Title : 75. So Fervently Do We Believe: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
link : 75. So Fervently Do We Believe: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
75. So Fervently Do We Believe: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter Six
The Lure of Utopia
Every morning when you picked up your newspaper you would read of some new scheme
for saving the world. ..soon all the zealots, all the Come-Outers, all the transcendentalists
of Boston gathered at the Chardon Street Chapel and harangued each other for three
mortal days. They talked on nonresistance and the Sabbath reform, of the Church and the
Ministry, and they arrived at no conclusions. "It was the most singular collection of
strange specimens of humanity that was ever assembled, " wrote Edmund Quincy, and
Emerson was even more specific: "Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers,
Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers,
Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, all came successively to the top
and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach or
protest. ...There was some-thing artificial about the Chardon Street debates, there was a
hothouse atmosphere in the chapel. There was too much suffering fools gladly, there was
too much talk, too much display of learning and of wit, and there was, for all the talk of
tolerance, an unchristian spirit.
— Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker
So Fervently Do We Believe
The cries of true believers are all around the history of schooling, thick as gulls at a
garbage dump.
School principal Debbie Reeves of the upscale Barnwell Elementary School in an Atlanta
suburb was quoted recently by the USA Today newspaper as the author of this amazing
testimonial of true belief, "I'm not sure you ever get to the point you have enough
technology. We just believe so fervently in it."
It's that panting excitement you want to keep an eye out for, that exaggerated belief in
human perfectibility that Tocqueville noticed in Americans 170 years ago. The same
newspaper article wanders through the San Juan Elementary School in the very heart of
Silicon Valley. There, obsolete computers sit idle in neat rows at the back of a spacious
media center where years ago a highly touted "open classroom" with a sunken common
area drew similar enthusiasm. The school lacks resources for the frequent updates needed
to boast state-of-the-art equipment. A district employee said: "One dying technology on
top of a former dying technology, sort of like layers of an archaeological dig."
America has always been a land congenial to Utopian thought. The Mayflower Compact
is a testimonial to this. Although its signers were trapped in history, they were ahistorical,
too, capable of acts and conceptions beyond the imagination of their parents. The very
thinness of constituted authority, the high percentage of males as colonists — homeless,
orphaned, discarded, marginally attached, uprooted males — encouraged dreams of a
better time to come. Here was soil for a better world where kindly strangers take charge
of children, loving and rearing them more skillfully than their ignorant parents had ever
done.
Religion flourished in the same medium, too, particularly the Independent and Dissenting
religious traditions of England. The extreme rationalism of the Socinian heresy and
deism, twin roots of America's passionate romance with science and technology to come,
flourished too. Most American sects were built on a Christian base, but the absence of
effective state or church monopoly authority in early America allowed 250 years of
exploration into a transcendental dimension no other Western nation ever experienced in
modern history, leaving a wake of sects and private pilgrimages which made America the
heir of ancient Israel — a place where everyone, even free thinkers, actively trusted in a
god of some sort.
Without Pope or Patriarch, without an Archbishop of Canterbury, the episcopal principle
behind state and corporate churches lacked teeth, allowing people here to find their own
way in the region of soul and spirit. This turned out to be fortunate, a precondition for our
laboratory policy of national utopianism which required that every sort of visionary be
given scope to make a case. It was a matter of degree, of course. Most Americans, most
of the time, were much like people back in England, Scotland, Scandinavia, Germany,
and Ireland, from which domains they had originally derived. After all, the Revolution
itself was prosecuted by less than a quarter of our population. But enough of the other
sort existed as social yeast that nobody could long escape some plan, scheme,
exhortation, or tract designed to lead the faithful into one or another Promised Land. For
the most part, Old Testament principles reigned, not New, and the Prophets had a good
part of the national ear.
From 1830 to 1900, over one thousand Utopian colonies flourished around the country,
colonies which mixed the races, like Fanny Wright's Neshoba in Tennessee, colonies
built around intensive schooling like New Harmony in Indiana, colonies which
encouraged free love and commonly shared sexual partners as did the Perfectionists at
Oneida in upstate New York. In the wonderful tapestry of American Utopian thought and
practice, one unifying thread stands out clearly. Long before the notion of forced
schooling became household reality, Utopian architects universally recognized that
schooling was the key to breaking with the past. The young had to be isolated, and drilled
in the correct way of looking at things or all would fall apart when they grew up. Only
the tiniest number of these intentional communities ever did solve that problem, and so
almost all vanished after a brief moment. But the idea itself lingered on.
In this chapter I want to push a bit into the lure of Utopia, because this strain in human
nature crisscrosses the growth curve of compulsion schooling at many junctures. Think of
it as a search for the formula to change human nature in order to build paradise on earth.
Such an idea is in flagrant opposition to the dominant religion of the Western world,
whose theology teaches that human nature is permanently flawed, that all human
salvation must be individually undertaken.
Even if you aren't used to considering school this way, it isn't hard to see that a
curriculum to reach the first end would have to be different from that necessary to reach
the second, and the purpose of the educator is all important. It is simply impossible to
evaluate what you see in a school without knowing its purpose, but if local administrators
have no real idea why they do what they do — why they administer standardized tests, for
instance, then any statement of purpose made by the local school can only confuse the
investigator. To pursue the elusive purpose or purposes of American schooling as they
were conceived about a century ago requires that we wander afield from the classroom
into some flower beds of Utopian aspiration which reared their head in an earlier
America.
The Necessity Of Detachment
Thus Article 75. So Fervently Do We Believe: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
That's an article 75. So Fervently Do We Believe: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org This time, hopefully can give benefits to all of you. well, see you in posting other articles.
You are now reading the article 75. So Fervently Do We Believe: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org with the link address https://polennews.blogspot.com/2019/03/75-so-fervently-do-we-believe.html
0 Response to "75. So Fervently Do We Believe: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org"
Post a Comment