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Chapter 15
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Schooling
In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in
20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible
conditions of the factories than return to school.
— Helen Todd, "Why Children Work," McClure’s Magazine (April 1913)
In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth...were asked if they
would return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as
they earned at work; only 16 said they would.
— David Tyack, Managers of Virtue (1982)
An Arena Of Dishonesty
I remember clearly the last school where I worked, on the wealthy Upper West Side of
Manhattan. An attractive atmosphere of good-natured dishonesty was the lingua franca of
corridor and classroom, a grace caused oddly enough by the school’s unwritten policy of cutting
unruly children all the slack they could use.
Student terrorists, muggers, sexual predators, and thieves, including two of my own pupils who
had just robbed a neighborhood grocery of $300 and had been apprehended coming back to class,
were regularly returned to their lessons after a brief lecture from the principal. All received the
same mercy. There was no such thing as being held to account at my school. This behavioral
strategy—leveling good, bad, ugly into one undifferentiated lumpenproletariat 1 —may seem odd
or morally repugnant in conventional terms, but it constituted masterful psychological
management from the perspective of enlightened pedagogy. What this policy served and served
well was to prioritize order and harmony above justice or academic development.
Once you know the code, the procedure is an old one. It can hardly be called radical politics
except by the terminally innocent. If you spend a few hours with Erving Goffman’s work on the
management of institutions, you discover that the strongest inmates in an asylum and the asylum’s
management have a bond; they need each other. This isn’t cynical. It’s a price that must be paid
for the benefits of mega-institutions. The vast Civil War prison camp of Andersonville couldn’t
have operated without active cooperation from its more dangerous inmates; so too, Dachau; so it
is in school. Erving Goffman taught us all we need to know about the real grease which makes
institutional wheels turn.
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