gat

ordered the editors of Collier’s to change its editorial policies, the distributor of Arena informed the publisher that
unsold copies would no longer be returned, and Max Eastman’s Masses was doomed by the passage of legislation
enabling the postmaster to remove any publication from the mails at his own discretion. Through these and similar
measures, the press and magazines of the United States had been fairly effectively muzzled by 1915 with not a
single printing press broken by labor goons. These midrange steps in the socialization of American society can best
be seen as exposing the will to homogenize at work in this country once the entire economy had been corporatized.
Emptiness: The Master Theory
Conceptions of emptiness to be filled as the foundation metaphor of schooling are not confined to
hollowness and plasticity, but also include theories of mechanism. De La Mettrie’s 2 Man a
Machine vision from the Enlightenment, for instance, is evidence of an idea regularly recurring for
millennia. If we are mechanisms, we must be predetermined, as Calvin said. Then the whole
notion of "Education" is nonsensical. There is no independent inner essence to be drawn forth and
developed. Only adjustments are possible, and if the contraption doesn’t work right, it should be
junked. Everything important about machinery is superficial.
This notion of machine emptiness has been the master theory of human nature since the beginning
of the nineteenth century. It still takes turns in curriculum formation with theories of vegetable
emptiness, plastic emptiness, systems emptiness and, from time to time, some good old-fashioned
Lockean blank sheet emptiness. Nobody writes curriculum for self-determined spiritual individuals
and expects to sell it in the public school market.
This hardline empiricism descends to us most directly from Locke and Hume, who both said Mind
lacks capacities and powers of its own. It has no innate contents. Everything etched there comes
from simple sense impressions mixed and compounded. This chilly notion was greatly refined by
the French ideologues 3 who thought the world so orderly and mechanical, the future course of
history could be predicted on the basis of the position and velocity of molecules. For these men,
the importance of human agency vanished entirely. With Napoleon, these ideas were given global
reach a few years later. So seductive is this mechanical worldview it has proven itself immune to
damage by facts which contradict it. 4
2 Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) was theearliest of the materialistic writers of the Enlightenment.His
conclusion that religious thought was a physical disorder akin to fever forced him to flee France. In the middle of the
eighteenth century his two master works, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, stated principles which are self-evident
from the titles. The ethics of these principles are worked out in later essays. The purpose of life is to pleasure the
senses, virtue is measured by self-love, the hope of the world lies in the spread of atheism. De La Mettrie was
compelled to flee the Netherlands and accept the protection of Frederick of Prussia in 1748. The chief authority for
his life is an eulogy entitled "The Elegy," written by Frederick II himself.
3 Ideologue is a term coined by Antoine Destuit de Tracy around 1790 to describe those empiricists and
rationalists concerned to establish a new order in the intellectual realm, eradicating the influence of religion,
replacing it with universal education as the premier solution to the problem of reforming human shortcomings. They
believed that Hume’s rationalized morality (after the methods of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and astronomy)
was the best way to accomplish this.
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