The Open History of American Education
launching my crowdfunding campaign!
(The Indiegogo for this project is now live! The pitch ended up being a full-length blog post, so I’m resposting the whole thing here as well.)
Project Summary
“The Underground History of American Education” written by the late John Gatto is a remarkably candid and well-researched exploration of the anti-intellectual foundations of compulsory schooling. The central point is this: the key figures that shaped the American school system actively and intentionally wanted to avoid intellectually empowering students; instead, their primary goal was fostering obedience. I believe strongly that understanding Gatto’s thesis and understanding it’s possible to independently verify his thesis is essential to understanding the world we find ourselves in today. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to investigate Gatto’s claims, the discourse around this history is quite barren. While reading his sources would be the most straightforward way to corroborate his account, even tracking them all down is time-consuming work: many of them are hard to find online, some are behind institutional paywalls, and some seem to have never been digitized at all.
This whole state of affairs is why — in the spirit of Open Access — I’m building a souped-up online edition of Gatto's book that gathers together the underlying sources and presents them alongside the original text. The aim here is to make the historical record accessible and make Gatto’s claims straightforward to independently verify. This is made possible by the fact that most of the sources that Gatto cites have long since entered the public domain, which means that the books, newspapers, board meeting notes, essays, and private letters that make up the historical record can all be digitized and publicly hosted without worry of copyright infringement. By embedding the sources directly alongside the original text, any time you want to know the context of a quote, any time you see a claim that seems too wild to be true, or anytime you’re simply intrigued and want to know more, you can go straight to the source with a single click, and without having to drop what you’re doing and switch contexts to hunt for a document that could take minutes or hours to find. Essentially, this hypertext book will make exploring the historical record that underlies Gatto’s book as easy as traveling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. This is what makes the difference between being able to fluidly engage with your doubt and curiosity in real time, and accumulating a stack of IOU’s to “look into this later!” which you may or may not ever get around to.
The Final Product, In More Detail
The end product is an online, annotated, “wikified” edition of Gatto’s “The Underground History of American Education” that has all the referenced sources digitized and available on the same website, accompanied by additional essays written by me that dive deeper into various aspects of the story I find interesting.
Broken down very concretely, that looks like:
1. PDF → Website (openhistory.education)
Gatto has already made his book freely available online as a PDF. I'll be breaking the book up chapter by chapter and converting it to plain old HTML web pages for a more streamlined reading experience on mobile and desktop.
2. Embedded Sources, a.k.a "one click context"
All public-domain sources cited in Gatto's book will be hosted on the same website. Clicking on a quote will open a PDF of the relevant source in a side panel with the quoted section highlighted, allowing you to peruse the surrounding context. A gallery of all cited sources will let you hunt for specific cited works either through tags or full-text search.
3. Wiki Style Back-links
I will be adding wiki-style "back links" to the text, which means any time a proper noun occurs, say "Columbia Teachers College", you can click on it to see a list of every paragraph of text that references it. This makes it possible to navigate the text by topic instead of only reading through linearly.
4. Annotations and Supplementary Essays
I've been slowly reading my way through Gatto's sources as well as other material on the history of compulsory schooling and I want to share some of what I've learned! Some content makes most sense to publish as annotations of Gatto's text, things like minor commentary and corrections. Other content will be published as stand-alone essays where I do deep dives into topics and questions Gatto didn't cover enough to satisfy my curiosity. Here’s a sample of some tentative titles of essays I’m planning on writing:
The Assault on the Alphabet: a data driven analysis of the past 100 years of vibes-based literacy
A Visual Exploration of Compulsory Schooling Laws Across Time
Breaking People’s Spirits While Smiling Instead of Scowling: how progressive education ditched the aesthetics of coercion while doubling down on psychological control
How History Can Be Ignored Instead of Being Erased
Deep Dive Into the Prussian System: the blueprint for the modern world
The Unlikely Alliance Between Progressive Education and Scientific Management
On the Existence of Well-Read Mainstream Academics With Anti-Intellectual Philosophies
The Emotional Structure of the “Blackpill”: acting cynically “in the know” about the way things really are while crushing your curiosity and confusion
A Brief Summary of The History
Though I've never been a fan of school, it wasn't until I read Gatto’s book that I learned the system was bad from the beginning. The American compulsory schooling system was never about learning. From its seeds in the post-Civil War decades, to its blossoming between the world wars and beyond, its key architects all saw mass schooling as a tool for allowing new levels of societal control.
Control to what ends? It varied. Robber baron capitalists were eager to continue the exponential explosion of the Second Industrial Revolution, and so needed an ever-growing supply of labor trained to accept the regimented nature of industrial work. Fabian socialists envisioned schooling as a "prime instrument of social evolution", which was something far too important to be left to the whims of democratic will. Meanwhile, the newly formed eugenics movement was using academically-legitimated scientific racism to forge a multi-partisan consensus among the upper class that the mass immigration of the late 1800s was an existential threat to the genetic destiny of mankind, a threat that needed to be kept under a watchful eye lest it outbreed blue-blooded Americans.
Though mass schooling set its sight on all children, an intellectually empowering education for everyone was out of the question. Sophisticated academics like John Dewey and G. Stanley Hall championed education philosophies that treated foundational aims like "make sure everyone can read and write and do basic arithmetic" as fetishistic scholasticism that would create a nation of egg-headed dorks. The newly class-conscious American aristocracy was concluding that Scientific Management had routinized Progress such that educating too great a portion of the population could only decrease "social efficiency" and gum up the cooperative engines of industry. And, of course, the high-profile eugenicists were busy "proving" it was futile and cruel to taunt those races that were "genetically predestined" to dumbness with the possibility of a life beyond their station.
Why Do I Care About Understanding the History?
Learning this history has affected me primarily through how it has brought clarity to several confusing aspects of how the present world works. Here are three exemplary claims — things that previously I only ever implicitly suspected but could never internalize or articulate to others:
There is not now, nor has there ever been, liberal (as in Liberty) reasons for compulsory schooling.
Compulsory schooling systematically breaks people’s spirits and stunts their intellect.
Our current world is composed almost entirely of people who spent the most formative periods of their lives in institutions designed to break their spirits.
A theme shared among these claims is the deep antagonism between compulsory schooling and children, and by extension, humanity. Though I’ve had plenty of opportunities to reach these conclusions over my life, it was only the explicitness of the historical record that allowed me to fully realize the extent of this conflict. Compulsory schooling was created by people who thought of children either as an enemy populace that needed to be subdued, or as blank-slate moldable resources to be mined. At no point in the intervening century since its creation have these ideas stopped being the basic assumptions of schooling. All that’s changed is that our institutions have undergone collective amnesia and memory-holed their origins, leaving current generations lamenting a “broken” system while having already normalized its most destructive premises.
Though I don’t have space here to give substantive arguments for these claims (that’s what the whole project is for!), I will briefly explain why I think these claims are critical for understanding the present, and why it was investigating Gatto’s history that gave me the final push I needed.
There are not and never have been liberal (as in Liberty) reasons for compulsory schooling
“Why are we forced to go to school?” is a question I only stopped asking when it became clear that either no one actually knew the answer or no one cared enough to let me in on it. Whenever I’ve asked people this question, the responses have invariably been canned and hollow.
“To learn!” Empirically, not a lot of learning happens in schools. To the degree learning does happen, there’s no reason to believe that schools have a monopoly on it, and even in the world where schools are uniformly great and are one of the few ways for kids to learn, that could only ever be an argument for free publicly funded education, not an argument for why you should go to jail if you don’t give your kids to the school system. “To keep kids out of the factories!” If that was really anyone’s goal why would child-labor laws not be enough? Even the most “cynical” reason I sometimes hear, “of course school isn’t about learning, but its load-bearing free day care for the overworked underclasses” utterly fails to address why this supposedly load-bearing infrastructure requires the backing of government force to continue functioning.
Not only are these justifications flimsy and half-assed, they are all ahistorical. Compulsory schooling was created as a tool for social engineering and, as a rule, people who have not yet been acculturated to submit (i.e children) will not willingly let themselves be broken in the absence of overwhelming force and everyone in their life gaslighting them into thinking it’s “for their own good”. This was wrong to do then; it is wrong to continue now. Nothing in the past 100 years has changed that.
Learning the history helped me denormalize compulsory schooling and notice that it’s neither natural nor inevitable. Specific people with specific, coherent, illiberal agendas put in work to make it so. It could have been otherwise and it can be otherwise. Unless people can question why schooling is compulsory, the best reformers will ever do is make the totally illiberal child prisons more humane.
Compulsory schooling systematically breaks people’s spirits and stunts their intellect.
Even the most humane schools consist of a constant stream of senseless violations of your personal autonomy. Whether or not the academics are good and whether or not the teachers are kind, the implicit curriculum of most schools is the same: it does not matter if what we’re doing here makes sense and you will get in trouble if you keep bringing it to our attention, you have no recourse, your body and your time are not your own, you will be rewarded for passing tests and not for understanding, nothing you do here is real.
School does real damage to people, regardless of how well they perform in the system. Kids who do well frequently get addicted to external approval and learn to orient themselves to everything as an Opportunity To Fail. Kids who do worse frequently get traumatized out of their natural ability to learn, leaving them vastly worse off than they would have been and on the path to becoming a Problem Person where they can be further abused by the system.
But what does history have to do with this? After all, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to notice the subtle and overt ways school crushes people. My own experience bears it out. The experience of most people I’ve talked to about school bears it out. Robin Hanson has been reminding me for years that school isn’t about learning, it’s about submission. And though I’ve only read them recently, John Gatto’s “Dumbing Us Down”, Grace Llewellyn’s “The Teen Liberation Handbook” very articulately describe how school stunts people. It’s easy to demonstrate school’s lack without referring to history, so why put in all this extra work?
I have this affliction that borders on mental illness, which I see in most of my peers, where I have difficulty explicitly acknowledging and integrating information about conflicts I'm in when counter-parties in the conflict deny that any conflict exists. While I've always been able to implicitly recognize that school was not my friend, the ambient gaslighting was enough that I never managed to put it into words that I could stand by. Understanding history changed that. The clarity that the historical record provided about the explicit antagonism between schooling and children was vivid and startling enough to shake me out of my compartmentalization. It now feels possible to integrate into my worldview that school damages, and orient to the question of how to keep loved ones safe. Though I wish I hadn’t needed that extra shove, that’s what did it for me, and I want to share that.
Our current world is composed almost entirely of people who spent the most formative periods of their lives in institutions designed to break their spirits
I have so much to say on this one, I’m going to leave most of it for a future essay and be brief here. Suffice to say that a lot of the problems of the current world are downstream of the fact that for over 100 years we’ve been shoving every generation through a meat grinder designed to get them to surrender their minds. Any honest attempt to make the world better will need to act in ways that account for the sheer number of people whose minds and spirits have been splintered, while maintaining compassion for the ways we and others have been hurt without normalizing the damage in a way that erases the very notion of an intact spirit.
Why does knowing it’s possible to verify this history for yourself matter?
Going through the process of investigating Gatto’s claims was just as transformative for me as coming to understand them was. When I first began to read “Underground History” this past fall, the massive implications of Gatto’s claims quickly became apparent and I felt compelled to get to the bottom of things. Though Gatto’s book felt quite credible, I knew that I’d need to follow up on his sources myself if there was to be any real hope of feeling confident about the matter.
I also felt quite certain that getting to the bottom of this was going to be a massive and arduous undertaking. Obviously no one would ever explicitly confess to the sorts of motives Gatto describes, and they probably wouldn’t even confess to obviously related motives or world views that would clearly indicate their real motives. Given that, I anticipated having to rely on opaque gut intuitions, reading between the lines, and doing my best Straussian divination of the 5d political chess games everyone would be playing. Plus there’s not gonna be many primary sources so I’m gonna have to filter through multiple layers of biased perspectives where it’s unintuitive what the biases could even be. I might still be able to gain a confident understanding of the truth, but it’s going to be messy, complicated, and not something I can expect to convince anyone of without them also getting Super Into The Weeds with me.
That’s how I expected it to go. How did it actually go? It was… easy. Startlingly easy. Surreal “am I being pranked??” levels of easy.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it still took dozens of hours of reading, but I’ve still spent probably less than 100 hours on the object level investigation, and all of the moves were simple ones. Identify the most interesting claims, look at the sources, see if those sources were hosted on Internet Archive or my local library, ctrl-F for the quotes to see if they’re in context, read 10 pages around the quote, read more if I felt interested, next source. That’s all. Even the way in which I expected evidence to accumulate was wrong. Initially I had expected the rhythm of the investigation to be that of a Noir Thriller, full of twists and turns, with every new piece of information Totally Recontextualizing everything I’d previously learned. But in reality, each new piece of information simply flushed out the details of the basically correct picture that all previous information had pointed to.
Learning that the history of schooling was easy to investigate was a massive shock because it invalidated a very deep seated belief I didn’t even know I had: if something is this big of a deal surely people must know about it, and if they don’t know about it then it must be very difficult to investigate. This was not a belief that was specific to the topic of education of history, but a shockingly general perspective that I applied to most things. The world is and will continue to be hidden from you. When there’s controversy, either people are sincere in which case who are you to know better than all the smart people arguing, or if they’re insincere they’ll be putting too much effort into obfuscating the information environment for you to get the truth without a heroic effort. There’s no $20 lying on the ground, and certainly no $100 dollar bills, and certainly there isn’t information crucial to the sanity of your future children just lying around on the ground. If it’s good it’s esoteric and I need to be inducted into the mystery cult to have access.
This particular nihilistic fatalism, or “blackpill” as the kids call it, is a perspective I wasn’t entirely aware that I held. It seems to be more of a set of acculturated habits, vibes, and anticipations of getting mocked if I engaged in certain kinds of inquiry, more so than it was a set of beliefs that I had convictions in. I also see this perspective to varying degrees in almost everyone I know, and the assumption of it in most media I encounter. My journey through Gatto’s book punctured a hole in this perspective in a way that both shifted some of my concrete underlying beliefs but also took the wind out of the sails of the gaslighting. The consequences of shifting out of the blackpill perspective have been huge.
The first is that I’ve got a much greater sense of opportunity. The world is investigatable. Knowledge is there for the taking. Even in situations of bad-faith conflict, people seem to not actually lie and obscure in a way that is actually meant to thwart non-trivial investigative effort.
The second consequence of this worldview shift is it makes clear how potent the ambient gaslighting is. When incredibly relevant and useful information, like the history of compulsory schooling, isn’t common knowledge, it’s not because the information is hard to get or hard to explain, nor is it because there are massive coverups, but because I and most people have been taught to ignore and avoid pursuing readily available information. In this way, the blackpill perspective is a self-perpetuating prophecy, a self-keeping secret. When most people are implicitly operating from the blackpill mindset, you don’t need cover ups and conspiracies to keep damning information from entering common knowledge.
Though there are many ways to come to notice all this, I came to it through investigating the history of compulsory schooling and I want to make that path easier for others to tread.
A Word On John Gatto
Gatto’s prose is a delight to read. He clearly was a man with a lot of character and intellectual integrity and it’s a joy to spend time with a mind as lively as his. I especially appreciate how he doesn’t pull his punches and manages to write with authentic emotion while never letting conveying emotions take precedence over conveying understanding. Though in the rest of this pitch I’ve mostly emphasized the importance of the history, I would be remiss to not mention the many positive qualities of the book I’m using as a springboard into the history. I have a lot of appreciation for his work and it’s a shame that I’ll never get to meet him in person.
How the Funding Will Be Used
This project has some operational costs such as servers, digitization equipment, and traveling to various library archives. Mainly, the money goes towards covering my cost of living so I can put more work into this project than other things.
This is very much an experiment in figuring out what kinds of writing/content people are interested in enough to pay me for. So if you like this project and want it to happen, or you generally like my style and want me to keep putting good work out there, please communicate that by donating!
Timeline
I loosely plan to have the website launched with the bulk of the sources digitized by the end of the summer. I might release one or two essays before then but will mostly likely start releasing them after I've finished the main website. Essays will be published on the project website openhistory.education, and on this substack.
click here to donate via Indiegogo
is it happening?