Correspondence
Original sin is the simple belief that we are not worthy of love. It is not a separation from God, but rather a separation from one’s own self. Like a deadly, mutating virus, it insidiously attacks the young before their immune systems have developed, producing needless suffering.
It’s shocking how loving parents can traumatize their young children by teaching them that they enter this world with blood on their tiny hands. These parents dare speak of family values while bestowing upon their innocent offspring the belief that they are unworthy in the eyes of God. Long before such children are old enough to enter the “godless” centers of learning John Taylor Gatto denounces, they have already been stripped of their inborn spirituality. Whatever the “sins” of the public schools may be, at least original sin isn’t one of them.
David Wahl
Edmond, Oklahoma
“In Defense of Original Sin,” by John Taylor Gatto, in the January 1998 issue of The Sun was worth the price of a year’s subscription.
Watson A Bowes Jr.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
John Taylor Gatto is not in support of spirituality in the schools; he’s in support of Christianity in the schools. This is elitism, and leaves a tremendous amount of spiritual wisdom out in the cold.
Gatto exhibits his ignorance of history in his narratives about the Constitution and the Puritan settlers. To begin with, the Constitution came almost in its entirety from that of the Iroquois nations. Our new country even took the Iroquois’ symbol, an eagle holding five arrows, and adapted it for its own use, making it thirteen arrows.
As for the Puritans, they and other settlers were continually running away to live with the Indians because there was more freedom and “democracy” among the natives than in the colonies. The Puritans made laws against running away that, at the extreme, imposed the penalty of death on the “criminal.” To cover this up, the history books, especially the Puritanical ones, listed such people as “captured by raiding Indians.” Gatto also seems to forget that the Puritans — particularly his favorite sect, the Congregationalists — used their religion to justify wiping out the Indians and to rationalize their “Manifest Destiny” of settling the entire continent.
Original sin says, quite openly and above board, “You are bad, and you will always be bad, because you were born bad.” And, of course, after centuries of hearing this, people believe it, which begets bad, unethical conduct. Buddhism, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in original sin; it teaches the basic goodness of man. Had we been taught from the start that we are basically good at heart, we would not have the mess we have today in the world.
James L. Secor
Lawrence, Kansas
John Taylor Gatto responds:
My critics seem to share a single misconception: that Christianity and formal, established Christian religions are one in the same. This is a shallow take on a complex matter, and prevents one from understanding what has attracted so many people to Christianity over the past two millennia.
I wrote “In Defense of Original Sin” to answer my own questions. For most of my life, I was utterly revolted and thoroughly baffled by the hold original sin has had on apparently intelligent people throughout history. Finally, at the age of fifty-eight, I took three full months off from everything and worked seven days a week from early morning to late at night, wrestling with this notion. My intention was not to believe, but only to understand original sin’s power. What I learned I stated as straight as I knew how before The Sun’s readers.
The message of original sin is strong, useful, and not at all inhumane, as Wahl and Secor characterize it. I believe they have mistaken John Calvin’s opinion, or John Knox’s, for the wisdom of Christianity. Jesus founded no church, and Christianity requires no middlemen. The truest thing Martin Luther ever said was “Every man his own priest.” Which is not to say a congregation can’t be inspired, or that anybody needs to go it alone, but only that the primary responsibility is yours. You can’t get rid of it. That’s the genius of Christianity.
My essay was neither an attempt to defend the church Establishment — whose record is spotty to grotesque — nor an attempt to Christianize the schools. But I do think the moral standard I outlined can and should be compared, point by point, to the moral standard sold by forced schooling. To do this you must bypass all the rhetoric and extract the message of secular schooling that resonates from every bell, every standardized test, every classroom segregated by social class and family income (forget race), every lie told about a correlation between school performance and success in life. List the prescription school teaches for a good life, point by point, and sit down with a bottle of good tequila to compare the Christian curriculum with the government version. Then choose the one that will serve you best as you work, play, deal with pain, age, and die. Another wonderful gift of Christianity is free will.
I’ve just finished reading John Taylor Gatto’s “In Defense of Original Sin” [January 1998] while on a retreat at a non-Christian spiritual center. It is amazing how true his statements ring to me here. It seems more useful to grasp the effect of original sin — separation from God — than to believe it makes us immutably bad, a condition that no amount of effort can change. It’s better to focus on reuniting with God, using the lessons we learn from work, pain, moral dilemmas, and death.
Paul Zielinski
Charlotte, Michigan
Having enjoyed John Taylor Gatto’s essays on schooling, I began “In Defense of Original Sin” [January 1998] with enthusiasm. Alas, I found myself dismayed by his essay. True, many good things came out of the early American religious communities of which he spoke. But let us not forget that the U.S. Constitution had its roots in the ideals of ancient Greek philosophers and the example of the Iroquois League, as well as in the American Protestant tradition. The dissenters Gatto admires did give each other room out of respect. Rather, for the first time in their contentious history, they found themselves in a land where they could spread out and avoid one another. And weren’t these the same people who brought us the Salem witch trials, and who banished Anne Hutchinson for heresy?
Gatto acknowledges that the settlers had their flaws, but says the damage they caused stopped at the boundaries of a single church and community. I disagree. It was the colonists who began the deforestation of the continent, not just to create farmland, but because they found the woods dark and demon-haunted. They used Scripture to justify slavery and the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants. The settlers saw the natives’ “sodomitical ways” (they honored people we call lesbian and gay) as proof of their ungodliness, and as justification for torturing and killing them. The verse in Genesis that Gatto sees as an invitation to accept pain these Christians used as a rationale for the oppression of women. (It refers to women having to suffer in childbirth as a result of Eve’s sin.)
You don’t need to believe in original sin to live a moral life, or to respect the planet and the other beings who share it with you. In fact, that belief may undermine such values, as it reinforces woundedness rather than wonder, guilt rather than gratitude.
It’s true, as John Taylor Gatto points out, that society and individuals would be better served, on some level, by a Christian curriculum. It is equally true that we would be better served by schools promoting any philosophy, religion, or belief system that espouses similar ethical ideas — and there are a variety of them. If Christianity is your chosen path, send your kids to a school based on it, but leave others to the path they choose — including none.
I’d also like to endorse Gatto’s debunking of the lies we tell as a society. He cites the purported relationship between school performance and success in life as one, but there are so many. I have often wondered, for example, what the effect is on children when they realize that their parents deliberately lied to them about Santa Claus. A wise teacher once told me, “Tell the truth, because it works.” I tell the truth because I cannot live any other way. Whether I ignore this part of my nature or serve it, I cannot change it. I tell the truth, not because it is morally right, but because it costs me my aliveness when I do not.
Marjorie Hamilton
Elmira, New York
I took a special interest in John Taylor Gatto’s “In Defense of Original Sin” because I am a public-school teacher and also a member of the Congregational Church, born and bred into what Gatto calls the “wisdom tradition of American Christianity.”
Much of what he says strikes a chord with me. Rational thought is useful, but, as Gatto points out, it is only a part of human life, and can be dangerous when mistaken for the whole story. Recently I read about a scientist who intends to clone humans and says unashamedly that it is the human destiny to become God through science. I also recognize, in a general sense, the complicity of compulsory education in such developments.
I disagree, however, with Gatto’s portrayal of public education as one system. Although we may trace the history of the public schools back to the factory model of the early Industrial Revolution, not all schools are operating from that model now. In my classroom of seven- and eight-year-olds, I try to create an environment that encourages autonomy yet recognizes each individual’s responsibility to the group. I get to know each student well enough to teach him or her some of the skills of reading, writing, mathematics, social inquiry, and, yes, scientific method. I also encourage the children’s wonder, and listen to their explanations. Sometimes they even talk about God.
When this happens, I acknowledge their thoughts and let the other children respond to them. In my particular school, I feel free to do this, though I don’t feel free to share my own beliefs, as I often wish I could. School systems vary from state to state. Within my home state, New Hampshire, they vary from town to town. The fact is, in some New Hampshire schools I might feel nervous letting children talk about God.
Can there be an education of the heart even when God is not mentioned explicitly?
Bruce Turnquist
Deerfield, New Hampshire
John Taylor Gatto responds:
In the April 1998 Correspondence section, Bruce Turnquist took issue with what he called my “portrayal of public education as one system.” I don’t blame him; I disagree with that statement, too. The trouble is I never said it.
Not all schools operate from the factory model, but it is far and away the dominant model in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France — indeed, it was created in these four great coal-mining powers of the nineteenth century — and it shows no signs of diminishing its grip. The goal of this system is to manufacture a universal utopia.
That a few schools (and more than a few individual teachers) practice a better, more humane method seems increasingly irrelevant in light of all the students whose lives are incomplete due to the monstrous preemption of their youth by an abstract system. Even those who successfully resist face a steadily diminishing variety of choices. The system of schooling is foreclosing on choice everywhere except in a relative handful of privileged sanctuaries like Turnquist’s Deerfield, New Hampshire. (Although surely Deerfield’s turn will eventually come, too.)
What confuses most of us, I think, is the phenomenal material success our current centralized form of compulsory schooling has conferred. The astounding power and wealth the U.S. has attained under what is essentially a classical fascist regimen has seduced people into believing they can have inhuman power and luxury and a complete life, but that is impossible. The price we must pay for the degree of comfort and safety we enjoy is the surrender of our liberty, spirituality, and loyalty to family and others. These cannot be allowed to interfere with the scientific management of the nation, or our material paradise would gradually come apart.
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