Ordinary people send their children to
school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It's a religious idea gone out of
control. You don't have to accept
that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by
too many smart people who
understand too much. I won't ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I'll
let a famous American publisher
explain to
you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient.
Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple
ignorance; now it is transformed from
ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity
like "gifted and
talented," "mainstream," "special ed."
Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely
ignorant. Now they are
indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of
commercially prepared
disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is
a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us
that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects
of schooling because they are
promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly: Critical judgment disappears
altogether, for in no way can
there ever be collective
critical judgment. ...The individual can no
longer judge for himself because
he inescapably relates his thoughts
to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made
value judgments invested with the
power of the truth by... the word of
experts.
The new dumbness is particularly deadly
to middle- and upper-middle-class
kids already made shallow by multiple
pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When
they come of age, they are certain
they must know something because their
degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal
divorce, a corporate downsizing in
midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan
Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school
adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
Ellul puts it this way:
The individual has no
chance to exercise his judgment
either on principal questions or on their
implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best
of] conditions. ..Once personal
judgment and critical faculties
have disappeared or have atrophied, they
will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed... years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore
such faculties. The propagandee,
if deprived of one propaganda,
will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis
some event without a ready-made
opinion.
Once the best
children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National
Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote
that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It
broke my heart. What kids dumbed
down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for
very long without feeling crazy;
stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their
knowledgeable elders.
According to all
official analysis, dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be
called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about
the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is
capable of what you and I call
mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a
trio occupying the three highest
positions on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According
to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice
to this social coup which revived
the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and
talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social
order.
If you believe
nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe
capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe
dumbness reflects depraved moral
fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies
from the reproduction sweepstakes
(the Darwinian model); or nature's way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model);
or that it's evidence of bad karma
(the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social
order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to
address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The shocking possibility that dumb
people don't exist in sufficient
numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my
proposition: Mass dumbness first
had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Once the dumb are
wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to
be watched, classified,
disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they
represent a challenge, reprobates
to be made socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require
paid
attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be
schooled one way or another.
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