Footnote to
The Former Student: A Philosophically Horrific Satireand
Anguish Tabulator_____________________________________________________________________
2009.09.26I am really inspired by The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, recommended to me by a mysterious malcontent who goes by the AKA purple1.
People who know who they are make trouble for schools.
One method people use to find out who they are becoming, before others do, is to keep a journal, where they log what attracts their attention, along with some commentary. In this way, you get to listen to yourself instead of listening only to others.
This is great advice. I encourage this as well.
Books can serve as mentors if you learn to read intensely, with every sense alert to nuances. Books can change your life, as mentors do.
Do those of us who know who we are and who are not afraid of revealing who we are make trouble for those who want us to play our assigned roles, read our scripts, and act as if we were what society tells us we are?
“There was a time when the artist mobilized all his defects to produce a work which concealed himself; the notion of exposing his life to the public probably NEVER occurred to him. We do not imagine Dante or Shakespeare keeping track of the trifling incidents of their lives in order to bring them to other people’s attention. Perhaps they even preferred giving a false image of what they were.” ~ Emile M. Cioran
Will there be an audience appreciative of my insights or do I write for my own satisfaction and relief?
2009.09.29Removing my presence from the Internet is something I want to do long before removing my presence from this realm altogether. I want to live as though I will die soon, and yet this, for some reason, compels me to go through my notebooks and type up what is relevant.
Schooling is not about intellectual development, not about character development, but about the inculcation of a synthetic culture in children, one designed to condition its subjects to a continual adjusting of their lives by unseen authorities. Anti-intellectual schooling is determined by the attitudes and the needs of prominent businessmen. Even at the university level, the mathematics departments seem to be funded by “applied math,” technological interests of businessmen.
The crux of the difference between education and schooling is that education nurtures knowledge and comprehension, whereas schooling nurtures discipline and obedience. Schooling, in concert with a controlled workplace retards the development of imagination … intentionally.
The psychological tool is alienation. The trick is to alienate us from our selves so that we can’t turn inward for strength!
This is the essence of scientific management.
Gatto lists what centralized schooling should deliver:
(1)Obedient soldiers to the army
(2)Obedient workers to the factories, farms, and other workplaces
(3)Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function
(4)Well-subordinated clerks for industry
(5)Citizens who think alike on mass issues
(6)National uniformity in thought, law, and deed
Welcome to Orwell’s Nightmare, where Freedom is Slavery and Schools make people stupid.
A productive work-force, a growing economy, high material standards of living, high-tech medicine, and a strong military could not be accomplished without second rate systems of education. People like President Obama make the error of equating material prosperity and power with education when affluence in the United States is built, not on education, but schooling.
The truth is that Amerika’s global power and wealth is a direct product of a third-rate educational system, upon whose inefficiency in developing intellect and character depends. If we were educated better, we could not sustain this corporate utopia/distopia. Schools build wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty. (Gatto 2001)
John Taylor Gatto claims that mass society, industrial civilization itself, depends on masses of “dumb” people not only to serve in the “work-force,” but to justify the careers of the managers and engineers of mass society, which include the politicians, ministers, psychiatrists, judges and their court clerks, prosecutors, etc … as well as the Slave Patrol (all forms of police, from the military to the security guard). It sounds cruel and even arrogant to point this out, but it’s true. Consider the Unions of prison guards who think it is in their best interest to keep the prisons full. Job security. Priestly castes depend on the status quo to secure their artificial positions of authority. Many suicides are simply displaying their ultimate POWER in this social arrangement.
People only appear dumb. It has to be an act. It’s inauthentic. I believe the real difference between so-called “intellectuals” and every-day, keep-it-simple, don’t-worry-be-happy types is the latter’s preference to become absorbed in practical pragmatic issues, whereas the former may be more focused on the universal dilemma, which is existence itself.
Where the masses are distracted with the practical, the one who “suffers” an excess of consciousness is concerned with trying to figure out how it has “fallen” into this predicament.
The position of the mental health industry ought to give us a clue: There is an inclination to avoid suffering. If the price to be paid for developing our powers of perception is “mental anguish,” it appears that most prefer less anguish. That’s what I find so inauthentic about psychiatry and even pop philosophy (the self-help therapy scams that go on and on about the “power” of positive thinking). Rather than recognizing mental and emotional disturbances as signals from the human brain responding to its environs, the “experts” and “professionals” try to sell a cure for the unpleasantness of the symptoms rather than acknowledging the legitimacy of the mental states experienced by the so-called sick.
This is like silencing a fire alarm and ignoring the flames.
“The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tend to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined. It isn’t real.”
“Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
Recall that, essentially, a gort is someone who has missed the bottom line in human consciousness. There is a point beyond which one may not be using one’s brain to the full extent necessary to qualify for a membership card to the human race.
Just because an individual has all the socially approved credentials does not mean they are really using their brains much at all. Think of the “programs” the managers and engineers come up with … Programs are for machines … machines that only understand on and off, if x then y … Machines don’t have consciousness or the power of reflection.
When the program has an error, the electricity follows the instructions blindly.
Mass society requires stupidity. Civilization would collapse without stupidity. Were a generation of youth be encouraged to develop their powers of perception, their critical thinking skills, and gain confidence in following their thoughts to their conclusions, our current social order would be seriously undermined.
philistine – a person who is lacking in or hostile or smugly indifferent to intellectual pursuits, aesthetic refinement, etc., or is contentedly commonplace in ideas and tastes, i.e., the phonies who fancy themselves “the middle class.”
2009.09.30The French Revolution was regarded as the work of a horde of underemployed intellectuals. Are extremely productive workers often deficient in their intellectual capacity? An even more suggestive question would be, “Just how many ‘successful businessmen’ or corporate executives show any interest in Hesse’s Stepppenwolf?”
Richard Stites described Fredrick W. Taylor as an anti-intellectual and a hater of individuals. One could even proclaim with confidence that Taylor was one of the ****s who had such an influence of uniformity and efficiency in the workplace.
I feel I am now hacking at the roots of the poisonous tree. Psychology has been a business from the start – an aggressive business lobbying for jobs and school contracts. Fabian practitioners developed Hegelian principles which they taught alongside Morgan bankers. One Hegelianism was that to push ideas efficiently, it was necessary to co-opt both the political left as well as the political right. They work with military precision to get control of the education of the children of the land.
To prevent mentally independent individuals who stress development of the intellect from becoming role models and mentors, two solutions were proposed around 1903 to make “instruction” teacher-proof: (1) grow a hierarchy of non-teaching administrators (principals, assistant principals, subject coordinators, guidance counselors); (2) the standardized test and subsequent test scores would signal the presence of a deviant teacher who strayed too far from “approved texts.”
Grandfathers of the Universe, behold me! Arthur Schopenhauer, behold me! Hegel, that charlatan, is regarded as “the most influential intellectual thinker in modern history” – what a scandal!
Hegel was important wherever strict social control was an issue. “Ambitious states couldn’t let a single child escape,” said Hegel!
So, when did the Heinrichs and Malmbergs arrive in North America? When did Heinrich become Hentrich? Let’s see … Great Grandmother was born around 1895, so probably around 1910 or thereabouts. By as early as 1882 there had been a struggle to preserve the “American social order.” European immigrants were polarizing the country. There was to be an official Amerikan Highway built from police manuals and schoolteacher training texts.
Between 1890 and 1920, when those who spawned me would have arrived in the Divided Snakes of Amerika, “complete medical control” was launched with a vengeance. Few intimidations are more effective than the threat of a stay in an insane asylum. Between 1890 and 1920, the amount of those committed to institutional confinement more than doubled. Gatto’s work continues to attract my attention. He explores the role the then new discipline of psychology played in social control. Because many immigrants in the United States actually favored Germany over England in the pre World War I conflict, and since the managerial class of the “colonies” was drawn from the Church of England gentry and aristocrats, there was pressure to socialize German children in Amerika as English.
[cyber-footnote:
Schools were “behavioral engineering plants.” Behavioral “healthcare”
Urrrrrrrrr ….. All that remained was to convince kids and their parents that there was no place to hide. In 1965 the ESE Act allowed for “interventions” by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, agencies, and various specialists. All were invited to use schools as satellite offices, in urban ghettos, as a primary office. Now it was the law.
The corporations which offer employment, endow university museums, schools, and churches, actually have a life and death stake in the formation of “correct psychological attitudes” among children toward production and consumption. Schools are about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits. Consumption became the most important end in itself. Good consumers are rewarded with artificial status while the frugal are marginalized as villains. Strong spirits are dangerous to mass societies.
Mass consumption depends on discontent. Spiritually contented individuals are dangerous on many levels and for several reasons. They don’t make reliable servants because they won’t jump at every command. Corporate and financial capitalism are hardly possible on a massive scale once a population finds its spiritual center. Materialistic people tend to assign a price to everything and they avoid spending too much time with those who promise no immediate payback.
John Taylor Gatto examines the perplexity of the corporate state. What is the modern state to do with its masses once they have been degraded to the ranks of the proletariat, and then further rendered superfluous by a stream of inventions? Isn’t this the problem Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was exploring in his first novel, Player Piano? Our modern corporate multiplex society has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, singers, film makers, whiskey makers, marijuana growers and renegade intellectuals – no outlet except for corporate work.
What indoctrination strategies are used for building and using psychological tools to create compliant children? Once the doctrine of “exclusive salvation” for the cooperative (and damnation for the critic) is clearly established, rulers will never be seriously questioned. People like myself make do with what they have, but resourcefulness and frugality are “pseudo-criminal” behaviors to a mass-production economy. Such examples threaten to infect others with the same fatal sedition.
School can never deal with really important things. Only education can teach us that quests don’t always work; that even worthy lives most often end in tragedy; that money can’t prevent this; that failure is a regular part of the human condition; that you will never understand evil; that serious pursuits are almost always lonely; that you can’t negotiate love; that money can’t buy much that really matters; that happiness is free.” (Gatto)
“The history of the Hmong yields several lessons that anyone who deals with them might do well to remember. Among the most obvious are that the Hmong do not like to take orders; that they do not like to lose; that they would rather flee, fight, or die, than surrender; that they are not intimidated by being outnumbered, that they are rarely persuaded that the customs of other cultures, even those more powerful than their own, are superior; that they are capable of getting very angry … Those who have tried to defeat, deceive, govern, regulate, constrain, assimilate, or patronize the Hmong, have, as a rule, disliked them intensely.” (Anne Fadiman: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down)