John Taylor Gatto: ‘Prussia had entrenched itself deep into the bowels of American institutional schooling’
It’s time to stop focusing on the symptoms and time to start attacking the disease, Part XIV
This is a continuation of my series on the government school system.
My contention is that we need to stop focusing on the symptoms of the problems in the system, such as “CRT” and “woke ideology,” and we need to start attacking the insidious disease, which is the government school system itself.
The basis of this series is to expose readers to the work of John Taylor Gatto, a former New York State Teacher of the Year who became a critic of the monstrous system he once worked for after quitting. As I wrote, I’ve heard nobody better explain how wicked and demonic the system itself is than from Gatto.
Brett Veinotte, of The School Sucks Project, put out a series of videos reading excerpts from Gatto’s 2000 book, “The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling.”
Here’s Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII and XIII:
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-why-are-you-so
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-government-schooling
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-americans-failed
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-what-modern-schooling
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-the-way-we-used
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-among-free-men
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-students-learn
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-post-wwii-school
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-school-was-engineered
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-once-you-trust
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-the-particular
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-schools-were-intended
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/john-taylor-gatto-teachers-are-screened
This is Part XIV:
“Administrative utopias are a peculiar kind of dreaming by those in power, driven by an urge to arrange the lives of others, organizing them for production, combat, or detention. The operating principles of administrative utopia are hierarchy, discipline, regimentation, strict order, rational planning, a geometrical environment, a production line, a cellblock, and a form of welfarism. Government schools and some private schools pass such parameters with flying colors. In one sense, administrative utopias are laboratories for exploring the technology of subjection and as such belong to a precise subdivision of pornographic art: total surveillance and total control of the helpless. The aim and mode of administrative utopia is to bestow order and assistance on an unwilling population: to provide its clothing and food. To schedule it.
In a masterpiece of cosmic misjudgment, the phrenologist George Combe wrote Horace Mann on November 14, 1843:
‘The Prussian and Saxon governments by means of their schools and their just laws and rational public administration are doing a good deal to bring their people into a rational and moral condition. It is pretty obvious to thinking men that a few years more of this cultivation will lead to the development of free institutions in Germany.’
“Earlier that year, on May 21, 1843, Mann had written to Combe: ‘I want to find out what are the results, as well as the workings of the famous Prussian system.’ Just three years earlier, with the election of Marcus Morton as governor of Massachusetts, a serious challenge had been presented to Mann and his Board of Education and the air of Prussianism surrounding it and its manufacturer/politician friends. A House committee was directed to look into the new Board of Education and its plan to undertake a teacher’s college with $10,000 put up by industrialist Edmund Dwight. Four days after its assignment, the majority reported out a bill to kill the board! Discontinue the Normal School experiment, it said, and give Dwight his money back:
‘If the Board has any actual power, it is a dangerous power, touching directly upon the rights and duties of the Legislature; if it has no power, why continue its existence at an annual expense to the commonwealth?’
“But the House committee did more; it warned explicitly that this board really wanted to install a Prussian system of education in Massachusetts, to put ‘a monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary in every respect to the true spirit of our democratical institutions.’ The vote of the House on this was the single greatest victory of Mann’s political career (245 to 182 vote to continue the Board of Education). A 32-vote swing might have given us a much different twentieth century than the one we saw.
Mann arrived in Prussia when its schools were closed for vacation. He toured empty classrooms, spoke with authorities, interviewed vacationing schoolmasters, and read piles of dusty official reports. Yet from this nonexperience he claimed to come away with a strong sense of the professional competence of Prussian teachers! All ‘admirably qualified and full of animation!’ His wife Mary, of the famous Peabodys, wrote home: ‘We have not seen a teacher with a book in his hand in all Prussia; no, not one!’ This wasn’t surprising, for they hardly saw teachers at all.
Equally impressive, he wrote, was the wonderful obedience of children; these German kinder had “innate respect for superior years.” The German teacher corps? ‘The finest collection of men I have ever seen — full of intelligence, dignity, benevolence, kindness and bearing….’ Never, says Mann, did he witness ‘an instance of harshness and severity. All is kind, encouraging, animating, sympathizing.’ On the basis of imagining this miraculous vision of exactly the Prussia he wanted to see, Mann made a special plea for changes in the teaching of reading. He criticized the standard American practice of beginning with the alphabet and moving to syllables, urging his readers to consider the superior merit of teaching entire words from the beginning. ‘I am satisfied,’ he said, ‘our greatest error in teaching lies in beginning with the alphabet.’
The heart of Mann’s most famous Report to the Boston School Committee, the legendary Seventh, rings a familiar theme in American affairs. It seems even then we were falling behind! This time, behind the Prussians in education. In order to catch up, it was mandatory to create a professional corps of teachers and a systematic curriculum, just as the Prussians had. Mann fervently implored the board to accept his prescription… while there was still time! The note of hysteria is a drum roll sounding throughout Mann’s entire career; together with the vilification of his opponents, it constitutes much of Mann’s spiritual signature.
That fall, the Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools published its 150-page rebuttal of Mann’s Report. It attacked the normal schools proposal as a vehicle for propaganda for Mann’s ‘hot bed theories, in which the projectors have disregarded experience and observation.’ It belittled his advocacy of phrenology and charged Mann with attempting to excite the prejudices of the ignorant. The second attack was against the teacher-centered nonbook presentations of Prussian classrooms, insisting the psychological result of these was to break student potential ‘for forming the habit of independent and individual effort.’ The third attack was against the ‘word method’ in teaching reading, and in defense of the traditional alphabet method. Lastly, it attacked Mann’s belief that interest was a better motivator to learning than discipline: ‘Duty should come first and pleasure should grow out of the discharge of it.’ Thus was framed a profound conflict between the old world of the Puritans and the new psychological strategy of the Germans.
Sixty years later, amid a well-coordinated attempt on the part of industrialists and financiers to transfer power over money and interest rates from elected representatives of the American people to a ‘Federal Reserve’ of centralized private banking interests, George Reynolds, president of the American Bankers Association, rose before an audience on September 13, 1909, to declare himself flatly in favor of a central bank modeled after the German Reichsbank. As he spoke, the schools of the United States were being forcibly rebuilt on Prussian lines.
On September 14, 1909, in Boston, the president of the United States, William Howard Taft, instructed the country that it should ‘take up seriously’ the problem of establishing a centralized bank on the German model. As The Wall Street Journal put it, an important step in the education of Americans would soon be taken to translate the ‘realm of theory’ into ‘practical politics,’ in pedagogy as well as finance.Dramatic, symbolic evidence of what was working deep in the bowels of the school institution surfaced in 1935. At the University of Chicago’s experimental high school, the head of the Social Science department, Howard C. Hill, published an inspirational textbook, The Life and Work of the Citizen. It is decorated throughout with the fasces, symbol of the Fascist movement, an emblem binding government and corporation together as one entity. Mussolini had arrived in America.
The fasces are strange hybridized images, one might almost say Americanized. The bundle of sticks wrapped around a two-headed axe, the classic Italian Fascist image, had been decisively altered. Now the sticks are wrapped around a sword. They appear on the spine of this high school text, on the decorative page introducing Part One, again on a similar page for Part Two, and are repeated on Part Three and Part Four as well. There are also fierce, military eagles hovering above those pages.
The strangest decoration of all is on the title page, a weird interlock of hands and wrists which, with only a few slight alterations of its structural members, would be a living swastika. The legend announces it as representing the ‘united strength’ of Law, Order, Science, and the Trades. Where the strength of America had been traditionally located in our First Amendment guarantee of argument, now the Prussian connection was shifting the locus of attention in school to cooperation, with both working and professional classes sandwiched between the watchful eye of Law and Order. Prussia had entrenched itself deep into the bowels of American institutional schooling.”