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dafremen
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"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
"The chief end is to impose upon the young the ideal of subordination."
- Benjamin Kidd, British evolutionist (of the "Education Trust" circa 1917)
"It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking...[is] opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor." - Ellwood P. Cubberly in Public Education in the United States (c)1934
The statement occurs in a section of his book called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory system" has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering march of machinery"), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.
Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress.
Arthur Calhoun writes in his 1919 book Social History of the Family that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He offered a significant forecast, that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit."
"The rugged individualism of Americanism must go, because it is contrary to the purpose of the New Deal and the NRA, which is remaking America.
Russia and Germany are attempting to compel a new order by means typical of their nationalism — compulsion. The United States will do it by moral suasion. Of course we expect some opposition, but the principles of the New Deal must be carried to the youth of the nation. We expect to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force." - Louis Alber of President Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration (1933)
In response..in the same paper:
"So, according to what Mr Alber says, NRA—sweeping and revolutionary as it is—is only a 'fragment' of the greater program of which the public knows nothing, and this unknown program is to be inculcated in the minds of pupils in the schools everywhere, by official efforts and at government expense. Hitherto the purpose of the schools has been merely to educate the youth of the land--to impart knowledge, in an unbiased and nonpolitical manner. Now, according to Mr Alber, our schools — like those of Italy, Germany and Russia — are to become an agency for the promotion of whatever political, social and economic policies the administration may desire to carry out. And the taxpayers, whether they like those policies or not, are to pay for having their children converted to them." - Editor Monroe Evening News
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060926
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john taylor gatto
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The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.
The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. This phenomenon has been well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.
As I watched it happen, it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do. In such environments, songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games, and other tension-breakers do the work better than angry words and punishment. Years ago it struck me as more than a little odd that the Prussian government was the patron of Heinrich Pestalozzi, inventor of multicultural fun-and-games psychological elementary schooling, and of Friedrich Froebel, inventor of kindergarten. It struck me as odd that J.P. Morgan’s partner, Peabody, was instrumental in bringing Prussian schooling to the prostrate South after the Civil War. But after a while I began to see that behind the philanthropy lurked a rational economic purpose.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
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060926
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