As Upton Sinclair tells us in 1923's The Goose-Step it was his intention to write just one book on education in America. However, the project grew and grew until he had far more material than he thought appropriate for one book. Accordingly he opted to produce two, the first of which was the aforementioned The Goose-Step--the two hundred thousand words of which Sinclair devoted to, as Thorstein Veblen had put it a few years earlier, "the Higher Learning in America"--while the equally voluminous follow-up he published the following year (1924) discussed the education America's students got before college in what we would today term "K-12" (hence, The Goose-Step being followed by The Goslings).
Coming to The Goslings after his first book I found Sinclair telling much the same story, not least the reality of control of the educational system by business (in part directly, in part through institutions they own like the so-called fourth estate, and in part with the help of conservative allies from the Catholic Church to the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan)--with the same results at the education system's lower levels as at its higher ones. Thus the teachers of the "goslings," at least as much as their counterparts in the professoriat, are subject to an exploitative and tyrannical treatment that, for all the pretenses, illusions and expectations that teaching is a "white collar," "middle class" and "professional" occupation ever encouraged by the pious praises conventionally bestowed upon those from whom "convenient social virtue" is demanded, so that they enjoy neither "the status of a free citizen, nor of a professional expert," but a mere hired hand who has their personal life surveilled, scrutinized, and when it is not to the liking of their employer, punished, in a way not only unknown for the free citizen or the professional expert, but most hired hands. Just as much as in the colleges what passes for education is a combination of intellectual stultification and political indoctrination ("patriotic," pro-capitalist, anti-leftist, etc.), with the relentless censorship exercised in such subjects as history and economics, the priority accorded athletics, the inculcation of "school spirit," playing their part in all this. And just as much as at the level of the colleges there is a combination of penuriousness and graft, as the businesses both fight to pay as little tax as possible, and then pillage the schools of what money they do get. From the ways in which the siting of school construction is decided in connection with real estate interests, to the way in which business is permitted to exploit the mineral and other resources on lands allotted the schools for their support in return for next to nothing, to the ceaseless rip-off in the putting up of the buildings and the provision of supplies from furniture to textbooks (the latter, a national-level racket dominated by a single firm, the American Book Company at its peak having ninety percent of the market), said businesses relentlessly cheated the taxpayer and shortchanged the children.
The similarity with the story Sinclair tells of the country's colleges is all the more apparent in that Sinclair tells it in much the same way, with the first half of the book largely given over to a tour of the relevant institutions across the country, the reports from which establish patterns he analyzes in the more "big picture"-oriented second half of the book. Still, the image Sinclair presents of conditions in the elementary, junior/middle and high schools has its own distasteful features, reflecting their different problems. After all, this was a period in which relatively few went to college, and especially relatively few of the less privileged groups. The result is that at the K-12 levels America's schools educated a far larger part of the country's population, and a population much more diverse in every conceivable way, while in spite of the measure of "standardization" imparted by the multiple levels of the machine (local schools under county and state administration) and national-level governmental and private organizations (like the National Education Association), did it in a much more diverse range of institutions, from the "little red schoolhouses" of the country's rural regions, to private finishing schools for young ladies from wealthy homes--with all the problems collectively entailed in their operation, and their relation to society at large. (Not the least of these was that the expenditure of what government money the schools do get is distributed in extremely disproportionate fashion, with public schools attended by the children of the well-off apt to be very different from the "dark, unsanitary fire-traps" run on two half-day shifts for the children of the poor in the very same school district, in a way that simply had no parallel at the college level.) The faculty teaching in those schools were also very different, in part because the barriers to entry were far lower, with one reflection the handing of faculty positions out as the spoils of local machine politics. (Horrid as their policies were, Sinclair never wrote of the colleges he discussed making anyone a professor just because they were a ward heeler's brother!) Meanwhile, in contrast with college teaching, teaching in K-12 was "feminized" ("a world which is five per cent male and ninety-five per cent female"), with all the inequities this tended to entail (from a refusal of employers to grant equal pay to equal work, to the harassment and worse to which the female teachers were so often subject by male administrators, perhaps the more in as so many of them were there just for what they could get). Certainly if the country had its religious colleges the opposition of some religious interests to the provision of secular education had no part in The Goose-Step at all comparable to what Sinclair describes here--with the same going for conduct of those employers outraged that children were being sent to school rather than toiling in their fields, mines and factories, and that when they grew up their educations might extend beyond the little they needed to know to perform the menial tasks they required them to perform on the job. And even where the problems were fundamentally the same they tended to have a sharper edge here--as with the "Won't somebody please think of the children!" sanctimoniousness and hysterics of what Sinclair called the "Babbitts" intent on persecuting instructors over anything they regarded as slightly amiss in their private lives, or politically unorthodox in their teaching. (While John Scopes had not been arrested for teaching his students about evolution when Sinclair published his book the fact that he was shortly after is rather telling of the situation that prevailed.) Indeed, on the whole the world of K-12 education as Sinclair presents it can seem even meaner and shabbier than that of higher learning in The Goose-Step--to which earlier book Sinclair in fact returns in this book's last chapters, discussing the response that earlier book received (frank interest from a good many of the sympathetic or at least open-minded, sneering sanctimoniousness from "kept" reviewers ever eager to bash him, disdain from the college administrators he called out for their conduct, the more in as they could not deny what he showed them to have done).
In conveying this picture--a more complicated picture than Sinclair's preceding book presented--Sinclair is well-served by his all too rare combination of gifts as journalist, social thinker, activist and novelist, not least extensiveness and thoroughness as a researcher, a sociological imagination and social vision, a body of relevant personal experience, an eye for telling details and anecdotes, and a lively writing style on fine display in the short, punchy, chapters he favors here as in his other Dead Hand books. Aside from making a good deal more readable a book that can at times seem as if it will bury its audience in minute details that risk monotony given the comparative constancy of the corruption and other failures he describes from coast to coast (that corruption, at least, one thing all those national institutions helped standardize), they enable him to produce from them an image which is comprehensive, yet not lacking for nuance--his treatment of such subtle and delicate matters as many teachers' conflicted attitude and muddled thinking regarding their status within society again and again ringing true (and in a way that shows Sinclair to be sympathetic and respectful, but also not in the least blinkered about human weakness by simple-minded idealism here).
Quite naturally The Goslings rounds out what Sinclair had to say in The Goose-Step. Of course, just as is the case with Sinclair's other Dead Hand books a hundred years have passed since he published The Goslings. (Indeed, 2024 is the hundred-year anniversary of the book's initial publication.) Still, contrary to the hopes Sinclair expressed at the time, society simply did not change in the way he thought it would--such change, much more than the narrower reforms he explicitly recommended (effective labor organization for teachers enabling them to fight for their rights, and the rights of their students, etc.), the real solution to the problem he described, with the reforms merely steps toward that which Sinclair himself wrote would be far more feasible if the responsible persons thought in terms of that larger social picture. (Certainly it seemed to Sinclair that teachers' coming around to thinking of themselves as working people, and being in solidarity with other working people, was essential to that unionization he described doing much good.) And American society in its essentials remaining what it was in Sinclair's day, so do its schools remain. Thus do the battles over education Sinclair described--the demand for honest administration of government monies and what people all too often get instead, the clashes between the champions of the public and of the private sector, the treatment of schools as battlegrounds by culture warriors, the struggle of teachers for recognition of their rights as citizens and claims as professional experts and those denying them, among much, much else--remain the battles filling up the headlines in our own day. In fact, what I have said of Sinclair's other books, and particularly the best of them, seems worth saying again here--that reading Sinclair's now century-old book we are likely to learn far more about the problems of our own time than they are likely to reading a good many more recent works (the more in as so few of them are likely to be written from a viewpoint at all like Sinclair's own, never mind presenting it so forthrightly). The result is that I would deem Upton Sinclair's The Goslings essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the problems of the American education system past or present, just like his earlier The Goose-Step, with it in fact seeming to me well worth reading the two books together as two volumes of a single study.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment