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The Game Is Crooked
Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the remarkable banality of Nazi-era organizational character calls
attention to its excessive orderliness, unfailing courtesy, neat files, schedules for everything,
efficient supply procedures, and the dullness and emotional poverty of Adolf Eichmann, who
supervised the destruction of many lives without any particular malice. He even liked Jews. That
he was part of a company dedicated to the conversion of animate into inanimate on a wholesale
basis wasn’t his fault. It was just a job. His rational duty was to do his best at it. Unless mankind
is allowed to possess some peculiar godlike dignity, a soul perhaps, Eichmann had a right to say
to his critics—what difference between what I do and the slaughter of British beef to prevent mad
cow disease? Nothing personal. Is it a shortage of people that makes you so angry?
That’s the real point, isn’t it? Once a mission is defined with pure objectivity, psychopathic
procedure makes perfect sense. If men and women can think about genocide that way, you can
understand why merely screwing up children wouldn’t trouble the sleep of school administrators.
Their job isn’t about children; it’s about systems maintenance. The school institution has always
had a strong shadow mission to refute the irrefutable fact that all kids want to learn to be their
best and strongest selves. They don’t need to be forced to do this.
School is a tour de force designed to recreate human nature around a different premise,
constructing proof that most kids don’t want to learn because they are biologically defective.
School succeeds in this private aim only by failing in its public mission; that’s the knuckle-ball
school critics always miss. Only a delicate blend of abject failures, midrange failures, and minor
failures mixed together with a topping of success guarantees the ongoing health of the school
enterprise. School is as good an illustration of the work of natural selection in institutional life as
we have. The only drawback is, the game is crooked. Like an undertaker who murders to boost
business or a glazier who breaks glass in the stillness of the night 2 to stimulate trade, schools
create the problems they seem to exist to solve.
2 This particular form of rational psychopathy has been an epidemic in the Northeast for decades, and it has struck
my own life more than once. Some think that auto-glass installers send agents through lines of parked cars late at
night to crack their windshields on the sensible supposition that in a trade without many practitioners, a decent
proportion of new work will go to the creators of the need. Or perhaps the entire guild underwrites the trade, who
knows?
Psychopathic Programming
I could regale you with mountains of statistics to illustrate the damage schools cause. I could
bring before your attention a line of case studies to illustrate the mutilation of specific
individuals—even those who have been apparently privileged as its "gifted and talented."3 What
would that prove? You’ve heard those stories, read these figures before until you went numb
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