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The Game Is Crooked

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the remarkable banality of Nazi-era organizational character calls attention to its excessive orderliness, unfailing courtesy, neat files, schedules for everything, efficient supply procedures, and the dullness and emotional poverty of Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the destruction of many lives without any particular malice. He even liked Jews. That he was part of a company dedicated to the conversion of animate into inanimate on a wholesale basis wasn’t his fault. It was just a job. His rational duty was to do his best at it. Unless mankind is allowed to possess some peculiar godlike dignity, a soul perhaps, Eichmann had a right to say to his critics—what difference between what I do and the slaughter of British beef to prevent mad cow disease? Nothing personal. Is it a shortage of people that makes you so angry?

That’s the real point, isn’t it? Once a mission is defined with pure objectivity, psychopathic procedure makes perfect sense. If men and women can think about genocide that way, you can understand why merely screwing up children wouldn’t trouble the sleep of school administrators. Their job isn’t about children; it’s about systems maintenance. The school institution has always had a strong shadow mission to refute the irrefutable fact that all kids want to learn to be their best and strongest selves. They don’t need to be forced to do this.

School is a tour de force designed to recreate human nature around a different premise, constructing proof that most kids don’t want to learn because they are biologically defective. School succeeds in this private aim only by failing in its public mission; that’s the knuckle-ball school critics always miss. Only a delicate blend of abject failures, midrange failures, and minor failures mixed together with a topping of success guarantees the ongoing health of the school enterprise. School is as good an illustration of the work of natural selection in institutional life as we have. The only drawback is, the game is crooked. Like an undertaker who murders to boost business or a glazier who breaks glass in the stillness of the night² to stimulate trade, schools create the problems they seem to exist to solve.

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