-Caveat Lector-
In her book, "The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution"
(in a chapter entitled, "The Comprachicos") Rand wrote:
Comprachico is a Spanish word meaning "child-buyer."
The comprachicos were a nomadic association, notorious
in the seventeenth century. They bought and sold
children - special children, children turned into
deformed freaks, used in freak shows to amuse the
public. At an early age they placed a young child
in a porcelain pot with a grotesque form. As the
child's body grew, it had to assume the shape of
the pot. The result was a deformed freak for people
to laugh at.
Rand uses the practice of the comprachicos as an analogy to
describe American "education." She refers to our "educators"
as "the comprachicos of the mind." Children's minds are forced
to assume the shape of a grotesque "intellectual pot."
Rand describes the result:
"The students' development is arrested, their minds
are set to respond to slogans, as animals respond
to to a trainer's whistle, their brains are embalmed
in the syrup of altruism as an automatic substitute
for self-esteem... They would obey anyone, they need
a master, they need to be told what to do. They are
ready now to be used as cannon fodder - to attack,
to bomb, to burn, to murder, to fight in the streets
and die in the gutters. They are a trained pack of
miserably impotent freaks, ready to be unleashed
against anyone."
--
John Taylor Gatto
*The Origins of Compulsory Education*
copyright 1994 by Jim Martin
Interview (April 1994)
<http://www2.flatlandbooks.com/flatland/Gatto.html>
*********Introduction: After nearly 30 years in the public schools, John Taylor Gatto
has quit his
job as a schoolteacher to become one of the country's most articulate critics of
American education.
The author of Dumbing Us Down currently lives in New York City, where he is working on
a book about
the history of compulsory education called The Empty Child.
During a telephone interview in 1994, I wanted to get John Gatto's opinions on
President Clinton's
edu-du-jour, which is called "Goals 2000". Rather than address the specifics of Goals
2000, or any
other educational "reform" efforts aimed at public schools, Gatto soon had me reeling
back almost
two centuries to the origins of compulsory schools, when children were marched off at
bayonet-point
to attend the first universal state-run schools.
**********Excerpts from John Taylor Gatto interview copyright (1994) by Jim Martin
from an article
appearing in Flatland Magazine #11 published September 1994 full text available for
$6.00 postpaid
from Flatland: POB 2420, Fort Bragg, CA 95437.
*************** Prussia is the first state in human history to have a compulsory
schooling law that
works. There were a handful of them that existed prior to the Prussian law of 1819 but
they don't
work. Nobody is dumb enough to keep going to school after a few days. It collapses
when the cops
don't come after you. That's what happened to the famous New England compulsory school
law. It was
there as a piece of window dressing.
But not in Prussia. They really were marched to school at bayonet point. It was after
Napoleon's
defeat of Prussia at the battle of Jena at 1806. A famous Prussian philosopher named
Fichte
announced in an Address to the German People: that the party was over. Now the
children would be
taken. Now they were going to be told what to think and how long to think it. They
were going to
understand that the state is the primary parent and the blood family is secondary.
Between 1806 and
1819, two brilliant brothers, the Humboldts, a guy named Stein, and a few others,
divide the society
into children who will become policy makers; children who will become assistants to
policy makers
(the engineers, architects, lawyers, and doctors); and the children who will be the
vast, massed,
the used.
Prussia sets up a three-tier school system, in which one half of one percent of the
population is
taught to think. They go to school called academie. Five and a half percent of the
population go to
Realschulen, where they partially learn to think, but not completely, because Prussia
believed their
defeat at the hands of Napoleon was caused by people thinking for themselves at times
of stress on
the battlefield. They were going to see to it that scientifically this couldn't
happen. The lowest
94%, (that's some pyramid, right?) went to volkschulen, where they were to learn
harmony, obedience,
freedom from stressful thinking, how to follow orders. They worked out a system that
would in fact
guarantee such results. In the volkschulen, it was to divide whole ideas (which really
simultaneously participate in math, science, social thinking, language, and art) into
subjects which
hardly had existed before, to divide the subjects further into units; to divide the
time into small
enough units of time. With enough variations in the course of a day, no one would know
what was
going on.
What they would learn is that
someone else told you what to think about,
when to think about it,
how long to think about it,
when to stop thinking about it,
when to think of something else,
and someone else sets up the secrets.
Now that was surely one of the most brilliant discoveries in human history. Obviously,
my sympathies
are not with it. It's evil in the genuine sense of the word.
Nevertheless, in the next thirty years a stream of American dignitaries, including
Horace Mann,
traveled to Prussia. Whoever they were, when they returned to the United States, they
would say we
must have this Prussian system." (...)
Let's take "the empty child" metaphor. You begin with Locke, the blank tablet, and go
through
Rousseau 80-100 years later, who demonstrates how to write on that blank tablet, and
we are on the
lip of the 19th century. So who institutionalizes the thinking that is codified over
the last 100
years? The Prussians. Prussia becomes a very proprius state under the Prussian's
forced-schooling
scheme. The King of Prussia, from a dirt poor country, with no natural resources, had
subordinated
labor so precisely that Prussian industry was a world leader, and Prussian scholarship
was the world
leader. In 1814 the first American, Edward Everett, goes to Prussia to get a PhD. He
eventually
becomes the governor of the state of Massachusetts [and spoke on the same occasion
when Lincoln
delivered the Gettysburg Address]. By 1900 all the PhD's in the United States were
trained in
Prussia. The degree doesn't exist any other place. It's a German invention.
It's based on Francis Bacon's idea, in The New Atlantis [1627], of a world research
university that
scans the world for babies and talent and draws it into the university called
Solomon's House,
talent which is given to the state. The state becomes invincible. It's impossible to
revolt against
the state, because the state knows everything. Francis Bacon's book was widely read by
German
mystics. By the 1840's Prussia has a number of Solomon's Houses available that are
utterly
democratic, or about as much as is possible in an imperfect world. They are drawing
talent and
developing it for the purposes of state power and stability.
The PhD's come back to the United States and they become, to a man, the Presidents of
all our
Universities, the heads of all our research bureaus, and corporate research is done by
German
Ph.D.'s. It would still be going on except for the First World War. Obviously, there
were dissident
elements, and some of them had power, who didn't want this development but weren't
strong enough to
stop it.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Prussia had openly acknowledged a new
development in the
sciences called "psycho-physics" which argued that people were in fact complex
machines. Prussia
institutionalizes this, and by the 1870's has created the new science (or
pseudo-science, if you're
John Gatto) of experimental psychology, the purpose of which is to discover what the
nature of this
machine is and how to program it. American elite sons travel and study at the feet of
Wundt. They
come back during the period 1880-1910 and become the heads of Psychological
Departments at Harvard,
University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, etc. and there aren't any exceptions to this. Now
Wundt is
extremely prolific, his published works run to about 67,000 pages. Wundt was an
industry. He trains
[James McKeen] Cattell, who trains 322 PhD's after the Wundtian system, in this next
decade or so.
These people set up the new discipline of educational psychology, which becomes a big
bucks system.
With the help of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations the system gets control of
psychological
testing for all the soldiers of the First World War. Aside from the vast power they
wielded, it is
the sorting mechanism of our whole economy. If we just talk about the money that can
be used to buy
votes, to change people's minds, to bludgeon down opposition, we're talking about an
enormous amount
of money flowing out of psychological testing. All of the proponents of which are
Wundtian-trained
and now head psychological departments in the United States." (...)
By 1910 the one room school has been destroyed. The factory school has been installed
everywhere.
Thanks to the actions of the great foundations, a national system of schooling was in
place. The
Carnegie credit guaranteed you'd have a high degree of uniformity but something else
did too. There
was a shadow organization in existence that has been well documented by mainstream
historians. It
was called the Educational Trust and it was run out of Stanford and Columbia's
Teacher's College. It
literally controlled all the Superintendencies in the United States and it placed key
students for
these jobs. The Superintendents had to guarantee, of course, to hire for all sorts of
out-of-class
positions, so the Educational Trust, in a very short time, became a very powerful
national shadow
organization controlling all the jobs in schooling. The source of this information is
Managers of
Virtue by David Tyack. It is an elite mainstream history, one that is not challenged
by the school
establishment, because Tyack is part of the school establishment. He has no wish to
overthrow the
system but just doing his job in documenting the existence of the "educational
trust"." (...)
Prominent men and women, agents of foundations worked on one legislature after
another. Once it
passed in New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Michigan, it became easier and
easier. Of course
they could demonstrate by then how useful it was to the legislature to have this power
over
schooling and not to allow it to be locally administrated. There were enormous
contracts to be let.
All the jobs that had never existed before in schooling history, non-teaching jobs,
were now at the
disposal of the legislature.
(...) We've psychologized the schools by the end of the First World War. Now that's in
place. (I'm
presenting this as though it was a sequence, actually these things are happening
simultaneously but
it's easier to see the necessity of having one solidified before another can really
get very far).
The next step came in 1890, when Andrew Carnegie wrote eleven essays, called The
Gospel of Wealth.
In it he said that capitalism�free enterprise� was stone cold dead in the United
States. It had been
killed by its own success. That men like himself, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Rockefeller now
owned
everything. They owned the government. Competition was impossible unless they allowed
it. Which,
human nature being what it is, was a problematical thing.
Carnegie said that this was a very dangerous situation, because eventually young
people will become
aware of this and form clandestine organizations to work against it. Ultimately
they'll bring down
this edifice. You've got to read all eleven essays, sometimes several times, and only
then the
majesty of the design emerges. Carnegie proposed that men of wealth re-establish a
synthetic free
enterprise system (since the real one was no longer possible) based on cradle-to-grave
schooling.
The people who advanced most successfully in the schooling that was available to
everyone would be
given licenses to lead profitable lives, they would be given jobs and promotions and
that a large
part of the economy had to be tied directly to schooling. So if you ever have two
years of your life
you want to spend investigating the American licensing industry, you need to look at
what occurred
in the two decades following Carnegie's original proposal (1890-1910). You're talking
about the
realization of Carnegie's design. These licenses, which now extend to bus drivers and
all sorts of
unlikely people who never had to be licensed are then tied to forms of schooling. So
they've
reserved that part of the work market. Through the cooperation of the business
community a large
part of the rest of the jobs are reserved. Through the cooperation of the government,
many of the
government position have very precise schooling requirements. You can in fact control
all of the
economy by tying jobs to schooling, and therefore you have a motivation for people to
learn what you
want them to learn. (...)
Back in the time of Sputnik, we get the dike opened and a blank check offered to
anyone who can come
up with a way to make the thing work. From 1950 -1990 we get, in inflation-adjusted
dollars, a
quadruple increase in funds available to schooling. The aspect of school as one of the
central parts
of the economy, independent of its schooling function, is now true in spades. Rivers
of money are
flowing back and forth, always being augmented never getting being cut back.
There is an increase in the centralization, with fifteen thousand school boards rather
than forty
thousand previously. One in every six thousand Americans serving on school boards that
are almost
stripped of their power. Whereas in the beginning of the century we have one in every
sixty-five
Americans serving on school boards that still have control of the purse. It hasn't yet
been
transferred to the state legislature. An explosive intrusion of foundation agents are
wandering
around the halls of state legislatures, key businesses, key teacher colleges. They are
writing a
tight script to seal the loop holes that have prevented Andrew Carnegie's dream from
working
smoothly. You get these amazing constructions of organized psychologizing that link
together all the
school years, all the testing functions, the hiring functions, you get these things
being imposed
without public knowledge. That's the dead give-away that something isn't kosher.
What we have now is a wide open scene where the concealment is thinner than it's ever
been before.
The naked power is closer to the surface. My instincts are that it is the identical
groups that
surfaced around 1905. One of the great evidences of that is a semi-secret group that
keeps its
deliberations utterly secret, called the Businessmen's Round Table, made up of the 200
largest
corporations, announced a few years ago that it was going to take a major seat at the
National
School policy table, and that it was backing national testing, national examinations.
Even�among its
radical members�there was a scheme to tie hiring and promotions to school performance.
*********
The complete text of this article appears in Flatland Magazine #11, direct for $6
postpaid from
Flatland POB 2420, Fort Bragg, CA 95437.
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