*1 "The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide.  I teach children they are always watched by keeping each student under constant surveillance as do my colleagues.  There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time.  Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels.  Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents.  Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.  A family trained to snitch on each other isn't likely to be able to conceal any dangerous secrets.  I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework", too, so that the surveillance travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood.  Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.  The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.  Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down Republic, in City of God, in Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan and many other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control.  Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed marching band.

John Talor Gatto

The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher

by John Taylor Gatto

New Society Publishers, 1992

 

*2 "We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.  But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision,there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.  What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture..."

Neil Postman

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Public Discoursein the Age ofShow Business

Penguin, 1985