds had to be zipped up tight in isolation, ward  schools and neighborhoods of their own, watched over by social gospelers, settlement     houses, and social workers trained in the new social science, a new American social  dimension was being created from scratch in which the best people could associate freely,  could rear children properly, could reap rewards they deserved as the most advanced  class on the evolutionary tree. That was not only justice, it was prudent preparation for an  even better biological future.  

 

     The way the new shadow society, a universe parallel to the one everyone else could see,  had to operate after it had first constructed for itself a theory of establishment and a  theology of caste, was by creating a new social structure, corporate in nature, in which  man was progressively defined by those with whom he affiliated, his synthetic,  associational tribe — not by his independent talents and accomplishments. If these  affiliations were only local, then status was correspondingly diminished; the trick was to  progressively graduate to memberships which had regional, national, or even  international status, and this associational prestige would then be transferred to the  individual. What a perfect way of keeping out the riffraff and porch monkeys this would  prove to be!  

 

     It was no idle boast, nor was the statement a simple expression of snobbery, when John  Lupton, director of development at the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, said,  "There is no door in this entire country that cannot be opened by a Choate graduate. I can  go anywhere in this country and anywhere there's a man I want to see... I can find a  Choate man to open that door for me," The crucial variables in identifying the right  people in the new exclusionary America no longer included high-profile expressions of  superiority. What they did include were: 1) Membership in the right metropolitan clubs.  2) An address in the right neighborhoods. 3) A degree from the right college. 4) A  membership in the right country club. 5) Attendance at the right summer resorts. 6)  Attendance at the right churches. 7) Passage through the right private schools. 8) An  invitation to the right hereditary association. 9) Involvement in the right charities. 10)  Trusteeships, boards, advisory councils. 1 1) The right marriages, alliances, a social  register listing. 12) Money, manners, style, physical beauty, health, conversation. 

 

      I've made no attempt to enter subtleties of gradation, only to indicate how the ephors  behind public schooling and virtually all significant decision-making in modern  American society created, quite self-consciously, a well-regulated world within a world  for themselves. Provision was made to allow some movement up from other classes.  Clubs, for instance, were also agencies for assimilating men of talent and their families  into an upper-class way of life and social organization.  

 

     If we are unwilling to face how very far-reaching the effects of this American  establishment are to schoolchildren, there is just no good way to think about school  reform. 5 Darwin's evolutionary racism, Galton's mathematical racism, Maine's  anthropological racism, Anglican theological racism/classism, all are deeply embedded in  the structure of mass schooling and the economy it serves. They cannot he extirpated by  rational discussion; these viruses are carried by institutional structures not amenable to  social discussion.  

 

  5 NeIson W. Aldrich, grandson of Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island, who was one of the principal architectsof the Federal Reserve system, put it  this way in his book Old Money: "Membership in this patriciate brought with it much besides wealth, of course: complete domination of all  educational and cultural institutions, ownership and control of the news media [and a variety of other assets]." Direct and indirect domination  of the forced schooling mechanism by the patriciate has never been adequately explored, perhaps owing to its ownership of both the tools of  research (in the colleges) and the tools of dissemination (in the media). 

 

 

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