183. The Scientific Curriculum: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

183. The Scientific Curriculum: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

The Scientific Curriculum 

 

      The particulars of the scientific curriculum designed to replace the Christian curriculum  look like this:  

 

     First, it asked for a sharply critical attitude toward parental, community, and traditional  values. Nothing familiar, the children were told, should remain unexamined or go  unchallenged. The old-fashioned was to be discarded. Indeed, the study of history itself  was stopped. Respect for tradition was held sentimental and counterproductive. Only one  thing could not be challenged, and that was the school religion itself, where even minor  rebellion was dealt with harshly.

 

       Second, the scientific curriculum asked for objectivity, for the suppression of human  feelings which stand in the way of pursuing knowledge as the ultimate good. Thinking  works best when everything is considered an equally lifeless object. Then

things can be  regarded with objectivity. Of course kids resist this deadening of nature and so have to be     trained to see nature as mechanical. Have no feeling for the frog you dissect or the  butterfly you kill for a school project — soon you may have no feeling for the humiliation  of your classmates or the enfeeblement of your own parents. After all, humiliation  constitutes the major tool of behavior control in schools, a tool used alike to control  students, teachers, and administrators.  

 

     Third, the scientific curriculum advised neutrality. Make no lasting commitments to  anything because loyalty and sentiment spell the end of flexibility; they close off options. 

 

      Last, the new scheme demanded that visible things which could be numbered and counted  be acknowledged as the only reality. God could not exist; He could not be seen. 

 

      The religion of Science says there is no good or evil. Experts will tell you what to feel  based on pragmatic considerations. Since there is no free will nor any divine morality,  there is no such thing as individual responsibility, no sin, no redemption. Just  mathematical decision-making; grounded in utilitarianism or the lex talionis, it makes  little difference which. The religion of Science says that work is for fools. Machines can  be built to do hard work, and what machines don't do, servants and wage slaves can.  Work as little as you can get away with — that's how the new success is measured. The  religion of Science says good feelings and physical sensations are what life is all about.  

 

     Drugs are such an important part of feeling good we began to need drugstores to sell the  many varieties available. People should try virtually everything; that is the message of the  drug- store and all advertising. Leave no stone unturned in the search for sensual  pleasure. With science-magic you don't even have to worry about a hangover. Simply  take vitamin B and keep on drinking — nor need you worry about incurring the  responsibility of a family with the advent of cheap contraceptives and risk- free legal  abortion. Lastly, the religion of Science teaches that death, aging, and sickness are  ultimate evils. With pills, potions, lotions, aerobics, and surgery you can stave off death  and aging, and eventually the magical medical industry will erase those scourges from  human affairs.  

 

     There. It is done. See how point for point the curriculum of Science, upgraded from an  instrument to a religion, revokes each of the penalties Christianity urges we accept  gladly? See how Science can be sold as the nostrum to grant absolute absolution from  spiritual covenants?