Some Lessons From The Underground History Of American Education

The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. By John Taylor GattoThe Education Department redefined the term “education” after the Prussian fashion as “a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character.” State education agencies would henceforth act as on-site federal enforcers, ensuring the compliance of local schools with central directives. Each state education department was assigned the task of becoming “an agent of change” and was advised to “lose its independent identity as well as its authority” in order to “form a partnership with the federal government.”Postmodern schooling, we are told, is to focus on “pleasure cultivation” and on “other attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world.” Thus the socialization classroom of the twentieth century’s beginning – itself a radical departure from schooling for mental and character development – can be seen to have evolved by 1967 into a full-scale laboratory for psychological experimentation.EDITOR’S NOTE: One of the most disturbing — yet revealing — posts this editor has ever placed onto WVWNews.Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spending more money on forced schooling than did the government itself. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were themselves spending more. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear an excerpt from the first mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board as it occurred in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple … we will organize children … and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.This mission statement will reward multiple rereadings.<a href=”http://abundance.org.uk/some-lessons-from-the-underground-history-of-american-education" target=”_blank”>Continue…</a>

2008-01-27