Area : I_UFO
Date : Sep 04 '95, 16:22
From : Walter Bartoo, 1:330/201
To   : ALL & Cris Paunescu
Subj : Dumbing Down America



          ORIGINS & HISTORY OF AMERICAN COMPULSORY SCHOOLING
                  An Interview with John Taylor Gatto
                             By Jim Martin

After nearly 30 -years in the public schools, John Taylor Gatto has
quit his job as a schoolteacher to become one of the country's most
articulate critics of American education.  The author of Dumbing Us
Down currently lives in New York City, where he is working on a book
about the history of compulsory education called The Empty Child.

I wanted to get John Gatto's opinions on President Clinton's edu-du-
jour, which is called "Goals 2000."  Rather than address the specifics
of Goals 2000, or any other educational "reform efforts aimed at
public schools, Gatto soon had me reeling back almost two centuries to
the origins of compulsory schools, when children were marched off at
bayonet-point to attend the first universal state-run schools.

Mind control is as pervasive and-commonplace as those bright yellow
school busses that come for our children at 8am each weekday morning.

Gatto: Okay, everybody in the world knows John Locke's tabula rasa.
That doesn't come out of his book on education that everyone reads in
graduate school, but from his essay "Concerning Human Understanding."
Locke announces in 1690 that children are blank slates.  He actually
says wax tablets but it is mistranslated blank slates, which is even
worse because you can write on them over and over again.  It's a
reference to the notebook the roman kids took to school.  In the
century that Locke announced that, this idea electrified the upper
classes of Europe and the United States.  This book was read by
everybody who was anybody for a century; books didn't have as short a
life or the same kind of competition they have today.  Between him and
Rousseau, who in about 1770 wrote Emile, during that 80 year period,
this idea of children as absolutely blank and subject to anything that
is written on them by their possessor really becomes the foundation
for the emergence of the strong state, which always comes to a cropper
if it can't control its population.

Suddenly philosophy is offering the state a way to secure its
territory: get hold of the children.  Rousseau's Emile is a
demonstration of exactly how, quite against the kid's own volition,
this can be done.  While appearing to play funny games and sing songs
and have a good time you can shape the person perfectly.  Emile
electrified the Prussian state, which is really a religious kingdom.
Few people realize that there was one Crusade authorized by the Pope
that wasn't to the Holy Land, it was to the Barbarian lands of
northern Europe to slaughter the Prussian primitives.  It was a
religious crusade.

Prussia is an Interesting synthetic state founded on religious
principle.  Almost nobody knows this: 48% of the soldiers in the
American revolution on both sides were Prussian mercenaries, and not
just on the British side.

All this is a river of information about what's going on in northern
Germany (which is becoming a more regulated state) and it's flowing
into the German colonies in Pennsylvania.  Ben Franklin is totally
aware of it, and interested in borrowing the principles and applying
them in the activities of the American state.

Prussia is the first state in human history to have a compulsory
schooling law that works.  There were a handful of them that existed
prior to the Prussian law of 1819 but they don't work. Nobody is dumb
enough to keep going to school after a few days. It collapses when the
cops don't come after you.  That's what happened to the famous New
England compulsory school law.  It was there as a piece of window
dressing.

But not in Prussia.  They really were marched to school at bayonet
point.  It was after Napoleon's defeat of Prussia at the battle of
Jena at 1806.  A famous Prussian philosopher named Fichte announced in
an Address to the German People: that the party was over.  Now the
children would be taken.  Now they were going to be told what to think
and how long to think it.  They were going to understand that the
state is the primary parent and the blood family is secondary.
Between 1806 and 1819, two brilliant brothers, the Humboldts, a guy
named Stein, and a few others, divide the society into children who
will become policy makers; children who will become assistants to
policy makers (the engineers, architects, lawyers, and doctors); and
the children who will be the vast, massed, the used.

Prussia sets up a three-tier school system, in which one half of one
percent of the population is taught to think.  They go to schools
called academies.  Five and a half percent of the population go to
Realschulen, where they partially learn to think, but not completely,
because Prussia believed their defeat at the hands of Napoleon was
caused by people thinking for themselves at times of stress on the
battlefield.  They were going to see to it that scientifically this
couldn't happen. The lowest 94%, (that's some pyramid, right?) went to
volkschulen, where they were to learn harmony, obedience, freedom from
stressful thinking, how to follow orders.  They worked out a system
that would in fact guarantee such results. In the volkschulen, it was
to divide whole ideas (which really simultaneously participate in
math, science, social thinking. language, and art) into subjects which
hardly had existed before, to divide the subjects further into units;
to divide the time into small enough units of time.  With enough
variations in the course of a day, no one would know what was going
on.

What they would learn is that someone else told you what to think
about, when to think about it, how long to think about it, when to
stop thinking about it, when to think of something else, and someone
else sets up the secrets.

Now that was surely one of the most brilliant discoveries in human
history.  Obviously, my sympathies are not with it.  It's evil in the
genuine sense of the word.

Nevertheless, in the next thirty years a stream of American
dignitaries, including Horace Mann, traveled to Prussia. Whoever they
were, when they returned to the United States, they would say we must
have this Prussian system...

Gatto: Let's take "the empty child" metaphor.  You begin with Locke,
the blank tablet, and go through Rousseau 80-100 years later, who
demonstrates how to write on that blank tablet, and we are on the lip
of the 19th century.  So who institutionalizes the thinking that is
codified over the last 100 years?  The Prussians.  Prussia becomes a
very proprius state under the Prussian's forced-schooling scheme.  The
King of Prussia, from a dirt poor country, with no natural resources.
had subordinated labor so precisely that Prussian industry was a world
leader, and Prussian scholarship was the world leader.  In 1814, the
first American,  Edward Everett, goes to Prussia to get a Ph.D. He
eventually becomes the governor of the state of Massachusetts [and
spoke on the same occasion when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg
Address].  By 1900 all the PhD's in the United States were trained In
Prussia.  The degree doesn't exist any other place.  It's a German
invention.

It's based on Francis Bacon's idea, in The New Atlantis [1627], of a
world research university that scans the world for babies and talent
and draws it into the university called Solomon's House; talent which
is given to the state.  The state becomes invincible.  It's Impossible
to revolt against the state, because the state knows everything.
Francis Bacon's book was widely read by German mystics.  By the 1840's
Prussia has a number of Solomon's Houses available that are utterly
democratic, or about as much as is possible in an imperfect world.
They are drawing talent and developing it for the purposes of state
power and stability.

The PhD's come back to the United States and they become, to a man,
the Presidents of all our Universities, the heads of all our research
bureaus, and corporate research is done by German Ph.D.'s.  It would
still be going on except for the First World War.  Obviously. there
were dissident elements, and some of them had power, who didn't want
this development but weren't strong enough to stop it.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Prussia had openly
acknowledged a new development in the sciences called 'psycho-physics'
which argued that people were in fact complex machines. Prussia
institutionalizes this, and by the 1870's has created the new science
(or pseudo-science, if you're John Gatto) of experimental psychology,
the purpose of which is to discover what the nature of this machine is
and how to program it. American elite sons travel and study at the
feet of Wundt.  They come back during the period 1880-1910 and become
the heads of Psychological Departments at Harvard, University of
Pennsylvania, Cornell, etc. and there aren't any exceptions to this.
Now Wundt is extremely prolific; his published works run to about
67,000 pages.  Wundt was an industry.  He trains [James McKeen]
Cattell, who trains 322 PhD's after the Wundtian system, in this next
decade or so.  These people set up the new discipline of educational
psychology, which becomes a big bucks item.  With the help of the
Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations the system gets control of
psychological testing for all the soldiers of the First World War.
Aside from the vast power they wielded, it is the sorting mechanism of
our whole economy.  If we just talk about the money that can be used
to buy votes, to change people's minds, to bludgeon down opposition,
we're talking about an enormous amount of money flowing out of
psychological testing.  All of the proponents of which are Wundtian-
trained and now head psychological departments in the United States.

By 1910 the one room school has been destroyed.  The factory school
has been installed everywhere.  Thanks to the-actions of the great
foundations, a national system of schooling was in place.  The
Carnegie credit guaranteed you'd have a high degree of uniformity but
something else did too.  There was a shadow organization in existence
that has been well documented by mainstream historians.  It was called
the Educational Trust and it was run out of Stanford and Columbia's
Teacher's College.  It literally controlled all the Superintendencies
in the United States and it placed key students for these jobs.  The
Superintendents had to guarantee, of course, to hire for all sorts of
out-of-class positions. so the Educational Trust, in a very short
time, became a very powerful national shadow organization controlling
all the jobs in schooling.  The source of this information is
"Managers of Virtue" by David Tyack.  It is an elite mainstream
history, one that is not challenged by the school establishment,
because Tyack is part of the school establishment.  He has no wish to
overthrow the system but was just doing his job in documenting the
existence of the "educational trust."

Prominent men and women, agents of foundations, worked on one
legislature after another.  Once it passed in New York. Massachusetts,
Wisconsin, and Michigan, it became easier and easier.  Of course they
could demonstrate by then how useful it was to the legislature to have
this power over schooling and not to allow it to be locally
administrated.  There were enormous contracts to be let.  All the jobs
that had never existed before in schooling history, non-teaching jobs,
were now at the disposal of the legislature.

We've psychologized the schools by the end of the First World War.
Now that's in place.  (I'm presenting this as though it was a
sequence, actually these things are happening simultaneously but it's
easier to see the necessity of having one solidified before another
can really get very far).  The next step came in 1890, when Andrew
Carnegie wrote eleven Essays, called The Gospel of Wealth.  In it he
said that capitalism - free enterprise - was stone cold dead in the
United States.  It had been killed by its own success.  That men like
himself, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Rockefeller now owned everything. They
owned the government.  Competition was impossible unless they allowed
it.  Which, human nature being what it is, was a problematical thing.

Carnegie said that this was a very dangerous situation, because
eventually young people will become aware of this and form clandestine
organizations to work against it.  Ultimately they'll bring down this
edifice.  You've got to read all eleven essays, sometimes several
times, and only then the majesty of the design emerges.  Carnegie
proposed that men of wealth re-establish a synthetic free enterprise
system (since the real one was no longer possible) based on cradle-to-
grave schooling.  The people who advanced most successfully in the
schooling that was available to everyone would be given licenses to
lead profitable lives, they would be given jobs and promotions and
that a large part of the economy had to be tied directly to schooling.
So if you ever have two years of your life you want to spend
investigating the American licensing industry, you need to look at
what occurred in the two decades following Carnegie's original
proposal (1890-1910).  You're talking about the realization of
Carnegie's design.  These licenses, which now extend to bus drivers
and all sorts of unlikely people who never had to be licensed are then
tied to forms of schooling.  So they've reserved that part of the work
market.  Through the cooperation of the business community a large
part of the rest of the jobs are reserved.  Through the cooperation of
the government, many of the government positions have very precise
schooling requirements.  You can in fact control all of the economy by
tying jobs to schooling, and therefore you have a motivation for
people to learn what you want them to learn.

Back in the time of Sputnik, we get the dike opened and a blank check
offered to anyone who can come up with a way to make the thing work.
From 1950-1990 we get. inflation-adjusted dollars, a quadruple
increase in funds available to schooling.  The aspect of school as one
of the central parts of the economy, independent of its schooling
function, is now true in spades. Rivers of money are flowing back and
forth, always being augmented never getting being cut back.

There is an increase in the centralization, with fifteen thousand
school boards rather than forty thousand previously. One in every six
thousand Americans serving on school boards that are almost stripped
of their power.  Whereas in the beginning of the century we have one
in every sixty-five Americans serving on school boards that still have
control of the purse.  It hasn't yet been transferred to the state
legislature.  An explosive intrusion of foundation agents are
wandering around the halls of state legislatures, key businesses, key
teacher colleges.  They are writing a tight script to seal the loop
holes that have prevented Andrew Carnegie's dream from working
smoothly.  You get these amazing constructions of organized
psychologizing that link together all the school years, all the
testing functions, the hiring functions, you get these things being
imposed without public knowledge.  That's the dead give-away that
something isn't kosher.

What we have now is a wide open scene where the concealment is thinner
than it's ever been before.  The naked power is closer to the surface.
My instincts are that it is the identical groups that surfaced around
1905.  One of the great evidences of that is a semi-secret group that
keeps its deliberations utterly secret, called the Businessmen's Round
Table, made up of the 200 largest corporations, announced a few years
ago that it was going to take a major seat at the National School
policy table, and that it was backing national testing, national
examinations. Even among its radical members there was a scheme to tie
hiring and promotions to school performance.

In 1889 the United States Commissioner of Education assured a
prominent railroad man, Collis P. Huntington, when he protested that
the schools seemed to be "over-educating" (meaning they were going to
be producing too many engineers, too many people who knew the score.
and therefore who would be tough political opponents).  He was
guaranteed, by William Torrey Harris, the United States Commissioner
of Education, that schools had been scientifically designed not to
over-educate.  I don't think anyone hearing that understood what the
mechanism that Harris was referring to was, but it was the German
mechanism devised between 1806 and 1819.

Once a kid is addicted to fragmented studies and stutter steps and
confusion. it is the rare person who can ever get control of their own
mind and their own will again.  They may get angry and refuse to do
something but they don't know how to write policy for themselves, they
can't write the script of their own lives. So if they can't get it
from their jobs, they get it from television, or from some other kind
of mind control.

-April, 1994

This article appeared in Flatland Magazine #11, available for $4.00
plus $2.00 for first class mail, or $3.00 for overseas surface from
Flatland, P.O. Box 2420, Fort Bragg, CA  95437. [Hmm...Fort Bragg,
eh?]

"Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto (1992) The Hidden Curriculum of
Compulsory Schooling.  "By stars and red checks, by smiles and frowns,
prizes, honors and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to
the predestinated chain of command."  104 pages; price: $9.95 from
Flatland

--- FMail 0.92
 * Origin: snet-l@world.std.com FidoNet-> (1:330/201)