The Underground History of American Education

shance

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Sat Jun-10-06 11:06 AM
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The Underground History of American Education

Edited on Sat Jun-10-06 11:08 AM by shance

The real makers of modern schooling weren't at all who we think.

Not Cotton Mather
or Horace Mann
or John Dewey.

The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...
Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...

Men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social efficiency" movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling

"The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose.
THE
FOURTH
PURPOSE

The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management.

(snip)

The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

The Business of Schooling

Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.

The prize was of inestimable value--control of the minds of the young.

After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called "The Workplace," even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.

In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.

(snip)

Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were well aware of this paradox, which our own time has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest tasks assigned to forced schooling

(snip)

"As you'll learn when you read The Underground History of American Education the new purpose of schoolingto serve business and governmentcould only be achieved efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another.
Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor.
The rationale, history, and dynamics of Fourth Purpose school procedure are carefully examined in The Underground History of American Education."

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm