by Tony Campolo
Do those on the Religious Right understand their duplicity?
For years they have argued against situational ethics. They have stood for absolutes and contended that those absolutes should never be compromised. With conviction they have declared, loud and clear, that the end never justifies the means. Now, with the war on terrorism on our hands, they support torture when interrogating suspects.
A prominent scholar recently polled a dozen top leaders of America’s Religious Right, who were unanimously in favor of using torture "given the situation at hand." When it suits them, it turns out, the end does indeed justify the means.
If they have changed their minds and are ready to refute the golden rule, then it is time for them to say plainly, "For the most part we agree with Jesus, but there are special circumstances when we must ignore His teachings."
Of course, these leaders ought to recognize the implications of their decision to support what they might call "necessary evils" in special circumstances. For instance, can they still tell a teenage girl who is pregnant by rape or incest that abortion is always wrong?
I’m not ready to answer such questions, except to say that the Religious Right can’t have it both ways. They can’t say that righteousness must never be compromised, and then add "except in certain situations—like torturing our enemies in times of war."
Friday, October 27, 2006
The Myth of Democracy in Iraq
by Tony Campolo
This administration, struggling for some justification for a war that is generally acknowledged as a disaster, has claimed that we’re in this war in order to spread democracy. The president points to the election of a parliament and the choosing of a prime minister as evidence that this war has had at least a modicum of success in achieving that end. But it is just this claim that I want to challenge.
First of all, a democracy is a society in which people are free to make those decisions that determine their own destiny. Any honest appraisal of what is going on in Iraq would lead to the conclusion that this is not the case today. The most recent study indicates that more than 80% of Iraqi people want our troops to go home - but our leaders in Washington ignore the will of the Iraqi people. Their destiny is not in the hands of the people of that devastated country.
A second characteristic of a democracy is that it is a society wherein the government has made it safe to be in the minority. Rule by the vote of the majority is not enough. In Iraq the majority of voters have chosen to create a government that is an Islamic Republic that embraces Shia law. The consequences are disturbing! There is no doubt that in removing Saddam Hussein a dictator was driven from power, but ironically women had more freedom under his rule than they are achieving in this new so-called democracy. The parliament that the majority of voters have put in place is showing signs of increasing the oppression of women. This minority group will not be safe!
Another minority group that is no longer secure is Christians. During the rule of the tyrannical Hussein, strange as this might seem, they were protected both in practicing and in spreading their religion. While Christians still can have worship services, Shia law prevents them from evangelizing - a privilege they previously enjoyed.
A recent United Nations report stated that religious minorities in Iraq have become regular victims of persecution and harassment. Christian women are said to have had acid thrown in their faces. Some have been killed for wearing jeans or not wearing the veil. As many as 60,000 Christians, and perhaps more, have fled the country. The 1.4 million Christians in Iraq have been whittled down to about 700,000. So much for democracy.
In light of these observations, what do we say to the families who lost their loved ones, thinking that those deaths were for the sake of spreading democracy? And what do we say to the mother of the last soldier to die in a war that is, for most observers, an obvious mistake? Isn’t it time for Red Letter Christians to demand some answers to these questions?
This administration, struggling for some justification for a war that is generally acknowledged as a disaster, has claimed that we’re in this war in order to spread democracy. The president points to the election of a parliament and the choosing of a prime minister as evidence that this war has had at least a modicum of success in achieving that end. But it is just this claim that I want to challenge.
First of all, a democracy is a society in which people are free to make those decisions that determine their own destiny. Any honest appraisal of what is going on in Iraq would lead to the conclusion that this is not the case today. The most recent study indicates that more than 80% of Iraqi people want our troops to go home - but our leaders in Washington ignore the will of the Iraqi people. Their destiny is not in the hands of the people of that devastated country.
A second characteristic of a democracy is that it is a society wherein the government has made it safe to be in the minority. Rule by the vote of the majority is not enough. In Iraq the majority of voters have chosen to create a government that is an Islamic Republic that embraces Shia law. The consequences are disturbing! There is no doubt that in removing Saddam Hussein a dictator was driven from power, but ironically women had more freedom under his rule than they are achieving in this new so-called democracy. The parliament that the majority of voters have put in place is showing signs of increasing the oppression of women. This minority group will not be safe!
Another minority group that is no longer secure is Christians. During the rule of the tyrannical Hussein, strange as this might seem, they were protected both in practicing and in spreading their religion. While Christians still can have worship services, Shia law prevents them from evangelizing - a privilege they previously enjoyed.
A recent United Nations report stated that religious minorities in Iraq have become regular victims of persecution and harassment. Christian women are said to have had acid thrown in their faces. Some have been killed for wearing jeans or not wearing the veil. As many as 60,000 Christians, and perhaps more, have fled the country. The 1.4 million Christians in Iraq have been whittled down to about 700,000. So much for democracy.
In light of these observations, what do we say to the families who lost their loved ones, thinking that those deaths were for the sake of spreading democracy? And what do we say to the mother of the last soldier to die in a war that is, for most observers, an obvious mistake? Isn’t it time for Red Letter Christians to demand some answers to these questions?
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Practice is More Important Than Theory
A Christian is not a Christian simply because she agrees to conform her life to some set of external principles or dogmas, or because at a particular moment in her life, she experienced a rupture and changed herself entirely. She is a Christian primarily because she acts like one. She loves and forgives; she listens and prays; she contemplates and befriends; her faith and her life fuse into an unself-conscious unity that affirms a tradition of moral life and yet also makes it her own. In that nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love is more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle.
--Andrew Sullivan
--Andrew Sullivan
Doubt
If we have never doubted, how can we say we have really believed? True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.
--Andrew Sullivan
--Andrew Sullivan
God is Beyond Our Human Categories
If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know--because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be God.
--Andrew Sullivan
--Andrew Sullivan
Monday, October 23, 2006
Arrogant Religious Certitude
Arrogant religious certitude allows no room for the possibility of being mistaken. Rather, it stomps all over the virtue of humility, failing to recognize that the human capacity to ingest, digest, and metabolize divine truth is limited.
So True Believers call each other names, assume they are saved and others damned, build walls to protect themselves from foreign truths, laugh at the pitiful infidels and stand with their pitchforks ready to ride into battle against them.
Renouncing arrogant religious certitude does not mean giving up our faith, our belief, our convictions. Not at all.
Rather, it means acknowledging that those convictions may not exhaust divine realities. It means leaving ourselves open to the idea that we have more to learn, more to understand.
--Bill Tammeus
So True Believers call each other names, assume they are saved and others damned, build walls to protect themselves from foreign truths, laugh at the pitiful infidels and stand with their pitchforks ready to ride into battle against them.
Renouncing arrogant religious certitude does not mean giving up our faith, our belief, our convictions. Not at all.
Rather, it means acknowledging that those convictions may not exhaust divine realities. It means leaving ourselves open to the idea that we have more to learn, more to understand.
--Bill Tammeus
Drive for Truth
The 18th century German playwright Gotthold Lessing said it best. He prayed a simple prayer: "If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say, Father, I will take this--the pure Truth is for you alone."
--Andrew Sullivan
--Andrew Sullivan
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Let the Institutions Do the Sinning
American preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa's apartheid, or Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose, and confront, the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people, and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them. This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good, but it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all.
--Peter Storey, former president of the Methodist Church of South Africa
--Peter Storey, former president of the Methodist Church of South Africa
Monday, October 16, 2006
Messing With God's Plans
The story goes that a North American missionary went out one day to preach in a barrio of a Brazilian city. Taking John 3:16 as his text, he stood on the corner proclaiming the love of God for all people.
A crowd gathered. One man in the crowd interrupted the missionary, "You are wrong, Señor, God doesn't love us."
But the preacher was adamant. "Oh, yes. God does love you. God gives all good things, including the Christ, for you."
The Brazilian, waving his arms at the squalor surrounding him, replied angrily, "Then somebody has been messing with the love of God!"
If God gave the earth for all people to share and enjoy, someone has been "messing" with God's plans.
--Charles Summers
A crowd gathered. One man in the crowd interrupted the missionary, "You are wrong, Señor, God doesn't love us."
But the preacher was adamant. "Oh, yes. God does love you. God gives all good things, including the Christ, for you."
The Brazilian, waving his arms at the squalor surrounding him, replied angrily, "Then somebody has been messing with the love of God!"
If God gave the earth for all people to share and enjoy, someone has been "messing" with God's plans.
--Charles Summers
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Cultural Famine
by Walter Mosely
America stands on a fiscal precipice here at the start of the twenty-first century. China and India and South America present powerful challenges to our economic hegemony; Europe's united economy also imperils our dominance. Our money is worth less daily, our children's potential is dwindling; our medical insurance, Social Security and ability to make choices about when and if we retire are fast eroding.
We cannot, with our present economic system, compete with Asia's burgeoning workforce. We are no longer superior in technology or the culling of natural resources. We can't even afford to pick our own vegetables or dig our own graves.
We've made enemies of the adherents of Islam, socialists, the French and much of the rest of the world. Most of our citizens are in debt over products that were made according to the lawful conspiracy of planned obsolescence, and we are mired in a war that we cannot win and yet cannot stop waging.
We say, and most of us believe, that our form of government is democratic at its root. But contradictorily, we suspect that it is the wealthiest among us who control Congress, the legal system and the presidency itself.
If we are lucky enough to achieve old age we know that all of our savings must be lost before we are interred in public nursing homes that have the smell and feel of detention camps--the last stop in the American Dream.
Our prisons are overflowing with undereducated and angry people of color, poor whites and the mentally ill.
Fast food clogs our arteries, and sugar is sprinkled over everything like fairy dust on ever-expectant Cinderellas. Television distracts us, and the Lotto is one of the minor faiths under the greater religion of Capitalism.
This is America. This is our home.
We worry that we might come in second or third when we are used to thinking about ourselves as Number One with a bullet. We are supposed to be the wealthiest, smartest, most powerful among nations. Our people are supposed to feel pride in our politics, our charity and our moral superiority.
But lately all of that seems to be slipping away.
What happened to us? How did we start to wind down? Why are we hated so? Why are we losing traction on the international playing field?
The answer, I believe, lies in a basic contradiction in our current national definitions of power and success. It was not the promise of wealth that made America strong; it was the hunger for freedom and the expressed belief that any woman, man or child has the potential to realize his or her abilities regardless of origin. It is not the questing after wealth and property that made us great but the belief in the rights of all human beings.
What would be wrong if our belief in our people made us less wealthy on an international level? What if we worked harder but ate better? What if we educated more of our children to become doctors but paid our doctors less? What if we built homes that anyone could afford to live in and limited the pain that profit often demands from our workers?
What if we demanded that we get value from our dollars and called out the credit card companies for what they are: loan sharks? What if we stopped policing the rest of the world and joined together with all nations as an equal looking for parity rather than professing our superiority because of our access to gold and the weapons we wield?
What if we recognized the crimes we've committed from Cambodia to Cuba, from Alcatraz to Africa? What if we recommitted ourselves to health, education and a minimum degree of wealth for all of our people? This would only serve to make us stronger (if not richer).
Because the truth is, we are starving on this fast-food, power-hungry diet of ours. Our children's minds are being strangled by our own corporations disseminating video games and advertising cross-trainers, selling SUVs and proudly manufacturing the tools of war.
Maybe if we had a little less and cared a lot more there would blossom the potential for happiness in our nation, more sweetness in our tone; we would certainly be stronger if our labor could support our lifestyles and our education opened our minds to the world. If we could realize that our culture creates criminality from the greed and poverty that abound within our borders, then we might have a chance to live in the world as equals, proud of our heritage and certain of our actions.
America stands on a fiscal precipice here at the start of the twenty-first century. China and India and South America present powerful challenges to our economic hegemony; Europe's united economy also imperils our dominance. Our money is worth less daily, our children's potential is dwindling; our medical insurance, Social Security and ability to make choices about when and if we retire are fast eroding.
We cannot, with our present economic system, compete with Asia's burgeoning workforce. We are no longer superior in technology or the culling of natural resources. We can't even afford to pick our own vegetables or dig our own graves.
We've made enemies of the adherents of Islam, socialists, the French and much of the rest of the world. Most of our citizens are in debt over products that were made according to the lawful conspiracy of planned obsolescence, and we are mired in a war that we cannot win and yet cannot stop waging.
We say, and most of us believe, that our form of government is democratic at its root. But contradictorily, we suspect that it is the wealthiest among us who control Congress, the legal system and the presidency itself.
If we are lucky enough to achieve old age we know that all of our savings must be lost before we are interred in public nursing homes that have the smell and feel of detention camps--the last stop in the American Dream.
Our prisons are overflowing with undereducated and angry people of color, poor whites and the mentally ill.
Fast food clogs our arteries, and sugar is sprinkled over everything like fairy dust on ever-expectant Cinderellas. Television distracts us, and the Lotto is one of the minor faiths under the greater religion of Capitalism.
This is America. This is our home.
We worry that we might come in second or third when we are used to thinking about ourselves as Number One with a bullet. We are supposed to be the wealthiest, smartest, most powerful among nations. Our people are supposed to feel pride in our politics, our charity and our moral superiority.
But lately all of that seems to be slipping away.
What happened to us? How did we start to wind down? Why are we hated so? Why are we losing traction on the international playing field?
The answer, I believe, lies in a basic contradiction in our current national definitions of power and success. It was not the promise of wealth that made America strong; it was the hunger for freedom and the expressed belief that any woman, man or child has the potential to realize his or her abilities regardless of origin. It is not the questing after wealth and property that made us great but the belief in the rights of all human beings.
What would be wrong if our belief in our people made us less wealthy on an international level? What if we worked harder but ate better? What if we educated more of our children to become doctors but paid our doctors less? What if we built homes that anyone could afford to live in and limited the pain that profit often demands from our workers?
What if we demanded that we get value from our dollars and called out the credit card companies for what they are: loan sharks? What if we stopped policing the rest of the world and joined together with all nations as an equal looking for parity rather than professing our superiority because of our access to gold and the weapons we wield?
What if we recognized the crimes we've committed from Cambodia to Cuba, from Alcatraz to Africa? What if we recommitted ourselves to health, education and a minimum degree of wealth for all of our people? This would only serve to make us stronger (if not richer).
Because the truth is, we are starving on this fast-food, power-hungry diet of ours. Our children's minds are being strangled by our own corporations disseminating video games and advertising cross-trainers, selling SUVs and proudly manufacturing the tools of war.
Maybe if we had a little less and cared a lot more there would blossom the potential for happiness in our nation, more sweetness in our tone; we would certainly be stronger if our labor could support our lifestyles and our education opened our minds to the world. If we could realize that our culture creates criminality from the greed and poverty that abound within our borders, then we might have a chance to live in the world as equals, proud of our heritage and certain of our actions.
Outwit Nature?
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
--E.B. White
--E.B. White
Friday, October 13, 2006
The Killing Must Stop
A group of American and Iraqi medical researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a new study on civilian casualties in Iraq Wednesday morning. Their conclusion? 655,000 more civilians have died as a result of violence since the U.S. invasion than would have died if there had been no invasion. The estimate is based on interviews with nearly 2,000 households in 47 neighborhoods across the country.
The survey shows that the range of deaths could be from 425,000 to 800,000 people, but they believe 655,000 is the best estimate. The causes of death include gunshots, car bombs and other explosives, and air strikes. U.S. and other coalition forces were responsible, the study says, for 31% of the deaths – 200,000 people. The violence of the insurgency and civil war sparked by the invasion caused the rest. The study, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq," was published in a British medical journal, The Lancet.
According to The New York Times, "the study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo," and noted that "statistics experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate." The Washington Post quoted a Human Rights Watch official who said, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the study.
When answering a question last December about how many Iraqis had been killed, President Bush replied, "I would say 30,000, more or less." This study shows that it may well be 20 times that number. The latest Pentagon numbers show 2,749 American troops have died, and more than 20,000 are wounded. This unnecessary war is a tragedy for American and Iraqi families and a moral outrage before God.
--Jim Wallis
The survey shows that the range of deaths could be from 425,000 to 800,000 people, but they believe 655,000 is the best estimate. The causes of death include gunshots, car bombs and other explosives, and air strikes. U.S. and other coalition forces were responsible, the study says, for 31% of the deaths – 200,000 people. The violence of the insurgency and civil war sparked by the invasion caused the rest. The study, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq," was published in a British medical journal, The Lancet.
According to The New York Times, "the study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo," and noted that "statistics experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate." The Washington Post quoted a Human Rights Watch official who said, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the study.
When answering a question last December about how many Iraqis had been killed, President Bush replied, "I would say 30,000, more or less." This study shows that it may well be 20 times that number. The latest Pentagon numbers show 2,749 American troops have died, and more than 20,000 are wounded. This unnecessary war is a tragedy for American and Iraqi families and a moral outrage before God.
--Jim Wallis
Globalization and the Common Good of Humanity
Globalization, for all its risks, also offers exceptional and promising opportunities, precisely with a view to enabling humanity to become a single family, built on the values of justice, equity, and solidarity. For this to happen, a complete change of perspective will be needed: it is no longer the well-being of any one political, racial, or cultural community that must prevail, but rather the good of humanity as a whole. The pursuit of the common good of a single political community cannot be in conflict with the common good of humanity.
--John Paul II
--John Paul II
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
An Amish Grandfather's Lesson of Forgiveness
by L. Gregory Jones
Shock, dismay, horror--words that only barely begin to convey our reactions to the killings of five Amish girls in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse this week. How could such a thing happen? We reel at this stark clash of cultures and images: the eruption of modern America's violence with the non-violent Amish; adult bitterness and youthful innocence.
There is also another story here that we risk missing amid the chaos of the moment--a tale of two lives, lived over time, with very different implications and lessons for all of us.
The grandfather of one of the slain Amish girls was standing next to his 13-year-old granddaughter's body, preparing her for burial. Less than 48 hours after the killings, he told a group of young boys: "We must not think evil of this man." He went on to urge them to forgive the killer, who had taken his own life as well.
Such words sound bizarre to many of us.How could a grieving grandfather think such thoughts, much less say them, so soon after the killing? Who among us, we wonder, is not thinking evil of this man?
What we miss is how this grandfather's life has been formed by non-violence, by patterns of prayer and worship and peaceful resolution of differences with others.
His words come naturally to him because they are the reflection of how he has lived over the course of a lifetime. They startle many of us who live in the midst of violence, who tend to harbor desires for vengeance, even if we do not act them out violently.
The grandfather would be the first to admit that it is not "natural" for human beings to embody a commitment to forgiveness, to living non-violently, to learning not to think evil of others. That must be learned over time, with the assistance of a wider community of people who share those commitments.
He would say it is learned by following Jesus.
The noted preacher William Sloane Coffin interpreted the verses Romans 8:14-21 by saying, "If you love good you have to hate evil; otherwise you are sentimental. But if you hate evil more than you love good, you simply become a damn good hater, and of such people the world has enough."
This grandfather is no hater. As a result of the habits of a lifetime, he is speaking and acting as those who know him would expect him to act: as a peaceful man who embodies the art of living as a forgiven and forgiving person. He undoubtedly hates the evil that was done to his granddaughter, but he also knows the corrosive effect of harboring that hatred and letting it define his life and our world.
By contrast, the killer learned to hate extremely well.
He evidently harbored bitterness for more than two decades, and there were no practices of forgiveness and repentance that would have enabled him to discover a way of letting past brokenness remain in the past.
Instead, bitterness seeped into his soul, and his grudge burdened him until it finally exploded in an outrageous series of actions whose effects go even beyond the horror of the young girls' deaths: the scarring of a community and its fragile peaceable life; the despair that many of us feel, wanting some constructive outlet for our own outrage and grief; the fear that we cannot stop the cycles of violence and the imitative destructiveness we have seen in recent school shootings.
Our task is to hope even against hope for communities and practices of forgiveness and repentance that can cultivate a future not bound by the destructiveness of the past.
We need not live like the Amish to learn a powerful lesson from the grandfather's life and witness.
But it will take us becoming focused on a renunciation of the violence and vengeance that haunts our own lives and imaginations, and learning to live in relationships and communities that are marked by the regular, difficult, costly yet life-giving patterns and practices of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Iris Murdoch once wrote that "a saint is someone who absorbs evil without passing it on." If a close relative can do so even in the wake of senseless killing, we ought to be able to find ways to cultivate such saintly practices in our own lives. Whatever it takes to do so.
Shock, dismay, horror--words that only barely begin to convey our reactions to the killings of five Amish girls in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse this week. How could such a thing happen? We reel at this stark clash of cultures and images: the eruption of modern America's violence with the non-violent Amish; adult bitterness and youthful innocence.
There is also another story here that we risk missing amid the chaos of the moment--a tale of two lives, lived over time, with very different implications and lessons for all of us.
The grandfather of one of the slain Amish girls was standing next to his 13-year-old granddaughter's body, preparing her for burial. Less than 48 hours after the killings, he told a group of young boys: "We must not think evil of this man." He went on to urge them to forgive the killer, who had taken his own life as well.
Such words sound bizarre to many of us.How could a grieving grandfather think such thoughts, much less say them, so soon after the killing? Who among us, we wonder, is not thinking evil of this man?
What we miss is how this grandfather's life has been formed by non-violence, by patterns of prayer and worship and peaceful resolution of differences with others.
His words come naturally to him because they are the reflection of how he has lived over the course of a lifetime. They startle many of us who live in the midst of violence, who tend to harbor desires for vengeance, even if we do not act them out violently.
The grandfather would be the first to admit that it is not "natural" for human beings to embody a commitment to forgiveness, to living non-violently, to learning not to think evil of others. That must be learned over time, with the assistance of a wider community of people who share those commitments.
He would say it is learned by following Jesus.
The noted preacher William Sloane Coffin interpreted the verses Romans 8:14-21 by saying, "If you love good you have to hate evil; otherwise you are sentimental. But if you hate evil more than you love good, you simply become a damn good hater, and of such people the world has enough."
This grandfather is no hater. As a result of the habits of a lifetime, he is speaking and acting as those who know him would expect him to act: as a peaceful man who embodies the art of living as a forgiven and forgiving person. He undoubtedly hates the evil that was done to his granddaughter, but he also knows the corrosive effect of harboring that hatred and letting it define his life and our world.
By contrast, the killer learned to hate extremely well.
He evidently harbored bitterness for more than two decades, and there were no practices of forgiveness and repentance that would have enabled him to discover a way of letting past brokenness remain in the past.
Instead, bitterness seeped into his soul, and his grudge burdened him until it finally exploded in an outrageous series of actions whose effects go even beyond the horror of the young girls' deaths: the scarring of a community and its fragile peaceable life; the despair that many of us feel, wanting some constructive outlet for our own outrage and grief; the fear that we cannot stop the cycles of violence and the imitative destructiveness we have seen in recent school shootings.
Our task is to hope even against hope for communities and practices of forgiveness and repentance that can cultivate a future not bound by the destructiveness of the past.
We need not live like the Amish to learn a powerful lesson from the grandfather's life and witness.
But it will take us becoming focused on a renunciation of the violence and vengeance that haunts our own lives and imaginations, and learning to live in relationships and communities that are marked by the regular, difficult, costly yet life-giving patterns and practices of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Iris Murdoch once wrote that "a saint is someone who absorbs evil without passing it on." If a close relative can do so even in the wake of senseless killing, we ought to be able to find ways to cultivate such saintly practices in our own lives. Whatever it takes to do so.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
How Public Education Cripples Our Kids
by John Taylor Gatto
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools--with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers--as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multi-volume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not "to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else."
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant--president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison--gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose--the actual purpose--of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits--and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit--with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments--clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era--marketing.
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley--who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard--had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools--with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers--as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multi-volume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not "to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else."
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant--president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison--gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose--the actual purpose--of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits--and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit--with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments--clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era--marketing.
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley--who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard--had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Incarcerated Women
Women now make up 7 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons. That statistic may not seem earth-shattering, but the rate at which women are entering prison is staggering. From 1980 to 2004, the numbers of incarcerated women increased from 12,300 to 105,000, an increase of 854 percent. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, women were incarcerated in 2004 at more than double the rate of men. And the numbers are still rising.
--Kimberley Gegner
--Kimberley Gegner
Prescription
It is one thing to say with the prophet Amos, "Let justice roll down like mighty waters," and quite another to work out the irrigation system. Clearly there is more certainty in the recognition of wrongs than there is in the prescription for their cure.
--William Sloane Coffin
--William Sloane Coffin
A Drop in the Ocean
We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.
--Mother Teresa
--Mother Teresa
Monday, October 02, 2006
Getting Enough
There are two ways to get enough; one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
--G.K. Chesterson
--G.K. Chesterson
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