gat

utopia, The Republic, Popper shows Socrates telling auditors: "They will take as their canvas a
city and the characters of men, and they will, first of all, make their canvas clean—by no means an
easy matter....They will not start work on a city nor on an individual unless they are given a clean
canvas, or have cleaned it themselves." (emphasis added) Popper continues:
In the same spirit, Plato says in The Statesman of the royal rulers who rule in
accordance with the royal science of statesmanship: "Whether they happen to
rule by law or without law, over willing or unwilling subjects;...whether they
purge the state for its good by killing or banishing some of its citizens—as long
as they proceed according to science...this form of government must be
declared the only one that is right." This is what canvas-cleaning means. He
must eradicate existing institutions and traditions. He must purify, purge,
expel, banish and kill.
Canvas-cleaning frees the individual of all responsibility. Morality is voided, replaced by
reinforcement schedules. In their most enlightened form, theories of a therapeutic community are
those in which only positive reinforcements are prescribed.
The therapeutic community is as close as your nearest public school. In the article "Teacher as
Therapist" (footnote, pages 270–271), a glimpse of Emile programmed on a national scale is
available. Its innocently garrulous author paints a landscape of therapy, openly identifying schools
as behavioral training centers whose positive and negative reinforcement schedules are planned
cooperatively in advance, and each teacher is a therapist. Here everything is planned down to the
smallest "minimal recognition," nothing is accidental. Planned smiles or "stern looks," spontaneity
is a weed to be exterminated—you will remember the injunction to draw smiling faces on every
paper, "even at the high school level."
An important support girder of therapeutic community is a conviction that social order can be
maintained by inducing students to depend emotionally on the approval of teachers. Horace Mann
was thoroughly familiar with this principle. Here are Mann’s words on the matter:
When a difficult question has been put to a child, the Teacher approaches with
a mingled look of concern and encouragement [even minimal recognition
requires planning, here you have a primer of instructional text]; he stands
before him, the light and shade of hope and fear alternately crossing his
countenance. If the little wrestler triumphs, the Teacher felicitates him upon his
success; perhaps seizes and shakes him by the hand in token congratulation;
and when the difficulty has been formidable and the effort triumphant, I have
seen Teacher catch up the child and embrace him, as though he were not able
to contain his joy...and all this done so naturally and so unaffectedly as to
excite no other feeling in the residue of the children than a desire, by the same
means, to win the same caresses. (emphasis added)
Table of Contents
Page 312