Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling

system-overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass

competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary

problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why?

Because they were designed to.

How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's

public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to

eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on

rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)?

Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal

educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they

were doing.

Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and

hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto

was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York

State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with

schools-the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural

creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child

has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of

America's educational system.

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about

the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was

actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend

history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated,

"We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of

late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."

By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new

form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous

philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:

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 his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood

Cubberly-the future Dean of Education at Stanford-wrote that schools should

be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed

into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for

manufacturing will come from government and industry."

The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board-which funded the

creation of numerous public schools-issued a statement which read in part:

In our dreams...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.

At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education

from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to

walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is

not an accident but the result of substantial education, which,

scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless,

ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty

of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external

world.

Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these

sentiments in a speech to businessmen:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another

class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a

liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual

tasks.

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H.

Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling

was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant

wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational

system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who

were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly

wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us

just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves,

question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to

become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population-mainly

the children of the captains of industry and government-to rise to the level

where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling

system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true

reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still

known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote

in 2001:

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright

eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested

that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher,

a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the

state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world.that

the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they

will lose their jobs in the real world."

John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American

Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling

(New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above

historical quotes. It is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I

recommend most highly. You can order it from Gatto's Website, which now

contains the entire book online for free.

The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent

book Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New

York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).