Post by Okwes on Feb 24, 2006 11:42:17 GMT -5
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job.
Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in
pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the
percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of
the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was. Fingers are pointed at
various aspects of the schooling system-overcrowded classrooms, lack of
funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are
just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still
suck. Why? Because they were designed to.
How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public
school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute
classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization,
lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who
designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the
late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.
Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to
obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted
the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State
Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools-the way they
enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness,
and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he
began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.
In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the
localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually
teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads,
to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that
education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting
itself among the laboring classes."
By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of
schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher
and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:
> Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the
> maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social
> growth.
>
> In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly-the
future Dean of Education at Stanford-wrote that schools should be factories "in
which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished
products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will
come from government and industry."
The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board-which funded the creation of
numerous public schools-issued a statement which read in part:
>
> 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.
At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from
1889 to 1906, wrote:
>
> Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in
> prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an
> accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is
> the subsumption of the individual.
In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:
>
> The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly
> places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of
> nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in
a speech to businessmen:
>
> We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very
> much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal
> education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard,
said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about
'the perfect organization of the hive.'"
While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that
the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had
been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the
nature of the industrial process."
In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an
educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough
to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the
sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good
worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population-mainly the children of the
captains of industry and government-to rise to the level where they could
continue running things.
This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a
blueprint which remains unchanged to this day.
Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're
apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce
E. Levine wrote in 2001:
>
> I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy
> labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy
> didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman,
> agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our
> job is to get them ready for the work world...that the children have to get
> used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the
> real world."
John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An
Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford
Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above historical quotes. It
is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. You
can order it from Gatto's Website, which now contains the entire book online
for free.
The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent book
Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New York:
Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).
It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job.
Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in
pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the
percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of
the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was. Fingers are pointed at
various aspects of the schooling system-overcrowded classrooms, lack of
funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are
just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still
suck. Why? Because they were designed to.
How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public
school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute
classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization,
lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who
designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the
late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.
Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to
obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted
the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State
Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools-the way they
enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness,
and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he
began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.
In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the
localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually
teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads,
to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that
education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting
itself among the laboring classes."
By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of
schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher
and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:
> Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the
> maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social
> growth.
>
> In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly-the
future Dean of Education at Stanford-wrote that schools should be factories "in
which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished
products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will
come from government and industry."
The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board-which funded the creation of
numerous public schools-issued a statement which read in part:
>
> 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.
At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from
1889 to 1906, wrote:
>
> Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in
> prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an
> accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is
> the subsumption of the individual.
In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:
>
> The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly
> places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of
> nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in
a speech to businessmen:
>
> We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very
> much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal
> education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard,
said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about
'the perfect organization of the hive.'"
While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that
the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had
been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the
nature of the industrial process."
In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an
educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough
to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the
sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good
worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population-mainly the children of the
captains of industry and government-to rise to the level where they could
continue running things.
This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a
blueprint which remains unchanged to this day.
Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're
apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce
E. Levine wrote in 2001:
>
> I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy
> labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy
> didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman,
> agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our
> job is to get them ready for the work world...that the children have to get
> used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the
> real world."
John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An
Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford
Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above historical quotes. It
is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. You
can order it from Gatto's Website, which now contains the entire book online
for free.
The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent book
Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New York:
Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).