GattoCommentary

Robert Burns' ... instinctive consideration of men as men came from an ancestry which still cared more for religion than education. The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated... Education ought to be a searchilight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centred entirely on himself...

To trivialize Gatto is to contemn any meaningful discussion of Public Instruction (PI). Gatto's magnum opus, "Underground History of American Education" (freely available on-line at http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm) combines diligence, rigor and vision. No living American matches Gatto's grasp of Public Instruction --- a riveting history of magnates and social engineers collaborating to create docile, well-trained workers, deliberately corralled "half-people," incapable of discerning the matrix that mandates their obligatory immaturity.

During my teaching career, I've taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, the UNAM Medical School in Managua, Nicaragua, Durham Technical Community College, Berkeley High School in California and Orange High School in North Carolina. Currently, I conduct Medical Spanish Immersion, a program subscribed by medical schools across the United States.

Seven years ago, North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction revoked my high school teaching credential. (In a similar act of harassment, New York State revoked Mr. Gatto's teaching credential despite being chosen "New York City Teacher of the Year" three times, "New York State Teacher of the Year" once, and White House award winner by three presidential administrations.)

After informing my "superiors" that I could teach these "required courses" better than the professors who offered them, I quit Public Instruction and began teaching clustered groups of home-schoolers. (Few, if any, of my NC teaching fellows could have made their living teaching Spanish "in the open market," but they - having "credentials" remained at their posts.)

The state will oppose this suggestion since PI Administration must protect the academic exclusivity of "The Club" - its only hope of controlling "club members." Public Instruction will also shun practical demonstration of teacher capability because administrators know it will insure higher quality. With better, more independent teachers, the wasted energy and needless diversion of central command-and-control are diminished. (I do not object to academic preparation per se. It may even benefit some candidates. However, final corroboration of a teacher's ability resides in practical demonstration, not in documentary warrant.)

While Gatto was talking with Neal Conan, a former home-school "Mom" sent the following email concerning her son, Colin, whom I taught two hours per week when he was 12. She said: "Colin is now at "real School." What a waste! He is however called "Mr. Genius" in his Spanish class! He easily matriculated into Spanish 2. I have heard your home-school students can readily go into Spanish 3 but the powers that be can't abide that! The department chair however did concede "a tutorial for 2 hrs. a week would beat a daily middle school class hands down."

I recall former student, David T., who deliberately gave wrong answers on UNC-Chapel Hill's Spanish language placement test because he knew that full revelation of his knowledge would "place" him in an advanced literary course with little conversational component. Shrewdly, David "dumbed himself down," thus outwitting UNC's flagship university and insuring development of his conversational skill.

Only after quitting public instruction did I realize the full scope of the educational horror in which I'd participated. While still "in the trenches," I was unconsciously obligated to deny my collusion in "structural damage." Had I acknowledged this damage while still teaching, the cognitive dissonance would have been unbearable.

Public instruction is so bad so destructive of The Common Good and our now defunct Political Forum that I must invoke Arthur Miller to probe the depth and breadth of the tragedy we confront - the tragedy our collective paralysis prolongs. "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Delve into Truth. Give young people "the straight shot." Expose them to adult conversation. Let them listen while thoughtful grown-ups wrestle with life's quandaries. Shun smarminess, jingoism and flag-waving. Re-live the debates and divisions that formed this nation and continue to shape it. If necessary, submit students to "do-or-die vision quests" similar to husquenaw practiced by North Carolina tribes. If only for a while, make kids responsible for their very survival. (Ben Mikaelson 's "Touching Spirit Bear" is a fine novel addressing this theme.) Don't just "let" kids get in trouble. Show that you love them enough to make them "get in trouble." As my former pastor, 85 year old Rev. Paul Byron put it: "If you're living rightly, you'll be getting into trouble constantly."

Gatto begins his prologue to "Underground History of American Education" with this suggestion: "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."

At the University of Toronto, my Trinidadian girlfriend used to wear a button that said: "Everybody is a genius at something." Jenny's advocacy on behalf of "universal genius" recalls ancient Rome. In the Roman view, every human being is endowed with an indwelling "genius." Each individual's responsibility is to liberate that genius. Until it is "set free," one's innate "genie" will "rattle around" trying to get out. If not liberated, it will break something. ("Going postal" is an example of such breakage.)

Many Americans --- broken by un-liberated genius --- no longer recognize their indwelling capability nor support their own "best interest." Public Instruction has taught them to "depend," not to be "independent." To the extent that PI conditions students to rely on "experts, bureaucracies and corporations," these eternally "partial" people are subject to dependencies --- dependencies that sap democracy's lifeblood.

Through ongoing acts of surrender, we have devised a system that fosters idolization of the marketplace and thoughtless submission to the State. Instead of creating free citizens, we have fashioned a captive majority of interchangeable "consumer units" - and lead them systematically - into unprecedented personal, political and economic peril.

"In helping us to confront, understand, and oppose the global economy, the old political alignments have become virtually useless. (The global economy) persists because ... multinational corporations (have) discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people's economy, you don't need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. In a totalitarian economy, any political liberties that people might retain simply cease to matter." Another Turn of the Crank, by Wendell Berry

"The fundamental task of education in a democracy is what Tocqueville once called the apprenticeship of liberty: learning to be free. I wonder whether Americans still believe liberty has to be learned and that its skills are worth learning. Or have they been deluded by two centuries of rhetoric into thinking that freedom is "natural" and can be taken for granted?

The claim that men are born free, upon which America was founded, is at best a promising fiction. In real life, as every parent knows, children are born fragile, born needy, born ignorant, born unformed, born weak, born foolish, born dependent --- born in chains. We acquire our freedom over time, if at all. Liberal-arts education actually means education in the arts of liberty; the "servile arts" were the trades learned by unfree men in the Middle Ages, the vocational education of their day...

Jefferson and Adams both understood that the Bill of Rights offered little protection in a nation without informed citizens. However, once educated (and not merely instructed in the performance of a trade) a people was safe from even the subtlest tyrannies. Jefferson's democratic proclivities rested on his conviction that education could turn a people into a safe refuge -- indeed "the only safe depository" for the ultimate powers of society. "Cherish therefore the spirit of our people," he wrote to Edward Carrington in 1787, "and keep alive their attention. Do not be severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves."

We have been nominally democratic for so long that we presume it is our natural condition rather than the product of persistent effort and tenacious responsibility. We have de-coupled rights from civic responsibilities and severed citizenship from education on the false assumption that citizens just happen. We have forgotten that the "public" in public schools means not just paid for by the public but procreative of the very idea of a public....

Undergirding Public Instruction is an obsession with "grading and sorting." This tidy process certifies the few who "make the grade," simultaneously insuring the failure of many. In keeping with the lineaments of mock meritocracy and the barely-submerged aggression of Social Darwinism, we are not outraged by this systematic elimination of the "unfit. Rather, our relentless determination to discard people (and to disable citizens) is first normalized, and then exacerbated by the "criteria" of "grading and sorting."

Briefly examine the goals of American public schools and you'll glimpse a disproportionate urge to create middle- and upper-level managers. Add "professional people" to this topheavy mix and you have an intellectual/academic ideal that consigns most folk to menial positions in merchandising and service industries. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart is America's largest employer. (Public Instruction used to train industrial workers as well. Now, with production overseas, remaining "line positions" are easily filled by "the over-educated.")

Increasingly, the premises of American public schooling support an academically-gifted aristocracy. This aristocracy like others plays by exclusive "club rules" and has no intention of fostering vital, boisterous democracy. For all our clamor concerning "democratic process," these carefully perpetuated aristocratic criteria have become cornerstones of "bureau-institutional fascism." The "successful" functionaries who manage BIF are rewarded for accelerating unbridled consumption and expanding the domain of non-democratic decision-making in bureaucratic and corporate bodies.

Brazilian educator Paolo Freire observed that 'real literacy is the ability to re-write a book while reading it.' The "task orientation" of Public Instruction doesn't even consider this "deep" literacy, and -- judging by letters received at Medical Spanish Immersion is only tangentially involved in communicating the mere mechanics of reading and writing.

Public Instruction fragments people just as it fragments the school day into neatly arranged and easily managed spatial-temporal "cubbies." The direct result of this dis-integrated compartmentalization is "cube culture" the colonized ground where bureau-institutional fascism flourishes. Regardless the wonderful content that may emerge from these "cubes" behold the paper trails! -- their context is essentially dehumanizing.

"The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves." G. K. Chesterton Toronto, 1930

There is little protest over this deliberate devastation, although the growing popularity of home-schooling is a hopeful sign. Similarly but less inspirational more parents are enrolling their children in private schools, the very best of which -- Groton, Exeter, St. Paul's, Andover -- have always established religion as a core curricular component. (Yesterday, the Dalai Lama began a tour of the United States encouraging all Americans to "choose a religion.")

Public Instruction's refusal to teach Comparative Religion as a foundational subject produces human beings unnecessarily ignorant of their metaphysical milieu. Such deliberate oversight is the educational equivalent of lobotomization. Lacking historical and metaphysical framework, our kids flail about in the Tyranny of the Disjointed Moment, boldly declaring this spiritual shrinkage "liberation."

I understand the fear concerning "separation of church and state." Nevertheless, if we do not chart clear courses toward faithful goals - and they are ALL faithful goals - we will be shunted to the default altar of brutish (and brutalizing) Materialism. The ineluctable degradation of Materialism may not manifest in the first generation but will become apparent by the second or third.

Wendell Berry observes: "We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations."

Berry goes on to say: "Science-technology-and-industry has enabled us to be precise in describing objects that are extremely small and near or extremely large and far away. But it has utterly failed to provide us with even adequate descriptions of the places and communities we live in - because it cannot do so. Our schools are turning out millions of graduates who do not know, in this sense, where they are."

The purpose of liberating education - the goal of Liberal Arts (L. "liberare" = "to free") - is to escape the box of solipsistic self-destruction urged by American culture. Outside the box, liberated students aim to create their own work in the world, to escape self-seeking agendas imposed by strangers, to aspire to higher goals than protecting "a good retirement package."

"It isn't just pop culture and fast food that is creating a monoculture across the planet There is at least one other great destructive force at work globally, and this is the American management model. Leaders everywhere, no matter what their culture or tradition, are pressured to focus on numeric measures of efficiency and narrow measures of success, i.e., growth and profit-making As these too-narrow measures roll out around the world, they create the condition for large scale destruction of cultures, habitats and the human spirit. Yet few local leaders can withstand the pressure to be "modern" and so they forfeit their own experience and wisdom about what works best within their own tradition." Margaret J. Wheatley, Vimukt Shiksha, March 2001. More of Margaret Wheatley's fine essays are available at http://www.margaretwheatley.com/writing.html

Trappist monk Thomas Merton was asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets of Success." He replied: "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."

School administrators are loath to supply students a steady diet of original political documents - from Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, through Marx, Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, to Norman Thomas, Ralph Nader and Eugene Debs. They're fearful and rightly so that students educated in the actual political process will become dangerous citizens certainly dangerous to the survival of the bureau-corporate state.

Gatto begins Chapter 1 of "Underground History of Education in America" with this observation: "(Early) America was a special place in modern history, one where the society was more central than the national political state. Words can't adequately convey the stupendous radicalism hidden in our quiet villages, a belief that ordinary people have a right to govern themselves. A confidence that they can." See http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

Gatto's dedicatory note to Underground History is from Tolstoy's "Education and Children" (1862): "Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in moralityand in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated." (As we deliberately "dumb down" the populace, the case for populism becomes less persuasive. People have grown so dependent - so beholden to The Economy's creation of Jobs - that "the authorities" now count on erstwhile citizens to vote in their worst interest.)

"Lies My Teacher Taught Me" --- winner of the 1996 American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship --- is reviewed at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684818868/qid=1069554063/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-6453741-9104051 (Reader reviews of Loewen's book are particularly good.)

You'll either discard Loewen as a liar himself, or be haunted for the rest of your life. Did you know that the United States dropped three times as many tons of explosives in Vietman as it dropped in all theaters of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Quick! How many people died in the Viet Nam "conflict?" Three million.

Over ten years I have asked more than a thousand undergraduates and several hundred non-students their beliefs about what kind of adults, by educational level, supported the war in Vietnam. I ask students to fill out a chart giving the percentage of polled Americans who were in favor of withdrawal of U.S. troops (Doves), and also giving the percentage of Americans against withdrawal (Hawks). These two percentages were positioned along the vertical axis of the chart while College Education, High School Education and Grade School Education were the three categories occupying the horizontal axis.

The people I have polled in recent years assumed that 90% of Americans with a College Education would have expressed opposition to the war in 1971; that 75% of Americans with a High School education would have opposed the war in that same year; and that 60% of people with a Grade School Education would have been in opposition.

Today most Americans agree that the Vietnam War was a mistake, politically and morally; so do most political analysts, including such men as Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford who waged the war. If we concur with this now conventional wisdom, then we must concede that the more educated a person was, the more likely s/he was to be wrong about the war.

My audiences are keen to learn why educated Americans were more hawkish. Two social processes, each tied to schooling, can account for educated Americans' support of the Vietnam War. The first can be summarized by the term allegiance. Educated adults tend to be successful and earn high incomes -- partly because schooling leads to better jobs and higher incomes, but mainly because high parental incomes lead to more education for their offspring. Also, parents transmit affluence and education directly to their children. Successful Americans do not usually lay their success at their parents' doorstep, however. They usually explain their accomplishments as owing to their own individual characteristics, so they see American society as meritocratic. They achieved their own success; other people must be getting their just desserts. Believing that American society is open to individual input, the educated well-to-do tend to agree with society's decisions and feel they had a hand in forming them. They identify more with our society and its policies. We can use the term "vested interest" here, so long as we realize we are referring to an ideological interest or need, a need to come to terms with the privilege with which one has been blessed, not simple economic self-interest. In this sense, educated successful people have a vested interest in believing that the society that helped them be educated and successful is fair. As a result, those in the upper third of our educational and income structure are more likely to show allegiance to society, while those in the lower third are more likely to be critical of it.

The other process causing educated adults to be more likely to support the Vietnam War can be summarized under the rubric socialization. Sociologists have long agreed that schools are important socializing agents in our society. "Socializing" in this context does not mean hobnobbing around a punch bowl but refers to the process of learning and internalizing the basic social rules -- language, norms, etiquette -- necessary for an individual to function in society. Socialization is not primarily cognitive. We are not persuaded rationally not to pee in the living room, we are required not to. We then internalize and obey this rule even when no authority figure lurks to enforce it. Teachers may try to convince themselves that education's main function is to promote inquiry, not iconography, but in fact the socialization function of schooling remains dominant at least through high school and hardly disappears in college. Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform. Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the rightness of our society. American history textbooks overtly tell us to be proud of America. The more schooling, the more socialization, and the more likely the individual will conclude that America is good.

Both the allegiance and socialization processes cause the educated to believe that what America does is right. Public opinion polls show the non-thinking results. In late spring 1966, just before we began bombing Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam, Americans split 50/50 as to whether we should bomb these targets. After the bombing began, 85 percent favored the bombing while only 15 percent opposed. The sudden shift was the result, not the cause, of the government's decision to bomb. The same allegiance and socialization processes operated again when policy changed in the opposite direction. In 1968 war sentiment was waning; but 51 percent of Americans opposed a bombing halt, partly because the United States was still bombing North Vietnam. A month later, after President Johnson announced a bombing halt, 71 percent favored the halt. Thus 23 percent of our citizens changed their minds within a month, mirroring the shift in government policy. This swaying of thought by policy affects attitudes on issues ranging from our space program to environmental policy... Educated people are over represented among these straws in the wind.

We like to think of education as a mix of thoughtful learning processes. Allegiance and socialization, however, are intrinsic to the role of schooling in our society or any hierarchical society. Socialist leaders such as Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung vastly extended schooling in Cuba and China in part because they knew than an educated people is a socialized populace and a bulwark of allegiance. Education works the same way here: it encourages students not to think about society but merely to trust that it is good. To the degree that American history in particular is celebratory, it offers no way to understand any problem -- such as the Vietnam War, poverty, inequality, international haves and have-nots, environmental degradation, or changing sex roles -- that has historical roots. Therefore we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand Vietnam or any other historically based problem. This is why educated people were more hawkish on the Vietnam War.

Why have well-educated audiences been so wrong in remembering or deducing who opposed the Vietnam War? One reason is that Americans like to believe that schooling is a good thing. Most Americans tend to automatically to equate "educated" with "informed" or "tolerant." Traditional purveyors of social studies and American history seize upon precisely this belief to rationalize their enterprise, claiming that history courses lead to a more enlightened citizenry. The Vietnam exercise suggests the opposite is more likely true.

Audiences would not have been so easily fooled if they had only recalled that educated people were (and are) more likely to be Republicans, while high school dropouts are more likely to be Democrats. Hawkish right-wing Republicans, including the core supporters of Barry Goldwater in 1964, of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and of groups like the John Birch Society, come disproportionately form the most educated and affluent segments of our society, particularly dentists and physicians. So we should not be surprised that education correlates with hawkishness. At the other end of the social status spectrum, although most African Americans, like most whites, initially supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam, blacks were always more questioning and more dovish than whites, and African American leaders -- Muhammed Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X -- were prominent among the early opponents of the war.

American history textbooks help perpetrate the archetype of the blindly patriotic hard-hat by omitting or understating progressive elements in the working class. Textbooks do not reveal that CIO unions and some working-class fraternal associations were open to all when many chambers of commerce and country clubs were still white-only. Few textbooks tell of organized labor's role in the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on Washington. Nevertheless many members of my audiences are aware that educated Americans are likely to be Republicans, hard-liners on defense, and right-wing extremists. Some members of my audiences know about Goldwater voters, Muhammed Ali's induction refusal, Birchers and education, or labor unions and the war --- information that would have helped them "fill in the blanks" correctly. Somehow, though, they never think to apply such knowledge. Most people fill out the table in a daze without ever using what they know. Their education and their position in society cause them not to think.

Such nonthinking occurs most commonly when society is the subject. "One of the major duties of an American citizen is to analyze issues and interpret events intelligently," "Discovering American History" exhorts students. ("Discovering American History" is one of a dozen high school textbooks which Loewen examined as the basis of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.") Our textbooks fail miserably at this task (of teaching us how to "analyze and interpret events intelligently".)

The Vietnam exercise shows how bad the situation really is. Most college students, even high school students, would never put up with such obvious contradictions when thinking about, say, chemistry. When the subject is the social world, however, they are often guilty of nonsensical reasoning. Sociology professors are amazed and depressed at the level of thinking about society displayed each fall by the upper-middle-class students entering their first year classes. These students cannot use the past to illuminate the present and have no inkling of causation in history, so they cannot think coherently about social life. Extending the terminology of Jules Henry, we might use "social stupidity" to describe the illogical intellectual process and conclusions that result.

Only in history is stupidity the result of more, not less, schooling. Why do students buy into the mindless "analysis" they encounter in American history courses? For some students, it is in their ideological interest. Upper-middle-class students are comforted by a view of society that emphasizes schooling as the solution to intolerance, poverty, even perhaps war. Such a rosy view of education and its effects lets them avoid considering the need to make major changes in other institutions. To the degree that this view permeates our society, students automatically think well of education and expect the educated to have seen through the Vietnam War.

Moreover, thinking well of education reinforces the ideology we might call American individualism. It leaves intact the archetypal image of a society marked by or at least striving toward equality of opportunity. Yet precisely to the extent that students believe that equality of opportunity exists, they are encouraged to blame the uneducated for being poor, just as my audiences blamed them for being hawks on the ware in Vietnam. Americans who are not poor find American individualism a satisfying ideology, for it explains their success in life by laying it at their own doorstep. This enables them to feel proud of their success, even if it is modest, rather than somehow ashamed of it. Crediting success to their position in social structure threatens those good feelings. It is much more gratifying to believe that their educational attainments and occupational successes result from ambition and hard work - that their privilege has been earned. To a considerable degree, working-class and lower-class Americans also adopt this prevailing ethic about society and schooling. Often working-class adults in dead-end jobs blame themselves, focusing on their own earlier failure to excel in school, and feel they are inferior in some basic way."

"One reason (for our belief in the essential goodness of America) is that Americans like to believe that schooling is a good thing. Most Americans tend to automatically equate "educated" with "informed" or "tolerant." (However,) hawkish right-wing Republicans, including the core supporters of Barry Goldwater in 1964, of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and of groups like the John Birch Society, come disproportionately from the most educated and affluent segments of our society, particularly dentists and physicians. So we should not be surprised that education correlates with hawkishness."

Since Loewen's focus is American high school history textbooks, it's easy to assume that a change in the way these books are written will remedy their deficiencies. Without arguing that the problem is rooted in the structure of "public schooling" itself, I would point to the virtual impossibility of persuading America's "well-schooled" adults to accept "enlightened" textbooks since -- if textbooks told the truth -- they would erode most people's identity, purpose and sense of belonging. Taken together the loss of these characteristics represents a kind of death.

Examination of values - and the a priori debate over "first principles" which such examination requires - ultimately elicits definition of religious belief, and any serious discussion of religious belief in the nation's schools is forbidden. It is not coincidental that in a technocratic society dependent on "manufactured consent" we use the phrase: "There are two things one must never discuss - politics and religion." (See Yale professor Stephen Carter's "American Politics and the Trivialization of Religion." -
http://moses.creighton.edu/CSRS/news/S94-1.html)

Make no mistake: the rubrics of America's secular religion are as real as the credos of more traditionally-defined religions. Sadly, America's secular creeds are more powerful and more dangerous than consciously-held belief systems since their alleged "objectivity" puts them beyond reproach and above criticism. Consequently, we have evolved a society of extraordinarily clever monkeys whose self-arrogated "enlightenment" prevents them from glimpsing the essentially "unexamined lives" they live.

Technocracy validates intellectual rigor in the mathematically-based sciences, but dismisses discussion of "value systems" because the latter can not be quantitatively assessed. The essential credo of technocracy holds that "quantitative analysis" and "qualitative values" be kept in separate domains --- one public, the other private.

What is religion but an attempt to heal the existential rift that pierces the human condition like a seismic fault line. Buddhism is avowedly agnostic and Jainism is avowedly atheistic, yet no one disputes the religiosity of these belief systems. By creating a false distinction between Almighty God and the Almighty Dollar (to choose two examples) progressives may be relinquishing the only ground on which a stand can be taken against the dominion of Moloch-Mammon.

No matter how diligently we try to expunge inevitable axioms from our "value systems", we are - necessarily - religious. Short of suicide every action we undertake is an essentially religious attempt to mend the breach in the human psyche, whether we make this attempt through meditation, Judeo-Christian sacraments, sex, drugs, politics or rock and roll. Once we abandon the notion that religiosity depends on transcendant deity, we at last level the human playing field so that every core value is seen for what it is: 1.) a belief, and 2.) an attempt to re-ligature the rift in the human psyche. (Even the word re-ligion derives from the Latin "re-ligare," meaning to re-ligature or re-connect.)

It is not a matter of science, but a matter of belief that we reward people according to intellectual performance, rather than rewarding them according to their virtue. Admittedly, it is easier to quantify the former, but most people recognize the importance of virtue more readily than they recognize the importance of intellectual capability. Even if we could "prove" that it is "better" to reward "intellectual competence" ahead of "virtue," we still collide with the rubrics of "one person, one vote" self-governance. (This line of inquiry soon leads to a discussion of whether or not buro-institutionalists are implicitly at war with our democratic traditions, an issue beyond the scope of this essay.)

Is meritocracy a tool for rewarding (and controling) those individuals who are dull enough to sit in state-designated chairs long enough to receive meaningless credentials, while simultaneously insuring that anyone "with a hard knocks life" is penalized because by choice or default - they choose to chart their own independent course?

Although "the best and the brightest" screw things up at the highest levels, "the world is run" -- as Harry Truman said -- "by C students." Admittedly, these bureaucrats are highly-credentialed C students. But why does the meritocracy deem these "formal achievers" worthy of such disproportionate reward? At the time of her caddy relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, for example, was receiving a salary of $88,000.00 per year.

Says Loewen: "Thinking well of education reinforces the ideology we might call American individualism. It leaves intact the archetypal image of a society marked by or at least striving toward equality of opportunity. Yet precisely to the extent that students believe that equality of opportunity exists, they are encouraged to blame the uneducated for being poor, just as my audiences blamed them for being hawks on the war in Vietnam. Americans who are not poor find American individualism a satisfying ideology, for it explains their success in life by laying it at their own doorstep." (This self-congratulation by well-educated professionals is analagous to the inability of wealthy Americans to acknowledge the ways in which corporate welfare favors their "success.")

Ultimately, individualism and community are at odds. The individualistic urge to own "one of everything" "to take care of oneself" and, eventually, to retire to a gated community is inconsistent with any notion of community based on the Common Good. All the "things" we value so highly are, ultimately, consolation prizes. We seek these things - and need these things because our obsessive regard for individualism diverts us our from the prize of healthy community on which all other Goods eventually depend.

Rugged individualism despoils the planet in the name of incessant consumerism, isolating each "consumer unit" in a scarcely identifiable gestaldt of terror since this terror is the residue left by the destruction of community. This horrifying angst is terror of "the void," terror of "the abyss," terror of having no ultimate recourse other than ourselves.

Since 1967, when I could walk anywhere in Latin America without fear of personal peril - day or night - the globalizing impact of American "culture" and American-style democratic capitalism has 1.) dismantled the peasantry, 2.) vastly expanded the domain of open-sewer slums, and 3.) inculcated the "pay-as-you-go" sense that "everyone is in it for themselves."

The system never was pretty. But it has become a lot less so in recent years. You almost never hear of a candidate's being selected because of positions anymore. Descriptions of the prospective president's or senator's or representative's or governor's leanings, ideas and record tend to be sketchy and vague. The candidate is "a moderate." The candidate is a devotee of the "middle way." But these definitions that leave out everything of substance, in the hope of producing an irresistible, one-size-fits-all candidacy. And in addition to the candidate's ability to raise money, you hear a great deal about what the candidate's polls show. With luck you will have got yourself a prodigious fund-provider (either the candidate's own money or that of lavish contributors) and a sure winner. The rest will take care of itself. Because these two indispensable qualities come most reliably with celebrities and very, very rich people, you will likely end up with more of both as officeholders, as is already happening.

I don't have anything against very, very rich people or celebrities, but I do have something against the way they are being routinely used by both Republicans and Democrats to rig our politics. And the same goes for what is innocently known as "spin." The reason it is felt necessary to raise so much political money a couple of years before an election or convention or primary is that this much time is required to buy the professional spin and let the spinners do their work and let their fabricated message sink in. It takes this much time to achieve the parroting outcome --- in which millions of people are suddenly saying more or less the same thing at the same time and honestly believing it to be an original thought of their own. A new reality will have been created. It will be almost impossible to break through or challenge as to facts...

Now these, I admit with embarrassment, are pretty paranoid thoughts. But I do think we have let ourselves get boxed into a political order that does less and less for people, that rewards the greediest and pettiest of the politicians' instincts and invariably seeks to punish the ones who try to take an independent stand or think for themselves or otherwise fight back. The obscene amounts of campaign funds sloshing through the nation's political arteries have not seemed to trouble people very much. What do those that provided the funds want? What did they get, and who gave it to them? How much of these transactions was camouflaged? More paranoia, I suppose...

Public schools have become so embattled in a struggle for survival, and parents so ferociously determined to believe that public instruction still works, that few citizens realize how schools have become custodial, spiritual and intellectual corrals. We are now beginning to witness the fulfillment of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's prophecy: "In the 21st century, our children will rise up against us for our neglect."

In a world dominated by spin doctors and word police, it is remarkable that the Department of Public Instruction has chosen a straightforward, honest name. "Instruction" derives from the Latin "in" "struere" meaning "to build in." "Education," on the other hand, derives from the Latin "ex" "ducere" meaning "to lead out." The essential "direction" of education is to lead people out of themselves and into the common good. Alternatively, instruction "builds into" people personally profitable skill-sets that enable isolated -- and therefore "hungry" -- consumers to pay-as-they-go.

Peter Kramer defends "school resource officers": "Far from seeing these officers as a hostile, intimidating presence, the great majority of students, staff and parents have welcomed them. In fact, many of the most troubled and "at-risk" students have sought out these individuals, as much or even more than they consult with other staff."

Mr. Kramer acknowledges that "on any given day some (students) brought and used drugs, got into fights, or threatened a peer or teacher." The normalization of these circumstances - coupled with the glib assumption that we can "tweak" needed adjustment in a system that's become a masterpiece of mediocrity - is "over the top." To explore these issues in greater depth, I encourage readers to visit: http://alanarchibald.homestead.com/Education.html

Notable by its absence is Mr. Kramer's failure to mention that after graduation, a far greater percentage of young Americans will find themselves behind bars than in any other human society including the Soviet Gulag at its peak. It is literally monstrous that an increasing number of American kids find themselves behind bars charged as adults before graduation!?!

Ironically, some of these problems can be solved by "professional intervention." However, such solutions only restore sufficient health so that the beast plods on. The bottom line is a vicious spiral that reinforces meta-level dependency, self-focused careerism-for-the-few, and increasingly careless citizenship among the many.

On August 25, 2003, NPR interviewed the Superintendent of Schools in Mobile, Alabama. He had just installed video cameras in every district classroom. Like Mr. Kramer, the superintendent pointed out that "parents, teachers and students like this surveillance. They think it's a good thing." (See http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5&prgDate=25-Aug-2003 Search key words "Public Schools.")

Having observed my sister's three and a half decades as an inner city public school teacher -- and having been an educator myself in Orange County for 14 years -- I've had a ringside seat at the repeated retrenchment of instructional staff. Until charter schools injected a modicum of real hope, classroom teachers re-trenched themselves ever nearer the brink of doom in a fey attempt to survive their ordeal in the belly of the beast. I know no one "in the trenches" who would blithely observe - as Mr. Kramer does - that "on any given day some (students) threatened a teacher."

Under the current arrangement, however, Charter Schools do not always bring about clear-cut academic improvement. Still, the occasional failure of Charter Schools is often attributable to the extraordinary difficulty of securing a decent physical plant. If public moneys covered construction costs - as well as instructional costs - academic superiority would soon become the Charter School norm.

It is not my purpose to dwell on the manifold difficulties of individual classroom teachers swimming against an increasingly stiff tide. Rather, "Central Office" has disproportionate responsibility. District Headquarters is a haven for people who couldn't survive "the trenches." Instead, these "high end" administrators dedicate themselves to "controlling the chaos," usually doing so by fitful application of "the remedy du jour," coupled with metastasizing "programs." The result is exhaustion for students and teachers alike, the expanded domain of "remedial experts," and an ample "paper trail" to justify administrative counter-productivity.