In 18th and 19th century America, citizens had freedom of choice in education.
Schooling in that early time was plentiful, innovative, and accessible to nearly all. Large numbers of children from all classes of society received several years of education of a quality and quantity that did an excellent job of preparing young people for productive lives that are today the stuff of legend. America became a great nation—a beacon to the world—based on the foundation of free-choice education and its intellectual and cultural outcomes.
It began to change in the mid-19th century when the banking and industrial elites decided there was too much freedom in America. They wanted to control society by transforming America into a capitalists’ utopia that had a low-wage workforce which was skilled, malleable, and obedient to their socioeconomic “betters.”
People who thought too much, who thought for themselves, did not fit into the world of industry and commerce that was taking shape under the leadership of financiers like J.P. Morgan, a front man for the Rothschild banking interests; industrialists like Henry Ford, the developer of the assembly line and other efficient production systems; and labor theorists like Frederick W. Taylor, who pioneered time-and-motion studies and “Scientific Management” (industrial engineering schemes that transformed people into cogs in a machine).
As State University of New York professor of education Joel Spring has written, “The primary result of common school reform in the middle of the nineteenth century was not the education of increasing percentages of children, but the creation of new forms of school organization” that reflected the models and theories that were driving developments in the emerging industrial economy.
It is significant to note what Henry Ford famously said about his Model-T: that the people could “have any color they want, as long as it’s black.” In the formative years of the industrial economy, the strategic paradigm was long production runs of identical products that could be affordably priced for mass markets because of product uniformity. This same thinking was implemented in the establishment of the Prussian-model schooling system in America.
It should be obvious that the school systems were not set up to serve the poor. As Milton Friedman stated in Capitalism and Freedom (a 1962 book in which he postulates that if parents could “shop” among a wider number of choices in schooling, public schools would have to improve in order to attract student enrollment and tuition): if the only motive for establishing state monopoly compulsion schooling were to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies. After all, when proponents of government activism wanted to use the state to subsidize the purchase of food, they did not propose that government build a system of state grocery stores. They instead created food stamps. So the question is: Why are there public schools rather than “school stamps” or vouchers?
The unavoidable conclusion is that the powers-that-be wanted to restrict freedom of choice in education and apply a one-size-fits-all standard to the majority of American young people. This was, after all, the age of monopolies in business: the railroads, the oil companies, etc. It makes perfect sense that the organization of schools would mirror the organization that was being applied to the industries and businesses of the age.
In fact, John D. Rockefeller, the greatest monopolist of the time, took a role—some would say a controlling role—in the establishment of Prussian-style schools in America. Rockefeller had became the first American worth more than a billion dollars, the world’s richest man and, adjusted for inflation, the richest person in history. Rockefeller spent the last 40 years of his life in retirement, and used his fortune to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy with foundations that that played a decisive role in shaping medicine, scientific research, and education.
He was the founder of the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University. His General Education Board, a philanthropic foundation established in 1903, was created to promote the new schooling at all levels everywhere in the country. The General Education Board helped to establish high schools throughout the South by providing free professional advice on improving instruction and education. The effort was a cooperative one, and local money was used to build the high schools.
In 1906 the General Education Board put out their first mission statement, which read in part: “In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their 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 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.”
The real purpose of modern schooling was announced by the sociologist Edward Roth in his 1906 manifesto called Social Control: “plans are underway to replace family, community and church with propaganda, mass-media, and education (of course he meant schooling)…people are only little plastic lumps of dough.”
In 1917, the Carnegie Foundation for Peace came to the conclusion that if there were to be no reversion of American life as it had existed before 1914, education needed to be controlled by the elites. So they approached Rockefeller’s foundation and said, “Will you take on the acquisition of control of education as it involves subjects that are domestic in their significance? We’ll take on the basis of subjects that have an international significance.” And it was agreed. These powerful foundations, as fronts for their benefactors, determined a key to social control was the teaching of American history, and that they must change not only how it was being taught, but its content.
According to educationalist John Taylor Gatto, by 1917 “the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of ‘the Education Trust’: representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, was to “impose on the young the ideal of subordination.” Gatto calls Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford “The Four Architects of Modern Forced Schooling” who thought that modern industry needed “workers who know nothing.”
Using Rockefeller money, in 1919 John Dewey, by then a professor at Columbia Teachers College (an institution heavily endowed by Rockefeller) founded the Progressive Education Association. Through its existence it spread the philosophy which undergirds welfare capitalism— that the bulk of the population is biologically childlike, requiring lifelong care.
The American public and its children were increasingly viewed not only as a vast labor pool that could be dumbed-down and be transformed into compliant automatons, but as consumers in a new economy based on dependency. All self-reliance had to be bred and schooled out of them.
A major milestone in this agenda happened on January 5, 1914 when Henry Ford announced his $5-per-day program, raising minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5. His program of simplifying (dumbing-down) assembly line jobs had created an unintended backlash: high turnover. In 1913 his company had to hire 963 workers for every 100 it needed to maintain production—and Ford needed a workforce of 13,600 employees in his factory. This meant that Ford was hiring 131,000 new workers a year, training them and providing benefits until they quit. It was expensive and unsustainable and undercut the value proposition Ford was trying to embody in the Model-T car.
Ford’s solution of raising the minimum wage was the talk of towns across the country; Ford was hailed as the friend of the worker, as an outright socialist, or as a madman bent on bankrupting his company. Many businessmen—including most of the remaining stockholders in the Ford Motor Company—regarded his solution as reckless. But he shrugged off all criticism. Ford knew that retaining more employees would lower costs, and that a happier work force would lead to greater productivity. The numbers bore him out. Between 1914 and 1916, the company’s profits doubled from $30 million to $60 million. “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” he later said.
There were other ramifications, as well. A budding effort to unionize the Ford factory dissolved in the face of the Five-Dollar Day. Yet most cunning of all, Ford’s new wage scale turned autoworkers into car customers. The car purchases they made returned at least some of those five dollars to Henry Ford and helped raise production, which in turn helped lower unit costs. When other businessmen followed Ford’s lead, it was the beginning of a worldwide consumer economy that Ford envisioned.
Over the next decades and up to the present day, these Four Architects and their foundations relentlessly furthered their agenda of creating malleable workers and consumers. The milestones are too numerous to detail here, but here are a few: In 1925 the Rockefeller Foundation set up the International Bureau of Education, which later became part of UNESCO; In 1933 the Rockefeller Foundation began a comprehensive national program to develop technology for “the control of human behavior.” Public education would figure prominently in the design; In 1936 the Ford Foundation was chartered in Michigan by Edsel Ford and two Ford Motor Company executives “to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare.”
Focusing on Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford philanthropies, Edward Berman, in Harvard Education Review concluded that the “public rhetoric of disinterested humanitarianism was little more than a facade” behind which the interests of the political state (not necessarily those of society) “have been actively furthered.” The rise of foundations to key positions in educational policy formation amounted to what Clarence Karier called “the development of a fourth branch of government, one that effectively represented the interests of American corporate wealth.”
In 1946 the Carnegie Corporation funded the Educational Testing Service of Princeton NJ, which controls most of the required tests of educational performance.
In 1954, a congressional investigation of foundation tampering (with schools and American social life) was attempted, headed by Carroll Reece of Tennessee. The Reece Commission quickly ran into a buzzsaw of opposition from influential centers of American corporate life. Major national newspapers hurled scathing criticisms which, together with pressure from other political adversaries, forced the committee to disband prematurely—but not before there were some tentative findings including:
“The impact of foundation money upon education has been very heavy, tending to promote uniformity in approach and method, tending to induce the educator to become an agent for social change and a propagandist for the development of our society in the direction of some form of collectivism. In the international field, foundations and the Interlock, together with certain intermediary organizations, have exercised a strong effect upon foreign policy and upon public education in things international. This has been accomplished by vast propaganda, by supplying executives and advisors to government, and by controlling research through the power of the purse. The net result has been to promote ‘internationalism’ in a particular sense—a form directed toward ‘world government’ and a derogation of American nationalism.”
Through their foundation fronts, the wealthy elites thus steadily advanced the reduction of school choice and the dumbing down of public schools that are available to choose from. Through the schools, they created a compliant worker/consumer class and made important attacks on family integrity, and personal and national sovereignty.
Money talks… but for the time being, there is still freedom for us to talk, too, and regain control over how we will educate our kids.
۞
Groove of the Day
Listen to Devo performing “Freedom of Choice”
It was the first of Hugo’s many, many visits to our home, and I distinctly remember the day Hugo told me about Eva Peron. It was a rags-to-riches story that somehow paralleled Hugo’s own story and for me became the same story. He told me how the masses of poor people, the “shirtless ones,” had adored Evita and were devastated when she died. She had been a patron to the masses and created hospitals, housing, and other charities for them; Hugo was attending Notre Dame because he, too, had a wealthy patron, an Argentinean movie star. Hugo had been one of the millions who had thronged the streets for Evita’s funeral. Hugo said she was the patron saint of Argentina’s poor. She was only 33 when she died of uterine cancer. Without Evita at his side to beguile the masses, Juan Peron lost power when the economy faltered, and he became an exile in Spain.
