Collected notes from a paper I wrote last fall. It is a bit “jumpy” thematically. The core discussion was influenced by Tyack’s and Zimmerman’s work in History of Urban Education.
Of course: the primary influence is directly from Jonathan Swift’s “Immodest Proposal” a la Adult Swim’s internet flash game “Orphan Feast”. The game can can be found here: http://games.adultswim.com/orphan-feast-adventure-online-game.html.
Despite the figurative language. Swift’s social criticism is mostly spot on.
Introduction: A Best System?
It may be overly obvious to state the following: public education throughout American history has served a certain Native White Protestant bias and has historically relegated the poor, the immigrant and the emancipated slave to a role of ‘servant’ of this overly powerful minority. But it needs be said, constantly. History has a way of forgetting its past mistakes. Turning the tragedy of history into a farce or at least a passionless comedy. Urbanization and modernization were used as a tool to ‘intertwine’ corporate-bureaucratic interests with the Native White Protestant ideology to build a foundation for cultural consolidation through education across the entirety of the country. According to Tyack (see Tyacks The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education for an expanded account of the history of “social efficiency” models in urban education) , this ‘one best system’ has ill-served the pluralistic character of America and has failed to systematically reflect the goal of ‘equal education for all’. But it is not obvious how public education, despite this innate hegemonic bias, has actually and successfully served the polyglot under-privileged or if it has, in fact, served them at all.
Building the Education Meat-grinder
It is hard to imagine the explosive transformation of a rural and agrarian society to a massive, industrial urban complex would not warrant some sort of educational reform. The urban environment became a pluralistic archipelago of ideology, religion and morality—most of which were opposed, on some level, to the Native Protestant way of thinking. Individualistic and independent, the growing American city was fractious and decentralized. The economic interests of the privileged and powerful fueling the industrial machine required centralized efficiency. As politics moved the cities away from the pluralistic Ward Archipelago to the central authority of city halls, the same principles of social efficiency were applied to education. Something, as they say, had to be done with the children.
The general organizational reforms in education were a natural outgrowth of the industrial apparatus and the inherent desire to emphasize efficiency and maximize production. This move to bureaucratize education opposed the local scale with the cosmopolitan, replacing layman educator with the ‘professional’ ruled by progressive administrators, removing the rural social identity with ‘the creeping menace of unification’. The rapid urban growth created a vacuum of insecurity among the middling class and social elite. In order to promote an efficient and well oiled industrial future, steps were taken to use public education to socialize and commodify these poor and wayward youth to newer, more industrial modes of production. Attuning them to the social hierarchy. Ultimately, the goal was to transform students into future cogs of a modernized economy. The public school was used to enculturate children into the ‘factory model’ in order to minimize any class-consciousness or group-think that would pose a threat to the Native Protestant social order. Therefore, any notion of public education as ‘serving’ the under-privileged should be taken in the literal, Twilight Zone sense of the word.[1] The minority privileged Native White Protestant hegemony used a properly utopian core of ‘American values’ as a meat grinder with education reforms ‘serving’ the now processed poor to the industrialized machine.
Mint Julep Curriculum
Zimmerman (See Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools) suggests the ‘culture wars’ for control of curriculum in public schools is unavoidable, social groups will ‘promote their own opinions rather than a discussion of competing ones’. When a small fraction of a rapidly expanding society controls a preponderance of the political capital and agency, ‘almost always’ they will use such power to ‘serve’ their own ends.
Education became a ‘bland affirmation’ of freedom, democracy and the meritocratic myth of the ‘American Dream’, with any ‘alternative narratives’ tacked-on to save face value. A sort of historical anti-depressant to gloss over the systemic state of exception of actual history: the bitterness, oppression, slavery and violence indicative of the actual Native Protestant narrative.[2] While a mechanism and agency allowed minorities and marginalized under-privileged to obtain some form of control of curriculum, Zimmerman has proposed that this widening of the ethnic lens bred a concomitant narrowing of the critical lens. As long as no violence was done to the ‘core’ history of American democratic destiny, these changes were tolerated. History wrapped in candy coating serves only those who have something to gain—namely the ruling minority—by denying students and future citizens the mechanisms to wrestle and negotiate with these historical ‘states of exception’.[3] Without the light of criticism to guide our way, the very individualism we may seek to promote and venerate is inhibited, ‘serving’ to protect the ‘pragmatic standards’ of the Native Protestant ideology at the expense of our truly natural resource: our own plurality.
The Cannibalistic Core of American Public Education
The growth of the industrial-economic apparatus was used by those in power as a justification for ‘control’ and ‘management’ of children through public education. Overtly or not, the ruling classes sought to indoctrinate future citizens by stratifying privilege through ability and IQ testing, using these tools to ‘diagnose’ and ‘prescribe’ the most adequate fit for each individual in the massive machinery of industry. Under the aegis of ‘meritocracy’ and suiting the needs of the student for the future, these high stakes assessments sought only to pigeon hole the under-privileged into education tracts suited for the ‘dirty’ and ‘dead end’ occupations of the factory system. These problems were pronounced among African-Americans who were generally pushed towards unskilled labor in jobs ‘no one else wanted’. Considering this, we cannot ask ‘who does education serve’ without implying the figurative cannibalism inherent with ‘serving’ poor as fodder to future industry. But how do we break this food chain? Zimmerman proposes in order to truly use education as ‘service-for-others’ and not ‘service-of-others’ we need to widen the lens of criticism and challenge these rosy colored narrative ‘myths’, emphasizing inquiry and investigation over ‘efficiency’, ‘control’ and ‘management’.[4] Effective education reform, according to Tyack, will also require a critical reassessment of these ‘cherished convictions’ and the ‘familiar patterns of power and authority’ that have governed the growth and development of the public school. Otherwise, we are all guilty of cultural cannibalism in the name of ‘efficiency’ and the ‘American dream’: a dream that is not truly a dream, but rather a frightful nightmare, a nightmare that will haunt us throughout this rosy colored history.
[1] Rod Serling. “To Serve Man”, The Twilight Zone. Season 3, Episode 89. Sorry the example is just too evocative to pass up. This notion is not new. Take Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal for instance and his tongue and cheek idea that the poor Irish would easily assuage their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the wealthy British gentry.
[2] Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised. Vintage, New York: 1979. This is an apt metaphor, historical inclusion as ‘happy pill’.
[3] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Standford University Press: 1998. Our marginalized voices find themselves submitted to the ‘sovereign’s’ state of exception, and while the marginalized are human and therefore deserving of human rights, they instead are treated as Homo sacer, a human with no political significance.
[4] ‘Service-for-others’ and ‘Service-of-others’ being, of course, my words used to describe the theoretical distinction.
Burlesque Philosophe 