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Prologue
The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t
exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted
to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central
proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first
had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.
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PART ONE
Of Schooling, Education, And Myself
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| Chapter One
The Way It Used To Be
Our official assumptions about the nature of modern
childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and
given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those
merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral
Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of
this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh.
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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.”
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| Chapter Three
Eyeless In Gaza
Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially
where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show
that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was
between 93 and 100 percent, wherever such a thing mattered. Yet
compulsory schooling existed nowhere. Between the two world wars,
schoolmen seem to have been assigned the task of terminating our
universal reading proficiency.
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| Chapter Four
I Quit, I Think
I lived through the great transformation which
turned schools from often useful places into laboratories of state
experimentation with the lives of children, a form of pornography
masquerading as pedagogical science. All theories of child-rearing talk
in averages, but the evidence of your own eyes and ears tells you that
average men and women don’t really exist except as a statistical
conceit.
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PART TWO
The Foundations Of Schooling
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| Chapter Five
True Believers And The
Unspeakable Chautauqua
From start to finish, school as we know it is a tale of true believers
and how they took the children to a land far away. All of us have a tiny
element of true believer in our makeups. You have only to reflect on
some of your own wild inner urges and the lunatic gleam that comes into
your own eyes on those occasions to begin to understand what might
happen if those impulses were made a permanent condition.
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| Chapter Six
The Lure Of Utopia
Presumably humane utopian interventions like compulsion schooling aren’t
always the blessing they appear to be. For instance, Sir Humphrey Davy’s
safety lamp saved thousands of coalminers from gruesome death, but it
wasted many more lives than it rescued. That lamp alone allowed the coal
industry to grow rapidly, exposing miners to mortal danger for which
there is no protection. What Davy did for coal producers, forced
schooling has done for the corporate economy.
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| Chapter Seven
The Prussian Connection
In 1935, at the University of Chicago’s experimental school where John
Dewey had once held sway, Howard C. Hill, head of the social science
department, published an inspirational textbook called The Life and Work
of the Citizen. The title page clearly shows four cartoon hands
symbolizing law, order, science, and the trades interlocked to form a
perfect swastika. By 1935, Prussian pattern and Prussian goals had
embedded themselves so deeply into the vitals of institutional schooling
that hardly a soul noticed the traditional purposes of the enterprise
were being abandoned.
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| Chapter Eight
A Coal-Fired Dream World
A dramatic shift to mass production and mass schooling occurred in the
same heady rush. Mass production could not be rationalized unless the
population accepted massification. In a democratic republic, school was
the only reliable long-range instrument available to accomplish this.
Older American forms of schooling would not have been equal to the
responsibility which coal, steam, steel, and machinery laid upon the
national leadership. Coal demanded the schools we have and so we got
them—as an ultimate act of rationality.
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| Chapter Nine
The Cult Of Scientific Management
“In the past,” Frederick Taylor wrote, “Man has been first. In the
future, System must be first.” The thought processes of the
standardized worker had to be standardized, too, in order to render him
a dependable consumer. Scientific management spread rapidly from the
factory into the schools to seek this goal.
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PART THREE
A Personal Interlude
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| Chapter Ten
My Green River
The great destructive myth of the twentieth century was the aggressive
contention that a child could not grow up correctly in the unique
circumstances of his own family. Forced schooling was the principal
agency broadcasting this attitude.
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PART FOUR
Metamorphosis
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| Chapter Eleven
The Crunch
The experience of global war gave official school reform a grand taste
for what was possible. Government intervention was proclaimed the
antidote for all dissent. In every nook and cranny of American life new
social organizations flourished, all feeding on intervention into
personal sovereignty and family life. A new republic was here at last
just as Herbert Croly announced, and government school was its church.
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| Chapter Twelve
Daughters Of The Barons
of Runnemede
The new compulsion-school institution was assigned the
task of fixing the social order into place, albeit with the cautions of
Pareto and Mosca kept in mind. Society was to reflect the needs of
modern corporate organization and the requirements of rational
evolution. The best breeding stock had to be protected and displayed.
The supreme challenge was to specify who was who in the new hierarchical
order.
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| Chapter Thirteen
The Empty Child
The basic hypothesis of utopia-building is that the structure of
personhood can be broken and reformed again and again. The notion of
empty children was the most important concept which inspired social
architects and engineers to believe that schools could indeed be remade
into socialization laboratories.
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| Chapter Fourteen
Absolute Absolution
God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn’t
because of any constitutional proscription—there was none that anyone
had been able to find in over a century and a half—but because the
political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual
tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is.
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| Chapter Fifteen
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Schooling
None of the familiar school sequences is defensible according to the
rules of evidence, all are arbitrary; most grounded in superstition or
aesthetic prejudice of one sort or another. Pestalozzi’s basic “Simple
to Complex” formulation, for instance, is a prescription for disaster
in the classroom.
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PART FIVE
The Problem Of Modern Schooling
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| Chapter Sixteen
A Conspiracy Against Ourselves
Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school
thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with
petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which
all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free
will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It’s a
bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under
the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food,
entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the
goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it.
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| Chapter Seventeen
The Politics Of Schooling
At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a
brilliantly designed power fragmentation system which distributes
decision-making so widely among so many warring interests that
large-scale change is impossible without a guidebook. Few insiders
understand how to steer this ship and the few who do may have lost the
will to control it.
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| Chapter Eighteen
Breaking Out Of The Trap
The only conceivable way to break out of this trap is
to repudiate any further centralization of schooling in the form of
national goals, national tests, national teaching licenses,
school-to-work plans, and the rest of the utopian package which
accompanies these. Schooling must be desystematized, the system must be
put to death. Adam Smith has correctly instructed us for more than two
centuries now that the wealth of nations is the product of freedom, not
of tutelage. The connection between the corporate economy, national
politics, and schooling is a disease of collectivism which must be
broken if children are to become sovereign, creative adults, capable of
lifting a free society to unimaginable heights. The rational manage-
ment model has damaged the roots of a free society and the free market
it claims to defend.
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| Epilogue
What has happened in our schools was foreseen long ago
by Jefferson. We have been recolonized silently in a second American
Revolution. Time to take our script from this country’s revolutionary
start, time to renew traditional hostility toward hierarchy and
tutelage. We became a unique nation from the bottom up, that is the only
way to rebuild a worthy concept of education.
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| About The Books I Used
Index
Acknowledgments
About The Author |