J: It wasn’t my intention but that is what happened.
M: The bell rings in a Pavlovian way and we take our children that we dearly love and we put them on this conveyor belt for twelve or more years and don’t ask any of the basic questions you raise. Why is it so hard for most of us who have been so deeply conditioned by this system to see that the king has no clothes?
J: They may have an intuition, but parents are involved in making a living and mowing the lawn and walking the dog, burping the baby. There’s so many distractions that I think we end up taking what seems to be a perfectly rational gamble because everyone else is taking it.
M: The true content of the television experience is the relationship we have to the box, not what is flickering on the screed. This notion that the form of the system, the structure, is that system’s primary content, is your underlying thesis.
You are not talking about the math, reading or history. You’re talking about the structure being the real content – not learned – but deeply conditioned form is content. We’re learning how to conform and part of this conditioning is to not question the structure.
J: The architects of institutional schooling were completely conscious of this. I’ve encountered some intriguing passages that state openly that habit training and attitude training is imposed by the structure. This is what mass schooling is really all about. These observations were not coming from outsiders or radical sources. They were coming from the very center, Alexander Inglis, around the First World
War, wrote a book, it’s very, very hard to get, called “Principles of Secondary Education”. In one section, he lists the purposes of what we call schooling. There’s six - everyone is illuminating - and hair raising.
- The first is to make people predictable so that the economy can be rationalized.
- You can do that if people are predictable. Yet, history has demonstrated over and over and over again that we’re not. So the very first purpose or goal of institutional schoolings is to make people predictable. Darwin was a big influence, but it’s not the Darwin that is sold in school text books. It’s not the fellow curious about nature. It’s a fellow absolutely certain that animal trainers and plant breeders had discovered the operational truth of human life. And that they have supplied, I’m citing from Darwin’s “Descent of Man” which is about 12 years after Origins of Species, and made a much bigger impact, thatthe overwhelming majority of human biology is fatally corrupted. It cannot be improved by cross-breeding because it’s so far gone. And if we cross-breed the mass with the evolutionarily advanced this will drag everyone back into the swamp. That book probably has caused more damage than any piece of writing in humanhistory. It was immediately adopted by the managerial classes of the planet. You had to find ways to lock up the evolutionarily retarded, to waste their time and set them against one another. And whatever you did, keep them away from the good stuff! There was no evil intended - quite the reverse. They were taking human improvement into their own hands. In the United States there was a seminar course taught by the President of Indiana University, David Starr Jordan, a legendary name on the West Coast. Jordan called the course Bionomics. The idea was to take charge of evolution by reducing the breeding propensities of the inferior.
- As Darwin said in Origin of Species, only mankind is stupid enough to allow its
inferior stock to breed. What Jordan did was to organize a class that would
politically and intellectually take charge of this. Who was the President of the
University of Indiana? He turned out to be the first President of Stanford University, the Harvard of the West, a position he held for 30 years. - What we’re really talking about is a deliberate and massive retardation of normal
human growth processes and the monopolistic assumption of responsibility and
decision making so the challenge of reducing inferior breeding can be conferred
on a managerial group.
J: The subject is schooling and all the unexamined assumptions schooling imply, such as - to be removed from your family, your neighborhood, your traditions, your church, whatever other source you have and be placed in the hands of total strangers who, after a while, if you keep your eyes open, you come to see are, all from bottom to the top, flunkies. They’re all interchangeable. None has any original ideas. This qualifies them as guards, to see that the training is imposed as it was designed. But by whom? Who designed the training?
It’s not easy to find out who designed the training. If you’re obsessive and I was obsessive because I was pissed off. I was so furious that I’d spent my life hurting children. That anger, quite hot, lasted for ten years. I’m still not un-angry. During that time, by working seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, and with nothing other than this on my mind, I managed to stumble across sources.
For example. In 1915 there was a Congressional Commission called the Walsh Committee that tried to answer the same question. In 1959 there was a second Congressional Committee called the Reese Commission. They discovered that the management of forced institutional schooling was coming from the project offices of a dozen or so private corporate foundations. Now, at least, you have a clue.
The expression common during the Watergate era was ‘follow the money.’ This is still the best way to begin. Who is actually putting out the money to underwrite this? There were key families who were proud enough of their heritage to have left behind a family record. By looking, not only at the immediate architect of a school plan, but looking at the grandparents, the great grandparents, as far back as you can trace, you can follow the continuation of ideas - like the one we went through a few minutes ago - that jumps from Calvin to Spinoza to Fichte to Darwin to Arthur Jensen.
The idea at bottom is that a utopian society is a worthy goal to spend your time on, especially if you have a lot of free time and a lot of money, and that the bedrock of a utopian society is an absolutely stable social order.
What’s being done is a trade of security and stability for liberty. You have to cash in your liberty, your individuality, your freedom to get that. Since people won’t willingly do that stability, all the insights about crowd management that have accumulated throughout human history are now put into play in the form of social structures.
J: We’re taking our real wealth – our children and their potential - and we’re throwing it away. We are burning it. We are smashing it. What the young brain offers in any moment in history is a new way to see things, unquenchable energy that can be beaten down and it will rise back up again. And we’re just pitching it out in exchange for this stable orderly society.
“Craig Ventner, the beach bum surfer who shared the laurels for producing the map of the human genome… cut class often to hit the boogie board and only escaped junior high because a teacher changed of his ‘F’ grades to a ‘D’ – so the school would be rid of him.
George W. Bush had a ‘C’ average in high school and a ‘C’ average in college, but that was a higher ‘C’ average in high school and college that was earned by Massachusetts senator John kerry… Al Gore flunked out of his first college and squeaked through his second with a ‘C’ average. Dick Cheney flunked out too. Legendary progressive Senator Paul Wellstone scored 800 on his combined SATs.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft – no college degrees. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple – no college degrees.
Michael Dell is another un-degreed immortal of the computer game, as is Larry Ellison of Oracle.
Ted Turner, founder of CNN, dropped out of college. William Faulkner’s high school grades were too horrible to get him into the University of Mississippi. Warren Avis, the man who pioneered auto rental s at airports, decided that college was a waste of time and didn’t even apply.
Edward Hamilton, the nation’s largest independent mail order book dealer, wrote me that the advantage he had was that he hadn’t wasted his capital or time on college. Paul Orfalea, the highly intelligent founderof Kinko’s was not regarded as very bright by his high school. Lew Waserman created modern Hollywood with is colossal MCA; he had no college and virtually no seat time in high school.
Warren Buffet started business at the age of 6, selling iced Coca-Cola. By 18 Buffet had the equivalent of $100,000 in the bank. Then applied to Warton Business School and was turned down.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln – someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system. Through most of American history kids generally did not go to high school – and 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.
Consider what society would look like if 65 million trapped school children learning to be consumers were suddenly set to actively imagining themselves to be producers instead of bored consumers?... Isn’t that exactly what America needs at this sorry, sterile juncture in our history – not more well-schooled zombies on whose backs the few can ride.
From Weapons of Mass Instruction
M: Imagination is the key. You said that the system prevents individuals from developing the capacity for critical or creative thinking.
J: I can give you a solid rational reason, divorced from the usual demonology, why imagination has to be destroyed. Capitalism is a way of organizing economic activities. It suffers from certain diseases that have been well understood for several hundred years. The most dangerous is something that used to be called over-production, now in the financial markets its called over-capacity. But let’s use the term, over-production.
In capitalism if more is produced that consumers purchase, the price can’t be maintained. Worse, it becomes difficult to assemble pools of capital because investors get spooked. The easiest way to curtail production is to make most people unproductive.
You do this by removing the imagination that can improve productive process. Do that and you remove the will to have an independent livelihood, by constantly talking, from kindergarten on, about ‘good jobs.’
M: How is the structure we call mass- schooling designed to retard imagination?
J: It was understood, as far back as the Roman Collegian, that if you submerge people in a rule-driven existence their imagination, the creative part of them, will naturally atrophy or vanish. There’s no room for it to be practiced. And those training procedures designed to retard imagination have been used by armies and churches throughout history.
Dr Carol Quigley, in a 1300 or 1400 page book, brilliantly written, and written only for a scholarly readership, says that not a single major event of the 20th Century hadn’t been staged and arranged. The First World War, the Second World War, etc., etc. Staged and arranged by exactly whom? And for what purpose?
It turns out that in the last part of the 19th Century, arising out of Oxford University in England, a small group of very, very influential people decided that the progress of the human race had stopped, and that war and starvation and all these bad things would continue to happen forever unless there was a world
global government.
They drew into their orbit Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the Rothschild’s in Europe, and in these high level commissions (think of them as the Aspen or the Bilderberg of their day), decided that no one would willingly surrender their national sovereignty. It would have to be taken from them by
trickery.
One of the strategies was to underwrite and subsidize war - everywhere on the planet - because war tends to break down and weaken national sovereignties. And the schemers knew that to eliminate national allegiance you had to eliminate the allegiance of the population to their own government. War was one of the best strategies to do that.
There are a variety of others but one that John D. Rockefeller proposed (and took charge of) was to infiltrate every subversive organization that they could locate anywhere on the planet. Not to destabilize these organizations, but just the reverse. To feed enough resources into the organization that it could survive and it’s thought, strategies and plans could be studied without the organization being aware.
M: All of this lays behind our deeply conditioned response to compulsory schooling. The bells, confinement, crazy time sequences, age segregation, lack of privacy, and constant surveillance were deliberately designed to prevent critical thinking and promote addiction and dependence.
J: You must have people dependent upon material purchases and consumption to keep a mass production economy running. Look at the powerful traditions that exist in the human history, the most powerful
of which to me, is the historic tradition that comes most predominately out of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius - that teaches: ‘nothing you can buy or no orders you can give are going to make your life better, or bring you happiness.’ Do you really want to spread that idea around if you’re in business? The dumbing down part is to prevent over-production.
Dumbing down starts with grades and pats on the head. The system is designed to create an unquenchable consumption sequence. Boredom is essential because you don’t want people who buy things that actually produce any satisfaction over a long period. Cars, suits, everything has to be disposed with as quickly as possible. Ideally you want to create a throw away economy and that takes a population that is easily bored and childish.
For example, you buy the newest computer. Read Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a Great Machine”. It won’t be a year before you begin to hear, not in so many words, that you’ve made a big mistake because coming down the production pipeline is a better model. It never ends.
You don’t reach nirvana in purchases because if you did, the whole economy would collapse. You have to become dissatisfied, bored with everything. Now if you learn to be bored with material things, you’ll also be bored soon enough with friends, with mates, with loyalties of any sort. You’ll dispense of them. You’ll
walk away from them. And that’s almost the definition of a Proletariat, a term used to identify members of a lower social class, the working class. The proletariat has no firm ground to stand on.
M: You began Dumbing Us Down with the statement that genius is extremely common and natural. What then is the purpose of schooling? We assume that the purpose of schooling is reading and writing. It only takes a hundred hours to transmit these skills if the person is interested and willing to learn. What do we do with the rest of the twelve plus yeas we spend in the machine, the system? It doesn’t add up.
J: It doesn’t add up for kids but it does for teachers, principals and a superintendents. It adds up for someone who writes school books, who delivers school books, who prints school books, who sells baloney to the cafeteria. It adds up for a lot of people. It only doesn’t add up as a sensible way to add quality to human life.
I won’t live to see this, but the first nation that deliberately sets out to unstandardize its population will end up in two or three decades owning the world. Ideas will crackle.
M: Imagination - the capacity to create images not present to the sensory systems, is the classic definition. This is the minds capacity to create and invent. Television undermines this capacity The collapse of descriptive language undermines this. If you don’t use it you lose it. Real education is not knowledge based. Real education is the unfolding of this capacity. I would love for you to help me rephrase this idea of the difference between conditioning/schooling and the unfolding of capacity which is education. The difference between those two are enormous.
J: Any number of social observers have said that death is at the center of a good life. It’s only knowing that you’re aging and will die relatively soon, that confers that electricity and magic on each moment. So that you want to draw from it everything that you can.
Back in the sixties an anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda, published a series of best sellers, supposedly about his apprenticeship with the Yaqui Indian shaman, Don Juan in Northern Mexico. The shaman said the key to everything is to always see death sitting on your left shoulder, this hawk or this raven watching you. Then each moment mean something.
If there was a pill tomorrow that would let us live two million years, what would anything mean at all?
I think we need to find what adds value to a community. First to add value to our self, so whatever our circumstances are, including being in a torture chamber, you have the maximum opportunity for satisfaction there. And second, because we’re social animals, we have to add value to the community around us, otherwise we are parasites. You draw value but you don’t reciprocate.
I don’t think any amount of money or fame can make up for the fact you’re not a productive person - not a consuming person - but a productive person. How can you be productive in a world in which everything has been stabilized? What you can do is be recruited by a productive idea. You have to have an imaginative understanding of what people are, what they need, and then you add your own gifts to meet those needs.
I don’t think you can live without imagination because then you’re reduced to the sensual life, to consuming. And we’ve all over-eaten, drunk too much, probably had some narcotics here and there and while it’s great at the moment, all these things wear out very quickly.
I’m in my middle seventies now, I can tell you I finally reached the point where I’m reluctant to travel, not because I don’t want to be amused. But because I have a piece of land, wild land in Upstate New York and I have a big porch in the back of an old barn and I put out hundreds of pounds of deer food and bird food and chipmunk food every week.
I’m surrounded by creatures of different species and they’re no longer intimidated in my presence. It’s just fascinating. I wake up in the morning now at 6:00 a.m., the first thing I see are hummingbirds. And almost immediately afterwards the Goldfinches. And then red-headed Finches come, and the wild turkeys come, and then the chipmunks start to dash in and grab some of the bird food, and a small herd of deer stick their heads out. It’s absolutely magical. I never get tired of it. Some way to be useful is available to everyone.
Buckminster Fuller said, the wealth that graces our lives is everywhere. The conditioning that schooling, television and the corporate-consuming culture creates in our head - that we must have this or that - prevents us from seeing that there is really is enough for everybody. I think we will have to abandon
forced schooling to finally realize this – to experience it deeply.
Link to Original Post: www.ttfuture.org/files/2/pdf/gotto_interview.pdf
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