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In contrast he says, “Process your kid like a sardine, even at a good cannery, and don't be surprised when he comes out oily and dead.”
Teachers suffer from some of this deadening process also as they struggle within a system that plays them off against each other, while failing to reward or encourage excellence or worthy innovation. Teachers who buck the system, no matter how effective they are in helping students learn, find themselves relegated to the lowest, dirtiest assignments—nudging them towards “early retirement.”
Gatto fans will especially appreciate the next chapter, where he reveals much about his own disturbing childhood. It's really a story about how children generally learn life's important lessons from people who touch their lives in some meaningful way. He tells us, “My best teachers in Monongahela were Frank Pizzica, the high-rolling car dealer, old Mr. Marcus, the druggist wiser than a doctor, Binks McGregor, psychological haberdasher, and Bill Pulaski, the fun-loving mayor. All of them would understand my belief that we need to be hiring different kinds of people to teach, people who've proven themselves at life by bearing its pain like free spirits.... No one who hasn't known grief, challenge, success, failure. This is one of the most important books on education ever written. Its importance stretches even beyond the realm of education because Gatto presents his “critique” of education within the much larger context of societal influences and ideas. I especially appreciate Gatto’s treatment because, even though it’s accusatory at times, it recognizes that people operate out of personal motivations which they perceive to be good. Nevertheless, the elitist ideas of those who would impose their own agendas on others has created most of the problems of modem society.
I’ll resume my review with Gatto”s “visit” to Chautauqua, a grand example of elitist manipulation.
“Chautauqua” should be part of our common vocabulary, but most of us likely never heard of the place. Chautauqua was the scene of a nineteenth-century utopian experiment. “... Chautauqua did a great deal to homogenize the U.S. as a nation. It brought to the attention of America an impressive number of new ideas and concepts, always from a management perspective...even a partial list of developments credited to Chautauqua is impressive evidence of the influence of this early mass communication device... For instance, we have Chautauqua to thank in some part for the graduated income tax, for slum clearance as a business opportunity, juvenile courts, the school lunch program, free textbooks, a ‘balanced diet,’ physical fitness, the Camp-Fire Girls, the Boy Scout movement, pure food laws, and much, much more.”
Chautauqua created a new orthodoxy among societal “shapers.” They could perfect society by scientific management. However, it would require detaching people from human, emotional ways of dealing with things. Schooling was a form of “social machinery” to shape utopian citizens.
According to Gatto, many of the reformers were childless men who saw no problem with asserting the State’s role as primary parent of all children. Families have become “conditional entities”—they remain together as long as they fulfill State views on family nurturing. Destruction of families can be viewed as a positive development seen through utopian eyes.
Gatto uncovers evidence for purposeful ejaculation of young men. Massachusetts schools in the mid-1800s purposely worked to replace male teachers with female, primarily by paying women higher wages than men! They believed that young men “need the softening and refining influence which woman alone can give...” in their influential role as school teachers.
Another interesting sidenote to utopian attempts to shape society has to do with children’s literature. Gatto says, “Through children’s books, older generations announce their values, declare their aspirations, and make bids to socialize the young... In the 30-year period from 1890 to 1920, the children’s book industry became a creator, not a reflector of values.” Individualism and personal needs came to replace “God-consciousness” as themes in cbildren's stories.
Utopian goals have been realized to a large extent in America. “Like a black hole it grew, although no human being flourishes under such a regime or rests easily inside the logic of hundreds of systems inter-meshing into one master system, all demanding obedience from human parts. This is a religious vision, Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, a nightmare come to life.”
Gatto decries utopian ideas as a small group of elitists’ desire to control humanity. School is a major part of the control mechanism. “What should make you suspicious about School is its relentless compulsion. Why should this rich brawling, utterly successful nation ever have needed to resort to compulsion to realize a social ordering of people into school classes—unless advocates of force–-schooling were driven by philosophical beliefs not commonly shared?”
Utopianism is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Much of it traces its roots back through history, with European history a rich source of utopian ideas. Gatto uncovers a major (if not the major) underlying rationale for controlled societies: the use of coal power, mechanization, and the need for people to work the factories. “Enthusiasm for schooling is closely correlated with a nation’s intensity in mechanical industry, and that closely correlated with its natural heritage of coal.” Coal-based industries required families to leave their farms and reorganize their lives around the needs of the factory rather than the family.
Gatto shows how “coal power” birthed what he calls “administrative utopias” to control people’s lives. The need became pressing in the 1800s and early 1900s with the huge influxes of immigrants, particularly the Irish and Italian Catholics. Industry needed cheap labor, but cities were overwhelmed with so many people of different cultures and religious beliefs. Protestants joined with Horace Mann and other utopians to protect their culture, not realizing that secular schools would eventually turn on them and undermine their own worldviews.
Digging deeper, Gatto discovered that inferior schools are actually essential to the industrialized society of the utopians. “... scientifically efficient schooling...does build national wealth and it does lead to endless scientific advances... The truth is that America’s unprecedented global power and spectacular material wealth is a direct product of a third-rate educational system, upon whose inefficiency in developing intellect and character it depends. If we educated better we could not sustain the corporate utopia we have made. Schools build national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality and family life. It’s a trade-off.”
Poorly-educated workers are less likely to challenge the powers that be. Gatto summarizes the government position as stated in the U.S. Bureau of Education’s Circular of Information, published in April 1872: “....‘inculcating knowledge’ teaches workers to be able to ‘perceive and calculate their grievances,’ thus making them ‘more redoubtable foes’ in labor struggles.” The Circular goes on to say, “We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.”
Also, children needed to be removed from and restrained from the workplace because mechanization reduced the number of laborers needed. Jobs needed to be reserved for adults, so school became a place to occupy children.
Here is where Gatto’s handling of the subject matter really shines. While discussing the horrific results of industrialization and schooling, he does not characterize those who managed such societal changes as evil, corrupt people, but as true believers who saw no other way to accomplish what they viewed as bringing about the best for society. While disagreeing with their motivation and understanding of human nature, he credits them with an earnestness to “do good.” Yet, there is a certain flavor of inevitability. Gatto summarizes, “why school after Coal had to become the way it did: To prevent overproduction of brains and character, to create a mass population in harmony with the capacities of mass production, to protect the war-making power and wealth-making power from labor disruption, and to diffuse the revolutionary potential of science upon which the whole edifice was built.”
Remember the movie Cheaper by the Dozen? Mr. Gilbreth, the father in the movie, was actually a real-life character who was a devotee of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, also known as Taylorism. Gilbreth managed his children with a stopwatch and machine-like efficiency. Taylor’s ideas focused on the primacy of the system over individuals. People must be made to fit the system, even if that meant psychological manipulation. Scientific management was quickly adopted by businesses, shortly followed by schools.
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