Centralised control, whether 'the state' acting as if the market or, ostensibly, the 'market' acting as if 'the state', fails (as does tickling yourself fail to raise a chuckle). What central 'control' is supposed to do is 'sense and react' and therein lays the two fundamental problems:
1/. the input is always going to be faulty (how can such a system be sensitive enough, accurate enough, smart enough to take account of every permutation)?
2/. the output is always going to be faulty (how can such a system be reactive enough, delicate enough, effective enough to take account of every permutation)?
And that does not take account of the two secondary problems, (problems that would remain even if the system of centralised control, be it faux market or state, did not suffer from the two fundamental problems):
a/. the centralised control is always going to attempt to manipulate the market by way of attempting to provide favourable conditions bias to suit its own agenda
b/. the faulty outputs and bias manipulation of the centralised control will distort the market away from the form it would otherwise naturally be drawn to.
Centralised control treats the economy as though it is one big thing and that then all the micro commercial activities will feed from that initiative, as if little piranhas swarming onto whatever gigantic carcass has been fed to them. That may be fine for feeding identical fish but the economy is rightly comprised of totally disparate elements - it is an ultimately diverse ecosystem.
The great thing about diverse ecosystems is that, left alone, they manage themselves. There is still a form of centralised control of economies but that is because: each and every element of the whole is a self regulating economy in itself. The effect of each element, free to act in its own best self interest, is that a system of each element's independent economy acts upon a plethora of spontaneous and autonomous sub-economies to effectively create a whole.
It is not only imposable to replicate or replace the effectiveness of this type of system, it is unnecessary to try (unless the intention of influencing is for one sub-economy to do so in order to attempt to change the whole for reasons of self-interest). It is unnecessary to try to replicate a system of sub-economies because: since the sub-economy system is so refined and reactive it cannot be bettered for servicing the interests of the sub-economy system as a whole.
There is no such thing as 'the economy', it is just a conceptual idea to explain the 'system of sub-economies' as a whole, just as there is not such thing as a forest, that is just a word for the conceptual idea of many trees, plants, animals living together in one place, symbiotically acting as a if a whole too.
Without 'the state' there would be no legitimatised use of force to make people's actions not be 'racist' or 'sexist' or 'homophobic' etc. And so, instead, a natural order would form and prevail. This was one of the matters I pondered and returned to whilst coming to accept and understand that statelessness is necessary and optimal for a properly functional human social order. The question was: how could 'minorities' be protected from 'discrimination' in a stateless society. The answer is not to offer a resolve to that supposed requirement but to understand that the question itself is invalid.
The supposed validity of the question is a premise advanced by 'the state' to help engender and consolidate a need for the existence of 'the state' to provide this function in society. This role helps not only 'the state' to perpetuate, (that minorities believe without the protection of 'the state' they would be subjected to discrimination so therefore, they believe, the perpetuation of 'the state' is essential for their continued well-being and protection), the role also allows 'political factions', within the state, to assemble a 'majority of minorities' to then act in union against the actual, real, social majorities.
In having 'the state' act against the true social majorities (supposedly on the behalf of their 'anointed' minority groups) it mean that 'the state' uses violent force and the threat of force to 'make' the majority behave in a manner they would not freely opt to do. This causes deep distortions to social order which is then exemplified because it suits 'the state' to consolidate ever widening factions too, who believe that they are also dependent on, or want, perpetual 'state' force for their specific situation to be protected, preserved, advanced and respected.
So it suits the state to fill their territory with an ethnically and culturally disparate population, to have a large population living in subsidised housing, to support single mothers, to have a significant population dependent on welfare, to give 'respectability' to non-heterosexuals, assure government workers of pensions, women the power to make fathers pay for them and their children no matter what and so on. It also, therefore, suits 'the state' to continuously add to these such factions comprising this state dependant element, to even cause endless frictions between each and all, so that then 'the state' is necessary to always remain as the 'only' solution to the apparent disorder that would result in the absence of rulers.
If, for example, it is that the natural, preferred, human social order is: to just live as nations of ethnically similar people; why not allow that resulting, stable, social order arise? I am somewhat doubtful that that is the real natural universally preferable situation for modern cultured human societies but it is very difficult to measure as so much of our past cultures were dependent on rulers usurping this intrinsic tendency and building nationalism in the people as a binding force for 'state' perpetuation, influence and, of cause, unity to support war.
Now the social order is to be directed towards ever-deepening social union of the peoples and nations of the world. Purportedly such global-union is a drive towards 'a world without wars' and for technocracy: the effective 'scientific management' of the global population and resource (the arguments against which is a separate matter to that being addressed here). In order to allow 'the state' to dictate, within a supposedly representational democratic process, to bring about the changes required, the voice of the majorities need to be repressed else such a union will be rejected as would a socialist society, and, I consider the continuation of the cult of the religious belief in 'the state' itself.
Here
is a patch of ground - how does it get along? With a natural order
each organism appears to struggle for success against others, the worm
is eaten by the bird, the trees take light from the ground. Soon a more
stable, infinity flexible, order becomes prevalent; one that is optimal
for the situation and for the life that can best flourish there. It
needs no maintenance, the system is self-correcting. If rabbits boom
the fox population grows too and counters that occurrence.
And it
is deeper than that. It appears that each organism is an actor in this
process but it is not entirely because each organism is a conglomeration
of individual cells that are all acting individually in their best
interest; which is to work in an ordered but highly complicated system
of cooperation to form the organism they comprise.
This patch of
ground needs no central planning and nor could that be achieved so
supremely as it organises itself just fine. The systems are so
intensely complicated it would be imposable to manage 'top-down' but
left to operate as it naturally does, ground-upwards, it always produces
a harmonious balanced and optimised environment.
Now the
alternative is to attempt to work against that natural order
and impose some apparently unified mono-culture on the patch - a lawn.
It is going to take a lot of work, it is going to require force and
resources. It is going to be unsustainable without constant attention
and even then it is only going to look like a lawn when its is still
just endlessly a natural environment struggling to return to its proper
balance.
For what. Why does it need to be a lawn? Human society
is not the sum of blades of grass to be unified and simplified, forced
and controlled. That is not necessary if the idea is to see life
flourish on this patch. Humans are as diverse as they individually wish
to be and, acting as individuals, will make the vast plethora of
decisions they need to work in their own best interests which then, as
parts of a whole, adapt and develop to allow a balance order to
flourish.
There does not have to be a 'state' for Capitalism to work, indeed
the free market is the very life-blood of a healthy economy and of a
harmonious human society when unencumbered by 'the state'. The less
'the state' the more competition arises, the more competition arises the
broader the economic and social benefit.
Corporatism is another
matter and the two, Capitalism and Corporatism, should in no way be
confused. Corporatism is utterly dependent on government to grant it
faux personage, indemnity, patent, monopoly and privilege. True that
Capitalism will seek-out whatever benefit it can derive from whatever
medium in which it is set; and that includes taking whatever advantage
it can derive and coerce from 'the state'. When Capitalism so feeds
from 'the state' it morphs into Corporatism. That is not the fault of
Capitalism that is one of the many faults of 'the state'.
End 'the state'. End Corporatism! Long live Freedom. Long live Capitalism. Long live the Free Market.
The alternative is to do away with this dangerous failed deceitful
system of democracy, but not to return to yet another government of
appointed officials. (The authority of the state will always be usurped
by the few at the expense of the many). Rather do away with the whole
busted, dated legacy of primitive tribal order. End our belief and
reliance in the false illusionary paradigm of the state and its
government too.
"Laissez-nous faire" 1. The individual is primary in human society. 2. Freedom is a natural right. 3.
Nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system. Human society as a
part of nature will be harmonious if free to be a fully self-regulating
system also.
The deeper and deeper the stupidity tangle becomes the more and more convolutions are added again and again to try and solve a knot so inextricably spun it can never be unwound by prescriptive means. NEVER will be unwound by prescriptive means.
NEVER NEVER NEVER!
This is the lesson human society is going to have to learn: the concept of 'the state' is a busted flush. It is a horrendously out-of-date illusionary hangover from neolithic tribal ordering, from wolf packs, from street dogs.
Mankind can do better than this. This reliance on the state coming to save us all, like a omnipotent god with special powers, like mummy and daddy caring for a little child, has to be seen for the illusion that it is and broken free from.
The two things the state does well is a/. self-perpetuation and b/. provide a mechanism for 'vampires' to feed off the productiveness of humanity. At everything else it really really sucks!
I feel like I am one of very few atheists, a castaway in a world of utter religious maniacs, a population so deeply indoctrinated into an extremely dangerous false belief system that only a complete implosion of the 'order' they think results is going to shock them out of it.
There are no single answers for unwinding the inevitable knots human society will always weave. That is why 'scientific socialism' is always destined to be a path of failure and collapse. The answers can only be found from ground-upwards solutions found by human society, on mass, via naturally occurring activity evolving autonomously into securing the most durable and efficient mechanisms for the optimum fruiting of humanity.
' In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost....'
The Great Dictator's Speech http://www.charliechaplin.com/en/synopsis/articles/29-The-Great-Dictator-s-Speech
I frankly, genuinely, do not
doubt the sincerity of some, many, the majority even, of those involved
within the European project.
There is bound to be corruption and ineptness when a new order is
devised and implemented so quickly. This is typical of all governments,
all public offices, all forms of authority. There will be abuse.
Cookies will get stolen. It happens.
What people do not understand, including this gaggle of well
intention and committed friends, is there is a covert darkness behind
the whole enterprise and all are caused to be just playing right into it
hands.
Too often the meaning of 'darkness' and of especially 'the occult'
are completely misunderstood. This is not unintentional. 'To occult'
means simply to hide and this is the clue to understanding what the
occult is really about. Clearly it is the same inference with darkness.
Truth, clarity, openness. These are the sort of words one does not readily associate with darkness and the occult.
I think the truth of the EU has been hidden in darkness, occulted,
from the minds of all but those who work to seek-out the hidden truth
and actual meaning.
This is how states, of all forms, have conducted themselves to
control and manipulate the people from time immemorial. And this, the
oldest established legacy of prehistoric-mankind to still remain, the
state and its utter dependency upon deception to function, needs to be
seen for what it is and cast-out, got rid-off, ended for ever.
From my
perspective politics is nothing but a writhing web of conspiracy,
encompassing all human endeavour, from the beginnings of mankind to
every humanly conceivable aspect of the future.
Politics does not exist without a shared agenda and a shared
political agenda is a conspiracy - maybe an open conspiracy but a
conspiracy nonetheless.
And trotting-out the jaded 'conspiracy theories' meme is really just a
bit of group-think 1984 Newspeak which has been indoctrinated into the
minds of the mainstream media consuming masses via a campaign of
propaganda to keep them from thinking it is OK to think for themselves
and joining together to point and laugh at the people still capable of
doing so.
Anyone to which this flap over Prism is a surprise is, frankly, naive and ill-informed. The only news to me was being introduced to this new name.
Five Eyes SIGINT or ECHELON has been known to exist for decades and was the feature of a European Parliament report back in 2001 where the threat of industrial espionage is understood as paramount. It is clear that every action on every phone and web based system, across the world, is possible to have been subject to intercept and likely subject of analysis.
The technical possibilities remain unknown but it is evident that these systems employ super-computers of gigantic capacity capable of robotic artificial-intelligence analysis of all interactions and associations, including geographic, to seek-out correlations of interest and so identify subjects for closer observation and deeper analysis.
It is also clear these automated systems have the same ability to examine actual communications content, including spoken, on a wide and random scale to further identify and analyse targets of interest.
Whilst it is comforting to think this is only done to protect society from extraordinary threats it is evident even from the synopsis of the EU report, sighted above, that this system is prospectively used for a far wider mode of operation than that: ranging from industrial espionage to the political subjugation of other sovereign states.
But rather than the EU acting to curtail these activities the closing remarks of their 2001 report demonstrates no less than a jealousy and a desire to form the same system or to even integrate and share.
See P192 - 12. The EU's external relations and intelligence gathering
So I would ask the question (but do not anticipate an answer): How deeply involved is the EU with Prism and indeed does it benefit from the intelligence derived, especially in relation to the EU member state's sovereign governments?
Whilst for the US to risk allowing the intelligence services of each and every EU member state to draw from the intelligence and analysis they derive from their vast network is improbable it is more likely a focused EU intelligence service would be considered a less risky partner to develop.
Once all the tools desirable to a draconian and authoritarian state have been put into place all that remains is for that state to arise, to become evident, when resistance will have be made all-but imposable.
It would be
nice to think the warm and cuddly state looks after folk just 'cause
they want to take care of them all. Yes: people are seduced into
replacing their 'want to be nurtured as if children' into adulthood -
they remain as childish adults. The state cultivates this as a
normality.
This is a ploy - a deception. This is an outcome of the state's
mechanisms: from state controlled schooling, the growing excessive state
interference with all important aspects of human existence; from
healthcare to banal media culture to devaluation of family and tribe to stupefying politically correct
thinking and such. It cultivates immature adulthood. It brings about a
submissive and unquestioning populous.
But in fact it is not so good for the people as we are trained to
think. It is brought about because people would not be seduced by a
state that appeared to return nothing - that clearly just took tithes
via the threat of force.
The state is a self perpetuating entity. No state works to reduce
itself to the smallest role possible. And worse the state is not as it
appears: not for the people and of the people. It is a mechanism of
control and for the gathering of taxes, opportunity and advantages -
wealth that far exceeds that which it returns.
The wealth is directed to the controlling oligarchy who choreograph
the theatre of governments. The main route for money from this tithe
gathering system is via the interest paid to the privately controlled
central banking system alongside of a labyrinth of global corporates.
The humans are tax-salves, given just enough choice and independence
to not clearly perceive their situation. They are the
human-tax-slave-herd. Countries are tax-farms in which the human-herd
produces.
Unemployment benefits costs jobs - who will work for less than they
can receive for nothing. Meanwhile other have their profits taken to
subsidise the non-productive.
Supplementary benefits just subside employers at the expense of the tax payer.
Minimum wages reduce employment opportunities.
The fact is that without these interferences from the state there
will be greater employment, lower taxes, more production and greater
wealth produced for all to befit from. Especially without the
bloodsuckers who sup upon it all.
The global elite's government fronts need this mishmash to subdue
humanity into a convoluted stupor of ill-educated poverty and run-ragged
servitude.
So keep begging to suckling those measly drips of stolen milk at the
bosom of the state or get a grip and produce your own abundance. There
is plenty to go around.
So long as people do not infringe upon other peoples rights to the property they own, a truly free humanity ultimately has to allow all the worlds people the freedom to live and work wherever they so choose.
If people are wanting to migrate it is because they seek 'advantage' and often that advantage is state welfare (tax-payer money taken by use of force and redistributed without approval), often it is that migrants will work for lower wages than the state imposed legal minimum dictates, often it is to escape the failings of the state from which they come.
A world without states would not have guards, fences and prisons for people who were born in one place just defined by lines on a map and controlled by people who simply pronounce it is they who are in control and so only they can wear the special hats!
And before too long the economy would settle, by a simple process of natural attrition, like a woodland can manage itself, a river workout the way to the sea, a bird learn to fly on the windiest of days.
The natural world does not need organising, by people in special hats, it can look-after itself and, when allowed to do so, quickly finds the optimum manner and with beautifully efficiency but yet breathtaking complexity too.
I am not saying we have to 'return to nature' or such - we must continue to advance. I am saying that we need to rediscover how to only allow all human macro-systems to dictate - roots-up - the structures of our global society.
We need the confidence to shrug-off the burden of our belief in omnipotent rulers being necessary, a paradigm remaining that is nothing but an ugly vestige of the past.
Sure it would be difficult to just open the world's boarders 'snap'!" - but we will have to rapidly evolve to this nirvana because, no matter how many rules and systems we impose, the concept of the state is failing. The state will eventually, can only but, fall as dust through our fingers no matter how much we think we have no better option or want to believe.
Wherever government sticks its meddling nose a rank stink is assured.
Rules upon subsidies, one cure attempted is another problem made.
This a patchwork of fudges so vast and ghastly yet the mad onwards
charge is the clarion call of all and sundry. More and more. Fix this
with that, they should stop this, they should encourage that. It is
as endless as it is impossible.
Why not just stop? Stop, look and see; the problem is not the market, it is
the endless interference with the market. If, by way of example, the state played absolutely no part in
the production of food, the management of land, the welfare of
agriculture, farming would quickly adapt and mend till the most productive
optimum emerged.
Best of all if we did not have a state at all. Its rubbish, its a
false paradigm; but people are so indoctrinated into the belief that a
state is necessary, a fundamental of the human condition, utterly
essential, that they cannot start to conceive what such political and
societal ‘atheism’ could look like or how it would function at all.
Two of the oldest ideas of mankind that we should grow out of and
dump: belief in god and belief in the state. They both are no more than
the devices of the few to enslave the many.
If we are on a sinking wooden boat and all we have is a captain and all that captain has is a great big hammer with a bucket full of nails; expect to hear nothing but the sound of banging, battering, clobbering, pounding, pummelling, thrashing, trouncing, walloping and whacking - in that order!
The captain will tell you this is all his men can do. But you know: the weight of all these nails is going to sink that darn boat anyway, regardless. The boat is sinking, you are on it and it is miles from land. And the funny thing is the ones who are doing all the hammering, having holed the hull in the first place, are the only ones with life-jackets on, indeed with your life-jackets on.
What are you going to do? Push those fellows with the hammer in the sea and tip their bucket of nails in with them too. I reckon with a little luck we could make it to the shore - this is, after all, a wooden boat.
Here is another thing. If you owned a money printing machine, not fake money but real money, would you ever be broke again? Only if you were really very stupid. And would you give that machine away on the agreement that you will instead pay interest for any of the money the machine printed. Only if you were very stupid again. Or fundamentally corrupt.
The Seven-Lesson School teacher by John Taylor Gatto – 1991 New York
State Teacher of the Year
Call me Mr. Gatto, please.
Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach English, I teach school — and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.
1. CONFUSION
A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana the other day: “What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn’t idiosyncratic — that there is some system to it all and it’s not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That’s the task, to understand, to make coherent.”
Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer languages, parents’ nights, staff-development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world….What do any of these things have to do with each other?
Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.
Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and theories, the age-old human search lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple relationship of “let’s do this” and “let’s do that” is just assumed to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned how little substance is behind the play and pretense.
Think of the great natural sequences like learning to walk and learning to talk; following the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; witnessing the ancient procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; watching your mother prepare a Thanksgiving feast — all of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifies itself and illuminates the past and the future. School sequences aren’t like that, not inside a single class and not among the total menu of daily classes.
School sequences are crazy. There is no particular reason for any of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized since everything must be accepted. School subjects are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the catechism or memorize the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism.
I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making a scheme of order. In a world where home is only a ghost, because both parents work, or because too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny. That’s the first lesson I teach.
2. CLASS POSITION
The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. I don’t know who decides my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of numbers they carry. Numbering children is a big and very profitable undertaking, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don’t even know why parents would, without a fight, allow it to be done to their kids. In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least to endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
In spite of the overall class blueprint, which assumes that ninety-nine percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless make a public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test success, hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a reward. I frequently insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though my own experience is that employers are rightly indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and schoolteaching are, at bottom, incompatible just as Socrates said they were thousands of years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and that there is no way out of your class except by number magic. Failing that, you must stay where you are put.
3. INDIFFERENCE
The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that; it impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we’ve been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.
Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
4. EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY
The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because rights do not exist inside a school — not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled — unless school authorities say they do. As a schoolteacher, I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. Individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children and teenagers, so my judgments come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels, or they steal a private instant in the hallway on the grounds they need water. I know they don’t, but I allow them to deceive me because this conditions them to depend on my favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or happy about things outside my ken; rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.
5. INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.
Successful children do the thinking I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kid has respectable parents who come to his aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. No middle-class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid’s school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent in twenty-six years of teaching. That’s amazing and probably the best testimony to what happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons.
Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained to be dependent: the social-service businesses could hardly survive; they would vanish, I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, prepared-food and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically down-sized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, the clothing business and schoolteaching as well, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year. Don’t be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do. It’s one of the biggest lessons I teach.
6. PROVISIONAL SELF-ESTEEM
The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have convinced him to believe they’ll love him in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that your self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.
A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into students’ homes to signal approval or to mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. The ecology of “good” schooling depends upon perpetuating dissatisfaction just as much as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematical records, the cumulative weight of the objective-seeming documents establishes a profile that compels children to arrive at certain decisions about themselves and their futures based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
7. ONE CAN’T HIDE
The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to conceal any dangerous secrets. I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band.
II
It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. “The kids have to know how to read and write, don’t they?” “They have to know how to add and subtract, don’t they?” “They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job.”
Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and feel. We were something special, as individuals, as Americans.
But we’ve had a society essentially under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War, and such a society requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling, to maintain itself. Before this development schooling wasn’t very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, twenty percent of whom were slaves, and fifty percent indentured servants.
Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn’t very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the seven lessons I’ve just described to you. The society that has become increasingly under central control since just before the Civil War shows itself in the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast, all of which are the products of this control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the United States products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual, family, and community importance, a diminishment that proceeds from central control. The character of large compulsory institutions is inevitable; they want more and more until there isn’t any more to give. School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life — in fact it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts — and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are near a school or an old people’s reservation if you wish a demonstration.
School as it was built is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. School is an artifice which makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable, although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution. From colonial days through the period of the Republic we had no schools to speak of — read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography for an example of a man who had no time to waste in school — and yet the promise of Democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient pharaonic dream of Egypt: compulsory subordination for all. That was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in The Republic when Glaucon and Adeimantus exhorted from Socrates the plan for total state control of human life, a plan necessary to maintain a society where some people take more than their share. “I will show you,” says Socrates, “how to bring about such a feverish city, but you will not like what I am going to say.” And so the blueprint of the seven-lesson school was first sketched. The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national school hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.
III
None of this is inevitable. None of it is impossible to overthrow. We do have choices in how we bring up young people; there is no one right way. If we broke through the power of the pyramidical illusion we would see that. There is no life-and-death international competition threatening our national existence, difficult as that idea is even to think about, let alone believe, in the face of a continual media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient, including in energy. I realize that idea runs counter to the most fashionable thinking of political economists, but the “profound transformation” of our economy these people talk about is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built — then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material “sufficiency” which our global “experts” are so insistent we be concerned about.
How did these awful places, these “schools”, come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But “modern schooling” as we know it is a by-product of the two “Red Scares” of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line American families were appauled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance towards the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called school must have been the consternation with which these same “Americans” regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance — all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution’s original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools — like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ — would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking the schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that powerful interests cannot afford to let it happen. You must understand that first and foremost the business I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting contracts. We cannot afford to save money by reducing the scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to help children grow up right. That is the iron law of institutional schooling — it is a business, subject neither to normal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition.
Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I’m trying to describe a free market in schooling just exactly like the one the country had until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education; it didn’t hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see. These options exist now in miniature, wonderful survivals of a strong and vigorous past, but they are available only to the resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. The near impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the shattered families of the poor or for the bewildered host camped on the fringes of the urban middle class suggests that the disaster of seven-lesson schools is going to grow unless we do something bold and decisive with the mess of government monopoly schooling.
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education. All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love — and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
From: Separating School & State: How To Liberate American Families
by Sheldon Richman
After the defeat of the Prussians (Germans) by Napoleon at the battle of Jena in 1806, it was decided that the reason why the battle was lost was that the Prussian soldiers were thinking for themselves on the battlefield instead of following orders.
The Prussian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), described by many as a philosopher and a transcendental idealist, wrote “Addresses to the German Nation” between 1807 and 1808, which promoted the state as a necessary instrument of social and moral progress. He taught at the University of Berlin from 1810 to his death in 1814. His concept of the state and of the ultimate moral nature of society directly influenced both Von Schelling and Hegel, who took an similarly idealistic view.
Using the basic philosophy prescribing the “duties of the state”, combined with John Locke’s view (1690) that “children are a blank slate” and lessons from Rousseau on how to “write on the slate”, Prussia established a three-tiered educational system that was considered “scientific” in nature. Work began in 1807 and the system was in place by 1819. An important part of the Prussian system was that it defined for the child what was to be learned, what was to be thought about, how long to think about it and when a child was to think of something else. Basically, it was a system of thought control, and it established a penchant in the psyche of the German elite that would later manifest itself into what we now refer to as mind control.
The educational system was divided into three groups. The elite of Prussian society were seen as comprising .5% of the society. Approximately 5.5% of the remaining children were sent to what was called realschulen, where they were partially taught to think. The remaining 94% went to volkschulen, where they were to learn “harmony, obedience, freedom from stressful thinking and how to follow orders.” An important part of this new system was to break the link between reading and the young child, because a child who reads too well becomes knowledgeable and independent from the system of instruction and is capable of finding out anything. In order to have an efficient policy-making class and a sub-class beneath it, you’ve got to remove the power of most people to make anything out of available information.
This was the plan. To keep most of the children in the general population from reading for the first six or seven years of their lives.
Now, the Prussian system of reading was originally a system whereby whole sentences (and thus whole integrated concepts) were memorized, rather than whole words. In this three-tier system, they figured out a way to achieve the desired results. In the lowest category of the system, the volkschuelen, the method was to divide whole ideas (which simultaneously integrate whole disciplines – math, science, language, art, etc.) into subjects which hardly existed prior to that time. The subjects were further divided into units requiring periods of time during the day. With appropriate variation, no one would really know what was happening in the world. It was inherently one of the most brilliant methods of knowledge suppression that had ever existed. They also replaced the alphabet system of teaching with the teaching of sounds. Hooked on phonics? Children could read without understanding what they were reading, or all the implications.
In 1814, the first American, Edward Everett, goes to Prussian to get a PhD. He eventually becomes governor of Massachusetts. During the next 30 years or so, a whole line of American dignitaries came to Germany to earn degrees (a German invention). Horace Mann, instrumental in the development of educational systems in America, was among them. Those who earned degrees in Germany came back to the United States and staffed all of the major universities. In 1850, Massachusetts and New York utilize the system, as well as promote the concept that “the state is the father of children.” Horace Mann’s sister, Elizabeth Peabody (Peabody Foundation) saw to it that after the Civil War, the Prussian system (taught in the Northern states) was integrated into the conquered South between 1865 and 1918. Most of the “compulsory schooling” laws designed to implement the system were passed by 1900. By 1900, all the PhD’s in the United States were trained in Prussia. This project also meant that one-room schoolhouses had to go, for it fostered independence. They were eventually wiped out.
One of the reasons that the self-appointed elite brought back the Prussian system to the United States was to ensure a non-thinking work force to staff the growing industrial revolution. In 1776, for example, about 85% of the citizens were reasonably educated and had independent livelihoods – they didn’t need to work for anyone. By 1840, the ratio was still about 70%. The attitude of “learn and then strike out on your own” had to be broken. The Prussian system was an ideal way to do it.
One of the prime importers of the German “educational” system into the United States was William T. Harris, from Saint Louis. He brought the German system in and set the purpose of the schools to alienate children from parental influence and that of religion. He preached this openly, and began creating “school staffing” programs that were immediately picked up by the new “teacher colleges”, many of which were underwritten by the Rockefeller family, the Carnegies, the Whitney’s and the Peabody family. The University of Chicago was underwritten by the Rockefellers.
The bottom line is that we had a literate country in the United States before the importation of the German educational system, designed to “dumb down” the mass population. It was more literate that it is today. The textbooks of the time make so much allusion to history, philosophy, mathematics, science and politics that they are hard to follow today because of the way people are “taught to think.”
Now, part of this whole paradigm seems to originate from an idea presented in The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon (1627). The work described a “world research university” that scans the planet for babies and talent. The state then becomes invincible because it owned the university. It becomes impossible to revolt against the State because the State knows everything. A reflection of this principle can be seen today with the suppression of radical and practical technologies in order to preserve State control of life and prevent evolution and independence. The New Atlantis was widely read by German mystics in the 19th century. By 1840 in Prussia, there were a lot of “world research universities”, in concept, all over the country. All of them drawing in talent and developing it for the purposes of State power and stability.
The Birth of Experimental Psychology in Germany
By the middle of the 19th century, Germany had developed a new concept in the sciences which they termed “psycho-physics”, which argued that people were in fact complex machines. It was the ultimate materialist extension of science that would parallel the mechanistic view of the universe already under way. This new view of people became more or less institutionalized in Germany, and by the 1870′s the “field” of experimental psychology was born. The ultimate purpose of experimental psychology was to discover the nature of the human machine and how to program it.
The main proponent of this new experimental psychology in Germany was Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who is today widely regarded as the “father” of that field. He is described by orthodoxy as having “freed the study of the mind from metaphysics and rational philosophy.” Presumably in favor of irrational philosophy. Wundt obtained his PhD in medicine from the University of Heidelburg in 1856, and embarked on the study of sensory perception. His most famous work was “Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception” , done between 1858 and 1862. It is described by orthodoxy as the first work of experimental psychology. In 1875, Wundt was appointed to a chair in philosophy at Leipzig, where he instituted a laboratory for the “systematic, experimental study of experience.” Back then, the phase “get a life” was not in vogue, and evidently he didn’t have much interpretable experience of his own.
In 1873, he began a year-long writing project which resulted in “Principles of Physiological Psychology”, which became a “classic” that was subsequently reprinted through six editions over the next 40 years, establishing psychology’s claim to be an “independent science”. Wundt also wrote on philosophical subjects such as logic and ethics, but as he did not subscribe to “rational philosophy”, his writings presumably yielded irrational interpretations of both areas. It is conceivable that his warped view of humanity and the universe contributed in some small way to the eventual Nazi penchant for experimenting on those they didn’t like, producing for them an irrational experience they would never forget. American students of Wundt who returned to the United States between 1880 and 1910 became the heads of Psychological Departments at major universities, such as Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania, to name a few. Wundt trained James Cattell, who on his return to the United States trained over 300 PhD’s in the Wundt world view. The system of “educational psychology” evolved from this. Funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, the Wundtian system gains control over educational testing in the United States for soldiers of World War I.
The “Educational System” Expands
The wave of immigration which began in 1848, combined with the visibility of revolutions taking place all over Europe, helped foster uncertainty in the public mind. Laws requiring compulsory schooling were then legislated. It was all very Hegelian. We wouldn’t want those little tykes to become reactionaries, would we? In 1890, Carnegie wrote a series of essays called The Gospel of Wrath, in which he claimed that the capitalistic free enterprise system was dead in the United States. It really was, since Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan, by then, owned the United States. It was about 1917 that a great “Red Scare” was instituted in the United States in order to set up a reactionary movement intended to get the public to accept the idea of compulsory schooling – Prussian compulsory schooling, of course.
The implimentation of the German educational nightmare in the United States met some initial resistence. In Carnegie’s home town of Gary, Indiana, the system was implemented between 1910 and 1916, mostly through the efforts of William Wirt, the school superintendent. It involved no academic endeavor whatsoever. It worked so well in supplying willing workers for the steel mills that it was decided by Carnegie to bring the system to New York City. In 1917, they initiated a program in New York in 12 schools, with the objective of enlarging the program to encompass 100 schools and eventually all the schools in New York. William Wirt came to supervise the transition.
Unfortunately for Carnegie, the population of the 12 schools was predominantly composed of Jewish immigrants, who innately recognized what was being done and the nature of the new “educational system”. Three weeks of riots followed, and editorials in the New York Times were very critical of the plan. Over 200 Jewish school children were thrown in jail. The whole political structure of New York that had tried this scheme were then thrown out of office during the next election. A book describing this scenario, The Great School Wars, was written by Diane Ravitch on the subject. Curiously, William Wirt was committed to an insane asylum around 1930, after going around making public speeches about his part in a large conspiracy to bring about a controlled state in the hands of certain people. He died two years later.
In order to make sure that the independence of the one-room schoolhouse and the penchant for communities to hire their own independent teachers would cease, the Carnegie group instituted the concept of “teacher certification” – a process controlled by the teaching colleges under Carnegie and Rockefeller control. No one knew that the Communist revolutions were funded from the United States. The buildup of the Soviet Union, as well as that of Nazi Germany, would also be funded later from the United States in order to get a reactionary public to bend to the will of controlling political factions. It was a plan that worked well in the 1920′s, and worked well again in the 1950′s in the psychological creation of the “cold war”, providing funding for the buildup of the military, industrial and pharmaceutical complex. The “non-thinking” American public never suspected a thing. Such a thing would have been “unbelievable.”
Because the United States was owned by wealthy businessmen, a synthetic free enterprise system was created and anti-trust laws were passed to prevent anyone else from gaining power. Everything that had already been consolidated was “grandfathered” out of the law. It was a brilliant scheme, and it worked very well.
Earlier in the century there were “school boards” in every town. Between 1932 and 1960, the number of school boards dropped from 140,000 to 30,000. Today there are about 15,000 – all controlled by extensions of the Carnegie-Rockefeller educational complex. In 1959, with the advent of the “Sputnik” and the public realization that “another country was ahead of us”, the embarrassed educational system was forced to temporarily create a synthetic focus on science which produced a generation of scientists and technicians in order to resolve the apparent deficit in the public mind.
In retrospect, in 1889 the U.S. Commissioner of Education assured a prominent railroad man, Collis Huntington, when he protested that the schools seemed to be over-educating (producing too many engineers and people who could think), that schools had been scientifically designed not to over-educate. It was a reference to the German system of education inculcated into the United States between 1806 and 1819.
Separating School & State: How To Liberate American Families
by Sheldon Richman
