179. The Problem Of God: The Underground History of Amerccan Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

179. The Problem Of God: The Underground History of Amerccan Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Chapter Fourteen   

 

 Absolute Absolution 

 

 The leading principle of Utopian religion is the repudiation of the doctrine of Original  Sin.   — H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)  

 

Everything functions as if death did not exist. Nobody takes it into account; it is  suppressed everywhere. ...We now seem possessed by he Promethean desire to cure death.   — Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)  

 

Education is the modern world's temporal religion...   — Bob Chase, president, National Education Association, NEA TODAY, April 1997  

 

 179. The Problem Of God  

 

     The problem of God has always been a central question of Western intellectual life. The  flight from this heritage is our best evidence that school is a project having little to do  with education as the West defined it for thousands of years. It's difficult to imagine  anyone who lacks an understanding of Western spirituality regarding himself as educated.  And yet, American schools have been forbidden to enter this arena even in a token way  since 1947.  

 

     In spite of the irony that initial Protestant church support is the only reason we have  American compulsion schools at all, the rug was pulled out from beneath the churches  quite suddenly at the end of the nineteenth century, under the pretext that it was the only  way to keep Catholicism out of the schools. When the second shoe dropped with the  Everson decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1947, God was pitched out of school on  His ear entirely. 

 

      Before we go forward we need to go back. The transformation businessmen wrought in  the idea of education at the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the  twentieth is the familiar system we have today. Max Otto argued in his intriguing book-  length essay Science and the Moral Life (1949) that a philosophical revolution had been  pulled off by businessmen under everybody's nose. Otto described what most college  graduates still don't know — that the traditional economy, where wants regulate what is  produced, is dead. The new economy depends upon creating demand for whatever stuff  machinery, fossil fuel, and industrialized imagination can produce. When this reversal  was concluded, consumption, once only one detail among many in people's lives, became  the most important end. Great consumers are heroes to a machine society; the frugal,  villains.    

 

     In such a universe, schools have no choice but to participate. Supporting the economic  system became the second important mission of mass schooling's existence, but in doing  so, materiality found itself at war with an older family of spiritual interests. In the general  society going about its business, it wasn't easy to see this contest clearly — to recognize  that great corporations which provided employment, endowed universities, museums,  schools, and churches, and which exercised a powerful voice on important issues of the  day — actually had a life-and-death stake in the formation of correct psychological  attitudes among children.  

 

     It was nature, not conspiracy, Otto wrote, that drove businessmen "to devote themselves  to something besides business." It was only natural "they should try to control education  and to supplant religion as a definer of ideals." The class of businessmen who operated  on a national and international basis, having estranged themselves from considerations of  nation, culture, and tradition, having virtually freed themselves from competitive risk  because they owned the legislative and judicial processes, now turned their attention to  cosmic themes of social management.  

 

     In this fashion, minister gave way to schoolteacher, schoolteacher became pedagogus  under direction of the controllers of work.