Perhaps the greatest of school's illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families -- to level the playing field, so to speak. Let's see what's really behind these illusions:

THE MAKERS OF MODERN SCHOOLING

The real makers of modern schooling weren't at all who we think.

Not Cotton Mather

or Horace Mann

or John Dewey.

The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron.

John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil.

Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty.

and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance.

Rich white men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social efficiency" movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.

THE BUSINESS OF SCHOOLING & THE FOURTH PURPOSE

If modern schooling has a “Fourth Purpose,” there must be an earlier three. Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes:

1. To make good people

2. To make good citizens

3. And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum.

The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose.

The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management.

We should reveal the mechanism of mind control training, habits, and attitudes.

Children were literally trained in bad habits and bad attitudes! Teachers and principals, “scientifically”certified in teachers college practices, were made unaware of the invisible curriculum they really taught.

The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

THE BUSINESS OF SCHOOLING

Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.

In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.

These processes didn't advance evenly. Some localities resisted more than others, some decades were more propitious for the plan than others. Especially during and just after national emergencies like WWI, the Depression, WWII, and the Sputnik crisis, the scheme rocketed forward; in quieter moments it was becalmed or even forced to give up some ground.

But even in moments of greatest resistance, the institutions controlling the fourth purpose -- great corporations, great universities, government bureaus with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate journalism -- increasingly centralized in fewer and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, kept a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources to wear down and outwait the competition.

The prize was of inestimable value -- control of the minds of the young.

SCHOOL BECOMES A DANGEROUS PLACE

After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called "The Workplace," even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.

In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.

This revolution in the composition of the American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since systematic forms of employment demand that employees specialize their efforts in one or another function of systematic production, then clear thinking warns us that incomplete people make the best corporate and government employees.

Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were well aware of this paradox, which our own time has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest tasks assigned to forced schooling.

Not only was the new form of institution spiritually dangerous as a matter of course, but school became a physically dangerous place as well.

What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!

Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best "police" to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.

SCHOOL BECOMES AN ARENA OF MEANINGLESS PRESSURE

As the twentieth century progressed, and particularly after WWII, schools evolved into behavioral training centers, laboratories of experimentation in the interests of corporations and the government. The original model for this development had been Prussian Germany, but few remembered.

School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent "standardized" exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.

For instance, take the case of Bill Bradley and George W. Bush, two of the four finalists in the 2000 presidential race. Bradley had a horrifying 480 on the verbal part of his own SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a senator; Bush graduated from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States -- with a mediocre 550. If you can become governor, senator, and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?

Perhaps they sort out good scientists from bad? If so, how is it that both the scientists principally involved in the Human Genome Project have strange scholarly backgrounds to say the least!

Francis S. Collins, the head of the public portion, was homeschooled, and never followed any type of formal curriculum.

Craig Venter was a very bad boy in high school, a surfing bum who nearly flunked out, and he didn't go to college after graduation, but into the U.S. Army as an enlisted man before being shipped off to Vietnam!

SCHOOL AS A PLACE OF BEWILDERMENT AND BOREDOM

The new purpose of schooling -- to serve business and government -- could only be achieved efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another.

Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor.

"Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manupulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression."

-- Emma Goldman

"Education is very important. That's why I never let schooling get in the way of mine."

-- Mark Twain

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."

-- Bertrand Russell

"There is, on the whole, nothing on Earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school."

-- George Bernard Shaw




"Now they're talking about making kids wear uniforms in school. This is pretty stupid. Don't these schools do enough damage making these kids think alike, now they want them to look alike too?"

-- George Carlin

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

-- Mark Twain

"What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system."

-- Bertrand Russell

"Here's a bumper sticker I'd like to see; 'We are the Proud Parents of a Child who has resisted his teacher's attempts to bend him to the will of his corporate masters'."

-- George Carlin

check out also Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society." the library has a copy, and there are copies of the full text online as well.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

yeah, obviously schools are bad, it's not necessary to learn to read or write. And who needs to learn math like multiplication and division. We have ten fingers, that's enough. They did hnot know higher matematics in the bible so why should we. The world looks flat to me so it must be so. And in the end it is all right to stay in poverty because some guy who went to college said that this is much better than staying in school to earn some money to trave to a better place.

Before compulsory schooling in the U.S., literacy was at its highest rate ever. As time went on, the literacy rate has steadily dropped. It is now at its lowest point ever in the U.S. At home, a child can read by age 5, and before the late 1800's, often did. How many 5 year-olds can read LAT OF THE MOHICANS? Back then they could. Most adults can't get through that now.

No school doesn't mean no learning. Rather no school means no social conditioning towards the groupthink of corporate puppethood. A common misconception is that only the Christian Right is into homeschooling, when actually almost every idealogical sector wants their kids to grow up to think and learn for themselves. School keeps people from learning because they associate study with oppressive school. Albert Einstein was a high school dropout. Bill Gates was a college freshman dropout. If you're good at walking the talk of school, you are a good robot/puppet/corporate shill. If you walk the talk of dropping out, you will find that learning to think and study and WORK FOR YOURSELF is where it's at. And they actively discourage such thoughts in school.

extremely difficult to argue with "gringo starrs" on that one.

BA is a refugee from the Portland IMC. Worst of luck to you Bush-Asslicker!

:)

I happen to have a college degree. I am no "failure" but thanks for asking. A common tactic of BA's is to derail discussions into a series of personal attacks. Thanks BA. It's easier to condemn than contemplate.

YES my formula of success is to be a drop-out. YOU, BA, deserve the CORPORATE TOOL AWARD! Your masters thank you for defending them - your reward will be... nothing.

I am no capitalist. It is a system that demands constant war, and in our country, covert agencies actively subvert foreign alternative economic/political systems, to give the appearance of no real alternatives.

CONGRATULATIONS, BA, YOU BELIEVE EVERYTHING THE CORPORATE NEW$ HAS TOLD YOU. Now go quick! O'Reilly is on Fox! you might miss some of his snappy, lying quips!

BA, you are SUCH a good boy. You do EVERYTHING your leaders ask you. SO OBEDIENT! Now go get me some more coffee, bitch. There's an extra dollar in it if you're snappy. For an extra ten dollars would you... (oh of course you would - you're an ENTREPRENEUR)

capitalist=whore=Bush Admirer

Go put on some make-up and stockings. Your pimp is calling.

You made all of my points for me, BA, thanks.

I still know NOTHING about you, bush-felcher. I'll be happy to tell you more about me if you yourself give it up: did YOU go to college? How do YOU soullessly enjoy your ill-gotten wealth? How have you profited from being the lapdog for wealth that you are? Has your worship for money gotten you any money? How much? Is your time worth it? What would you rather be doing? What music do you enjoy?

"I have a BS in Marine Engineering"

BS in quite a few things, I'd say.

BushBlower is a spoiled rich kid...never worked a day in his life...everything he has was given to him by his rich daddy, who he now despises. Paid for his BS degree...paid for his car to drive around during his college days, where he got shitty grades.... paid for his MBA...got him a deal on his 3800 sqft home, which he hasn't fully paid daddy back for yet....got him his clients for his "hi-tech" recruiting firm. If it was not for daddy buying him everything, he wouldn't be qualified to drop the fry basket at Burger King.



...pretty accurate, huh BushBlower?

They hate success stories. Achievers are evil, aren't they KPC?

Bullshit, BushBlower...you AND your daddy never made an honest dollar in your pathetic little lives...you are, as he was, a spoiled little rich boy, a social parasite, and making up these little biographies fools no one....all anyone has to do is read you delusional posts to see that you are removed from reality and always have been...You admire the Shrub because he has gotten where he is, thanks to daddy, despite his overwhelming mediocrity, just like you....."El Sereno", what a fuckin' laugh! You are soooo embarrassed that you must make up a past to deal with your present. How pathetic!

And YoMamma, does daddy buying you everything classify one as an Achiever in your book? And I did not say that BushBlower is evil...he's merely a silver spoon douchebag, but of the harmless vinegar and water sort....I'll leave the extreme exaggerations to bootlickers like you...

...by the way, what is it about the taste of shoeleather that keeps you coming back for more?

Must be a really swell life to be angry at the world. Makes you want to be like them, doesn't it? Who wouldn't want to be like KPC. Such an optimist!!

...so you remember the neighborhood where you dropped off the maid after daddy was finished schtupping her...big deal

...by the way, how's the one man crusade to destroy the left coming along?...that, along with your little fictional biography, qualifies you as the most delusional of douchebags...but continue with your fictions, they are very entertaining...couldn't you have imagined yourself maybe 3rd in the class, I mean, c'mon, y' can only stretch the truth so far...nobody who'd blow Bush could finish first!

...you are a clown, BushBlower...a fuckin' clown! A leech who has to imagine earned success to perk up his nipples....nobody is impressed, we are all either laughing, or farting, or laughing so hard that we fart.

Oh, didn't I tell you? I was born in a hole in the ground to a black family. I have a 2800 IQ, and was given a Masters Degree in Physics by the age of three. I have sixteen, no SEVENTEEN successfull companies that I started when I was ten, using only 13 cents and a plastic fork for capital.



HA!

2800? Wow. That's a lot. If you're so smart you must know all about Bush Admirer's background. So I guess it wouldn't do to argue with you on the subject.

The SimpleOne...writhing in the crushing grip of reason!