John Taylor Gato on Modern Schooling - 12th April 2005

F.R. Scott, Social Democrat, and constitution lawyer, early pioneers of social justice in Canada.

POEM - “The Examiner”

The routine trickery of the examination
Baffles these dis heart and discouraged youths
Driven by they know not what external pressure
They pour their hated self analysis
Through the nib of confession
Onto the accusatory page

I who have plotted their immediate downfall
I am entrusted with the divine categories
A, B, C, D and the hell of F
The parade of Prize and the backdoor of pass

In the tight silence
Standing by a green grass window
Watching the fertile earth graduate its sons
With more compassion — not commanding the shape
Of stem and stamen, bringing the trees to pass
By shift of sunlight and increase of rain,
For each seed the whole soil, for the inner life
The environment receptive and contributory—
I shudder at the narrow frames of our text-book schools
In which we plant our so various seedlings.

Each brick walled Barracks
Cut into numbered rooms
Black boarded
Ties the venturing shoot
To the master's stick
To screwed desks rows of lads and girls
Subdued in the shade of an adult
Their assets subsoil
Shape the new to the old
IN the Ashen Garden

Shall we Open the Whole Skylight of Thought
TO these tip toe minds
Bring them our frontier worlds
And the boundless uplands of art for their field of growth
Or shall we pass them the chosen poems with the footnotes
Ring the bell on their thoughts
Period their play
Make laws for averages
and plans for means
Print one history book
For a whole province
And let 90,000 read page ten by Tuesday

As I gather the inadequate paper evidence
I hear across the neat campus lawn
The professional mowers drone
Clipping the inch high grass




John Taylor Gato


New York State Teacher of the Year. Investigating purpose and history of education.

Forced Schooling (compulsory).
James Brian Cohen.

Boredom. Its your responsibility, shouldn't be left to someone else to entertain you. Its part of personal development to learn how to keep yourself from being bored. Taken out, to extend childishness, to sell the ENTERTAINMENT to adults and children alike.

Teachers and Students BORED. Neither is interested in teaching what is being taught, and not interested in learning what is to be learnt. WHO MAKES this NATIONAL CURRICULUM?

Childish people need to be attended by adults.

Youthful – positive window, means adventurous, energetic,curious, surprising, open to new experience. WHAT Schools and modern education systems ENCOURAGE or FIT these universal qualities?
So if modern forced education is not here to suit this YOUTHFULNESS, what purpose are they for?

Rational and reasonable, are different.
Unreasonable, in discouraging youthfulness, but doesn't mean they are not rational.
Before WW2, High Schools and Secondary Schools were small and not so important.
In Switzerland, richest nation in world per capita. Less than 1 in 4 goes past elementary school.

People at age 13, were not traditionally seen as children.


Prussia, 1820. Where it began.
1st Purpose – Religious
2nd Purpose – Good citizens, to shoulder responsibility of society
3rd Purpose – to enhance God given individual gifts

4th – Obedience – TO POLITICAL PARTY, to STATE, etc.

Habit Training - Making children reflect positively to propaganda.
Prussian Habit Controlling Schools – conditioned children to any sort of authoritarian appeals, including soft.. PR & Advertising.

Public Opinion can be made manageable.

Marketing means overcoming sales resistance.


They can peddle any SUPPLY by psychological means.

Founders of Forced Schooling, were to collectivising and socialising the ordinary population to the habits of dependency
- IE, extending childishness, by removing children from the world, from parents, and into a world of strangers, hidden from public view. Protection from World Outside, make them dependent upon the system.

TRACK FOUR

James B. Conant
born March 26, 1893, Dorchester, Mass., U.S.
died Feb. 11, 1978, Hanover, N.H. – President of Harvard Univ for 30 yrs.
Member of Inner Circle of Atomic Bomb Committee.
High Commissioner of American Zone in American controller Germany in WW2.

Made books about Schools and society.

Principle legitimizer gargantuan High School planning.

“The Child, The Parent and the State” - JBC.

Mentions a Coup had given Modern Schooling, in book.

“Principles of Secondary Education” - 1918. Find details of this 'COUP'

No library had this book. So JTG looked for Author, the Principle of Harvard University.
Mr English was decedent of prominent American family sympathetic to British Side, in US revolution.

Another English wrote a refutation of Common Sense. Anglican Bishop wanted State Religion.

Honor Lecture at Harvard University, its called the “English Lecture”.


Track 5, 6 purposes of Modern Education.
Surgical Incision, into Class Base, to interdict liberty tradition.
Infiltrate Minds of Children, out of sight of Parents.
Keep Children kept childish beyond age. By removing insights of History, philosophy and religion, and removing reflections upon Death.

1- Childish Adults, easier to control than independent free thinking individuals.

1- “Fixed Habits of Reactions to Authority”
requiring obedience to Stupid Orders useful.

2 – Diagnostic Function.
So much testing and so forth. Determine proper social role and fix you into that role.

3 – Sorting Function
Training individuals only as far as their likely destination in Social Role, not any further.

4 – Com formative
Make them all alike, whatever background they are from, not for egalitarianism, but to Make future behaviour mathematically predictable in service to market and government research.

5 – Hygienic Function.
Not to do with Individual Health, but Health of RACE. To Accelerate Natural Selection, by tagging the UNFIT clearly, to drop them from the reproduction sweep stakes. Make those that are FIT, promiscuous. Humiliation through Sports and so forth; contests. Popularity things.

6 – ProPiDoTic
Small Fraction of Lucky Kids are properly taught to take over this management of society, in future. In order to make government and management economically manageable.

“1984” - George Orwell. Necessary to compel him to love Big Brother, then kill him. If you had to be forced to kill him, you wouldn't know how many others like him out there.

Infant-alisation, gradual dumbing down and demoralisation, and critical responsibility of families and communities to the State & its institutions.


TRACK SIX

Radical extension of Childhood principally through schooling first, but in time through every institution, including and especially through popular entertainment (including Mass Media), controlled by a small elite.

Popular Entertainment, prevents need to entertain oneself.


Childish Adults cant effectively be a threat to Management. They don't know how the system works, so eventually give up making “noise” & trying to rebel. They lack “inner” resources to be self sustained; dependent upon system & institutions.

2nd Half of 19th Century. North German States, Prussia, Saxony and Hanover. Science of Making young people childish, grew up. Study by certain prominent Americans, Harris Man, William Tory Harris, the P-body family, J.P Morgan and Canada by Edgerton Ryson, and by others who envied the control it offered to management and wanted that control for themselves.

With the rise of Centralised Economy, after Civil War. Another over riding reason to place population under tight management.

At same time this project was going on, other than businessman and politicians were interested in such studies. Such as Utopian socialists like Robert Owen and John Ruskin, thought that through an endless childhood an agrarian Utopian could be achieved. The evolution crowd like Darwin, Spencer, etc, we are Biologically retarded, so we couldn't grow up, so we needed guidance and authority.
Scientific historians, Hegel, Herder, like Marx, thought by keeping people dumb and incomplete, history itself could be controlled by small elites and guided to a conclusion.

Many potent interests around, but none had resources of Corporations to sustain such a long term campaign in such a direction. Only needed a little corporation behind the scenes, to allow an army of innocent academics and philosophical “screw-balls” to do the corporate-government bidding unknowingly, thinking they were riding their own hobby horses.

L Wood Cuberly, friend of Cohen at Harvard, and partner of Alexander English's at Huffton Mifton, Publisher. Where he edited the elementary series of Textbooks, whilst English did Secondary textbooks. They had a monopoly on institutional schooling (Huffton Mifton).

Cuberly was Dean of education at Stanford University. Were he became head of a EDUCATION TRUST, a shadowy cabal of Academics Nationwide, who controlled every administrative post in USA, by 1918. SOURCE is from TEXTBOOK “Managers of Virtue” - by David Tiack.

All administrative jobs held by EDUCATION TRUST, until Newspapers got wind of it, and it changed its name. In 1906, Cuberly, in his PHD thesis, wrote that “children are to be shaped and fashioned like nails. And the specifications will come from business and government, in that order”...
Specifications – outcomes desired.
Outcomes to be reached are decided by academics and bureaucrats, who worked for policy people. BUSINESS STRATEGY known as management by OBJECTIVEs.

Few years later, 1919, same Cuberly, wrote “childhood deliberately extended by four years, because a combination of powerful interests had demanded this. The trick was pulled off by denying children association with the adult world and with real responsibility, through comprehensive confinement schooling, which created a world of children separate from the real world. There the little human resources could be held, until summoned or not summoned.”
The interests are about delaying personal sovereignty, the managerial outlook. Total management and human independence are mutually contradictory terms. Once professionalized, management finds it irresistible to argue, that neither children nor their parents can be trusted. That the only sensible way of handling growing up, is through expert goal settings and professional interventions at public expense.
Once institutional infrastructure is established, no body needs to know what its about. They have to know that they don't get their pay check unless they keep the system in a steady state. So that eventually all the architects who know whats going on die off and the thing becomes a piece of autonomous social technology.

TRACK SEVEN

Expert management is never well served by allowing children to grow up, or grow up. Its tutelage is only justified intellectually, by academic disciplines of Psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, even military, conclude that growing is impossible for most of us.
All of these made by government under-writings. All paid for by corporations or government.
Philosophical momentum of mangerialism in west, was only bought by theology of Christian, which expressly forbids the faithful to duck personal responsibility, and establishes the road to salvation as a lonely personal road. You can get some assistance from congregation, but when face to face with God, there are no excuses, you are fully responsible. Thus western religious thinking was a prime target of schooling, so it had to be systematically destroyed.
Higher Academic voices in US, set up a litany that communicated, that however elliptical, we would always need supervision, guidance and authority.

Vice President Gore's Wife, held Press Conference. Said 55% of US people are mentally disturbed and in need of therapy. One of a host of commentators that urged we need to be kept under closer and closer surveillance for our own good.

General irresponsibility – see how useful it is when Classrooms are workshops of rudeness, rowdiness and danger. Far from avoiding this, its ideal to make them untrusting of each other, and instruct parents to not get in the way of official administration, “cause look how dangerous they are[children]”.

At the end of 20th century, approximately 100,000 US school children were being bar coded, in an experiment to track their passages, and see to it that each child is always were someone believes they should belong. Every thing in its place, a place for everything.

Transformation not by popular demand, or prominent socialists like John Doey, who are usually blamed. made by industrial titans like, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Vincent Aster, Commodore Vanderbilt, John Lee Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and a few others.
SOURCE - Two American Congressional Investigations, of whats behind schooling. One made in 1915 “Walsh Committee Report”, 1953 by Senator from Tennessee. Both came to same conclusion, that schooling was under direction of private corporate foundations of this handful of managers, measured, and long after their death, that oversight continues.
Carnegie Endowments, Ford and Rockefeller Endowments, mentioned in Schools, how “generous” of them.

TRACK EIGHT

unlimited energy in Coal and Oil, with Mass Production Industry, suggested that Industrial Utopia was actually in reach. But only if society could be made susceptible to a degree of management beyond any historical precedent. Personal liberty and conventional morality would have to be surrendered if this promise was to be realised (industrial utopia).
Visionary Industrialists; Struggling to socialise the majority into dependence on central management. Crude examples, raising your hand to go to the toilet.
The authority of the political state had to replace the authority of family, tradition and religion. A huge task with no where else to start but with the Children.
Drawing on method of Prussia, the quick arrival of young Americans of responsible maturity had to be ended. Financial capital demanded this. Why make huge investments in machinery that was certain to obsolete itself soon, unless the markets could be guaranteed. Unless this could be done, capital would not be forthcoming, and we would have a different economy than what we have.
Assuring markets is an old game, Britain has been doing it for many years. Competition can be muted in a lot of ways, through Trust Formations, Government regulations, Government Subsidies that stack the market deck and in many ways unknown to the butcher the baker the candle stick maker. But not so easy in convincing our uniquely productive population to give up its traditional yearning for independent livelihood. The majority had to be retrained into thinking of themselves as employees and consumers, rather than producers. A Job is what someone gives you.
Otherwise the perils of over production would frighten away the investment that centralised industrial growth depends upon. So mass schooling of compulsory nature was given its teeth in 1905 and 1915. A little bit earlier than that in Canada, it was testing ground for this ideas, Bruce Coopers “Making of Educational State” - the early Canadian experience of this, and how Army was brought in to shove it down communities throats.

Not about fashioning good people or good citizens, but like in Prussia, incoccasions of habbits, fears, apetities and attitudes useful to management. That's all you need to know about standardised testing, and whats it about. Measures nothing else, but those things.

This scheme was never intended to be destructive, but the reverse. By converting Americans into specialised economic and social functions, into incompletely human beings. This nation US and Canada, created the most reliable domestic market in the world. The human mutilations of schooling are a trade off for this prosperity. Comfort and security are achieved at the price of personal sovereignty. That's what extended childhood is a parody. Give it up and a society would enter a great turbulence, a resolution which no body can predict.

Well schooled people are trained to reflexively obey strangers commands and to attenualy seek the judgment of strangers, that's how As are distributed. Later on after the school game is over, advertising and advocacy journalism (paid for by advertisers), slips easily into role of School Teachers. Well schooled people have lower threshold of boredom, they need constant novelty to feel alive, with only the flimsiest inner lives, they must stay in touch with official voices, through TV, Radio, Music, Films, Internet, Mass Media, shallow Friendships exchanged on a regular basis.

Track Nine

How to avoid marrying a Turkey. Find out their friends, if all their friends are new, and they are 25 Years old, wonder how they past through teens and early adulthood, without carrying any with them. Changes classes at sort intervals, is a drill to prepare kids to changing associates, domiciles, mates and possessions, in dizzying and eternal perfusion. A climate of low level dissatisfaction is the very air that a mass production economy MUST Breed.

Your meant to be BORED instantly with what you buy or eventually. Your terrified that that PC you set up at home, you got to hurry and work more to buy upgrades and keep up to speed.

Well Schooled people must be poorly trained in history, philosophy, economics, literature, poetry, music, art and theology, anything known in History to develop a personal inner life. Well School people need life long tutelage, cradle to grave schooling, to make any sense of their days. Mass entertainment and mass journalism provide that tutelage long after school is done.

Over a century ago, great industrials with the help of academics and politicians, set out to rewrite laws of supply and demand. They knew that if centralised producers learned to create demand, for whatever could be produced most efficiently. The moral world could be turned upside down and those dogs at the top could bark there for ever. The problem of succession that doomed Rome and every other empire today, would finally have found its solution.

Thus school rooms became laboratories of experimentation on young minds, research centres of scientific management. To be acquitted of this, WE NEED TO WAKE UP to what our Schools have become and are becoming. First need to repudiate that fatal belief of giving government or free enterprises more freedom and control, things would eventually evolve and sort themselves out.

NADER was RIGHT, both Political parties work to exactly same ends, no change in leap frogging parties. Neither republic or democratic, its an industrial Empire. Recognise the paradox of Extended Childhood, blessing Management and economy at expense of your children. Schooling is a forgery, see it as that.

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