Editor’s note: John Taylor Gatto was the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991 and has been named New York City Teacher of the Year three times.

Extending Childhood

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, it was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political State needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people known to history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. This candor can be heard clearly in a speech Woodrow Wilson made to businessmen before the First World War:

In their wishful belief that there is really no longer an economic problem people have been confirmed by irresponsible talk about “potential plenty” -which, if it were a fact, would mean that there is no economic problem which makes the choice inevitable. But although this snare has served socialist propaganda under various names as long as socialism has existed, it is still as palpably untrue as when it was first used over a hundred years ago. In all this time not one of the many people who have used it has produced a workable plan of how production could be increased so as to abolish even in Western Europe what we regard as poverty -not to speak of the world as a whole. The reader may take it that whoever talks of potential plenty is either dishonest or does not know what he is talking about…” (Friederich A Hayek, The Road to Serfdom 1944)

c) The Control of Science

As documented since the 19th century, revolutionary scientific developments which have the potential to free humankind from monotonous work and the clutches of the corporate-financial monopoly are bought up and shelved.

(VII) Financial growth

The clandestine hierarchies of the Mafia undoubtedly parallel the hierarchies built by the financial empires that have grown up since the 19th century. Of all the institutions of 20th/21st century capitalism, the banks are the most omnipresent. It is fitting that the institutions that more than any other control society’s buying power have become its most powerful bastions. Financial power is also an expression of the immiseration of humanity, i.e. the growing polarization of wealth and income between rich and poor. Among the great merger movement of the 1990s, which the Wall Street Journal likened to the mergers of the late 19th century (_Corporations’ Dreams Converge in One Idea: It’s Time to do a Deal_, by Steven Lipin, Wall Street Journal, February 26, 1997), the banks have been among the star performers. The growth of banking power has paralleled the growing polarization of society, starting with U.S. society.

(XIII) Informality…

Perhaps the most telling feature of the decline of the capitalist economic system has been the outgrowth of the informal sector, which has implications for all parts of the system –its legal framework, its State, its economy, and its institutions. Informality basically means non-payment of certain State taxes, non-observance of laws, the growth of parallel economies, the super-exploitation of workers (it ignores labor laws, health laws, etc.), the opening-up of society to the ills of the past (slavery, tyranny, etc.), the degradation of human rights and the displacement of the public sector by the private sector, while its directly criminal part engages in such pursuits as prostitution, drug-trafficking, illegal arms dealing and trading in stolen cars, machinery, etc. Unemployment, the child of increased productivity under Capital (the displacement of workers by machines, etc.) is the basis for the growth of the informal sector, which provides a great nest for crime and its organizations.

(XVI) Militarism

We live at a cross-roads today –but we have lived there for some time now. Indeed, as time goes by, it would seem that the cross-roads has been widening; this also opens up more potential, if only we could get across! However, the world’s power elite, like that of the Industrial Revolution, is now hell-bent on remolding society. The “post-modern Prometheus” of hi-tech addictive capital, far from allowing the new technology to liberate humanity once and for all from the bonds of its monopolistic parasitism, is determined to make it work for its further domination. Again, we are face-to-face with the absurd, because again we come face-to-face with the expropriation of the means to life. But everything is described as only “natural” in this best of all possible worlds.

WHY?

A Sustainable Future?

The problem of working for a sustainable future –or there will be no future –cannot be reduced to a single formula (or a single struggle).