For teachers: a homework assignment - "The Underground History of American Education" & Spiro Agnew

[Waiting For Everyman]

Excerpts from several pages of The Underground History of American Educationn by John Taylor Gatto, a former "outstanding" 30-year NYC teacher...

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm


School As Religion

snip

School is a religion. Without understanding the holy mission aspect you’re certain to misperceive what takes place as a result of human stupidity or venality or even class warfare. All are present in the equation, it’s just that none of these matter very much—even without them school would move in the same direction. Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed statement of 1897 gives you a clue to the zeitgeist:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.

What is "proper" social order? What does "right" social growth look like? If you don’t know you’re like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who did, too.

Somehow out of the industrial confusion which followed the Civil War, powerful men and dreamers became certain what kind of social order America needed, one very like the British system we had escaped a hundred years earlier. This realization didn’t arise as a product of public debate as it should have in a democracy, but as a distillation of private discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but that didn’t disturb them. They had a stupendous goal in mind—the rationalization of everything. The end of unpredictable history; its transformation into dependable order.

From mid-century onwards certain utopian schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play, following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be reached in stages, was an orderly, scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.

During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue4.htm


The New Dumbness

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It’s a religious idea gone out of control. You don’t have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won’t ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I’ll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient.

Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.

Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:

Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts.

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

Ellul puts it this way:

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under conditions...Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed...years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.

Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can’t do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.

According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm


A Change In The Governing Mind

Today’s corporate sponsors want to see their money used in ways to line up with business objectives.... This is a young generation of corporate sponsors and they have discovered the advantages of building long-term relationships with educational institutions.
— Suzanne Cornforth of Paschall & Associates, public relations consultants. As quoted in The New York Times, July 15, 1998

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.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2a.htm

_________________________________________________________________________

IMO, 1968, the year I graduated from high school, was the high-water mark for our public school system. It peaked then, and declined rapidly. If we want good schools, we should go back to what we did then, and merely update it.

What I'm going to say may seem like a different subject but it isn't... Does anybody know why Spiro Agnew was chosen to be Nixon's VP in 1968? Did anybody even look into why at the time? Answer: no. We should've though. I have an educated guess as to why he was chosen. Spiro Agnew was the president of my elementary school's PTA. By the time I was in junior high school, he was the county executive. By high school, he was governor. And by the time I graduated, he was VP. He went from PTA president to VP of the US in 10 years.

Agnew, as county executive started a "pilot program" in my school, which I took part in. My whole grade took part in it, and it lasted two years. There was general agreement among all of us involved, both students and teachers alike (and we were asked for our opinions at the end of it) that it was a preposterous and worthless failure - a totally stupid and counterproductive idea. We thought that was the end of it. Five years after I graduated (by 1973), it was 100% implemented in our state, as it was nationally. How do I know this? My parents who were both 30+ year elementary school teachers, and still teaching at the time, and told me about it. The "experiment" became national policy... it included the "new math", open classrooms without windows, team teaching, interrelated subject matter rather than classes in single "subjects", mostly group activities rather than individual study, politically correct opinion rather than fact, disregard of spelling and grammar... all the components we're familiar with now. But my parents' jobs didn't last long after that. Most of the older teachers were forcibly retired within a few years, and the newly indoctrinated crop of fresh teaching graduates were mass-hired in their place. That way, there would be no complaining or comparisons about how it used to be.

And that's why Agnew was "rewarded" with the VP. He developed the prototype for murdering our schools. You may not believe it, but I know it. Two more excerpts to consider, below. Remember in the early 1970s, when all of a sudden we first started hearing about our once #1 educational system "falling behind" Japan and Germany? ...


Change Agents Infiltrate

By 1971, the U.S. Office of Education was deeply committed to accessing private lives and thoughts of children. In that year it granted contracts for seven volumes of "change-agent" studies to the RAND Corporation. Change-agent training was launched with federal funding under the Education Professions Development Act. In time the fascinating volume Change Agents Guide to Innovation in Education appeared, following which grants were awarded to teacher training programs for the development of change agents. Six more RAND manuals were subsequently distributed, enlarging the scope of change agentry.

In 1973, Catherine Barrett, president of the National Education Association, said, "Dramatic changes in the way we raise our children are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling...we will be agents of change." By 1989, a senior director of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory told the fifty governors of American states that year assembled to discuss government schooling, "What we’re into is total restructuring of society." It doesn’t get much plainer than that. There is no record of a single governor objecting.

Two years later Gerald Bracey, a leading professional promoter of government schooling, wrote in his annual report to clients: "We must continue to produce an uneducated social class."

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2j.htm


Occasional Letter Number One

Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spent more money on forced schooling than the government itself did. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were spending more themselves. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear a few excerpts from the first mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board as they occur in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

This mission statement will reward multiple rereadings.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2i.htm

_______________________________________________________________________

I ask you... try to tell me this plan has not been fully actualized. Think about the RW, the Religious Right, and the media, and peoples' opinions and votes against their own plain interest, and the way our society disregards talent but demands "credentials" (i.e., degrees). And now, we have the unbelievable cost of those credentials, which has become nothing less than a "new indentured servitude" to go along with our indoctination and mass-manipulation as a population. Tell me the Rockefellers' dreams have not been made fact. I don't believe the case can be made anymore, that it has not.

I asked my kids' high school principal (back in the 1990s) why a student being late to class was treated with more importance and attention and tracking than serious assaults committed there every day, or caring about the individual students at all in any way. The answer: "We have to train kids to be good employees". I said, "Well what if my kids aren't going to be employees, but instead are going to be among the people to have a new idea and start a new business, isn't the ability to think for themselves more important to them than being on time?" I got no answer to that. But instead of dealing with any more of this school's trivial yet dangerous nonsense, I took my kids out of school and had them instead "advance placement test" into college. Both of them made Dean's List, despite being only "C" students in high school. Hmm... And I have no doubt that the nazism and "drone factory agenda" in schools has continued on its downward spiral since then.

Why are our schools deliberately dumbed-down? Why are no "thinkers" needed from among them? The elite private schools provide that. Nevermind, that mediocre idiots like our last president are the result. Elite=intelligent to our educational designers. That's the world's elite, mind you. We can't have public-schooled middle-class geniuses taking the highest-echelon incomes away from the private school graduates of the world, now, can we? :sarcasm:

Before we "reform" education again, we should take a look at the premises and assumptions underlying it. Just like our economic system, it's rotten to the root. It needs a total re-thinking, from the way it is now.

A closing quote...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia.

Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: "The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided." National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an "effective use of capital" through which our "unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained." When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2g.htm

[Greyhound]

1. Some very good information here, Thank you.

We do need to re-invent the entire educational systems, that is perfectly clear. The objective needs to be learning how to learn and to think, instead of creating obedient cogs. Living beings are not naturally drawn to being cogs.
:kick: & R

[Greyhound]

2. No love for informative post today, kick. n/t

[Waiting For Everyman]

4. Thanks, Greyhound! :)

[get the red out]

3. Great book

but the author does stray a bit too far into the "don't let them loose their family religion" area and seems to be pointing toward home schooling as a solution. Those were the parts that made me worry about the purpose of presenting the rest of the information, though I have to say I agreed with most of the book.

A long read, but worth it.

[Waiting For Everyman]

6. I can understand that impression.

I think public education is great thing, but it is too long for what it accomplishes, and it doesn't do much to prepare most people for their adult lives except to mold them into manageable worker-units. We used to have a not great, but pretty good vocational program in high schools, which at least helped people to get started in the choice of non-academic careers, and was a much better used of their time.

I think the ever-increasing educational requirements today, are only to feed the "degree industry" and the banks which finance it.

[MadHound]

5. Hmm, looks like another person who didn't like their school years

Are turning the skills they learned in school toward criticizing schools. Worse yet, they are using critiques that are antiquated and outdated. John Dewey, dead for decades, as is the vast amount of his pedagogy. New Math, died like the dinosaur that it was.

I suggest that you do two things, step into some modern education classrooms and see what is being taught to our future teachers. Then step into a modern classroom and see what is being taught to our current students. Until then, all you're doing is whining and carping about days gone by.

[Waiting For Everyman]

8. Matter of fact, I loved my school years.

The point isn't Dewey or new math. That was the initial change, which of course did not stand still since then. Maybe you should look at where we are, and how people are, and that has to come from somewhere.

These are THINKING institutions, are they not? And is there not a problem with the thinking in this country? I'd say "yes".

[MadHound]

9. So out of the myriad of causes

Ranging from parents to television to computer, you're blaming it all on the education system.

Wake the fuck up. Get yourself into a classroom and see what's going on.

Got to run now, got an elementary class to teach. Oh, one of the books I'm using, Zinn's People's History of the US.

But yes, I'm just not teaching the kiddies how to think.

What the fuck ever.

[Waiting For Everyman]

11. You seem to think I'm anti-teacher, but I'm not. Not at all.

Most of my family are teachers, going back generations. It's the "family biz", so to speak.

You're overlooking the people who are failed by the system. I'm saying there is a reason for that, and it isn't the teachers' fault. It's the design of the thing - it isn't meant to succeed. Some get through it, yes, but a lot of talent is destroyed by it too.

[reggie the dog]

15. I studied Dewey

at the university of Illinois at Chicago's education department in 2002 2003. His "Moral Principles in Education is valuable. On page 11 he says "here too, the ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must be interpreted in the broadest and freest spirit; it is equivalent to that training of a child which will give him such possession of himself that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the changes that are going on, but have power to shape and direct them."

Dewey is not too bad. What is wrong with educating people to be adaptable intelligent critical thinkers?

[BanzaiBonnie]

7. Gatto holds some controversial opinions,some I agree with, others not

He is correct about the timing of the decline in education. Somewhere after 1968, things started to unravel.


My belief is that all this focus on testing is detrimental to our children. Teaching children how to take tests is ridiculous. Teaching them to think critically would do them better. But Gatto is right that our masters do not want the vast majority educated, they want trained workers.


I remember taking the California tests at the end of every year. How I dreaded that testing. I ALWAYS felt like a failure because I didn't know all the answers on the test. I don't remember ever being told that they did not EXPECT us to know all the answers. I just took it for granted that if I was being tested then I should know the material. I pretty much gave up on school by the time I was in 6th grade. Until then I was probably near the top of my class because I was a voracious reader.

[Waiting For Everyman]

10. Exactly. We're all about quantifying everything, which has run amuck.

Btw, reading used to be how people educated themselves. When my daughter left school, that's what she did. I gave her my (fantastic) eighth grade teacher's booklist, and told her to read as much as she could. As I said, she made Dean's List in college - as a "hs drop out".

[dcindian]

12. It is the direction our media controlled society has taken.

Not the direction the education system has taken which leads us to this place.

I think you will find the largest drop in academic achievement occurs right along side with the increase in mass media's invasion into our daily lives. It is no circumstance that the positive education shows are few and the anti education shows are many when viewed along side the deterioration of education.


Watch Disney and you are likely to see: Teachers and good students are the enemy
Watch Japanese cartoons and you are likely to see: Teachers and good students are the hero's

[Mnemosyne]

13. Professors I had in the mid-eighties, had major complaints about the

school districts around this area. Several told me, "Kids from there just can't think for themselves. They can't write a paper."

I dropped out after 9th grade and did better in college than many of our HS grads here.

I believe training to be good worker bees was implemented and successful to this day here. Now the bees have no work which have lead to worse drug and alcohol problems than ever before; and it's been very bad here for quite awhile.

Between the addictions and under/unemployment, I believe my small town is almost over.

Heaven help kids that think and imagine too much. :(


Interesting info on Agnew. I may read more. Thanks!

[reggie the dog]

14. this quote is what it is all about

"What is "proper" social order? What does "right" social growth look like? If you don’t know you’re like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who did, too."

What is right and proper in a multi cultral society is to tolerate others and their lifestyles so long as they are not infringing on someone elses rights. Teaching kids to respect others and live as free individuals seems to me to be the right social growth and the proper social order. This is what I try to convey to my students.

[many a good man]

16. What a load of drivel

I never knew Dewey was such a fascist! :sarcasm:
:tinfoilhat:

[lildreamer316]

17. My mother's passion was her teaching.

I know she often wondered why I hated school so much.
I was always sorry to disappoint her,but I will never be sorry for not 'buying in' to the indoctrination I felt in school. However, I self-educated to a point, and paid enough attention to the basics to be able to communicate well.

Thank you for this informative and enlightening article.