Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at
Salaried Professionals
and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives
(Rowman
& Littlefield, 2000) by Jeff Schmidt
Number 31 (2001), pages 79-82
ISSN 0196-4801
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Jeff Schmidt Disciplined Minds: A
Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that
Shapes their Lives Reviewer:
Neala Schleuning Neala Schleuning is a regular contributor
to Social Anarchism. She is
author of To Have and To Hold: The Meaning of Ownership in the United
States. Many
years ago, after completing a baccalaureate degree in Interdisciplinary
Studies, I asked my advisor, Mulford Q. Sibley, where I could take up graduate
studies “where they wouldn’t mess with my mind” too much. Sibley was a wise
man, a knowledgeable man, and perhaps the most systematic radical thinker I
have ever met. His mind and his interests ranged far and wide, but he was
first and foremost committed to good radical thought processes. Sibley
understood better than most intellectuals the nature of the free mind and the
need to nourish creative and diverse thought. I took his advice and enrolled
in the American Studies program -- a haven at the time for free spirits,
cranks, artists, malcontents and other intellectual misfits. I found to my
delight a community of kindred souls and spirits -- others like myself who
found they didn’t “fit” in the traditional disciplines, who found they chafed
at the harnesses of disciplinarity and proscribed thought patterns. Reading
Jeff’s book helped me better understand my discomfort, and better appreciate
my advisor’s advice and the choices I made. In this book Jeff
Schmidt gives us a remarkably insightful political analysis of the process of
inculcating graduate school initiates into a discipline, and how this process
of “disciplining” contributes to the making and perpetuating of unfree minds
in the professions. Schmidt begins the text with the lines: “This book is
stolen. Written in part on stolen time. My job simply didn’t leave me enough
energy for a major project of my own, and no one was about to hire me to
pursue my own vision, especially given my irreverent attitude toward
employers.” These words draw us in as partners in taking a subversive stance
from the very beginning. For his good efforts, Jeff Schmidt lost his job. But
he has given us a wonderful window into the inner workings of seemingly
innocuous intellectual activity -- the shaping of an ideological
professional. He explores how disciplines shape thinking, control thinking,
and perpetuate thinking, and how the results of those brainwashing activities
are played out in the workplace and the political culture and behavior of
professionals. I’d like to begin with
definitions. In this case the OED defines “discipline” at several levels. The
first, is relatively straightforward (and also obsolete): “Instruction
imparted to disciples or scholars.” Definition three begins to impute
intentionality into the word: “Instruction to form the pupil to proper
conduct and action.” Definition five states very explicitly that discipline
is the “order maintained and observed among pupils, or other persons under
control or command.” This latter definition gives us a little better sense of
how Schmidt would have us understand the potential implications of
professionals trained in a “discipline.” I would also like the
reader to keep in mind that this is NOT an anti-intellectual book. (I can
hear the sigh of relief from academics, and the skepticism of the
deconstructionists). It is, however, a kind of “heads up” to individuals who
have submitted themselves to any type of mental training, an opportunity for
self-examination about how the mind can be consciously shaped, or warped, by
the pressures of any community of “like” minds. Further, I don’t think
Schmidt would “abolish” disciplines. We are all comfortable, for example,
that doctors who do brain surgery have been carefully inculcated into the
knowledge and content of the medical discipline, and we are all happy that
the engineers conform to national accreditation standards. His arguments
focus on the culture of
disciplines, and the socialization
disciplines impose on the gullible and unwary aspirants. Where his arguments
do resonate, however, is when we think of those “professionals” we’ve
encountered in our lives who seem to have an explicit, or implicit
ideological twist in their day to day to work. An example from my own past
that comes readily to mind is the “welfare rights” lawyers who were supposed
to defend the individual, but who hid behind the rules and regulations
instead of challenging them when they should have. A good friend of mine has
her own name for a similar class of professionals she calls the “Ishians” (you know, technicians,
statisticians, those nameless people who speak for and maintain what we call
the “system”). It is the nature of a
“discipline” (academic or otherwise) to train and educate
students-in-training to do, and to think, in particular pathways -- pathways
using particular methodologies, particular tools, even particular
dispositions. Sorting out who “fits” and who doesn’t is often more an art
than a science. Beyond the content of an education, how do we know whether
someone will be a “good” teacher? A “good” accountant? It is on these “hidden
curricula,” which Schmidt argues should be understood as ideological, that he
shines his analytical light, offering us a rare glimpse into the inner
thinking processes of educators. The book is divided into three parts: (1) a
detailed account of the product of professional training that describes what
a profession IS and DOES in the contemporary social order; (2) a section
describing how individuals are screened for acceptance into professions and subsequently
trained; and (3) a concluding discussion on brainwashing techniques and a
“handbook” on how to resist ideological repression. The
first part of the book describes professionals and their ideological work,
but the central focus of the book is on the inner workings of the
indoctrination process of professional training. In particular, Schmidt wants
us to understand the forces shaping how disciplines step-by-step train the
professional workforce, in certain ideologically pathways. Central to the training
of the ideological workforce is inculcating the right “attitude” through what
Schmidt called the “hidden curriculum of subordination” (page 21). This
curriculum of subordination produces professionals who “sell to their
employers more than their ordinary labor power, their ability to carry out
instructions. They also sell their ideological labor power, their ability to
extend those instructions to new situations. It is this sale that
distinguishes them from nonprofessionals” (38). How this commitment to
devoted and unquestioned expansion of political agendas is trained into
professionals is a riveting section of the book. He begins by describing how
people “get in” to the professions, including a lengthy discussion of
selective admission practices he calls the “Ugly Scene at the Narrow Gate.”
In a section entitled “Metamorphosis and Unnatural Selection,” he explores
how people undergo change as they progress through professional training --
by either “ideological weeding out or ideological transformation” (123). The author’s argument is
perhaps made more compelling because he shares examples from his own
discipline of physics -- a seemingly non-political, “objective” discipline.
His examples certainly dispel the notion that ANY profession is free of
politics. He concludes that if “‘God is in the details,’ as the phrase often
attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe has it, then making sure the details
represent the right god is the raison d’être of professionals” (41).
This is what makes this book important reading for anarchists and other free
thinkers. It lays bare the curriculum of power at the same time as it
explicates the curriculum of subordination. The conclusion of the
book is a fairly familiar list of how organizations and cultures (including
religious sects, political groups and academic departments/disciplines) go
about the process of transforming intellectual independence into thought
processes that are aimed at inculcating/brainwashing
new members. In the process of discussing resistance to indoctrination, he
makes a useful -- and important -- distinction between brainwashing and
education, the latter committed to developing critical thinking skills. Professionals armed with
Schmidt’s list of “mind-police-techniques-to-watch-out-for” can be on the
lookout on their jobs for some of the tell-tale signs of ideological
repression: guilt tripping and shaming, whether you have a life outside of
work, the idea that there is only “one best way” to salvation, among many
others. This section of the book also includes a great discussion on
resistance to brainwashing that is based in large part on a U.S. Army
handbook on resisting brainwashing techniques, “Field Manual No. 21-78.” Schmidt summarizes his
insights into three important principles for how professionals can maintain
personal and political integrity by becoming “radical” professionals: be sure
to maintain your primary identity as a radical, hold a critical view of the
social role of your profession, and “your politics must make a difference in
the world:” “You get little satisfaction when you do essentially the same
thing that would be done by a nonradical
replacing you…but you are truly satisfied only when you do something that
increases the total amount of socially beneficial work that is done” (266). Who should read this
book? Graduate students for certain, so they can see how their education and
training shapes their ideological views of the world. Students who dropped
out or were forced out of graduate school will also benefit from reading this
book. If they left, as many do, in a swirl of self-doubt and confusion, or
because they couldn’t or wouldn’t adopt an appropriate subordinate attitude,
they will find some comfort in knowing the inner mechanisms of what they
found so stifling as they resisted. But I think the primary audience is the
broad class of “professionals” in our society who are troubled by the
stultifying cultures of their professional lives, and who long to “make a
difference” not only for themselves, but for others. Reading this book will
help sort out and make clear a pathway to a renewed commitment to acting
politically in the world. What concerns me, and I hope Jeff Schmidt might
take up this issue in his next book, is how a personal political agenda will,
or will not, shape the use of the powers at the disposal of individuals. Are
we best to change from inside, or from outside the professional setting? How
will professionals choose to implement their new-found radical insights? And
how will they learn to use critical thinking skills to monitor their own
ideological thought processes to ensure that they do not pass on the
contagion of repression? |