Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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The teacher would give out a series of problems in “mental arithmetic”—tricks which you had been taught, and you wrote the answers on your slate, and then marched in line past the teacher’s desk, and if you had done it according to rule, you got a check on your slate. You learned the great purpose of life was these “marks.” If you got good ones, your teacher smiled at you, your parents praised you at home, you had a sense of triumph over other little boys who were stupid. You enjoyed this triumph, because no one ever suggested to you that it was cruel to laugh at your weaker fellows. In fact, the system appeared to be designed to bring out your superiority, and to increase the humiliation of the others.

In this school everything in the world had been conveniently arranged in packages, which could be stowed away in your mind and made the subject of a “mark.” Columbus discovered America in 1492; the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776; Switzerland was bounded on the north by Germany. This business of “boundings” appeared in little diagrams; Switzerland was yellow and Germany pink, and no one burdened your mind with the idea that these spots of color represented places where human beings lived. At this same time the little boy was going to Sunday school, where he learned something called “the creed,” with a sentence declaring that “from Thency shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” The little boy pondered hard, but never made sure whether “Thency” was the name of a person or a place.