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Excerpt from
John Taylor Gatto's
The Underground History
of American Education |
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Chapter Two
An Angry Look At Modern Schooling
The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the
way children learn and it isn’t supposed to. It took seven
years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that
mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the
four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one
hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president
of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a
comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in
Mason’s words, “the control of human behavior.”
A Change In The Governing Mind
Sometimes the best hiding place is right in the open. It
took seven years of reading and reflection for me to finally
figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a
creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth
century. It was under my nose, of course, but for years I
avoided seeing what was there because no one else seemed to
notice. Forced schooling arose from the new logic of the
Industrial Age—the logic imposed on flesh and blood by fossil
fuel and high-speed machinery.
This simple reality is hidden from view by early
philosophical and theological anticipations of mass schooling
in various writings about social order and human nature. But
you shouldn’t be fooled any more than Charles Francis Adams
was fooled when he observed in 1880 that what was being cooked
up for kids unlucky enough to be snared by the newly proposed
institutional school net combined characteristics of the
cotton mill and the railroad with those of a state prison.
After the Civil War, utopian speculative analysis regarding
isolation of children in custodial compounds where they could
be subjected to deliberate molding routines, began to be
discussed seriously by the Northeastern policy elites of
business, government, and university life. These discussions
were inspired by a growing realization that the productive
potential of machinery driven by coal was limitless. Railroad
development made possible by coal and startling new inventions
like the telegraph, seemed suddenly to make village life and
local dreams irrelevant. A new governing mind was emerging in
harmony with the new reality.
The principal motivation for this revolution in family and
community life might seem to be greed, but this surface
appearance conceals philosophical visions approaching
religious exaltation in intensity—that effective early
indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly
scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now
freed from the obsolete straitjacket of democratic traditions
and historic American libertarian attitudes.
Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole
continental population into conformity with these plans so
that it might be regarded as a "human resource" and managed as
a "workforce." No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be
allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to
see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their
working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth
and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled.
Extending Childhood
From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced
schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents,
kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was
forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and
system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was
thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized
political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the
first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry
and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably
provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed
against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people in
history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid
about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before
businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made
this unabashed disclosure:
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want
another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo
the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to
perform specific difficult manual tasks.
By1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling
were under the control of a group referred to in the press of
that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this
trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie,
Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National
Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the
British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the
ideal of subordination."
At first, the primary target was the tradition of
independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee
entrepreneurialism could be extinquished, at least among the
common population, the immense capital investments that mass
production industry required for equipment weren’t conceivably
justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as
employees competing for the favor of management. Not as
Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as
self-determined, free agents.
Only by a massive psychological campaign could the menace
of overproduction in America be contained. That’s what
important men and academics called it. The ability of
Americans to think as independent producers had to be
curtailed. Certain writings of Alexander Inglis carry a hint
of schooling’s role in this ultimately successful project to
curb the tendency of little people to compete with big
companies. From 1880 to 1930, overproduction became a
controlling metaphor among the managerial classes, and this
idea would have a profound influence on the development of
mass schooling.
I know how difficult it is for most of us who mow our lawns
and walk our dogs to comprehend that long-range social
engineering even exists, let alone that it began to dominate
compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934
edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley’s Public Education in the
United States is explicit about what happened and why. As
Cubberley puts it:
It has come to be desirable that children should not
engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent
thinking...[is] opposed to their doing so. Both the
interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation
have set against child labor.
The statement occurs in a section of Public Education
called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in
which Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory
system" has made extended childhood necessary by depriving
children of the training and education that farm and village
life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village
industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the
apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its
extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering march of
machinery"), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley,
who know nothing.
Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers.
Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of
progress. According to Cubberley, with "much ridicule from the
public press" the old book-subject curriculum was set aside,
replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of
instruction which came to us from abroad." That last
mysterious reference to a new psychology is to practices of
dumbed-down schooling common to England, Germany, and France,
the three major world coal-powers (other than the United
States), each of which had already converted its common
population into an industrial proletariat.
Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 Social History of the Family
notified the nation’s academics what was happening. Calhoun
declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming
true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody
of community experts." He offered a significant forecast, that
in time we could expect to see public education "designed to
check the mating of the unfit." Three years later, Mayor John
F. Hylan of New York said in a public speech that the schools
had been seized as an octopus would seize prey, by "an
invisible government." He was referring specifically to
certain actions of the Rockefeller Foundation and other
corporate interests in New York City which preceded the school
riots of 1917.
The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling as well
as for the stock market. In 1928, a well-regarded volume
called A Sociological Philosophy of Education claimed,
"It is the business of teachers to run not merely schools but
the world." A year later, the famous creator of educational
psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College,
announced, "Academic subjects are of little value." William
Kirkpatrick, his colleague at Teachers College, boasted in
Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition
of rearing the young was being made over by experts.
The Geneticist’s Manifesto
Meanwhile, at the project offices of an important employer
of experts, the Rockefeller Foundation, friends were hearing
from Max Mason, its president, that a comprehensive national
program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, "the control
of human behavior." This dazzling ambition was announced on
April 11, 1933. Schooling figured prominently in the design.
Rockefeller had been inspired by the work of Eastern
European scientist Hermann Müller to invest heavily in
genetics. Müller had used x-rays to override genetic law,
inducing mutations in fruit flies. This seemed to open the
door to the scientific control of life itself. Müller preached
that planned breeding would bring mankind to paradise faster
than God. His proposal received enthusiastic endorsement from
the greatest scientists of the day as well as from powerful
economic interests.
Müller would win the Nobel Prize, reduce his proposal to a
fifteen-hundred-word Geneticists’ Manifesto, and watch
with satisfaction as twenty-two distinguished American and
British biologists of the day signed it. The state must
prepare to consciously guide human sexual selection, said
Müller. School would have to separate worthwhile breeders from
those slated for termination.
Just a few months before this report was released, an
executive director of the National Education Association
announced that his organization expected "to accomplish by
education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by
compulsion and force." You can’t get much clearer than that.
WWII drove the project underground, but hardly retarded its
momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school
became a major domestic battleground for the scientific
rationalization of social affairs through compulsory
indoctrination. Great private corporate foundations led the
way.
Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword
Thirty-odd years later, between 1967 and 1974, teacher
training in the United States was covertly revamped through
coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations,
select universities, global corporations, think tanks, and
government agencies, all coordinated through the U.S. Office
of Education and through key state education departments like
those in California, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New
York.
Important milestones of the transformation were: 1) an
extensive government exercise in futurology called
Designing Education for the Future, 2) the Behavioral
Science Teacher Education Project, and 3) Benjamin Bloom’s
multivolume Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, an
enormous manual of over a thousand pages which, in time,
impacted every school in America. While other documents exist,
these three are appropriate touchstones of the whole, serving
to make clear the nature of the project underway.
Take them one by one and savor each. Designing Education,
produced by the Education Department, redefined the term
"education" after the Prussian fashion as "a means to achieve
important economic and social goals of a national character."
State education agencies would henceforth act as on-site
federal enforcers, ensuring the compliance of local schools
with central directives. Each state education department was
assigned the task of becoming "an agent of change" and advised
to "lose its independent identity as well as its authority,"
in order to "form a partnership with the federal government."
The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science
Teacher Education Project, outlined teaching reforms to be
forced on the country after 1967. If you ever want to hunt
this thing down, it bears the U.S. Office of Education
Contract Number OEC-0-9-320424-4042 (B10). The document sets
out clearly the intentions of its creators—nothing less than
"impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future
America in which "few will be able to maintain control over
their opinions," an America in which "each individual receives
at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables
employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings
and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when
necessary. Readers learned that "chemical experimentation" on
minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a
pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions
which now accompany the practice of forced schooling.
The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project
identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will
control all important matters, one where participatory
democracy will largely disappear. Children are made to see,
through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel
and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of
self-discipline, and so ignorant they need to be controlled
and regulated for society’s good. Under such a logical regime,
school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is
sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration
project of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its
functions.
Post-modern schooling, we are told, is to focus on
"pleasure cultivation" and on "other attitudes and skills
compatible with a non-work world." Thus the socialization
classroom of the century’s beginning—itself a radical
departure from schooling for mental and character
development—can be seen to have evolved by 1967 into a
full-scale laboratory for psychological experimentation.
School conversion was assisted powerfully by a curious
phenomenon of the middle to late 1960s, a tremendous rise in
school violence and general school chaos which followed a
policy declaration (which seems to have occurred nationwide)
that the disciplining of children must henceforth mimic the
"due process" practice of the court system. Teachers and
administrators were suddenly stripped of any effective ability
to keep order in schools since the due process apparatus, of
necessity a slow, deliberate matter, is completely inadequate
to the continual outbreaks of childish mischief all schools
experience.
Now, without the time-honored ad hoc armory of disciplinary
tactics to fall back on, disorder spiraled out of control,
passing from the realm of annoyance into more dangerous
terrain entirely as word surged through student bodies that
teacher hands were tied. And each outrageous event that
reached the attention of the local press served as an
advertisement for expert prescriptions. Who had ever seen kids
behave this way? Time to surrender community involvement to
the management of experts; time also for emergency measures
like special education and Ritalin. During this entire period,
lasting five to seven years, outside agencies like the Ford
Foundation exercised the right to supervise whether
"children’s rights" were being given due attention, fanning
the flames hotter even long after trouble had become virtually
unmanageable.
The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project,
published at the peak of this violence, informed
teacher-training colleges that under such circumstances,
teachers had to be trained as therapists; they must translate
prescriptions of social psychology into "practical action" in
the classroom. As curriculum had been redefined, so teaching
followed suit.
Third in the series of new gospel texts was Bloom’s
Taxonomy, in his own words, "a tool to classify the ways
individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some
unit of instruction." Using methods of behavioral psychology,
children would learn proper thoughts, feelings, and actions,
and have their improper attitudes brought from home "remediated."
In all stages of the school experiment, testing was
essential to localize the child’s mental state on an official
rating scale. Bloom’s epic spawned important descendant forms:
Mastery Learning, Outcomes-Based Education, and School to Work
government-business collaborations. Each classified
individuals for the convenience of social managers and
businesses, each offered data useful in controlling the mind
and movements of the young, mapping the next adult generation.
But for what purpose? Why was this being done?
Bad Character As A Management Tool
A large piece of the answer can be found by reading between
the lines of an article that appeared in the June 1998 issue
of Foreign Affairs. Written by Mortimer Zuckerman,
owner of U.S. News and World Report (and other major
publications), the essay praises the American economy,
characterizing its lead over Europe and Asia as so
structurally grounded no nation can possibly catch up for100
years. American workers and the American managerial system are
unique.
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