Finally– A Government Agency That’s Actually Doing Its Job
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jan 23, 2010 in Commentary • 8 commentsThe United Farm Workers recently sent out an alert. The Texas Board of Eduction is “erasing Cesar Chavez and all Hispanic historical figures from public school text books.” Given the size of the Texas schoolbook market, its government specifications tend to have a wag-the-dog effect on the national industry.
Chavez, in particular, was eliminated on the grounds that he “lacks the stature…and contributions” and should not be “held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation.” According to the UFW press release, the state School Board and its appointees have complained of “over representation of minorities” in the current social studies standards.
This is in keeping with the Board’s broader approach, which includes downplaying the contributions of the organized labor movement and exonerating Joe McCarthy. If Cesar Chavez fails to meet the Board’s notability requirements or serve as a proper role model, however, that’s not true of “the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s including Phyllis Schafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” No, seriously. (They forgot to mention Fred Phelps.)
This is actually an old story in Texas. For years, state education authorities have been a prime target for the most reactionary and troglodytic lobbyists in the country, because of the state’s disproportionate influence on the national textbook industry.
Frankly, I don’t know why anyone should be surprised by this sort of thing. Texas being what it is, you might expect the Bob Jones University rejects on its state School Board to be a little more over-the-top than average. But other than that, they’re doing essentially what the publik skools are supposed to. As George Carlin put it,
“There’s a reason that education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed…. Because the owners of this country don’t want that….
“[T]hey don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking…. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago….
“They want obedient workers, obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
If you think what Carlin said is an overstatement, just read the work of John Taylor Gatto or Joel Spring, and you can find plenty of quotes from the founders of the modern public education system saying the same thing, in almost exactly the same words (minus an f-bomb or two).
The whole point of the state’s education system, from its beginning, was to process human raw material into docile and obedient “human resources,” just intelligent enough to carry out their assigned tasks as efficiently as possible, without ever stopping to examine the system that employed them, or question the authority figures behind desks who assigned those tasks.
If dissatisfaction with the further nationwide bastardization of history and social studies texts gives some more impetus to open-source textbook initiatives, that will be good. But more than anything, this should serve to reinforce the need to circumvent the state’s education system altogether.
Excellent article. My minor quibble (probably more of an aside than a quibble) is that I think that the “dumbing down” effect is more of a side effect than an intended goal. I think the sorting function was the intended goal. If you’re looking for a way to maintain the status quo in terms of power, privilege, and wealth through the generations, while at the same time keeping up a pretense of meritocracy, the public schools are a godsend. And the ever-increasing focus on sorting (not just the students, but the schools, districts, etc., as well) has the added bonus of detracting from learning actual critical thinking skills, although those skills are still emphasized in the elite private schools.
For the record, I am pretty satisfied with how my public school education helped me to develop critical thinking skills, though I have to admit that it is probably due to a few dedicated teachers who struggled against the system (I occasionally saw them struggling). Also, I was fortunate to attend the school with the least discipline problems in the county, and one than also had high levels of parental involvement.
One consequence is that when teachers were given the choice of where to teach, they often choose my school. As a result, we had a lot of experienced teachers (supported by parents) who were able to fight the administration when it interfered with their teaching style.
You draw many conclusions about the government wanting to dumb us down through education, from a state wanting to leave certain people out of the history books.
I think i agree more with quasibill on this, that it is an unintended consequence than an intentional one. On the whole, the US government wants to be competitive in the technological world market and can’t well do that with idiot workers.
I would also venture a guess that you, all the commenters and most of the readers of this blog schooled by the government, yet we have the critical thinking skills needed to come to the conclusion that government isn’t needed.
Center For a Stateless Society readers will probably be interested in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left pamphlet Liberating Learning: http://nj.libertarianleft.org/downloads/liberating_learning.pdf
eredeath: You may be conflating several different things. The ideology behind modern public education systems, as expressed by its founders, was pretty much as I described: to give those from Beta Plus on up the necessary flexibility and judgment to do their professional and administrative jobs without questioning the system too much, and those below that level to show up on time and follow instructions. Those goals are to a large extent promoted by an invisible hand mechanism by the education departments, teachers’ colleges and school administrators, although it’s questionable how much those serving as cogs in that machinery are engaged in coherent thought at all (paging Richard Mitchell!). To the extent that a minority of people in the system consciously frame its goal as processing serfs, or conceal that function behind less dissonance-inducing language–while the system’s structure promotes that goal in functional terms–quasibill’s term “unintended consequence” may be apt, at least in terms of the goals of most individuals in the system.
The goals of actual teachers working in the belly of the beast are a different matter. I was, indeed, schooled by the government. Like ricketson, my critical thinking skills were encouraged by dissident teachers (who more often than not openly mocked the administration when the telescreens were turned off). And the schools did a passable job teaching me to read and cipher in the first few years of elementary school. But by the time I developed an interest in learning about the world for myself, I saw the school’s assignments as mainly a hindrance to genuine learning, the same way “jobs” are usually a hindrance to productive work. Learning and productive work are things that take place despite the hierarchies that claim to exist for those purposes. And during that time, I saw the dissident teachers who really taught me things as a refuge from the system rather than a part of it.
I do agree that big movers and shakers explicitly argued for schooling’s ability to create essentially mindless automatons for their factories. But I think the reason that they were willing to talk so blithely about this goal is because the underlying goal was the creation of a self-perpetuating mostly rigid class system. The idea of public schooling originated in Prussia and the Indian subcontinent. Two of the most rigidly class based societies in history. If you don’t think that this was obvious to those who imported the idea….
Sure, some lower class types would move up the ladder, so it wasn’t entirely rigid. The important part is that it would be hard to go in the other direction. And all the time, it could be trumpeted as a meritocracy, and those unusual individuals that moved up through the classes could be trumpeted endlessly as “proof” of the existence of a meritocracy.
Meanwhile, private tutors, private schools, SAT test preps, etc., etc., were all there to ensure top class descendants never went the other direction. Then layer on the existence of “premiere” universities, and the system just rolled right along.
And of course, there were and are multiple strands of bootleggers and baptists involved, so there are all sorts of pools and eddies were good things happen within the larger context. But try stripping the school system of its attributes one by one, and I think you’ll find that the one thing that is non-negotiable is grading (sorting).
George Carlin was great. I like the bit he did about the names of the education programs: “First it was Head Start, now it’s No Child Left Behind. We’re moving backwards.”
Regarding dissident teachers, I had the same experience, although not until I was in college–at which point, I guess, they were more like dissidents in the (mostly left-wing) political sense, as opposed to bucking the educational system. I don’t think I had a single teacher in high school who did much more than simply “process” us through the system, and this was supposed to be one of the area’s better public schools. I’ll admit, I was pretty much beyond being educated in any way by my junior year. But still, looking back, my overall impression is of almost unbearable tedium. It seemed like everyone was just killing time, including the teachers.
I had a civics teacher in ninth grade (part of the junior high in my town), John Weaver, who had a big set of shelves behind his desk with Nietzsche’s works prominently featured. After he did a rush job getting us through the textbook in the first semester, he spent the second semester trying to stump us with ethical problems, and challenged us to evaluate assorted proofs of the existence of God, etc. I really don’t know how he managed to keep his job for so long, but I’m glad he did.
Another guy, a vice principal named John DeLap, was never formally a teacher of mine. But one of my teachers passed him a copy of an essay I’d written (IIRC it was a Hobbesian defense of religion as a useful tool for Straussian ubermenschen like me to manipulate the masses–hey, everybody goes through an assholish phase of some sort), and he called me into his office just to bullshit. He held the school administration in utter contempt, and mocked things like “school spirit” relentlessly. He actually made it to principal after I graduated, and was then removed from the position and simultaneously kicked upstairs to the administration (I’m fuzzy on the details). His removal sparked a fairly big student demo.