Reviews by Hubie Goode: Secrets of Our Educational System

Secrets of Our
Educational System

Part 1

Waiting in Vain for Superman

A while back I wrote in this blog about many of the influences that have shaped our world today, not just my America, but the whole globe population. I have other posts here about such men as Evolutionist Charles Darwin, Psychologist/Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, Economist John Maynard Keynes and Educator John Dewey.

On the last note, that of education, I recently posted about seeing a movie entitled, “Waiting for Superman”, which is a brutal condemnation of our educational system and the subsequent failures that have developed among school age kids, plus the resultant effects upon America and its way of life. Much was made in this movie about the how and why we have reached the place we are now as far as our educational system goes, but few realize how deep the historical roots of our educational system’s demise truly go. The men I mention before from the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s, have much to do with our place in the world today, and it is a part of the oldest battle known to mankind.

Orwell was Overt

Many once believed that there was a social conscience behind making school attendance a law. Little did they know that the powers that be had much different ideas as to what schooling should really be, and what its place for our society should be. In truth, schooling was a pawn of a highly centralized corporate economy, and a system of finance that wanted to become internationalized. The strong, centralized political state needed our schools too, and education was secretly looked upon as a tool for governing, and also a branch of industry. In a time of anger and contempt against illegal immigrants, those who were managing society were open and honest as to their motivations for their actions.

Woodrow Wilson said it best in a speech before World War I: "What we want is for one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." (i.e. a servant class, so to speak)

In 1917, the largest administrative jobs in schooling were held by a group called “The Education Trust”. It’s members included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harard, Stanford, The University of Chicago and the National Education Association. The chief purpose of the meeting was, as EVOLUTIONIST Benjamin Kidd said in 1918: "To impose on the young the ideal of subordination.”

American independence and entrepreneurship were now slated for being weeded out of the American way of life. Creators like Franklin or Edison were to be curtailed and discouraged. Immense investments of money for industry to provide mass production and also to reap mass income were not justifiable if America truly believed that every man could make something by himself and for himself that could bring income from outside of his sphere of influence. The dream of American industry was contained within the "grunt pool" of students who would see themselves as employees whose main purpose was to make management happy.

Something called overproduction was a big bugaboo word among industry in the 1880’s-1920’s. Psychology was a new and “magic” thing, despite its inherent lack of any real evidence for its major stipulations, and industry jumped at the chance to use this new information to manipulate Americans into throwing away the possibility of independent production that would compete with the larger industrial complex. The writings of Alexander Inglis hold no punches in outlining schooling’s place in the grand scheme of lining the pockets of major industry at the expense of independent, creative production and the potential future of American students.

Get Them When They Are Young

Long range social engineering may seem to you and me as a preposterous concept, something out of a science fiction novel, but sometimes those sci fi novel writers know more than perhaps even they realize at the time. The facts are though, that long range social engineering has impacted our educational system for over a century now. A tome called: Public Education in the United States by Ellwood P. Cubberley (1934), puts it quite plainly:

"It has become desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking ....(is) opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor."

This quote comes from a section of the book called: A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence. It is explained that the arrival of the factory system has made extending dependent childhood necessary. Children must now be deprived of the training and education that farm and village life once provided. With the subsequent breakdown of home and village industries, all in the name of progress and the potential mass income from a dependent market, the passing on of work done in the home and the apprenticeship industry would now give way to large scale production and a division of labor. An army of workers would then arise, as it did, all in the service of modern industry.

The sweetness of intimate American home life could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. Now in the halls of education the old book-subject ways of teaching had to be overcome. It was now time to adapt a new psychology of instruction that came to us from abroad. Not coincidentally, this new wave of so called intellectualism was the very same force that would transform the Christian church in America from something grounded in firm belief to something liberalized which would one day, after World War II, accept atheist existentialist equivocations. If you have ever wondered where the term “The dumbing down of America” got its start, this is the time period. All of Europe, once a bastion of the clarion call of Christianity had recently lost its soul to the “new teachings” of humanists like Freud, Darwin and soon, Kierkegaard also. England, France and Germany, major world powers of coal energy, had adopted this new dumbed down schooling technique some time earlier and had turned their populace into an industrial proletariat long before the American infection happened.

In 1905, Cubberley wrote in a dissertation paper: “Schools should be factories, where the raw product of children are to be shaped and formed into a finished product. This product, manufactured like nails, should be determined by government and industry.”

In a book by Arthur Calhoun (1919) named: Social History of the Family, he declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was now coming true: the child was passing from its family into the custody of community experts. His forecast was that, in time, public schools would be able to “check” the mating of the unfit. John Hylan, Mayor of New York announced in a speech some three years later that: "the schools had been seized as an octopus would seize prey... by an invisible government." His comments referred to the Rockefeller foundation and other corporate interests in New York city that proceeded the riots in 1917 at many schools.

Happy Days were here again! Mankind had finally surpassed the wretched history of the past.

The 1920’s saw the monster of forced schooling bear fangs and sprout wings. The stock market too had shown amazing growth, as anyone alive today who remembers the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, can tell you. A book from 1928 called: A Sociological Philosophy of Education, stated: "It is the role of teachers to run not merely schools, but the world." Edward Thorndike, the creator of educational psychology announced to the academic world that: “Academic subjects are of little value.” His contemporaries also agreed that the whole business of rearing the young was now being transformed by "experts". Those "experts" were people just like you and me, however their allegiance to pure education values without secondary agendas can always be questioned, and truly, how many in such a position of power every really succeed at keeping things streamlined toward the benefit of the individuals they serve. I mean, really.... name some, .....please.

Doctor Doom is just a comic book character

President Max Mason of the Rockefeller Foundation was telling his buddies about something called “the control of human behavior” right about this time. Schooling was a major tenant of the program.

These folks were intensely interested in the work of German scientist, Hermann Muller, who had used X Rays to override genetic law, creating mutations in fruit flies. This lead these men to believe that perhaps life itself could be controlled. Muller put forth the idea that planned breeding could bring mankind to the paradise that he longed for with or without God, and probably faster. ( I kid you not!) The greatest scientists of the day and also those of the economic world who held sway, lauded him with many accolades.

Muller won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. He wrote a “Geneticist Manifesto” and a handful of the worlds top scientists signed on with him. It was now the state’s job to consciously guide human sexual selection, so said Muller. School would separate the good stock for breeding and eliminate those who were unfit. All hail the law of unnatural selection.

Right about this time a leader of the National Education Association announced that: “Education would accomplish what dictators in Europe hope to do by force”
World War II then came along and pretty much screwed everything up. Not only for this project of human genetic selection, but it also disillusioned the populace who had come to believe that the new version of Christianity that had allowed them to operate on their own instead of being subject to God, had failed them. School was now a battle ground for the scientific and religious rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination. As in all muggings of this kind, one need only follow the money trail. That trail lead to private corporate foundations.

Tune in and Drop out, baby

Some thirty odd years later, with American society, and now a lot of the external world, bamboozled by the quasi intellectualism and rampant confusion of meaning that infected our everyday conversations, all thanks to men the likes of Hegle and Kierkegaard, intellectual philanderers in their own right, teacher training in our schools was revamped by a small number of large foundations, think tanks, and government agencies, and covertly so. The U.S. Office of Education coordinated the whole thing by manipulating the key education departments of major schools in California, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York.

Major tenants of the transformation included:

1) Designing Education for the Future, a government exercise in futurology.

2) The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project

3) Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, this was a huge volume which had a far reaching effect on all education, even to our day today.

Designing Education, an early victim of existentialist equivocation, REDEFINED the term “education”, as existentialists are always ready to do. It was now defined as: “an important means to achieve economic and social goals of a national character.” State education agencies were now on site federal enforcers. They were there to ensure the compliance of local schools with central directives. Directives devised and put forth by “soldiers of the government” who just happened not to wear jack boots to work.

Curiously, each state education department was now directed to become an agent of change. They were to lose their independent identity and authority as well as becoming a partner with the federal government.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project projected the future as one in which a small elite will control all important matters. (Sound familiar????) Teaching reforms were to be forced on the country after 1967. (And records show a huge slide in our education production ever since the early 1970’s) According to this tome, participatory democracy must be eliminated. Children must be convinced that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so unable to be self disciplined, and so ignorant that they require being controlled for society’s own good. School terror now becomes good advertising at this point. Mass schooling was now a tool for the display of human inadequacy. It’s jarring to see a movie like the recent “Flipped”, where kids are actually good and not naturally aggressive, which fictionally took place in the late 1950’s, and then to consider the world of youth just ten years later with all its drug culture and challenge to authority. Its main tenants of protest were more commercial than factual.

Post modern schooling was now to focus on “pleasure cultivation”, much like saying in an Old Testament way, “Worship Baal, my children.” Other attitudes and skills must be cultivated which are easier to use in a non-work related format of life. “Dumb down”, eat, drink and be merry, let the government guide you. (As I have said before in other posts, a colony of artists cannot survive on its own, but is reliant on the surrounding practical production of society's infrastructure.)

This is where the socialization of the classroom now happened, and the slide of school performance seen in “Waiting on Superman” began. No longer was it about mental development or character development, for the existentialists had rendered those terms meaningless. School was one big lab, one big social lab, for an unseen government experiment.

Not coincidentally, in the 1960’s, as the tide of cancer known as existential philosophy, Keynesian economics, Freudian psychology, Atheistic Dewey-an education and Darwinian evolution took their hold, and the Bible was slowly shown the door in America’s homes and schools, there was a tremendous rise in school violence and general school chaos. (Thank you, Soren.) This added to the transformation of America’s schools and also its compliance and reliance on government intervention. Discipline now became a derivative of the court system. Due process was now the way to deal with kids. Teachers were stripped (seemingly from necessity) of any way to keep kids controlled in the classroom due to the requirements of due process and its slow march toward the hell that is called a trial. Mischievous kids are everywhere, and they act up. There is no way to deal with them over a series of months while following government procedure and still receive the results that a classroom of kids requires.

With teacher’s hands tied, bad kids influenced the rest of the crowd and promoted a kind of "insolent coo" within the classrooms of America. Now, each time there was a campus calamity, this received press and proved the need for the design and control of “experts”. What happened to the kids of “Flipped”? Where have you gone Richie Cunningham? Time for the emergency measures of special education and the over prescribing of Ritalin.

Teachers were now instructed to deal with bad behavior as social psychologists or therapists, who would take practical action in the classroom. Curriculum had been re-defined, as existentialism is want to do, so now teaching too, was re-defined.

The last of the “new gospel” texts, Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, is in his own words: "a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or feel as a result of some instruction." George Orwell would have been proud... or maybe chagrined. Using popular psychology, kids were now taught proper thoughts, feelings and actions, and to have improper attitudes (as defined by the state) “re-mediated” which they brought from home. For instance, believe Darwin, not Holy Scripture.

Testing was now also a way to measure a child’s mental state on an official rating scale. Such paradigms as “mastery learning”, “outcome based education” and “school to work” government business collaborations grew from a need to classify individuals for the convenience of social managers and business. Data was provided by these tests for the desire to control the minds and movements of the young.

It was Social engineering of the next adult generation.

more in part 2