197. Two Social Revolutions Become One: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

197. Two Social Revolutions Become One: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Chapter Sixteen    

 

A Conspiracy Against Ourselves

 

       A lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education without  being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the  twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The  demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out  of this intellectual proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self-  improvement were not sufficient  — Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History 

 

      Two Social Revolutions Become One  

 

      Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair,  not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, 1  that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts  what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and  most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to  serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this  instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we? 

 

      As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring  out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which  imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to  escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social  organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself  what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery  dissipates — these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people  against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting  the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of  mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require  human architects to get launched.  

 

     I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated  industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant,  resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based  economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in  the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated  usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth  would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor  Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It  insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican  norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire     school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that  education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no  adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers,  wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand  other useful human enterprises — no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the  periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a  host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of  imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. 

 

      Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your  principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring  against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules  which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional  schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First  you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-  logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they  could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.  

 

     Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast,  intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to  work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on  the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its  coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction,  and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace  into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a  business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the  subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national  life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the  net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families,  individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a  regular corporate paycheck. 

 

      A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay  in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able  to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them  for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of  thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome  of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men — but with  decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with  the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of  producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one  which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold  our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy  against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning  them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.    

 

 

1. The labels, themselves, are an affront to decency. Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified  like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.