gat

for institutional schooling as it eventually emerged. This Arcadia would be possible only if men of
great vision had the nerve and iron discipline to follow where rationality and science led. The
crucial obstacle was this: an unknown number of generations would have to be sacrificed to
industrial slavery before mankind could progress to its comfortable destiny. On the other side of
that immoral divide, paradise might lie.
How to get there? Though Malthus and Darwin had shown the way to intellectually devalue
human life and to do with protoplasm whatever needed to be done, the force of Western tradition,
particularly Judeo-Christian tradition, was still too strong to be brushed aside. Into this paradox
stepped socialism. It was a happy coincidence that while one aspect of industrial imagination, the
capitalist lobe, was doing the necessary dirty work of breaking the old order and reorganizing its
parts, another, softer aspect of the same industrial mind could sing the identical song, but in a
different key and to a different audience.
What socialists helped capitalism to teach was that the industrial promise was true. The road to
riches could be followed through coal smoke to an eventual paradise on earth. Only the masters
had to be changed. In place of bosses would sit workers. Meanwhile, both sides agreed (Marx is
particularly eloquent on this point) that many would have to suffer a great while, until predictable
advances in social reordering would ultimately relieve their descendants.
Managerial Utopia
In an angry letter to the Atlantic Monthly (January 1998), Walter Greene, of Hatboro,
Pennsylvania, protested the "myth of our failing schools," as he called it, on these grounds:
We just happen to have the world’s most productive work force, the largest
economy, the highest material standard of living, more Nobel prizes than the
rest of the world combined, the best system of higher education, the best
high-tech medicine, and the strongest military. These things could not have
been accomplished with second-rate systems of education.
On the contrary, the surprising truth is they could not have been accomplished to the degree they
have been without second-rate systems of education. But here it is, writ plain, the crux of an
unbearable paradox posed by scientifically efficient schooling. It works. School, as we have it,
does build national wealth, it does lead to endless scientific advances. Where is Greene’s misstep?
It lies in the equation of material prosperity and power with education when our affluence is built
on schooling (and on entrepreneurial freedom, too, of course, for those libertarian enough to seize
it). A century of relentless agit-prop has thrown us off the scent. The truth is that America’s
unprecedented global power and spectacular material wealth are a direct product of a third-rate
educational system, upon whose inefficiency in developing intellect and character they depend. If
we educated better we could not sustain the corporate utopia we have made. Schools build
national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality, and family life. It was a trade-off.
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