The school

II.

Montgomery replaced the phone and folded his hands on the desk. His eyes stared ahead, seeing nothing for a moment. This new assignment was nothing to cheer about, but he was glad he had been able to remain at Firestone throughout the construction of the Ninety-one. His contribution was not exactly visible, yet it was substantial. He knew he’d done a good job of expediting the flow of information back and forth between the Air Force and the engineers.

One thing he appreciated in the change, however, was the chance he might have to help Soren Gunderson if the engineer were going to be sucked into some foolish program that would injure himself and the nation’s production. But he wondered if he actually had any chance at all of getting inside this school. It didn’t seem likely that operators of the kind they appeared to be would give the Air Force a chance to come in and snoop around.

He left the office and went back to the testing area. Gunderson was busy in conference with the group of XB-91 engineers, analyzing the data of the morning’s flight. So Montgomery spent an hour roaming through the ship, drinking in again the sense of power and greatness of the giant plane. He had been aboard during some of the earlier check flights, but he had never had a chance to take the controls himself. Now he went up to the pilots’ compartment and sat down, wondering if he ever would get a chance to handle it. That was the one thing he still deeply desired.

The XB-91 was representative of the new concept of bombing planes, the invincible, self-contained fortress of the air. It flew alone, high, and twice as fast as sound. The approach of any object during flight, interceptor plane or guided missile, triggered the Ninety-one’s defenses. Automatically, at such approach, the bomber spit out its own target-seeking missile to destroy any attacking device at a safe range. It wasn’t vulnerable, as Gunderson said, Montgomery thought. It was the most completely invincible machine ever devised.

But something of what Gunderson had said that morning continued to nag at Montgomery as he moved along the catwalk, inspecting the empty nests that would hold the target-seeking missiles. It was true there was a kind of vulnerability built right into the ship — the vulnerability of its nightmare complexity. It would be nice to have simpler answers to complex problems, but where were they going to be found? If men like Gunderson couldn’t devise them, who could?

The chief engineer was alone in the hangar office when Montgomery came down from the plane. He waved a hand through the glass partition and walked into the room without knocking.

“The Ninety-one doesn’t look as if the speed runs shook her to pieces,” he said.

Gunderson was looking half-pleased with the sheaf of papers under his hands. “No, we discovered one small area of vibration near the tail that’s not good. But I think we can clear it up with just a little modification of the frame at that point.”

Montgomery sat down. “Something’s been bothering me. I can’t get out of my head the business you were talking about this morning. This school thing —”

Gunderson nodded. “I’ve found it pretty hard to keep off my mind, too.”

“I’ve been wondering — just suppose the thing does turn out to be on the level, that they’ve really got something there — do you think there’s any chance you might be able to get me in?”

Gunderson looked at the major in surprise. “I didn’t think you would be interested in anything like that.”

Montgomery smiled easily. “I suppose I’ve been a soldier long enough to acquire something of that Army Look, but actually I’m perfectly aware of the truth of the things you said this morning about the unmanageable complexity of the Ninety-one. If this school has got something that will draw men like Norcross and you, I think I’d like to get a piece of it for myself.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t made application yet. Could you get away?”

“Dodge has been pretty decent since I’ve been in R&D. I think he’d go for it, if I asked him.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Gunderson. “But remember, it’s still a pig in a poke as far as I know anything about it.”

“I’ll gamble with you on it,” said Montgomery.

Six weeks later, modifications were completed and the Ninety-one was accepted by the Government. Almost simultaneously, Soren Gunderson’s application was accepted by the Nagle-Berkeley Institute, and he was invited to bring his associate, Major Montgomery, for interview.

Colonel Dodge chafed daily on the phone regarding the inaction during that period, and did everything he could to speed up the acceptance of the plane. Thirty other men left critical positions in various parts of the nation during that time, but Major Montgomery remained the only R&D man who had a lead that could take him to the school.

Also, the first score of men had come out of the school and were applying again for places in industrial and scientific jobs. Some asked re-instatement with their former employers, others sought entirely new areas of activity. None would make any comment regarding his absence.

Official word had gone out quietly, however, that until more was learned of the school the applications of these men were to be held in abeyance. They were not to be hired even as janitors in critical plants. On the other hand, it was desired to avoid any investigation that would appear as a frontal attack and scare off the operators of the school prematurely. Dodge managed to convince his superiors and the FBI that Montgomery offered their best opportunity.

The Institute was located in the small northern California town of Casa Buena, on the coast near the Oregon border. Montgomery drove from Seattle alone, following Gunderson and his family by a day. It had been decided that Montgomery’s wife, Helen, and their two children would remain where they were since this might be a quite temporary assignment.

The major checked in at one of the two resort hotels as soon as he arrived in Casa Buena. His next act was arrangement of the phone scrambler and a report to Dodge — and to Dr. Spindem, who listened in on most of his conversations. This fact inspired a persistent irritation like that of an irremovable splinter in the hand.

It was midafternoon, but when he finally called Gunderson he was told to hurry over. Their initial interviews could be taken care of at once.

The school was at the edge of town on a low bluff overlooking the ocean. It occupied a set of old California-Spanish style structures that once housed an unsuccessful summer resort. Heavy foliage screened it from the road. The interior court had been landscaped to a Mediterranean garden — with only a slight touch of Hollywood. It formed a kind of “campus” on which numerous students lounged in the shade as Montgomery and Gunderson walked toward the administration building. Montgomery could not help staring as he recognized at a distance the features of men whose brains literally controlled large segments of the aircraft industry.

In the office, a secretary took their names and announced their presence over the interphone.

“Dr. Berkeley will see you, Mr. Gunderson,” she said, “and Dr. Nagle will see Major Montgomery.”

Montgomery felt a spasm of apprehension. The success of his whole operation here depended on the next few minutes. He managed to grin back at Gunderson as the engineer held up a circled forefinger and thumb. Then he was gone.

A door opened to Montgomery’s left and the girl ushered him into the presence of a pleasantly sharp-eyed man in his middle forties. “Dr. Nagle,” said the girl, “this is Major Montgomery.”

“Come in, major,” said Dr. Nagle. “We already know something of your background, and it was indeed a pleasure to receive your application.”

They sat on opposite sides of a large, mahogany desk and surveyed each other a moment. “One of the first things we like to know,” said Dr. Nagle, “is why a man chose to apply for admission to the Institute in the first place.”

Montgomery’s face sobered. He paused a long moment, both for the hoped-for effect of impressing Nagle — and to collect his own full quota of reassurance. He had rehearsed this to himself for the last six weeks. Now to see if he could put it over.

“As you may know,” he said, “Soren Gunderson and I have worked closely together during the past four years in building the XB-91.” As Nagle nodded, Montgomery went on. He borrowed as closely as he dared the bitter objections Gunderson had made to the Ninety-one. He modified and embellished, adding items of his own, all the while watching carefully the reactions of Nagle’s expression.

“Soren and I have felt there ought to be some answer to this inadequacy of our engineering. When he began hearing about the Institute, I was immediately interested also in the possibility that some solution had been found. Of course, I was frankly dubious,” he said with a smile. “You can’t expect a man not to be — but I decided I wanted to find out for myself.”

Nagle’s expression changed but little during Montgomery’s story. As the engineer finished, he said, “Did you do anything during the building of the plane to try to eliminate some of these troublesome complexities?”

“Well, yes — during the time the wings were in design I felt there ought to be another answer to the tremendous demand for lift at the ship’s service altitude. It was just a fuzzy sense that there ought to be some other way of building it. I worked out a few sketches on my own, but nothing came of it.”

Nagle remained silent, watching him as if speculating over the truth of his statements. “Gunderson calls his plane a monster — a failure,” he said finally. “And he’s right. From an engineering standpoint the thing is quite ridiculous. It’s the end product of our ‘bigger and better’ creed, which has been our standard for some time. Bigger planes, bigger automobiles, bigger plants — laboratories — schools — houses. You know how it works in your organization. A supervisor rates a grade higher when his personnel reaches thirty in number, so he phonies up enough projects and recruits the additional men. For every honest administrator there are a dozen empire builders working their pet researches into the status of major projects — with them at the head.”

Montgomery started to protest involuntarily. “R&D isn’t —”

Nagle cut him short. “The problem has been with us for a long time, but only in the last decade has it been felt as severely as it is right now. Our need for creative engineering and design has been more intense than ever before, and we have increased our efforts to obtain it proportionately. The result has been to greatly magnify all the obstacles which have always stood in our way.

“We have become aware that we are in the midst of a famine of genuine, new basic ideas. The XB-91 is a monument to this famine. It was built from the mountains of data we have collected, but it is not the product of invention and research.”

“The nation has done everything possible to foster technological growth,” said Montgomery. “Our engineering schools have never operated at the peak they now are.”

Nagle smiled slowly as if enjoying a joke briefly at the major’s expense. “You are quite right. More schools and more engineers than ever before. Yet the problems represented by the XB-91 are not being solved by the kind of thinking coming out of our engineering schools today.”

“Why not? Do you consider the schools themselves responsible?”

“Actually — no, the schools are not responsible. There are scores of factors, but standing well out in front is our misevaluation of what public education is supposed to accomplish.”

“Certainly, one of its major aims is to produce an adequate corps of creative engineers!”

Nagle shook his head. “No. But in order to understand the failure of any mechanism it is best to inquire if the mechanism was designed to perform the failed function in the first place.

“The school is a peculiar institution. Even its personnel are regarded as public property. The control imposed by a community upon its school-teachers has long been a stock source of humor, but there’s nothing funny in it to anyone who’s ever experimented with making the school anything but the strict, literal voice of the community.

“Educational systems have always been a source of public pride, whether in Rome of the fourteenth century, or Paris, or London, or Podunk Corners, U.S.A. New advances in education are announced with great fanfare. In reality, however, the school never changes. Its basic purpose today is the same as it was when Egyptian boys studied the Book of the Dead to learn how departed souls must act to obtain happiness.

“It existed in the ancient synagogues, the military barracks of Sparta, the gymnasiums of Athens, the harsh discipline of Roman schools. It was in the church schools and universities of the Middle Ages, as well as in Napoleonic France where the system was geared to reverence for the new emperor, ‘given by God.’ It’s painful to attempt an evaluation of our own current system, but the basic purpose is there.

“In all ages the educational system has existed to enable the individual to become an integral part of his cultural life — whatever form that culture might have.”

“That doesn’t sound extremely ominous,” said Montgomery.

“I haven’t said that it is. Judgment on that point will be left up to you. But let us consider the system in engineering terms:

“A culture demands a certain minimum degree of stability for its existence. Uniformity of customs, thoughts, and habits contributes to this stability. Likewise, there is demanded a heavy checkrein on excursions too far away from the cultural norm. Both of these items, the uniformity and the restraint, can be very adequately provided by indoctrination in the Traditions of the Elders, by dispensing All That is Known of the Universe and Man in the sixteenth century, or by wrapping up the results of much data collection in a Handbook of Wing Design for aeronautical engineers.

“This represents a homeostatic process. The school is the instrument designed to carry it out. It’s the thermostat on the stove to keep the pot from boiling over.”

“If that were true, the school would be responsible for keeping things as they are — not for venturing into the new and unknown!”

“Exactly,” said Nagle. “An educational system forms a homeostatic control over the natural adventuresomeness of the individual human mind to keep it in line with established patterns. It preserves the cultural ideal at all costs through widespread indoctrination with the particular mass of data currently accepted as ‘truth.’ This is its only function”

“I should think that would be extremely difficult to prove.”

“On the contrary, it is so obvious it requires nothing more than calling attention to it. It is more than amply demonstrated by the fact that no educational system has ever been able to concern itself with the basic object of its ministrations: the individual human brain. The enormous range of variation in human minds has been taken into account only as something to be flattened out so that whatever curriculum is in vogue can be injected with minimum effort. No effective program to investigate these variations and harness their usefulness has ever been established. Earnest people have thought upon the problem from time to time, but they seemed unaware that the educational system is basically unable to do anything but what it is doing.”

“This sounds rather rough on the educators.”

“Not at all! They’re fulfilling the function assigned by society long ago when the first half dozen families gathered outside the communal cave and decided little Joe Neanderthal was getting too big for his britches and somebody was going to have to teach him a thing or two. They’ve been teaching him ever since this first school was set up. There are many social homeostats outside the family now, but the school was the first — and the function of a homeostat is to flatten variations.”

Montgomery laughed. “I suppose everyone has that kind of feeling about his education at times — although I’m not yet convinced your description is wholly accurate. I do remember seeing at one time, however, a picture of an ingenious machine to stamp walnuts with a brand name. Regardless of the shape or size of the nut it came through the machine with the same brand as all the rest. I thought then that schools had also been stamping the nuts with identical brands for a long time.”

Nagle smiled broadly and nodded. “They deal in terms of classes, not individuals, of materials to be taught, of obtaining agreement from the pupils, not of inviting them to original thought. We laugh now at little Joe Genius being held down by the backwardness of the Little Red School-house on the prairie, and exult in his eventual triumph over it. We fail to recognize that the Little Red School-house is still with us — even though it now has air-conditioning, glass bricks, and cantilevered roofs. We fail to recognize that discovery and invention are culture-smashing activities, and education is a culture-preserving mechanism. By its very nature, then, education cannot sponsor any vital, new departures in any facet of our culture. It can only appear to do so, to preserve the sustaining illusion of progress while at the same time maintaining the homeostasis of the culture.”

“And all this leads to what?” said Montgomery.

“To the question of what happens to a working system when the setting of its homeostatic control is pushed down too low!”

Montgomery shifted uncomfortably. He refused to believe the arguments Nagle was proposing, yet he wasn’t quite sure how he would have refuted them if he had been in a position to do so.

“I suppose in that case,” he said, “the fire goes out. You believe this has happened?”

“It is happening,” said Nagle, “at an alarming rate. Education is being substituted for learning. Data-collecting is taking the place of research.

“Perhaps no period of our culture has seen a more optimum balance between the two than the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this one. Education was widespread enough to enable a country the size of the United States to function as a unit — and limited enough to keep from smothering the culture-shaking activities of the Edison-Ford-Wright type. We have to work toward a restoration of that balance.”

Montgomery shook his head — not too vigorously, in view of the necessity to not antagonize Nagle. “Cultures can’t be static structures trying to avoid all change,” he said. “They don’t last very long if they are. To exist, a culture must be a vigorous, growing entity. Ours is — and in my opinion our educational system is largely responsible for it. For every invention of the Edison, Ford, or Wright type you’ve got a thousand others produced quietly in industrial and university research centers, and each is just as important in its own way as the work of the barefoot boys who sold newspapers. After all, the atom bomb didn’t come out of somebody’s basement lab!”

“No — it came only after virtually all homeostatic forces involved were thoroughly shackled. We could argue the variations in thousands of instances, but that would hardly be practical.

“What is practical is to note that the situation we’re in produces XB-91's — and will continue to produce them unless a change occurs. We have to tackle the basic problems of the minds that do the thinking. We supply them with bigger wind tunnels, more complex computers. That merely evades the problem. It doesn’t solve it.

“We must find out the nature and purposes of the human being — of you and me. We have to turn our vision from the external world to the internal. This is something that science, society — our whole culture from the very beginning — has been afraid to do. We make believe we’re going after it by taking electroencephalograms, analyzing blood constituents and glandular products. But this, too, is an evasion. It tells us nothing of what a man is and what he’s doing - and why he’s doing it.

“And you’ve missed my point about the function of homeostatic controls. They don’t necessarily prevent cultural growth. They keep it within certain bounds. But the control must not be confused with the agency responsible for growth. That would be somewhat like confusing the thermostat with the fire!”

Montgomery felt a sense of anger growing within him for a reason he couldn’t quite name. Nagle seemed so sure he had all the answers. “What agency is responsible, then?” he demanded.

“That, my friend,” said Nagle, “is what you are here to discover for yourself.”

“And in spite of all your objections to schools it appears that you have set up still another one.”

“Our Institute has been called a school, but it shouldn’t be. Our function is primarily to reverse the activities of the ordinary school. You might — and quite correctly — say that we are engaged in de-educating —”

“De-educating —?”

“Yes. Meaning to remove the homeostatic controls imposed by your education — to whatever degree you wish them removed — and from whatever source your education was derived.”

“Even if I were to accept the possibility of this, it sounds more than a little dangerous — to both the individual and his society.”

Nagle’s eyes grew more sober. “I wouldn’t have you acquire any illusions on that point. It is capable of very great danger — to both parties!”