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The goals of education changed under the influence of scientific management. An 1893 report from the “Committee of Ten” stated that “the purpose of all education is to train the mind.” But, in 1911 and 1918, NEA TV reports attacked the “bookish curricula” that gave children “false ideas of culture.” Drills were a better method of learning than reading; social studies more useful than history. According to Gatto, the latter of these reports, “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education,” now declared “that human behavior, health, and vocational training were the central goals of education. Not mental development.” Larger, centralized schools; standardized tests; students moving between classrooms for different classes; and bells signaling time to move were all products of scientific management.
The large foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, et al.) come closest to being labeled as the evil behind the scenes. They financed and controlled education reform to such an extent that it became a matter of passionate discussion in Congress. The January 26, 1917 Congressional Record recalls the words of Senator Works of California who said, “These people ...are attempting to get control of the whole educational work of the country.”
By the way, fans of standardized testing will be dismayed to know that these were created as tools to “teacher-proof” education. Teachers whose performances are judged by student test scores seldom stray far from the prescribed curricula.
Control issues are also the subject of a chapter, appropriately titled “The Crunch.” It focuses more closely on immigration and attempts to protect cultural hegemony. Some of the ugliest secrets of our country’s history stem from fear of foreigner. Gatto focuses on racism and the eugenics movement, reactions to those fears.
A host of social engineering strategies were spawned. Gatto tells us, “Besides destroying lesser breeds (as they were routinely called) by abortion, sterilization, adoption, celibacy, two-job family separations, low-wage rates to dull the zest for living, and, above all schooling to dull the mind and debase the character, other methods were clinically discussed in journals and private clubs including childlessness induced through easy availability of pornography.”
Such measures were required to prevent racial suicide. Evolutionary thought fully supported efforts to improve genetic bloodlines by encouraging reproduction of only the superior races.
Did you know that the phrase “melting pot” isn’t a recent phrase, but derived from propaganda events after WWI where a huge black pot served as a prop for processions of costumed immigrants to enter the pot and emerge as identically-dressed “real Americans”?
Frances Kellor founded the “Committee for Immigrants in America," which “proclaimed itself the central clearinghouse to unify all public and private agencies in a national spearhead to ‘make all these people one nation.’ When government failed to come up with money for a bureau Miss Kellor’s own backers—who included Mrs. Averill Harriman and Felix Warburg, the Rothschild banker, did just that, and this private entity was duly incorporated into the government of the United States!” becoming the Division of Immigrant Education.
Gatto tells us, “Immigrant education meant public school education, for it was to compulsion schooling the children of immigration were consigned, and immigrant children, in a reversal of traditional roles, became the teachers of their immigrant parents, thus ruining their families.”
Kellor had a very large vision. In a book she wrote, published in 1916, “she called for universal military service, industrial mobilization, a continuing military build-up, precisely engineered school curricula, and total Americanization...” Concerned about the “Red Menace,” Kellor worked with the major employers who used foreign labor, warning them of potential revolutionaries in their midst. “Kellor proposed a partnership of business and social work to ‘break up the nationalistic, racial groups.’” One of the prime ways to do so was to weaken family life.
Gatto is remarkably broad in his inclusion of many key players in this drama, but in the next chapter he focuses in on upper class-society in America, how it came into being, what its goals were, and how schools became the vehicle for its goals. Gatto paints a fascinating picture of the Anglican mindset which dominated in such circles. He explains the genesis of ideas about the Aryan race, its origins and descendants, raising some very troublesome questions about the entire notion.
A number of books were written to buttress the ideas of superior races, many of them challenging the notion that democracy was a good thing. Gatto writes of a particular book as an example: “It charged there was no connection between democracy and progress; in fact, it claimed the reverse was –true. Maine’s account of racial history was accepted without question. It admirably complemented a torrent of scientifically-mathematicized racism pouring from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and virtually every bastion of high academia right through the WWl period and even beyond, scientific racism which determined the shape of government schooling in large measure and still does.”
The welfare state was another natural outgrowth of this mindset. The elite who controlled the major industries were naturally concerned about maintaining civic order—difficult to do when people are dependent upon jobs that can suddenly disappear when a factory or mine closes.
Welfare was a way to take care of the lower classes, meeting their most basic needs, as well as keeping them from causing trouble. Gatto quotes Alan Pifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation, who in a 1984 document wrote concerning the possibility of social unrest that might endanger “the survival of our capitalist economic system.” Pifer went on to say, “Just as we built the general welfare state—and expanded it in the 1960s as a safety valve for the easing of social tension, so will we do it again in the 1980s. Any other path is too risky.”
If some people are considered inferior, then they probably need direction for their lives. It's easier to get people to do what you'd like them to do if you use psychological manipulation.
Scientific behaviorism, the brain child of B.F. Skinner came on the scene at just the right time for such purposes. Schools learned to play their new role as purveyors of “mental health.” Desired responses could be programmed into children by the use of rewards and punishments.
Gatto tells us about Edward Thorndike, who might be considered the founder of educational psychology: “According to Thorndike, the aim of a teacher is to ‘produce and prevent certain responses,’ the purpose of education was to promote ‘adjustment.’ In [Thorndike’s book] he urged the deconstruction of emphasis on ‘intellectual resources’ for the young, advice that was largely taken by school people over the years.”
Gatto admits to being a past student and purveyor of behaviorism—you'll find a story or two in the chapter titled “The Empty Child”—which clearly taught him some unintended lessons about real people and the ways they act.
After demolishing educational theories that assume that man is little more than an animal, Gatto turns to the alternative: the spiritual side of man. His chapter titled “ Absolute Absolutism” is a significant investigation into the nature of man, free will, and ultimate purpose. A key paragraph will give you an ideal of where this leads: “The ancient religious question of free will marks the real difference between schooling and education. Education is conceived in Western history as a road to knowing yourself and through that knowledge arriving at a further understanding of community, relationships, jeopardy, living nature, and inanimate matter. But none of those things has any particular meaning until you see what they lead up to, finally being in full command of the spectacular gift of free will: a force completely beyond the power of science to understand. With the tool of free will, anyone can forge a personal purpose.”
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