Mandatory Public Schooling: Is it a tool for Education and Enlightenment or the Creation of a "Standardized Citizenry"?

Old-thinker news | Dec. 17, 2007

The following quotes can be found throughout John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of American Education."

"In our dream...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." - John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, Occasional Letter Number One (1906)

John Taylor Gatto notes that, "Although this statement was first publicly disclosed in an obscure book (The World's Work, 1912) and republished as part of a collection printed by Rockefeller's GEB in 1913 for its selective readership, it had apparently circulated at the Foundation much earlier. Various guesses place its origin from 1913, a year after the GEB was formed to 1906."

"A government system of education in Prussia is not inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society, for there all wisdom is supposed to be lodged in the government. But the thing is wholly inadmissible here . . . because, according to our theory, the people are supposed to be wiser than the government. Here, the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give the law to the government. To entrust, then, the government with the power of determining the education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power to be our master. This fundamental difference between the two countries [United States and Prussia], we apprehend, has been overlooked by the board of education and its supporters." - Orestes Brownson, In Opposition to Centralization, 1839

"This subject [mass psychology] will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity... It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician's paradise." - Bertrand Russel, The Impact of Science on Society (1952) page 41

“Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening… The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they’re not tempted to think about any other role." - U.S. Commissioner of Education William Torrey Harris, 1889

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body." - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

"[Administration] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd." - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)

"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 this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven." - John Dewey's Pedagogic Creed, 1897

"That erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence....Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its am everywhere else." - H.L Mencken, The American Mercury, April 1924

"Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality—and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated." - Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children" (1862)

"Today’s corporate sponsors want to see their money used in ways to line up with business objectives.... This is a young generation of corporate sponsors and they have discovered the advantages of building long-term relationships with educational institutions." - Suzanne Cornforth of Paschall & Associates, public relations consultants. As quoted in The New York Times, July 15, 1998

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson, 1909

"They [the "un-intelligent"] are amenable to any reasonable treatment that we may prescribe for them and whenever society is ready to eliminate them from the main group and to provide for them in ways that will make them happy and as efficient as they, with their limited intelligence can be made, we will at least have increased the total efficiency to an almost unbelievable extent. It is said that the busy bee, so often held up to us as a model of industrious work, actually works twenty minutes a day. The explanation of the great amount that he accomplishes is said to be in the fact of the perfect organization of the hive. Perhaps it would be wiser for us to emulate the bee's social organization more and his supposed industry less." - Henry Herbert Goddard, Human Efficiency (1920), page 61-62

"Ignorance was widespread and formal education did not flourish in the Chesapeake. This condition was not an accident. It was deliberately contrived by Virginia's elite, who positively feared learning among the general population." - David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed

This excerpt is from page 192 of The Underground History of American Education:

In the Congressional Record of January 26, 1917, for instance, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon entered these words:

They are moving with military precision all along the line to get control of the education of the children of the land.

Senator Poindexter of Washington followed, saying:

The cult of Rockefeller, the cult of Carnegie...as much to be guarded against in the educational system of this country as a particular religious sect.

And in the same issue, Senator Kenyon of Iowa related:

There are certain colleges that have sought endowments, and the agent of the Rockefeller Foundation or the General Education Board had gone out and examined the curriculum of these colleges and compelled certain changes....

It seems to me one of the most dangerous things that can go on in a republic is to have an institution of this power apparently trying to shape and mold the thought of the young people of this country.

Senator Works of California added:

These people...are attempting to get control of the whole educational work of the country.

If it interests you, take a look. It’s all in the Congressional Record of January 26,1917

"The ideology that lies behind these texts [school textbooks] is rather difficult to define.... it does not fit usual political patterns....the texts never indicate any line of action....authors avoid what they choose to and some of them avoid main issues....they fail to develop any original ideas....they confuse social sciences with science....clouds of jargon....leave out ideas....historical names are given no character, they are cipher people....there are no conflicts, only "problems"." - Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised