163. Elasticity: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

163. Elasticity: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Elasticity 

 

      Among structural engineers, the terms plastic and elastic describe propensities of  material; these are concepts which can also be brought to bear on the question whether  human nature is built out of accidents of experience or whether there is some divine inner  spark in all of us that makes each person unique and self-determining. As you decide, the  schools which march forward from your decision are predestined. Immanuel Kant  thought both conditions possible, a strong, continuous effort of will tipping the balance.  

 

     In structural engineering, implications of the original builder/creator's decision are  inescapable; constructions like bridges and skyscrapers do have an inner nature given  them by the materials chosen and the shapes imposed, an integrity long experience has  allowed us to profile. The structure will defend this integrity, resisting wind stress, for  example, which threatens to change its shape permanently. 

 

      When stress increases dangerously as it would in a hurricane, the building material  becomes elastic, surrendering part of its integrity temporarily to protect the rest,  compromising to save its total character in the long run. When the wind abates the urge to  resume the original shape becomes dominant and the bridge or building relaxes back to  normal. A human analogy is that we remember who we are in school even when coerced  to act like somebody else. In engineering, this integrity of memory is called elastic  behavior. Actors practice deliberate elasticity and the Chechens or the Hmong express  remarkable group elasticity. After violent stresses abate, they remember who they are.   

 

      But another road exists. To end unbearable stress, material has a choice of surrendering  its memory. Under continued stress, material can become plastic, losing its elasticity and  changing its shape permanently. Watch your own kids as their schooling progresses. Are  they like Chechens with a fierce personal integrity and an inner resilience? Or under the  stress of the social laboratory of schooling, have they become plastic over time, kids you  hardly recognize, kids who've lost their original integrity? 

 

      In the collapse of a bridge or building in high wind, a decisive turning point is reached  when the structure abandons its nature and becomes plastic. Trained observers can tell  when elasticity is fading because prior to the moment of collapse, the structure cannot  regain its original shape. It loses its spirit, taking on new and unexpected shapes in a  struggle to resist further change. When this happens it is wordlessly crying HELP ME!  HELP ME! just as so many kids did in all the schools in which I ever taught. 

 

      The most important task I assigned myself as a schoolteacher was helping kids regain  their integrity, but I lost many, their desperate, last-ditch resistance giving way, their  integrity shattering before my horrified eyes. Look back in memory at your kids before  first grade, then fast forward to seventh. Have they disintegrated into warring fragments  divided against themselves? Don't believe anyone who tells you that's natural human  development. 

 

      If there are no absolutes, as pragmatists like Dewey assert, then human nature must be  plastic. Then the spirit can be successfully deformed from its original shape and will have  no sanctuary in which to resist institutional stamping. The Deweys further assert that  human nature processed this way is able to perform efficiently what is asked of it later on  by society. Escaping our original identity will actually improve most of us, they say. This  is the basic hypothesis ofutopia-building, that the structure ofpersonhood can be broken  and reformed again and again for the better.  

 

     Plasticity is the base on which scientific psychology must stand if it is to be prescriptive,  and if not prescriptive, who needs it? Finding an aggressive, instrumental psychology  associated with schooling is a sure sign empty-child attitudes aren't far away. The notion  of empty children has origins predating psychology, of course, but the most important  engine reshaping American schools into socialization laboratories, 1 after Wundt, was the  widely publicized work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) who had been  a student of Wundt at Leipzig. Pavlov won the Nobel in 1904, credited with discovering  the conditioned reflex whereby systems of physical function thought to be fixed  biologically, like the salivation of dogs, could be rewired to irrelevant outside stimuli,  like bells ringing. 

 

      This had immense influence on the spread of behavioral psychology into government  agencies and corporate boardrooms, for it seemed to herald the discovery of master  wiring diagrams which could eventually bring the entire population under control of  physiological psychology.    

 

     Pavlov became the most prestigious ally of the behavioral enterprise with his Nobel. His  text The Conditioned Reflexes (1926) provided a sacred document to be waved at  skeptics, and his Russian nationality aided immeasurably, harmonizing well with the long  romance American intellectuals had with the Soviet Union. Even today Pavlov is a name  to conjure with. Russian revolutionary experimentation allowed the testing of what was  possible to go much further and faster than could have happened in America and western  Europe. 

 

      Notions of emptiness turn the pedestrian problem of basic skills schooling into the  complex political question of which outside agencies with particular agendas to impose  will be allowed to write the curriculum. And there are nuances. For instance, the old-  fashioned idea of an empty container suggests a hollow to be filled, an approach not  unfamiliar to people who went to school before 1960. But plastic emptiness is a different  matter. It might lead to an armory of tricks designed to fix, distract, and motivate the  subject to cooperate in its own transformation — the new style commonly found in public  schools after 1960. The newer style has given rise to an intricately elaborated theory of  incentives capable of assisting managers to work their agenda on the managed. Only a  few years ago, almost every public-school teacher in the country had to submit a list of  classroom motivation employed, to be inspected by school managers.

 

1.   The whole concept of "socialization" has been the subject of a large library of books and may beconsidered to occupy an honored role as one  of the most important ongoing studies (and debates) in modern history. In shorthand, what socialization is concerned with from a political  standpoint is the discovery and application of a system of domination which does not involve physical coercion. Coercion (as Hegel is thought  to have proven) will inevitably provoke the formation of a formidable counter-force, in time overthrowing the coercive force. The fall of the  Soviet Union might be taken as an object lesson. 

      Before Hegel, for 250 years along with other institutions of that society the state church of England was a diligent student of socialization. The  British landowning class was a great university of understanding how to proceed adversarially against restive groups without overt signs of  intimidation, and the learnings of this class were transmitted to America. For example, during the second great enclosure movement which  ended in 1875, with half of all British agricultural land in the hands of just two thousand people, owners maintained social and political control  over even the smallest everyday affairs of the countryside and village. Village halls were usually under control of the Church of England whose  clergy were certifiably safe, its officials doubling as listening posts among the population. All accommodations suitable for meetings were  under direct or indirect control of the landed interests. It was almost impossible for any sort of activity to take place unless it met with the  approval of owners. 

   Lacking a long tradition of upper-class solidarity, the United States had to distill lessons from England and elsewhere with a science of public  opinion control whose ultimate base was the new schools. Still, before schooling could be brought efficiently to that purpose, much time had to  pass during which other initiatives in socialization were tried. One of these, the control of print sources of information, is particularly  instructive.  

     After the Rockefeller disaster in the coal fields of southeastern Colorado in April of 1914, ordinary counter-publicity was insufficient to stem  the tide of attacks on corporate America coming from mass circulation magazines such as Leslie 's Illustrated Weekly, McClures 's,  Everybody 's, Success, Hampton 's, Collier 's, The Arena, The Masses, and others. A counterattack was launched to destroy the effectiveness of  the magazines: West Virginia Pulp and Paper bought McClure 's, Butterick Patterns bought Everybody 's, bankers folded Success by calling in  its loans and ordered the editors of Collier 's to change its editorial policies, the distributor of Arena informed the publisher that unsold copies  would no longer be returned, and Max Eastman's Masses was doomed by the passage of legislation enabling the postmaster to remove any  publication from the mails at his own discretion. Through these and similar measures, the press and magazines of the United States had been  fairly effectively muzzled by 1915 with not a single printing press broken by labor goons. These midrange steps in the socialization of  American society can best be seen as exposing the will to homogenize at work in this country once the entire economy had been corporatized.  

 

Emptiness: The Master Theory