187. Religion And Rationality: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

187. Religion And Rationality: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Religion And Rationality 

 

      The Supreme Court Ever son ruling of 1 947 established the principle that America would  have no truck with spirits. There was no mention that the previous 150 years of American  judicial history passed without any other court finding this well-hidden meaning in the  Constitution. But even if we grant the ruling is sincere, an expression of the rational  principle behind modern leadership, we would be justified in challenging Everson  because of the grotesque record laid down over the past fifty years of spiritless schooling.  Dis-spirited schooling has been tested and found fully wanting. I think that's partially  because it denies the metaphysical reality recognized by men and women worldwide,  today and in every age. 

 

      It is ironic from a contrarian viewpoint that the most prestigious scientific position in the  world today is surely heading up the human genome project, and that project, as I write,     is in the hands of a born-again Christian. Corporations are lined up all the way to China  to make fortunes out of genetic manipulation. The director of that project is a man named  Dr. Francis S. Collins, who, according to The New York Times, personally recognizes  religion as the most important reality in his life. Collins was reared in an agnostic home  in western Virginia where he was homeschooled by his outspoken, radical mother who  stretched the school law in a number of ways to give him an education. While in medical  school, he came to the conclusion that he would become a born-again Christian because  the decision was "intellectually inescapable." And he has maintained that faith  energetically ever since, a decision that makes his professional colleagues very  uncomfortable.  

 

     The difficulty with rational thought, however valuable a tool it certainly is, is that it  misses the deepest properties of human nature: our feelings of loneliness and  incompletion, our sense of sin, our need to love, our longing after immortality. Let me  illustrate how rational thinking preempts terrain where it has no business and makes a  wretched mess of human affairs. After this, you can tell your grandchildren that you  actually heard someone at the onset of the twenty- first century challenging Galileo's  heliocentric theory. 

 

      In materially evidentiary terms, the sun is at the center of the solar system, not the earth,  and the solar system itself is lost in the endless immensity of space. I suppose most of  you believe that; how could you not? And yet, as far as we scientifically know to date,  only planet Earth looks as if it were designed with people in mind. I know that Carl  Sagan said we'll find millions of populated planets eventually, but right now there's only  hard evidence of one. As far as we know, you can't go anyplace but earth and stay alive  for long. So as of 2000, earth is clearly the whole of the human universe. I want to push  this a little farther, however, so stick with me. 

 

      Planet Earth is most definitely not the center of your personal life. It's merely a  background which floats in and out of conscious thought. The truth is that both  psychologically and spiritually you are the center of the solar system and the universe.  Don't be modest or try to hide the fact. The minute you deny what I just said, you're in  full flight from the responsibility this personal centrality entails: to make things better for  the rest of us who are on the periphery of your consciousness. 

 

      When you deny your own centrality, you necessarily lose some trust in yourself to move  mountains. As your self-trust wanes — and school is there to drill you in distrusting  yourself (what else do you think it means to wait for teacher to tell you what to do?) —  you lose some self-respect. Without full self-respect, you can hardly love yourself very  much because we can't really love those we don't respect (except, curiously enough, by  an act of faith). When you can't trust or even like yourself very much, you're in a much  worse predicament than you may realize, because those things are a precondition to  sustaining loving relationships with other people and with the world outside. 

 

      Think of it this way: you must be convinced of your own worth before you ask for the  love of another or else the bargain will be unsound. You'll be trading discounted     merchandise unless both of you are similarly disadvantaged and perhaps even then your  relationship will disintegrate.  

 

     The trouble with Galileo's way is that it's a partial truth. It's right about the relations of  dead matter; it's wrong about the geography of the spirit. Schools can only teach  Galileo's victory over the Church; they can't afford to harbor children who command  personal power. So the subtlety of the analysis that you and I just went through about the  way religion confers power has to be foregone. Galileo's Tightness is only a tiny part of a  real education; his blindness is much more to the point. The goal of real education is to  bring us to a place where we take full responsibility for our own lives. In that quest,  Galileo is only one more fact of limited human consequence.  

 

     The ancient religious question of free will marks the real difference between schooling  and education. Education is conceived in Western history as a road to knowing yourself ,  and through that knowledge, arriving at a further understanding of community,  relationships, jeopardy, living nature, and inanimate matter. But none of those things has  any particular meaning until you see what they lead up to, finally being infill command  of the spectacular gift of free will: a force completely beyond the power of science to  understand. 

 

      With the tool of free will, anyone can forge a personal purpose. Free will allows infinite  numbers of human stories to be written in which a personal you is the main character.  The sciences, on the other hand, hard or soft, assume that purpose and free will are  hogwash; given enough data, everything will be seen as explainable, predetermined, and  predictable. 

 

      Schooling is an instrument to disseminate this bleak and sterile vision of a blind-chance  universe. When schooling displaced education in the United States just about a century  ago, a deterministic world could be imposed by discipline. We entrap children simply by  ignoring the universal human awareness that there is something dreadfully important  beyond the rational. We cause children to mistrust themselves so severely they come to  depend on cost-benefit analyses for everything. We teach them to scorn faith so  comprehensively that buying things and feeling good become the point of their lives.  

 

     The Soviet empire did this brilliantly for a little over seventy years. Its surveillance  capability was total. It maintained dossiers on each human unit, logged every deviation,  and assigned a mathematical value so that citizens could be ranked against each other.  Does that sound familiar? It schooled every child in a fashion prescribed by the best  psychological experts. It strictly controlled the rewards of work to ensure compliance,  and it developed a punishment system unheard of in its comprehensiveness. 

 

      The Soviet Union lasted one lifetime. Our softer form of spiritual suffocation has already  been in place for two. The neglected genius of the West, neglected by the forced  schooling institution as deliberate policy, resides in its historical collection of spiritual  doctrines which grant dignity and responsibility to ordinary individuals, not elites.   

 

      I have the greatest respect for every other religious tradition in the world, but not one of  them has ever done this or attempted to do this. Western religion correctly identified  problems no one can escape, problems for which there are no material solutions,  problems you can't elude with money, intellect, charm, politics, or powerful connections.  It said also that these problems were, paradoxically, fundamental to human happiness.  Serious problems necessary to our happiness? That's some perverse doom, I know you'll  agree. The question is what to do about it.