The Underground History Of American Education
By John Taylor Gatto
Chapter Thirteen
The Empty Child
Walden Two (1948) B.F. Skinner. This utopist is a psychologist, inventor of a mechanical
baby-tender, presently engaged on experiments testing the habit capacities of pigeons.
Halfway through this contemporary utopia, the reader may feel sure, as we did, that this
is a beautifully ironic satire on what has been called "behavioral engineering".... Of all
the dictatorships espoused by utopists, this is the most profound....The citizen of this ideal
society is placed during his first year in a sterile cubicle, wherein the conditioning
begins.... In conclusion, the perpetrator of this "modern" utopia looks down from a
nearby hill of the community which is his handiwork and proclaims: "I like to play God!"
— Negley and Patrick, The Quest For Utopia
Miss Skinner Sleeps Scientifically
At the university people used to call Kings College before the American Revolution, I
lived for a time under a psychological regime called behaviorism in the last golden
moments before Mind Science took over American schooling. At Columbia, I was in on
the transformation without ever knowing it. By the time it happened, I had shape-shifted
into a schoolteacher, assigned to spend my adult life as a technician in the human rat cage
we call public education.
Although I may flatter myself, for one brief instant I think I was the summer favorite of
Dr. Fred S. Keller at Columbia, a leading behaviorist of the late 1950s whose own college
textbook was dedicated to his mentor, B.F. Skinner, that most famous of all behaviorists
from Harvard. Skinner was then rearing his own infant daughter in a closed container
with a window, much like keeping a baby in an aquarium, a device somewhat misdescribed in the famous article "Baby in a Box," (Ladies Home Journal, September 28,
1945).
Italian parents giving their own children a glass of wine in those days might have ended
up in jail and their children in foster care, but what Skinner did was perfectly legal. For
all I know, it still is. What happened to Miss Skinner? Apparently she was eventually sent
to a famous progressive school the very opposite of a rat-conditioning cage, and grew up
to be an artist.
Speaking of boxes, Skinner commanded boxes of legal tender lecturing and consulting
with business executives on the secrets of mass behavior he had presumably learned by
watching trapped rats. From a marketing standpoint, the hardest task the rising field of
behavioral psychology had in peddling its wares was masking its basic stimulus-response
message (albeit one with a tiny twist) in enough different ways to justify calling
behaviorism "a school." Fat consultancies were beginning to be available in the postwar
years, but the total lore of behaviorism could be learned in about a day, so its
embarrassing thinness required fast footwork to conceal. Being a behaviorist then would
hardly have taxed the intellect of a parking lot attendant; it still doesn’t.
In those days, the U.S. Government was buying heavily into these not-so-secret secrets,
as if anticipating that needy moment scheduled to arrive at the end of the twentieth
century when Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies would write for Harper’s
in a voice freighted with doom:
The problem is starkly simple. An astonishingly large and increasing number of human
beings are not needed or wanted to make the goods or provide the services that the paying
customers of the world can afford.
In the decades prior to this Malthusian assessment, a whole psychological Institute for
Social Cookery sprang up like a toadstool in the United States to offer recipe books for
America’s future. Even then they knew that 80 percent of the next generation was neither
needed nor wanted. Remedies had to be found to dispose of the menace psychologically.
Skinner had wonderful recipes, better than anyone’s. Not surprisingly, his procedures
possessed a vague familiarity to readers listed in the Blue Book or the Social Register,
people whose culture made them familiar with the training of dogs and falcons. Skinner
had recipes for bed wetting, for interpersonal success, for management of labor, for
hugging, for decision-making. His industrial group prepackaged hypotheses to train
anyone for any situation. By 1957, his machines constituted the psychological technology
of choice in institutions with helpless populations: juvenile detention centers, homes for
the retarded, homes for wayward mothers, adoption agencies, orphan asylums—
everywhere the image of childhood was most debased. The pot of gold at the end of
Skinner’s rainbow was School.
Behaviorism’s main psychological rival in 1957 was psychoanalysis, but this rival had
lost momentum by the time big government checks were available to buy psychological
services. There were many demerits against psychoanalysis: its primitive narrative
theory, besides sounding weird, had a desperate time proving anything statistically. Its
basic technique required simple data to be elaborated beyond the bounds of credibility.
Even where that was tolerable, it was useless in a modern school setting built around a
simulacrum of precision in labeling.
Social learning theorists, many academic psychiatrists, anthropologists, or other
specialists identified with a university or famous institution like the Mayo Clinic, were
behaviorism’s closest cash competition. But behind the complex exterior webs they wove
about social behavior, all were really behaviorists at heart. Though they spun theory in
the mood of Rousseau, the payoff in each case came down to selling behavioral
prescriptions to the policy classes. Their instincts might lead them into lyrical flights that
could link rock falls in the Crab Nebula to the fall of sparrows in Monongahela, but the
bread and butter argument was that mass populations could be and should be controlled
by the proper use of carrots and sticks.
Another respectable rival for the crown behaviorism found itself holding after WWII was
stage theory, which could vary from the poetic grammar of Erik Eriksson to the
impenetrable mathematical tapestry of Jean Piaget, an exercise in chutzpah weaving the
psychological destiny of mankind out of the testimony of less than two dozen bourgeois
Swiss kids. Modest academic empires could be erected on allegiance to one stage theory
or another, but there were so many they tended to get in each other’s way. Like sevenstep programs to lose weight and keep it off, stage theory provided friendly alternatives
to training children like rats—but the more it came into direct competition with the
misleading precision of Skinnerian psychology, the sillier its clay feet looked.
All stage theory is embarrassingly culture-bound. Talk about the attention span of kids
and suddenly you are forced to confront the fact that while eighteen-month-old
Americans become restless after thirty seconds, Chinese of that age can closely watch a
demonstration for five minutes. And while eight-year-old New Yorkers can barely tie
their shoes, eight-year-old Amish put in a full work day on the family homestead. Even in
a population apparently homogenous, stage theory can neither predict nor prescribe for
individual cases. Stage theories sound right for the same reason astrological predictions
do, but the disconnect between ideal narratives and reality becomes all too clear when
you try to act on them.
When stage theory was entering its own golden age in the late 1960s, behaviorism was
already entrenched as the psychology of choice. The federal government’s BSTEP
document and many similar initiatives to control teacher preparation had won the field
for the stimulus-response business. So much money was pouring into psychological
schooling from government/corporate sources, however, that rat psychologists couldn’t
absorb it all. A foot-in-the-door opportunity presented itself, which stage theorists
scrambled to seize.
The controlling metaphor of all scientific stage theories is not, like behaviorism’s, that
people are built like machinery, but that they grow like vegetables. Kinder requires
garten, an easy sell to people sick of being treated like machinery. For all its seeming
humanitarianism, stage theory is just another way to look beyond individuals to social
class abstractions. If nobody possesses a singular spirit, then nobody has a sovereign
personal destiny. Mother Teresa, Tolstoy, Hitler—they don’t signify for stage theory,
though from time to time they are asked to stand as representatives of types.
Behaviorists
To understand empty child theory, you have to visit with behaviorists. Their meal ticket
was hastily jerry-built by the advertising agency guru John Watson and by Edward Lee
Thorndike, founder of educational psychology. Watson’s "Behaviorist Manifesto" (1913)
promoted a then novel utilitarian psychology whose "theoretical goal is the prediction
and control of behavior." Like much that passes for wisdom on the collegiate circuit, their
baby was stitched together from the carcasses of older ideas. Behaviorism (Thorndike’s
version, stillborn, was called "Connectionism") was a purified hybrid of Wilhelm
Wundt’s laboratory at Leipzig and Comte’s positivism broadcast in the pragmatic idiom
of the Scottish common-sense philosophers. We needn’t trace all the dead body parts
pasted together to sigh at the claim of an originality which isn’t there—reminiscent of
Howard Gardner’s fashion as seer of multiple intelligence theory—an idea as ancient as
the pyramids.
Behaviorists read entrails; they spy on the movements of trapped and hopeless animals,
usually rats or pigeons. This gives an advantage over other psychologists of standing on a
pile of animal corpses as the emblem of their science. The study of learning is their chief
occupation: how rats can be driven to run a maze or press a bar with the proper schedule
of reward and punishment. Almost from the start they abjured the use of the terms reward
and punishment, concluding that these beg the question. Who is to say what is rewarding
except the subject? And the subject tells us more credibly with his future behavior than
with his testimony. You can only tell whether a reward is truly rewarding from watching
future behavior. This accurate little semantic curve ball allows a new discipline to grow
around the terms "positive reinforcement" (reward) and "negative reinforcement"
(punishment).
Behavior to behaviorists is only what can be seen and measured; there is no inner life.
Skinner added a wrinkle to the simpler idea of Pavlovian conditioning from which
subsequent libraries of learned essays have been written, when he stated that the stimulus
for behavior is usually generated internally. In his so-called "operant" conditioning, the
stimulus is thus written with a small "s" rather than with a Pavlovian capital "S." So
what? Just this: Skinner’s lowercase, internal "s" leaves a tiny hole for the ghost of free
will to sneak through!
Despite the furor this created in the world of academic psychology, the tempest in a teapot nature of lowercase/uppercase stimuli is revealed from Skinner’s further assertion
that these mysterious internal stimuli of his can be perfectly controlled by manipulating
exterior reinforcements according to proper schedules. In other words, even if you do
have a will (not certain), your will is still perfectly programmable! You can be brought to
love Big Brother all the same.
The way I came to the attention of Dr. Keller’s teaching assistants was by writing a
program to cause coeds to surrender their virginity behaviorally without realizing they
had been scored, with an operant conditioning program. My blueprint delighted the
assistants. Copies were prepared and sent informally to other colleges; one went, I
believe, to Skinner himself. When I look back on my well-schooled self who played this
stupid prank I’m disgusted, but it should serve as a warning how an army of grown-up
children was and still is encouraged to experiment on each other as a form of higher-level
modern thinking. An entire echelon of management has been trained in the habit of
scientific pornography caught by the title of the Cole Porter song, "Anything Goes."
Behaviorism has no built-in moral brakes to restrain it other than legal jeopardy. You
hardly have to guess how irresistible this outlook was to cigarette companies, proprietary
drug purveyors, market researchers, hustlers of white bread, bankers, stock salesmen,
makers of extruded plastic knick-knacks, sugar brokers, and, of course, to men on
horseback and heads of state. A short time after I began as a behaviorist, I quit, having
seen enough of the ragged Eichmannesque crew at Columbia drawn like iron filings to
this magnetic program which promised to simplify all the confusion of life into
underlying schemes of reinforcement.
Plasticity
The worm lives in our initial conception of human nature. Are human beings to be
trusted? With what reservations? To what degree? The official answer has lately been
"not much," at least since the end of WWII. Christopher Lasch was able to locate some
form of surveillance, apprehension, confinement, or other security procedure at the
bottom of more than a fifth of the jobs in the United States. Presumably that’s because we
don’t trust each other. Where could that mistrust have been learned?
As we measure each other, we select a course to follow. A curriculum is a racecourse.
How we lay it out is contingent on assumptions we make about the horses and spectators.
So it is with school. Are children empty vessels? What do you think? I suspect not many
parents look at their offspring as empty vessels because contradictory evidence
accumulates from birth, but the whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is
built on the outlook that people are empty, or so plastic it’s the same thing.
The commodification of childhood—making it a product which can be sold—demands a
psychological frame in which kids can be molded. A handful of philosophers dominates
modern thinking because they argue this idea, and in arguing it they open up possibilities
to guide history to a conclusion in some perfected society. Are children empty? John
Locke said they were in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any
ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store...? To this I
answer in one word, from Experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that
it ultimately derives itself.
Are there no innate ideas? Does the mind lack capacities and powers of its own, being
etched exclusively by sensory inputs? Locke apparently thought so, with only a few
disclaimers so wispy they were abandoned by his standard bearers almost at once. Are
minds blank like white paper, capable of accepting writing from whoever possesses the
ink? Empty like a gas tank or a sugar bowl to be filled by anyone who can locate the
filler-hole? Was John Watson right when he said in 1930:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them
up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of
specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, his penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and
race of his ancestors.
Do you find something attractive in that presumption of plasticity in human nature? So
did Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, two of the century’s foremost applied behaviorists
on the grand scale. Taylorism sought to manage by the control of physical movements
and environments, but the behaviorists wanted more certainty than that, they wanted
control of the inner life, too. A great many reflective analyses have placed our own two
Roosevelt presidencies in the same broad category.
The trouble in school arises from disagreement about what life is for. If we believe
human beings have no unique personal essence, this question is meaningless, but even
then you can’t get rid of the idea easily. Life commands your answer. You cannot refuse
because your actions write your answer large for everyone to see, even if you don’t see it
yourself. As you regard human nature, you will teach. Or as someone else regards it, you
will teach. There aren’t any third ways.
Is human nature empty? If it is, who claims a right to fill it? In such circumstances, what
can "school" mean?
If ever a situation was capable of revealing the exquisite power of metaphor to control
our lives, this must be it. Are children empty? As helpless infants and dependent youth
we lay exposed to the metaphors of our guardians; they colonize our spirit.
Elasticity
Among structural engineers, the terms plastic and elastic describe propensities of
material; these are concepts which can also be brought to bear on the question whether
human nature is built out of accidents of experience or whether there is some divine inner
spark in all of us that makes each person unique and self-determining. As you decide, the
schools which march forward from your decision are predestined. Immanuel Kant
thought both conditions possible, a strong, continuous effort of will tipping the balance.
In structural engineering, implications of the original builder/creator’s decision are
inescapable; constructions like bridges and skyscrapers do have an inner nature given
them by the materials chosen and the shapes imposed, an integrity long experience has
allowed us to profile. The structure will defend this integrity, resisting wind stress, for
example, which threatens to change its shape permanently.
When stress increases dangerously as it would in a hurricane, the building material
becomes elastic, surrendering part of its integrity temporarily to protect the rest,
compromising to save its total character in the long run. When the wind abates the urge to
resume the original shape becomes dominant and the bridge or building relaxes back to
normal. A human analogy is that we remember who we are in school even when coerced
to act like somebody else. In engineering, this integrity of memory is called elastic
behavior. Actors practice deliberate elasticity and the Chechens or the Hmong express
remarkable group elasticity. After violent stresses abate, they remember who they are.
But another road exists. To end unbearable stress, material has a choice of surrendering
its memory. Under continued stress, material can become plastic, losing its elasticity and
changing its shape permanently. Watch your own kids as their schooling progresses. Are
they like Chechens with a fierce personal integrity and an inner resilience? Or under the
stress of the social laboratory of schooling, have they become plastic over time, kids you
hardly recognize, kids who’ve lost their original integrity?
In the collapse of a bridge or building in high wind, a decisive turning point is reached
when the structure abandons its nature and becomes plastic. Trained observers can tell
when elasticity is fading because prior to the moment of collapse, the structure cannot
regain its original shape. It loses its spirit, taking on new and unexpected shapes in a
struggle to resist further change. When this happens it is wordlessly crying HELP ME!
HELP ME! just as so many kids did in all the schools in which I ever taught.
The most important task I assigned myself as a schoolteacher was helping kids regain
their integrity, but I lost many, their desperate, last-ditch resistance giving way, their
integrity shattering before my horrified eyes. Look back in memory at your kids before
first grade, then fast forward to seventh. Have they disintegrated into warring fragments
divided against themselves? Don’t believe anyone who tells you that’s natural human
development.
If there are no absolutes, as pragmatists like Dewey assert, then human nature must be
plastic. Then the spirit can be successfully deformed from its original shape and will have
no sanctuary in which to resist institutional stamping. The Deweys further assert that
human nature processed this way is able to perform efficiently what is asked of it later on
by society. Escaping our original identity will actually improve most of us, they say. This
is the basic hypothesis of utopia-building, that the structure of personhood can be broken
and reformed again and again for the better. [yeah like Brandon's delusional build back better horses*#t dc]
Plasticity is the base on which scientific psychology must stand if it is to be prescriptive,
and if not prescriptive, who needs it? Finding an aggressive, instrumental psychology
associated with schooling is a sure sign empty-child attitudes aren’t far away. The notion
of empty children has origins predating psychology, of course, but the most important
engine reshaping American schools into socialization laboratories,1
after Wundt, was the
widely publicized work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) who had been
a student of Wundt at Leipzig. Pavlov won the Nobel in 1904, credited with discovering
the conditioned reflex whereby systems of physical function thought to be fixed
biologically, like the salivation of dogs, could be rewired to irrelevant outside stimuli,
like bells ringing.
This had immense influence on the spread of behavioral psychology into government
agencies and corporate boardrooms, for it seemed to herald the discovery of master
wiring diagrams which could eventually bring the entire population under control of
physiological psychology.
Pavlov became the most prestigious ally of the behavioral enterprise with his Nobel. His
text The Conditioned Reflexes (1926) provided a sacred document to be waved at
skeptics, and his Russian nationality aided immeasurably, harmonizing well with the long
romance American intellectuals had with the Soviet Union. Even today Pavlov is a name
to conjure with. Russian revolutionary experimentation allowed the testing of what was
possible to go much further and faster than could have happened in America and western
Europe.
Notions of emptiness turn the pedestrian problem of basic skills schooling into the
complex political question of which outside agencies with particular agendas to impose
will be allowed to write the curriculum. And there are nuances. For instance, the old fashioned idea of an empty container suggests a hollow to be filled, an approach not
unfamiliar to people who went to school before 1960. But plastic emptiness is a different
matter. It might lead to an armory of tricks designed to fix, distract, and motivate the
subject to cooperate in its own transformation—the new style commonly found in public
schools after 1960. The newer style has given rise to an intricately elaborated theory of
incentives capable of assisting managers to work their agenda on the managed. Only a
few years ago, almost every public-school teacher in the country had to submit a list of
classroom motivation employed, to be inspected by school managers.
1
The whole concept of "socialization" has been the subject of a large library of books and may be considered to occupy an honored role as one
of the most important ongoing studies (and debates) in modern history. In shorthand, what socialization is concerned with from a political
standpoint is the discovery and application of a system of domination which does not involve physical coercion. Coercion (as Hegel is thought
to have proven) will inevitably provoke the formation of a formidable counter-force, in time overthrowing the coercive force. The fall of the
Soviet Union might be taken as an object lesson.
Before Hegel, for 250 years along with other institutions of that society the state church of England was a diligent student of socialization. The
British landowning class was a great university of understanding how to proceed adversarially against restive groups without overt signs of
intimidation, and the learnings of this class were transmitted to America. For example, during the second great enclosure movement which
ended in 1875, with half of all British agricultural land in the hands of just two thousand people, owners maintained social and political control
over even the smallest everyday affairs of the countryside and village. Village halls were usually under control of the Church of England whose
clergy were certifiably safe, its officials doubling as listening posts among the population. All accommodations suitable for meetings were
under direct or indirect control of the landed interests. It was almost impossible for any sort of activity to take place unless it met with the
approval of owners.
Lacking a long tradition of upper-class solidarity, the United States had to distill lessons from England and elsewhere with a science of public
opinion control whose ultimate base was the new schools. Still, before schooling could be brought efficiently to that purpose, much time had to
pass during which other initiatives in socialization were tried. One of these, the control of print sources of information, is particularly
instructive.
After the Rockefeller disaster in the coal fields of southeastern Colorado in April of 1914, ordinary counter-publicity was insufficient to stem
the tide of attacks on corporate America coming from mass circulation magazines such as Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, McClures’s,
Everybody’s, Success, Hampton’s, Collier’s, The Arena, The Masses, and others. A counterattack was launched to destroy the effectiveness of
the magazines: West Virginia Pulp and Paper bought McClure’s, Butterick Patterns bought Everybody’s, bankers folded Success by calling in
its loans and ordered the editors of Collier’s to change its editorial policies, the distributor of Arena informed the publisher that unsold copies
would no longer be returned, and Max Eastman’s Masses was doomed by the passage of legislation enabling the postmaster to remove any
publication from the mails at his own discretion. Through these and similar measures, the press and magazines of the United States had been
fairly effectively muzzled by 1915 with not a single printing press broken by labor goons. These midrange steps in the socialization of
American society can best be seen as exposing the will to homogenize at work in this country once the entire economy had been corporatized.
Emptiness: The Master Theory
Conceptions of emptiness to be filled as the foundation metaphor of schooling are not
confined to hollowness and plasticity, but also include theories of mechanism. De La
Mettrie’s 2 Man a Machine vision from the Enlightenment, for instance, is evidence of an
idea regularly recurring for millennia. If we are mechanisms, we must be predetermined,
as Calvin said. Then the whole notion of "Education" is nonsensical. There is no
independent inner essence to be drawn forth and developed. Only adjustments are
possible, and if the contraption doesn’t work right, it should be junked. Everything
important about machinery is superficial.
This notion of machine emptiness has been the master theory of human nature since the
beginning of the nineteenth century. It still takes turns in curriculum formation with
theories of vegetable emptiness, plastic emptiness, systems emptiness and, from time to
time, some good old-fashioned Lockean blank sheet emptiness. Nobody writes
curriculum for self-determined spiritual individuals and expects to sell it in the public
school market.
This hardline empiricism descends to us most directly from Locke and Hume, who both
said Mind lacks capacities and powers of its own. It has no innate contents. Everything
etched there comes from simple sense impressions mixed and compounded. This chilly
notion was greatly refined by the French ideologues 3
who thought the world so orderly
and mechanical, the future course of history could be predicted on the basis of the
position and velocity of molecules. For these men, the importance of human agency
vanished entirely. With Napoleon, these ideas were given global reach a few years later.
So seductive is this mechanical worldview it has proven itself immune to damage by facts
which contradict it.4
2
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) was the earliest of the materialistic writers of the Enlightenment.His conclusion that religious thought
was a physical disorder akin to fever forced him to flee France. In the middle of the eighteenth century his two master works, Man a Machine
and Man a Plant, stated principles which are self-evident from the titles. The ethics of these principles are worked out in later essays. The
purpose of life is to pleasure the senses, virtue is measured by self-love, the hope of the world lies in the spread of atheism. De La Mettrie was
compelled to flee the Netherlands and accept the protection of Frederick of Prussia in 1748. The chief authority for his life is an eulogy entitled
"The Elegy," written by Frederick II himself.
3
Ideologue is a term coined by Antoine Destuit de Tracy around 1790 to describe those empiricists and rationalists concerned to establish a new
order in the intellectual realm, eradicating the influence of religion, replacing it with universal education as the premier solution to the problem
of reforming human shortcomings. They believed that Hume’s rationalized morality (after the methods of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and
astronomy) was the best way to accomplish this.
4
For instance, the serious problems encountered by mechanists in the nineteenth century when developments in electricity revealed a cornucopia of nonmechanical, non-gravitational forces and entities which eroded the classical conception of
matter. In optics, the work of Young and Fresnel on diffraction and refraction made Newton’s particle theory of light untenable, yet it was still
being taught in senior physics at Uniontown High School when I got there in the 1950s. The earth might move, but human nature only accepts
the move when it suits human purposes.
A Metaphysical Commitment
At the core of every scientific research program (and forced schooling is the largest such
program in history) lies a metaphysical commitment on which all decision-making rests.
For instance, the perspective of which pedagogy and behavioral science are both latterday extensions rests on six pillars:
1. The world is independent of thought. It is atomic in its basic constituents.
2. The real properties of bodies are bulk, figure, texture, and motion.
3. Time and Space are real entities; the latter is Euclidean in its properties.
4. Mass is inert. Rest or uniform motion are equally "natural" conditions involving
no consciousness.
5. Gravitational attraction exists between all masses.
6. Energy is conserved in interactions.
There is no obvious procedure for establishing any of these principles as true. There is no
obvious experimental disproof of them either, or any way to meet Karl Popper’s
falsification requirement or Quine’s modification of it. Yet these religious principles, as
much metaphysics as physics, constitute the backbone of the most powerful research
program in modern history: Newtonian physics and its modern fellow travelers.5
The psychology which most naturally emerges from a mechanical worldview is
behaviorism, an outlook which dominates American school thinking. When you hear that
classrooms have been psychologized, what the speaker usually means is that under the
surface appearance of old-fashioned lessons what actually is underway is an experiment
with human machines in a controlled setting. These experiments follow some
predetermined program during which various "adjustments" are made as data feed back
to the design engineers. In a psychologized classroom, teachers and common
administrators are pedagogues, kept unaware of the significance of the processes they
superintend. After a century of being on the outside, there is a strong tradition of
indifference or outright cynicism about Ultimate Purpose among both groups.
Behaviorism holds a fictionalist attitude toward intelligence: mind simply doesn’t exist.
"Intelligence" is only behavioral shorthand for, "In condition A, player B will act in range
C, D, and E rather than A, B and C." There is no substantive intelligence, only dynamic
relationships with different settings and different dramatic ceremonies.
The classic statement of behavioristic intelligence is E.G. Boring’s 1923 definition,
"Intelligence is what an intelligence test measures." Echoes of Boring reverberate in
Conant’s sterile definition of education as "what goes on in schools." Education is
whatever schools say it is. This is a carry-over of Percy Bridgman’s 6
recommendation for
an ultimate kind of simplification in physics sometimes known as operationalism (which
gives us the familiar "operational definition"), e.g., Boring’s definition of intelligence.
This project in science grew out of the positivistic project in philosophy which contends
that all significant meaning lies on the surface of things. Positivism spurns any analysis
of the deep structure underlying appearances. Psychological behaviorism is positivism
applied to the conjecture that a science of behavior might be established. It’s a guess how
things ought to work, not a science of how they do.
B.F. Skinner’s 7 entire strategy of behavioral trickery designed to create beliefs, attitudes,
and behavior patterns in whole societies is set down in Walden Two, a bizarre illustration
of some presumed uses of emptiness, but also a summary of observations (all uncredited
by Skinner) of earlier undertakings in psychological warfare, propaganda, advertising
research, etc., including contributions from public relations, marketing, schooling,
military experience, and animal training. Much that Skinner claimed as his own wasn’t
even secondhand—it had been commonplace for centuries among philosophers. Perhaps
all of it is no more than that.
6 My discussion here is instructed by the lectures of Michael Matthews, philosopher of science.
7
Physics professor, Harvard. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize. Perhaps the most influential American writer on the philosophy of science in the
twentieth century.
The Limits Of Behavioral Theory
The multibillion dollar school-materials industry is stuffed with curriculum
psychologized through application of behaviorist theory in its design and operation. What
these kits are about is introducing various forms of external reinforcement into learning,
based on the hypothesis the student is a stimulus-response machine. This surrender to
questionable science fails its own test of rationality in the following ways.
First and foremost, the materials don’t work dependably. Behavior can be affected, but
fallout is often negative and daunting. The insubstantial metaphysics of Behaviorism
leads it to radically simplify reality; the content of this psychology is then always being
undermined by experience.
Even some presumed core truths, e.g., "simple to complex, we learn to walk before we
can run" (I’ve humanized the barbaric jargon of the field), are only half-truths whose
application in a classroom provoke trouble. In suburban schools a slow chaos of boredom
ensues from every behavioral program; in ghetto schools the boredom turns to violence.
Even in better neighborhoods, the result of psychological manipulation is indifference,
cynicism, and overall loss of respect for the pedagogical enterprise. Behavioral theory
demands endless recorded observations and assessments in the face of mountainous
evidence that interruptions and delays caused by such assessments create formidable
obstacles to learning—and for many derail the possibility entirely.
By stressing the importance of controlled experience and sensation as the building blocks
of training, behaviorism reveals its inability to deal with the inconvenient truth that a
huge portion of experience is conceptualized in language. Without mastery of language
and metaphor, we are condemned to mystification. The inescapable reality is that behind
the universality of abstraction, we have a particular language with a particular
personality. It takes hard work to learn how to use it, harder work to learn how to protect
yourself from the deceptive language of strangers. Even our earliest experience is
mediated through language since the birth vault itself is not soundproof.
Reality Engages The Banana
Michael Matthews’ analysis of language as a primary behavior in itself will serve as an
illustration of the holes in rat psychology. His subject is the simple banana.8
Contrary to
the religion of behaviorism, we don’t experience bananas as soft, yellowish, mildly
fibrous sense impressions. Instead, reality engages the banana in drama: "Food!", "Good
for you!", "Swallow it down or I’ll beat you into jelly!" We learn rules about bananas
(Don’t rub them in the carpet), futurity (Let’s have bananas again tomorrow), and value
(These damn bananas cost an arm and a leg!). And we learn these things through words.
When behaviorism pontificates that children should all "learn from experience," with the
implication that books and intellectual concepts count for little, it exposes its own
poverty. Behaviorism provides no way to quantify the overwhelming presence of
language as the major experience of modern life for everyone, rich and poor.
Behaviorism has to pretend words don’t really matter, only "behavior" (as it defines the
term).
To maintain that all knowledge is exclusively sense experience is actually not to say
much at all, since sense experience is continuous and unstoppable as long as we are alive.
That is like saying you need to breathe to stay alive or eat to prevent hunger. Who
disagrees? The fascinating aspect of this psychological shell game lies in the self understanding of behavioral experts that they have nothing much to sell their clientele
that a dog trainer wouldn’t peddle for pennies. The low instinct of this poor relative of
philosophy has always been to preempt common knowledge and learning ways, translate
the operations into argot, process them into an institutional form, then find customers to
buy the result.
There is no purpose down deep in any of these empty-child systems except the jigsaw
puzzle addict’s purpose of making every piece FIT. Why don’t children learn to read in
schools? Because it doesn’t matter in a behavioral universe. This goes far beyond a
contest of many methods; it’s a contest of perspectives. Why should they read? We have
too many smart people as it is. Only a few have any work worth doing. Only the logic of
machinery and systems protects your girl and boy when you send them off to behavioral
laboratories on the yellow behaviorist bus. Should systems care? They aren’t Mom and
Dad, you know.
8 While fact-checking the book in March 2003, I had occasion to contact Professor Matthews in Australia, who had no memory of ever using
bananas in his scholarly prose! Fortunately, he found the reference in his works several days later and was gracious enough to contact me, or
this lovely critique of psychobabble would have been lost to the Underground History.
Programming The Empty Child
To get an act of faith this unlikely off the ground there had to be some more potent vision
than Skinner could provide, some evidence more compelling than reinforcement schedule
data to inspire men of affairs to back the project. There had to be foundational visions for
the scientific quest. One will have to stand for all, and the one I’ve selected for
examination is among the most horrifyingly influential books ever to issue from a human
pen, a rival in every way to Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management. The author was
Jean Jacques Rousseau. The book, Emile, published in 1762. Whether Rousseau had
given his own five children away to the foundling home before or after he wrote it, I can’t
say for sure. Before, I’m told.
Emile is a detailed account of the total transformation of a boy of ten under the precisely
calculated behavioral ministrations of a psychological schoolmaster. Rousseau showed
the world how to write on the empty child Locke had fathered; he supplied means by
which Locke’s potent image could be converted to methodology. It took only a quarter
century for Germans to catch on to the pick-and-shovel utility of dreamy Rousseau, only
a little longer for Americans and English to do the same. Once Rousseau was fully
digested, the temptation to see society’s children as human resources proved irresistible
to those nations which had gone furthest in developing the mineral resource, coal, and its
useful spirits, heat and steam.
Rousseau’s influence over pedagogy began when empty child explanations of human
nature came to dominate. With emotional religion, village life, local elites, and American
tradition reeling from hammer blows of mass immigration, the nation was broadly
transformed at the beginning of the twentieth century without much conscious public
awareness of what was happening.
One blueprint for the great transformation was Emile, an attempt to reestablish Eden
using a procedure Rousseau called "negative education." Before the book gets to
protagonist Emile, we are treated to this instructive vignette of an anonymous student:
The poor child lets himself be taken away, he turned to look backward with regret, fell
silent, and departed, his eyes swollen with tears he dared not shed and his heavy heart
with the sigh he dared not exhale.
Thus is the student victim led to the schoolmaster. What happens next is reassurance that
such a scene will never claim Emile:
Oh you [spoken to Emile] who have nothing similar to fear; you, for whom no time of
life is a time of constraint or boredom; you, who look forward to the day without disquiet
and to the night without impatience—come, my happy and good natured pupil, come and
console us.9
Look at Rousseau’s scene closely. Overlook its sexual innuendo and you notice the
effusion is couched entirely in negatives. The teacher has no positive expectations at all;
he promises an absence of pain, boredom, and ill-temper, just what Prozac delivers.
Emile’s instructor says the boy likes him because he knows "he will never be a long time
without distraction" and because "we never depend on each other."
This idea of negation is striking. Nobody owes anybody anything; obligation and duty are
illusions. Emile isn’t happy; he’s "the opposite of the unhappy child." Emile will learn "to
commit himself to the habit of not contracting any habits." He will have no passionately
held commitments, no outside interests, no enthusiasms, and no significant relationships
other than with the tutor. He must void his memory of everything but the immediate
moment, as children raised in adoption and foster care are prone to do. He is to feel, not
think. He is to be emptied in preparation for his initiation as a mindless article of nature.
The similarity of all this to a drugged state dawns on the critical reader. Emile is to find
negative freedom—freedom from attachment, freedom from danger, freedom from duty
and responsibility, etc. But Rousseau scrupulously avoids a question anybody might ask:
What is this freedom for? What is its point?
9
The creepy tone of this authorial voice reminded me of a similar modern voice used by a district school psychologist for the Londonderry,
New Hampshire, public schools writing in an Education Week article, "Teacher as Therapist" (October 1995):
"Welcome....We get a good feeling on entering this classroom.... M&M’s for every correct math problem [aren’t necessary]. A smile, on the
other hand, a "Good Job!" or a pat on the back may be effective and all that is necessary. Smiling faces on papers (even at the high-level) with
special recognition at the end of the week for the students with the most faces...can be powerful.... By setting appropriate expectations within a
system of positive recognition and negative consequences, teachers become therapists."
Dr. Watson Presumes
Leapfrogging 163 years, Dr. John B. Watson, modern father of behaviorism, answered
that question this way in the closing paragraphs of his Behaviorism (1925), when he
appealed to parents to surrender quietly:
I am trying to dangle a stimulus in front of you which if acted upon will gradually change
this universe. For the universe will change if you bring your children up not in the
freedom of the libertine, but in behavioristic freedom....Will not these children in turn
with their better ways of living and thinking replace us as society, and in turn bring up
their children in a still more scientific way, until the world finally becomes a place fit for
human habitation?
It was an offer School wasn’t about to let your kid refuse. Edna Heidbredder was the first
insider to put the bell on this cat in a wonderful little book, Seven Psychologies (1933). A
psychology professor from Minnesota, she described the advent of behaviorism this way
seven decades ago:
The simple fact is that American psychologists had grown restive under conventional
restraints. They were finding the old problems lifeless and thin, they were "half sick of
shadows" and...welcomed a plain, downright revolt. [Behaviorism] called upon its
followers to fight an enemy who must be utterly destroyed, not merely to parley with one
who might be induced to modify his ways.
John B. Watson, a fast-buck huckster turned psychologist, issued this warning in 1919:
The human creature is purely a stimulus-response machine. The notion of consciousness
is a "useless and vicious" survival of medieval religious "superstition." Behaviorism does
not "pretend to be disinterested psychology," it is "frankly" an applied science. Miss
Heidbredder continues: "Behaviorism is distinctly interested in the welfare and
salvation—the strictly secular salvation—of the human race."
She saw behaviorism making "enormous conquests" of other psychologies through its
"violence" and "steady infiltration" of the marketplace, figuring "in editorials, literary
criticism, social and political discussions, and sermons.... Its program for bettering
humanity by the most efficient methods of science has made an all but irresistible appeal
to the attention of the American public."
"It has become a crusade," she said, "against the enemies of science, much more than a
mere school of psychology." It has "something of the character of a cult." Its adherents
"are devoted to a cause; they are in possession of a truth." And the heart of that truth is "if
human beings are to be improved we must recognize the importance of infancy," for in
infancy "the student may see behavior in the making, may note the repertoire of reactions
a human being has...and discover the ways in which they are modified...." (emphasis
added) During the early years a child may be taught "fear," "defeat," and "surrender"—or
of course their opposites. From "the standpoint of practical control" youth was the name
of the game for this aggressive cult; it flowed like poisoned syrup into every nook and
cranny of the economy, into advertising, public relations, packaging, radio, press,
television in its dramatic programming, news programming, and public affairs shows,
into military training, "psychological" warfare, and intelligence operations, but while all
this was going on, selected tendrils from the same behavioral crusade snaked into the
Federal Bureau of Education, state education departments, teacher training institutions,
think tanks, and foundations. The movement was leveraged with astonishing amounts of
business and government cash and other resources from the late 1950s onwards because
the payoff it promised to deliver was vast. The prize: the colonization of the young before
they had an opportunity to develop resistance. The holy grail of market research.
Back to Rousseau’s Emile. When I left you hanging, you had just learned that Emile’s
"liberty" was a well-regulated one. Rousseau hastens to warn us the teacher must take
great pains to "hide from his student the laws that limit his freedom." It will not do for the
subject to see the walls of his jail. Emile is happy because he thinks no chains are held on
him by his teacher/facilitator. But he is wrong. In fact the tutor makes Emile entirely
dependent on minuscule rewards and microscopic punishments, like changes in vocal
tone. He programs Emile without the boy’s knowledge, boasting of this in asides to the
reader. Emile is conditioned according to predetermined plan every minute, his
instruction an ultimate form of invisible mind control. The goals of Rousseau’s
educational plan are resignation, passivity, patience, and, the joker-in-the-deck,
levelheadedness. Here is the very model for duplicitous pedagogy.
This treating of pupils as guinea pigs became B.F. Skinner’s stock in trade. In a moment
of candor he once claimed, "We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled
nevertheless feel free, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than
was ever the case under the old system." Rousseau was Skinner’s tutor.
1 The "problem" with English phonics has been wildly exaggerated, sometimes by sincere people but most
often by those who make a living as guides through the supposed perils of learning to read. These latter
constitute a vast commercial empire with linkages among state education departments, foundations,
publishers, authors of school readers, press, magazines, education journals, university departments of
education, professional organizations, teachers, reading specialists, local administrators, local school
boards, various politicians who facilitate the process and the U.S. offices of education, defense and labor.
2 Mitford Mathews, Teaching to Read Historically Considered (1966). A brief, intelligent history of reading.
A number of other good treatments are available for the newcomer.
Cleaning The Canvas
Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is written
somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a true image
shines forth. Schooling, on the other hand, seeks a way to make mind and character
blank, so others may chisel the destiny thereon.
Karl Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies reveals with great clarity how old
the idea of tabula rasa (erroneously attributed to John Locke) actually is. In writing of
Plato’s great utopia, The Republic, Popper shows Socrates telling auditors: "They will
take as their canvas a city and the characters of men, and they will, first of all, make their
canvas clean—by no means an easy matter....They will not start work on a city nor on an
individual unless they are given a clean canvas, or have cleaned it themselves." (emphasis
added) Popper continues:
In the same spirit, Plato says in The Statesman of the royal rulers who rule in accordance
with the royal science of statesmanship: "Whether they happen to rule by law or without
law, over willing or unwilling subjects;...whether they purge the state for its good by
killing or banishing some of its citizens—as long as they proceed according to
science...this form of government must be declared the only one that is right." This is
what canvas-cleaning means. He must eradicate existing institutions and traditions. He
must purify, purge, expel, banish and kill.
Canvas-cleaning frees the individual of all responsibility. Morality is voided, replaced by
reinforcement schedules. In their most enlightened form, theories of a therapeutic
community are those in which only positive reinforcements are prescribed.
The therapeutic community is as close as your nearest public school. In the article
"Teacher as Therapist" (footnote, pages 270–271), a glimpse of Emile programmed on a
national scale is available. Its innocently garrulous author paints a landscape of therapy,
openly identifying schools as behavioral training centers whose positive and negative
reinforcement schedules are planned cooperatively in advance, and each teacher is a
therapist. Here everything is planned down to the smallest "minimal recognition,"
nothing is accidental. Planned smiles or "stern looks," spontaneity is a weed to be
exterminated—you will remember the injunction to draw smiling faces on every paper,
"even at the high school level."
An important support girder of therapeutic community is a conviction that social order
can be maintained by inducing students to depend emotionally on the approval of
teachers. Horace Mann was thoroughly familiar with this principle. Here are Mann’s
words on the matter:
When a difficult question has been put to a child, the Teacher approaches with a mingled
look of concern and encouragement [even minimal recognition requires planning, here
you have a primer of instructional text]; he stands before him, the light and shade of hope
and fear alternately crossing his countenance. If the little wrestler triumphs, the Teacher
felicitates him upon his success; perhaps seizes and shakes him by the hand in token
congratulation; and when the difficulty has been formidable and the effort triumphant, I
have seen Teacher catch up the child and embrace him, as though he were not able to
contain his joy...and all this done so naturally and so unaffectedly as to excite no other
feeling in the residue of the children than a desire, by the same means, to win the same
caresses. (emphasis added)
Children were to be "loved into submission; controlled with gestures, glances, tones of
voice as if they were sensitive machinery." What this passes for today is humanistic
education, but the term has virtually the same magnitude of disconnect from the historical
humanism of the Erasmus/DeFeltre stripe (which honored the mind and truly free choice)
as modern schooling is disconnected from any common understanding of the word
education.
Therapy As Curriculum
To say that various psychologies dominate modern schooling is hardly to plow new
ground. The tough thing to do is to show how that happened and why—and how the
project progresses to its unseen goals. The Atlantic Monthly had this to say in April 1993:
...schools have turned to therapeutic remediation. A growing proportion of many school
budgets is devoted to counseling and other psychological services. The curriculum is
becoming more therapeutic: children are taking courses in self-esteem, conflict
resolution, and aggression management. Parental advisory groups are conscientiously
debating alternative approaches to traditional school discipline, ranging from teacher
training in mediation to the introduction of metal detectors and security guards in the
schools. Schools are increasingly becoming emergency rooms of the emotions,
devoted...to repairing hearts. What we are seeing....is the psychologization of American
education.
Two years before I ran across that Atlantic broadside, I encountered a different analysis
in the financial magazine Forbes. I was surprised to discover Forbes had correctly
tracked the closest inspiration for school psychologizing, both its aims and its techniques,
to the pedagogy of China and the Soviet Union. Not similar practices and programs, mind
you, identical ones. The great initial link with Russia, I knew, had been from the
Wundtian Ivan Pavlov, but the Chinese connection was news to me. I was unaware then
of John Dewey’s tenure there in the 1920s, and had given no thought, for that reason, to
its possible significance:
The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in
psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children. These include
emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support,
stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying
moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not
confined to separate courses or programs...they are not isolated idiosyncrasies of
particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials
in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and
teach the techniques to teachers. Some packages even include instructions on how to deal
with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done
through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through roleplaying assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in
China under Mao.
The Forbes writer, Thomas Sowell, perhaps invoking the slave states in part to rouse the
reader’s capitalist dander, could hardly have been aware himself how carefully industrial
and institutional interest had seeded Russia, China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands with the
doctrine of psychological schooling long ago, nearly at the beginning of the century, and
in Japan’s case even before that. All along we have harvested these experimental growths
in foreign soil for what they seem to prove about people-shaping.
For example, the current push for School-to-Work deep mines specific practices of the
former Soviet Union, even to the point of using identical language from Soviet texts.
School-to-Work was a project installed in Russia by Americans in the 1920s to test the
advice of the nineteenth-century Swiss aristocrat von Fellenberg that manual labor should
be combined with academic schooling. Fellenberg’s doctrine was a short-lived fad in this
country in the 1830s, but ever after it had a place in the mind of certain men of affairs and
social theorists. The opportunity afforded by Russia’s chaos after WWI seemed too
promising to pass up.
The New Thought Tide
The great forced schooling plan even long ago was a global movement. Anatomizing its
full scope is well beyond my power, but I can open your eyes partway to this poorly
understood dimension of our pedagogy. Think of China, the Asian giant so prominently
fixed now in headline news. Its revolution which ended the rule of emperors and
empresses was conceived, planned, and paid for by Western money and intellectuals and
by representatives of prominent families of business, media, and finance who followed
the green flag of commerce there.
This is a story abundantly related by others, but less well known is the role of ambitious
Western ideologues like Bertrand Russell, who assumed a professorship at the University
of Peking in 1920, and John Dewey, who lived there for two years during the 1920s. Men
like this saw a unique chance to paint on a vast blank canvas as Cecil Rhodes had shown
somewhat earlier in Africa could be done by only a bare handful of men.
Listen to an early stage of the plan taken from a Columbia Teachers College text written
in 1931. The author is John Childs, rising academic star, friend of Dewey. The book,
Education and the Philosophy of Experimentalism:
During the World War, a brilliant group of young Chinese thinkers launched a movement
which soon became nationwide in its influence. This movement was called in Chinese the
"Hsin Szu Ch’au" which literally translated means the "New Thought Tide." Because
many features of New Thought Tide were similar to those of the earlier European
awakening, it became popularly known in English as "The Chinese Renaissance."
While the sources of this intellectual and social movement were various, it is undoubtedly true that some of its most able leaders had been influenced profoundly by the
ideas of John Dewey....They found intellectual tools almost ideally suited to their
purposes in Dewey’s philosophy.... Among these tools...his view of the instrumental
character of thought, his demand that all tradition, beliefs and institutions be tested
continuously by their capacity to meet contemporary human needs, and his faith that the
wholehearted use of the experimental attitude and method would achieve results in the
social field similar to those already secured in the field of the natural sciences.
At about the time of the close of the World War, Dewey visited China. For two years,
through lectures, writing, and teaching, he gave in-person powerful reinforcement to the
work of the Chinese Renaissance leaders.
It’s sobering to think of sad-eyed John Dewey as a godfather of Maoist China, but that he
certainly was.
To Abolish Thinking
Dewey’s Experimentalism 10 represented a new faith which was swallowed whole in
Watson’s behaviorism. According to Childs, the unavowed aim of the triumphant
psychology was "to abolish thinking, at least for the many; for if thinking were possible
the few could do it for the rest." For Dewey as for the behaviorists, the notion of purpose
was peculiarly suspect since the concept of conditioning seemed to obsolete the more
romantic term. A psychological science born of physics was sufficient to explain
everything. The only utopia behaviorism allowed was one in which the gathering of facts,
statistical processing, and action based on research was allowed.
It is tempting to bash (or worship) Dewey for high crimes (or high saintliness), depending
on one’s politics, but a greater insight into the larger social process at work can be gained
by considering him as an emblem of a new class of hired gun in America, the university
intellectual whose prominence comes from a supposed independence and purity of
motives but who simultaneously exists (most often unwittingly) as protƩgƩ, mouthpiece,
and disguise for more powerful wills than his own. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew
Brzezinski are prime examples of the type in our own day.
Dewey was determined his experimental subjects would be brought to actively participate
in the ongoing experiments, not necessarily with their knowledge. All education was
aimed at directing the responses of children. Orwell is really satirizing Deweyists and
Fabians in his post-WWII dystopian nightmare, 1984, when Winston Smith’s execution
is delayed until he can be brought to denounce the people he loves and to transfer his love
to Big Brother. In Dewey’s world this is only bringing Smith into active participation.
That it is in his own degradation is final proof that private purposes have been
surrendered and the conditioning is complete.
"[We] reject completely the hypothesis of choice. We consider the traditional doctrine of
‘free-will’ to be both intellectually untenable and practically undesirable," is the way
Childs translates Dewey. The new systems theorists, experimentalists, and behaviorists
are all Wundt’s children in regarding human life as a mechanical phenomenon.11 But they
are polemicists, too. Notice Childs’ hint that even if free will were intellectually tenable,
it would only cause trouble.
10The best evidence of how intensely the zeitgeist worked on Dewey is found in the many mutations his philosophy underwent. After an early
flirtation with phrenology, Dewey became a leader of the Young Hegelians while William Torrey Harris, the Hegelian, presided over the
Federal Department of Education, then for a brief time was a fellow traveler with the Young Herbartians when that was voguish at Columbia
Teachers. Soon, however, we find him standing in line of descent from Pierce and James as a pragmatist. Thereafter he launched
Instrumentalism (crashed) and Experimentalism (crashed). And there were other attempts to build a movement.
His long career is marked by confusion, vaunting ambition, and suspicious alliances with industrialists which earned him bitter enmity from his
one-time acolyte, the brilliant radical Randolph Bourne. In retaliation against Bourne’s criticism, Dewey destroyed Bourne’s writing career by
foreclosing his access to publication under threat that Dewey himself would not write for any magazine that carried Bourne’s work!
11. The bleak notion of mechanism first appears unmistakably in recorded Western history in the Old Norse Religion as the theology of ancient
Scandinavia is sometimes called. It is the only known major religion to have no ethical code other than pragmatism. What works is right. In
Old Norse thinking, nothing was immortal, neither man nor gods; both were mere accidental conjunctions of heat and cold at the beginning of
time—and they are destined to pass back into that state in an endless round.
Old Norse establishes itself in England after the Norman Conquest, locating its brain center at Cambridge, particularly at College Emmanuel
from which the Puritan colonization of New England was conceived, launched, and sustained. Old Norse was slowly scientized into rational
religion (various unitarian colorations) over centuries. It transmuted into politics as well, particularly the form known in England and America
as Whig. An amusing clue to that is found in the history of the brilliant Whig family of Russell which produced Bertrand and many more
prominent names— the Russells trace their ancestry back to Thor.
Understanding the characteristics of the Old Norse outlook in its rampant experimentalism and pragmatic nature allows us to see the road the
five thousand year old civilization of China was put upon by its "New Thought Tide," and to understand how the relentlessly unsentimental
caste system of Old Norse history could lead to this astonishing admission in 1908 at a National Education Association national convention:
How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming generations which...cannot possibly be
fulfilled?....How can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be leaders? Is
human nature so constituted that those who fail will readily acquiesce in the success of their rivals?
The speaker was a Russell, James Russell, dean of Columbia Teachers College. No pussy-footing there.
The Old Norse character, despising the poor and the common, passes undiluted through Malthus’ famous essay (Second edition, 1803), in
which he argues that famine, plague, and "other forms of destruction" should be visited on the poor. "In our towns we should make the streets
narrower, crowd more people into the houses and court the return of the plague." No pussy-footing there, either. Over a century later in Woman
and the New Race (1920), Margaret Sanger wrote, "the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it."
Great Britain’s Prince Philip said that if he were reincarnated he would wish to return as "a killer virus to lower human population levels."
Even the kindly oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau , writing in the UNESCO Courier, (November 1991) said "we must eliminate 350,000
people per day...This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation...is lamentable." The eugenic
implications of this prescription go unremarked by Cousteau. Suppose you were among the inner circle of global policymakers and you shared
these attitudes? Might you not work to realize them in the long-range management of children through curriculum, testing, and the procedural
architectonics of schooling?
Wundt!
The great energy that drives modern schooling owes much to a current of influence
arising out of the psychology laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in Saxony. With a stream of international assistants, Wundt set out to examine how the
human machine was best adjusted. By 1880, he laid the basis for Pavlov’s work and the
work of Watson in America, for the medical procedure of lobotomy, for electroshock
therapy, and for the scientific view that school was a ground for social training,
"socialization" in John Dewey’s terminology.
Among Wundt’s principal assistants was the flamboyant American, G. Stanley Hall, who
organized the psychology lab at Johns Hopkins in 1887, established the American
Journal of Psychology, and saw to it that Sigmund Freud was brought to America for a
debut here. Stanley Hall’s own star pupil at Hopkins was the Vermonter, John Dewey.
Wundt’s first assistant, James McKeen Cattell, was also an American, eventually the
patron saint of psychological testing here. He was also the chief promoter of something
called "the sight-reading method," the dreadful fallout from which helped change the
direction of American society. Cattell was the first "Professor of Psychology" so titled in
all the world, reigning at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1894, he founded The
Psychological Review. Over the next twenty-five years, he trained 344 doctoral
candidates. In these stories and many others like them, the influence of Wundt and
Prussia multiplied. Cattell later created the reference books Leaders in Education,
American Men of Science, and The Directory of American Scholars and, for good
measure, founded Popular Science, all of which boosted the stock of the infant discipline.
Other Wundtian Ph.D.s in the United States included James Baldwin who set up the
psych lab at Princeton, Andrew Armstrong who did the same at Wesleyan, Charles Judd
who became director of education at the University of Chicago, and James Earl Russell,
president of Teachers College at Columbia. There were many others.
Russell’s Teachers College, the Rockefeller-sponsored, Prussian-inspired seminary on
120th Street in New York City, had a long reign dominating American pedagogy. By
1950, it had processed an unbelievable one-third of all presidents of teacher-training
institutions, one-fifth of all American public schoolteachers, one-quarter of all
superintendents. Thus the influence of Prussian thought dominated American school
policy at a high level by 1914, and the Prussian tincture was virtually universal by 1930.
Some parts of the country were more resistant to the dumbing down of curriculum and
the psycho socializing of the classroom than others, but by a process of attrition
Prussianization gained important beachheads year by year—through private foundation
projects, textbook publishing, supervisory associations, and on through every aspect of
school. The psychological manipulation of the child suggested by Plato had been
investigated by Locke, raised to clinical status by Rousseau, refined into materialist
method by Helvetius and Herbart, justified philosophically as the essential religion by
Comte, and scientized by Wundt. One does not educate machines, one adjusts them.
The peculiar undertaking of educational psychology was begun by Edward Thorndike of
Teachers College in 1903. Thorndike, whose once famous puzzle box became the
Skinner box of later behavioral psychology after minor modifications, was the protƩgƩ of
Wundtians Judd and Armstrong at Wesleyan, taking his Ph.D. under Wundtian Cattell
before being offered a post by Wundtian Russell at Teachers College.
According to Thorndike, the aim of a teacher is to "produce and prevent certain
responses," and the purpose of education is to promote "adjustment." In Elementary
Principles of Education (1929), he urged the deconstruction of emphasis on "intellectual
resources" for the young, advice that was largely taken. It was bad advice in light of
modern brain research suggesting direct ties between the size and complexity of the brain
and strenuous thought grappled with early on.
Thorndike said intelligence was virtually set at birth—real change was impossible—a
scientific pronouncement which helped to justify putting the brakes on ambitious
curricula. But in the vitally important behavioral area—in beliefs, attitudes, and
loyalties—Thorndike did not disappoint the empty-child crowd. In those areas so
important to corporate and government health, children were to be as malleable as anyone
could want them. An early ranking of school kids by intelligence would allow them to be
separated into tracks for behavioral processing. Thorndike soon became a driving force in
the growth of national testing, a new institution which would have consigned Benjamin
Franklin and Andrew Carnegie to reform school and Edison to Special Education. Even
before we got the actual test, Thorndike became a significant political ally of the
semi covert sterilization campaign taking place in America.
That pioneering eugenic program seemed socially beneficial to those casually aware of it,
and it was enthusiastically championed by some genuine American legends like Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. But if you find yourself nodding in agreement that morons have no
business with babies, you might want to consider that according to Thorndike’s fellow
psychologist H.H. Goddard at Princeton, 83 percent of all Jews and 79 percent of all
Italians were in the mental defective class. The real difficulty with scientific psychology
or other scientific social science is that it seems to be able to produce proof of anything
on command, convincing proof, too, delivered by sincere men and women just trying to
get along by going along.
Napoleon Of Mind Science
William James wrote in 1879:
[Wundt] aims on being a Napoleon....Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo....cut
him up like a worm and each fragment crawls....you can’t kill him.
From his laboratory in upper Saxony near the Prussian border, Wundt wrote 53,735
published pages in the sixty-eight years between 1853 and 1920, words which sculpted
modern schooling, from a disorderly attempt to heighten human promise in individuals or
to glorify God’s creation, into mandated psychological indoctrination.
Wundt’s childhood was unrelieved by fun. He never played. He had no friends. He failed
to find love in his family. From this austere forge, a Ph.D. emerged humorless,
indefatigable, and aggressive. At his end he returned to the earth childless. Wundt is the
senior psychologist in the history of psychology, says Boring: "Before him there was
psychology but no psychologists, only philosophers."
Coming out of the physiological tradition of psychophysics in Germany, Wundt followed
the path of de La Mettrie, Condillac, and Descartes in France who argued, each in his
own way, that what we think of as personality is only a collection of physiological facts.
Humanity is an illusion.
Wundt had a huge advantage over the mechanists before him. For him the time was right,
all religious and romantic opposition in disarray, bewildered by the rapid onset of
machinery into society. Over in England, Darwin’s brilliant cousin Francis Galton was
vigorously promoting mathematical prediction into the status of a successful cult. In one
short decade, bastions of a more ancient scholarly edifice were overrun by number
crunchers. A bleak future suddenly loomed for men who remained unconvinced that any
transcendental power was locked up in quantification of nature and humankind.
The Pythagorean brotherhood was reseating itself inexorably in this great age of Wundt,
the two in harmony as both contributed heavily to the centralization of things and to the
tidal wave of scientific racism which drowned the university world for decades,
culminating in the racial science station maintained on the old Astor estate in Cold Spring
Harbor, Long Island, by Carnegie interests until the events of September 1939, caused it
to quietly close its doors.12 Even at the beginning of the marriage of scholarship and
statistics, its principals saw little need to broaden their investigations into real life, an
ominous foreshadowing of the eugenical outlook that followed.
A friendless, loveless, childless male German calling himself a psychologist set out, I
think, to prove his human condition didn’t matter because feelings were only an
aberration. His premises and methodology were imported into an expanding American
system of child confinement and through that system disseminated to administrators,
teachers, counselors, collegians, and the national consciousness.
As Germany became the intellectuals’ darling of the moment at the end of the nineteenth
century, a long-dead German philosopher, Kant’s successor at the University of Berlin,
Johann Herbart, enjoyed a vogue in school-intoxicated America. "Herbartianism" is
probably the first of a long line of pseudoscientific enthusiasms to sweep the halls of
pedagogy. A good German, Herbart laid out with precision the famous Herbartian Five Step Program, not a dance but a psychologized teacher training program. By 1895, there
was a National Herbartian Society to spread the good news, enrolling the likes of
Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia and John Dewey. Herbart was finally laid to rest
sometime before WWI when Dewey’s interest cooled, but his passage was a harbinger of
many Herbart-oid enthusiasms to follow as a regular procession of educational gurus rose
and fell with the fashion of the moment. The Moorish dance of scientific pedagogy
accelerated its tempo relentlessly, and arms, legs, heads, perspiration, cries of venereal
delight, and some anguish, too, mingled in the hypnotic whirl of laboratory dervishes. By
1910, Dewey was substituting his own five steps for Herbart’s in a book called How We
Think. Few who read it noticed that a case was being made that we don’t actually think at
all. Thinking was only an elusive kind of problem-solving behavior, called into being by
dedicated activity; otherwise we are mindless.
12 America’s academic romance with scientific racism, which led directly to mass sterilization experiments
in this country, has been widely studied in Europe but is still little known even among the college-trained
population here. An entire study can be made of the penetration of this notion—that the makeup of the
species is and ought to be controllable by an elite—into every aspect of American school where it remains
to this day. I would urge any reader with time and inclination to explore this matter to get Daniel J. Kevles’
In The Name of Eugenics where a thorough account and a thorough source bibliography are set down. This
essay offers a disturbing discussion which should open your eyes to how ideas flow through modern
society and inevitably are translated into schooling. Dr. Kevles is on the history faculty at California
Institute of Technology.
Oddly enough, on December 11, 1998, the New York Times front page carried news that an organization in
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, had deciphered the full genetic code of a microscopic round worm, a
landmark achievement. The president of the National Academy of Sciences is quoted as saying, "In the last
10 years we have come to realize humans are more like worms than we ever imagined." Whether the Cold
Spring Harbor facility which announced this has any connection with the former racial science station, I do
not know.
What Is Sanity?
What we today call the science of child development grew out of the ambition of G.
Stanley Hall, Wundt’s first assistant at Leipzig, Dewey’s mentor at Hopkins, and a man
with a titanic ego. Hall inserted the word "adolescence" into the American vocabulary in
1904. If you wonder what happened to this class before they were so labeled, you can
reflect on the experience of Washington, Franklin, Farragut, and Carnegie, who couldn’t
spare the time to be children any longer than necessary. Hall, a fantastic pitchman, laid
the groundwork for a host of special disciplines from child development to mental
testing.
Hall told all who listened that the education of the child was the most important task of
the race, our primary mission, and the new science of psychology could swiftly transform
the race into what it should be. Hall may never have done a single worthwhile scientific
experiment in his life but he understood that Americans could be sold a sizzle without the
steak. Thanks in large measure to Hall’s trumpet, an edifice of child development rose
out of the funding of psychological laboratories in the early 1900s during the famous Red
Scare period.
In 1924, the Child Welfare Institute opened at Teachers College, underwritten by the
Rockefeller Foundation. Another was opened in 1927 at the University of California.
Generous donations for the study of all phases of child growth and development poured
into the hands of researchers from the largest foundations. Thirty-five years later, during
what might be thought of as the nation’s fourth Red Scare, the moment the Soviets beat
America into space, the U.S. Education Office presided over a comprehensive infiltration
of teacher training and schools.13 Judiciously applied funds and arm-twisting made certain
these staging areas would pay proper attention to the psychological aspect of schooling.
Dewey, Hall, Thorndike, Cattell, Goddard, Russell, and all the other intellectual stepchildren of Wundt and the homeless mind he stood for, set out to change the conception
of what constitutes education. They got powerful assistance from great industrial
foundations and their house universities like Teachers College. Under the direction of
James Earl Russell, president (and head of the psychology department), Teachers College
came to boast training where "psychology stands first." Wherever Columbia graduates
went this view went with them.
The brand-new profession of psychiatry flocked to the banner of this new philosophy of
psychological indoctrination as a proper government activity, perhaps sensing that
business and status could flow from the connection if it were authoritatively established.
In 1927, Ralph Truitt, head of the then embryonic Division of Child Guidance Clinics for
the Psychiatric Association, wrote that "the school should be the focus of the attack."
The White House appeared in the picture like a guardian angel watching over the efforts
this frail infant was making to stand. In 1930, twelve hundred child development
"experts" were invited to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, an
event with no precedent. One primary focus of attendees was the role "failure" played as
a principal source of children’s problems. The echo of Rousseau was unmistakable. No
attempt was made to examine how regularly prominent Americans like Washington or
successful businessmen like Carnegie had surmounted early failure. Instead, a plan to
eliminate failure structurally from formal schooling was considered and endorsed—
failure could be eliminated if schools were converted into laboratories of life adjustment
and intellectual standards were muted.
By 1948, the concept of collective (as opposed to individual) mental health was
introduced at an international meeting in Britain to discuss the use of schools as an
instrument to promote mental health. But what was mental health? What did a fully sane
man or woman look like? Out of this conference in the U.K. two psychiatrists, J.R. Rees
and G. Brock Chisholm, leveraged a profitable new organization for themselves—the
World Federation for Mental Health. It claimed expertise in preventative measures and
pinpointed the training of children as the proper point of attack:
The training of children is making a thousand neurotics for every one psychiatrists can
hope to help with psychotherapy.
Chisholm knew what caused the problem in childhood; he knew how to fix it, too:
The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations and the only psychological
force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong.
Shakespeare and the Vikings had been right; there’s nothing good or bad but thinking
makes it so. Morality was the problem. With WWII behind us and everything adrift, a
perfect opportunity to rebuild social life in school and elsewhere—on a new amoral,
scientific logic—was presenting itself:
We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our
Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers....The
results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy
living.... If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be
psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.
Old Norse pragmatism, the philosophy most likely to succeed among upper-crust thinkers
in the northeastern United States, was reasserting itself as global psychiatry.
The next advance in pedagogy was the initiative of a newly formed governmental body,
the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). In 1950, it arranged the White House
Conference on Education to warn that a psychological time-bomb was ticking inside the
schools. An epidemic of mental insufficiency was said to be loose among Americans,
imperiling the advances that industry and the arts had given America. Barbarians were
already through the gates and among us!
13 The story of the BSTEP document and the Delphi Technique, two elements in this initiative, is told in
Beverly Eakman’s Educating for the New World Order, by a former Department of Justice employee. The
book offers an accessible, if somewhat breathless, passage into the shadow world of intrigue and corporate
shenanigans behind the scenes of schooling. Also worth a look (and better edited) is Eakman’s Cloning of
the American Mind. Whatever you think of her research, Miss Eakman turns over some rocks you will find
useful.
Bending The Student To Reality
Twice before, attempts had been made to tell the story of an Armageddon ahead if the
government penny-pinched on the funding of psychological services. First was the great
feeble-mindedness panic which preceded and spanned the WWI period, word was spread
from academic centers that feeble-mindedness was rampant among Americans.
The "moron!" "imbecile!" and "idiot!" insults which ricocheted around my elementary
school in the early 1940s were one legacy of this premature marketing campaign. During
WWII, this drive to convince keepers of the purse that the general population was a body
needing permanent care was helped powerfully by a diffusion of British psychological
warfare bureau reports stating that the majority of common British soldiers were mentally
deficient. Now that notion (and its implied corrective, buying protection from
psychologists) made inroads on American managerial consciousness, producing monies
to further study the retarded contingent among us.
Reading the text "Proceedings of the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children
and Youth," we learn that school has "responsibility to detect mental disabilities which
have escaped parental or pre-school observation." Another huge duty it had was the need
to "initiate all necessary health services through various agencies." Still another, to
provide "counseling services for all individuals at all age levels."
The classic line in the entire massive document is, "Not only does the child need to be
treated but those around him also need help." A hospital society was needed to care for
all the morons, idiots, and mental defectives science had discovered lurking among the
sane. It would need school as its diagnostic clinic and principal referral service. Western
religious teaching—that nobody can escape personal responsibility—was chased from the
field by Wundt’s minimalist outlook on human nature as mechanism. A complex process
was then set in motion which could not fail to need forced instruction to complete itself.
The NIMH used the deliberations of the 1950 conference to secure government funding
for an enormous five-year study of the mental health of the nation, a study conducted by
the very people whose careers would be enhanced by any official determination that the
nation faced grave problems from its morons and other defectives. Can you guess what
the final document said?
"Action for Mental Health" proposed that school curriculum "be designed to bend the
student to the realities of society." It should be "designed to promote mental health as an
instrument for social progress," and as a means of "altering culture."
What factors inhibit mental health that are directly in the hands of school authorities to
change? Just these: expectations that children should be held responsible for their actions,
expectations that it is important for all children to develop intelligence, the misperceived
need to assign some public stigma when children lagged behind a common standard. New
protocols were issued, sanctions followed. The network of teachers colleges, state
education departments, supervisory associations, grant-making bodies, and national
media inoculated the learning system with these ideas, and local managers grew fearful of
punishment for opposition.
In 1962, an NIMH-sponsored report, "The Role of Schools in Mental Health," stated
unambiguously, "Education does not mean teaching people to know." (emphasis added)
What then? "It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave," a clear echo of the
Rockefeller Foundation’s "dream" from an earlier part of the century (See page 45).
Schools were behavioral engineering plants; what remained was to convince kids and
parents there was no place to hide.
The report was featured at the 1962 Governor’s Conference, appearing along with a
proclamation calling on all states to fund these new school programs and use every state
agency to further the work. Provisions were discussed to overturn resistance on the part
of parents; tough cases, it was advised, could be subjected to multiple pressures around
the clock until they stopped resisting. Meanwhile, alarming statistics were circulated
about the rapid growth of mental illness within society.
The watershed moment when modern schooling swept all competition from the field was
the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 (ESEA). The Act
allocated substantial federal funds to psychological and psychiatric programs in school,
opening the door to a full palette of "interventions" by psychologists, psychiatrists, social
workers, agencies, and various specialists. All were invited to use the schoolhouse as a
satellite office, in urban ghettos, as a primary office. Now it was the law.
Along the way to this milestone, important way stations were reached beyond the scope
of this book to list. The strand I’ve shown is only one of many in the tapestry. The
psychological goals of this project and the quality of mind in back of them are caught
fairly in the keynote address to the 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar in
Boulder, Colorado, delivered by Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce. This quote
appears to have been edited out of printed transcripts of the talk, but was reported by
newspapers in actual attendance:
Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes
to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials,
toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of
this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children
well—by creating the international child of the future. [what a piece of s*#t dc]
Perhaps it’s only a fortuitous coincidence that in the ongoing psychologization of schools
from 1903 onwards, the single most prominent thread—the nearly universal prescription
for better-ment offered by every agency, analyst, and spokesperson for mental health—
has been the end of competition in every aspect of training and the substitution of
cooperation and intergroup, interpersonal harmony. In utopia, everyone has a fixed place.
Envy and ambition are unwelcome, at least among the common classes. The prescription
should sound familiar, we’ve encountered it before as the marching orders of the Prussian
volksschulen. Unfortunately we know only too well how that Pestalozzian story ended.
Paying Children To Learn
As it turned out, my own period of behaviorist training came back to haunt me thirty
years later as garlic sausage eaten after midnight returns the next afternoon to avenge
being chewed. In 1989, to my delight, I secured a substantial cash grant from a small
foundation to pay kids for what heretofore they had been doing in my class for free. Does
that sound like a good idea to you? I guess it did to me, I’m ashamed to say.
Wouldn’t you imagine that after twenty-eight years of increasingly successful classroom
practice I might have known better? But then if we were perfect, who would eat garlic
sausage after midnight? The great irony is that after a long teaching career, I always made
it a major point of instruction to actively teach disrespect for bribes and grades. I never
gave gold stars. I never gave overt praise, because I believe without question that learning
is its own reward. Nothing ever happened in my experience with kids to change my mind
about that. Soaping kids, as street children called it then, always struck me as a nasty,
self-serving tactic. Addicting people to praise as a motivator puts them on a slippery
slope toward a lifetime of fear and exploitation, always looking for some expert to
approve of them.
Let me set the stage for the abandonment of my own principles. Take a large sum of
money, which for dramatic purposes, I converted into fifty and one hundred dollar bills.
Add the money to a limited number of kids, many of them dirt poor, some having never
eaten off a tablecloth, one who was living on the street in an abandoned car. None of the
victims had much experience with pocket money beyond a dollar or two. Is this the
classic capitalist tension out of which a sawbuck or a C-note should produce beautiful
music?
Now overlook my supercilious characterization. See the kids beneath their shabby
clothing and rude manners as quick, intelligent beings, more aware of connections than
any child development theory knows how to explain. Here were kids already doing
prodigies of real intellectual work, not what the curriculum manual called for, of course,
but what I, in my willful, outlaw way had set out for them. The board of education saw a
roomful of ghetto kids, but I knew better, having decided years before that the bell curve
was an instrument of deceit, one rich with subtleties, some of them unfathomable, but
propaganda all the same.
So there I was with all this money, accountable to nobody for its use but myself. Plenty
for everyone. How to spend it? Using all the lore acquired long ago at Columbia’s
Psychology Department, I set up reinforcement schedules to hook the kids to cash,
beginning continuously—paying off at every try—then changing to periodic schedules
after the victim was in the net, and finally shifting to aperiodic reinforcements so the
learning would dig deep and last. >From thorough personal familiarity with each kid and
a data bank to boot, I had no doubt that the activities I selected would be intrinsically
interesting anyway, so the financial incentives would only intensify student interest.
What a surprise I got!
Instead of becoming a model experiment proving the power of market incentives, disaster
occurred. Quality in work dropped noticeably, interest lessened markedly. In everything
but the money, that is. And yet even enthusiasm for that tailed off after the first few
payments; greed remained but delight disappeared.
All this performance loss was accompanied by the growth of disturbing personal
behavior—kids who once liked each other now tried to sabotage each other’s work. The
only rational reason I could conceive for this was an unconscious attempt to keep the
pool of available cash as large as possible. Nor was that the end of the strange behavior
the addition of cash incentives caused in my classes. Now kids began to do as little as
possible to achieve a payout where once they had striven for a standard of excellence.
Large zones of deceptive practice appeared, to the degree I could no longer trust data
presented, because it so frequently was made out of whole cloth.
Like Margaret Mead’s South Sea sexual fantasies, E.L. Burtt’s fabulous imaginary twin
data, Dr. Kinsey’s bogus sexual statistics, or Sigmund Freud’s counterfeit narratives of
hysteria and dream,14 like the amazing discovery of the mysterious bone which led to the
"proof" of Piltdown Man having been discovered by none other than Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin (who, after the fraud was exploded, refused to discuss his lucky find ever
again),15 my children, it seemed, were able to discern how the academic game is played
or, perhaps more accurately, they figured out the professional game which is about fame
and fortune much more than any service to mankind. The little entrepreneurs were telling
me what they thought I wanted to hear!
In other unnerving trends, losers began to peach on winners, reporting their friends had
cheated through falsification of data or otherwise had unfairly acquired prizes. Suddenly I
was faced with an epidemic of kids ratting on each other. One day I just got sick of it. I
confessed to following an animal-training program in launching the incentives. Then I
inventoried the remaining money, still thousands of dollars, and passed it out in equal
shares at the top of the second floor stairs facing Amsterdam Avenue. I instructed the
kids to sneak out the back door one at a time to avoid detection, then run like the wind
with their loot until they got home.
How they spent their unearned money was no business of mine, I told them, but from that
day forward there would be no rewards as long as I was their teacher. And so ended my
own brief romance with empty-child pedagogy.
14 When you come to understand the absolute necessity of scientific fraud, whether unintentional or
deliberate, to the social and economic orders we have allowed to invest out lives, it is not so surprising to
find the long catalogue of deceits, dishonesties, and outright fantasies which infect the worlds of science
and their intersection with the worlds of politics, commerce, and social class. The management of our
society requires a stupefying succession of miracles to retain its grip on things, whether real miracles or
bogus ones is utterly immaterial. To Mead, Burtt, Kinsey, Freud, and de Chardin, might be added the recent
Nobel laureate James Watson, double-helix co-discoverer. Watson’s fraud lies in his presumption that
having solved one of the infinite puzzles of nature, he is qualified to give expert opinion on its uses. As The
Nation magazine reported on April 7, 2003, Watson is an energetic advocate of re-engineering the human
genetic germline. In a British documentary film, Watson is shown declaring that genetic expertise should
be used to rid the world of "stupid" children. And "ugly" girls! It is only necessary to recall the time when
corporate science presented the world with DDT as a way to rid the world of stupid and ugly bugs, and the
horrifying aftermath of that exercise in problem-solving, to reflect that we might be better off ridding the
world of Watsons and keeping our stupid kids and ugly girls.
15 One of the most amazing deceptive practices relating to science has been the successful concealment, by
the managers of science and science teaching, of the strong religious component shared by many of the
greatest names in science: Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin and many more.
Even Galileo had no doubt about his faith in God, only in the established church’s interpretation of His
will. Newton’s Principia is unambiguous on this matter, saying "He must be blind who...cannot see the
infinite wisdom and goodness of [the] Almighty Creator and he must be mad, or senseless, who refused to
acknowledge [Him].
A.P. French quotes Albert Einstein in his Einstein: A Centenary Volume (1979) on the matter this way:
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious
feeling....,rapturous amazement of the natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that,
compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant
reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work. It is beyond questions closely akin to
that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
But neither Newton or Einstein cut the mustard, where their spirituality might raise embarrassing questions
among school children. School science is almost purely about lifeless mechanics. In the next chapter we'll see
why that happened.
next 313s
Absolute Absolution
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