rbhg: home school, social programming, social engineering, education, fascism, christianity, teaching, employment, James Bryant Conant, high school,

Secrets of Our

Educational System

part 5

James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, is a school name that resonates through the central third of the twentieth century. He once wrote a book called; The American High School Today (1959), which was one of the important things that pushed secondary schools to gigantic size in the 1960’s and forced consolidation of many small school districts into larger ones. Conant was a poison gas specialist in World War I, a reward for family lineage that had all the right stuff. He also worked on the World War II atomic bomb project, and was U.S. High commissioner for Germany during the occupation in 1945.

In his book, he addressed men and women of his own snooty class who were beginning to doubt the veracity of forced schooling and turning their opinions toward a return to the old style American methods of education. “No!” He fervently told them. “The clock cannot be turned back. The total process is irreversible!” Severe consequences would certainly follow if this carefully contrived behavioral-training machine were broken up. “A successful counter revolution would require reorientation of a complex social pattern. Only a crazy person would undertake such a project.”

Reading Conant’s book is like seeing a conversation in writing that was not meant for you but has major implications to you personally. Conant believed that schooling was a triumph of Anglo/German pragmatism, a pinnacle of the technocrats social planning art. It had sharply ruined the American entrepreneurial spirit. This made perfect sense to do if you stand in the shoes of management. As long as capital investment was at the mercy of millions of self-reliant, resourceful young entrepreneurs with a magic gleam in their eye, where would the money come from to continually tool and retool the commercial/industrial and financial machine? If the entire population could become producers, young people could always be loose cannons crashing around the deck of a ship teetering and tottering out of control. This was a threat to the corporate ship, however, if they were controlled as employees, then a dependable domestic market could be established.

But how to mute the urge for innovation in the population of tomorrow, that was the question. Conant tells us that the answer was in “formulation”, much in the same way he mixed gasses to create death for the enemy in a war situation. By the time 1905 came along, the call to formulation was followed en masse by the entire nation. “Keep all youth in school full time through grade twelve.” All youth, even those who didn’t wish to be there, and especially those who would take vengeance on their jailers.

Conant knew good and well that practical minded kids paid the biggest price for forced schooling and enforced confinement. But what could be done? The genie was out of the bottle so to speak. For Conant, it was a worthy trade off. Any mind complex enough to calculate a way to short circuit entrepreneurial energy, and ideology driven enough to make this happen all in the service of a corporate takeover of the economy, is sharp enough to see the side effects of a band of prisoners forced to remain in school against their will along with the docile and compliant. The net result of intellectual possibilities of class instruction was predictably a wipe out, as we have seen for 40 years now.

Going back for a moment to Cubberly, the Stanford education dean, he too had written about the serious decline of class work caused by early experiments in forcing universal school attendance. Therefore it was no surprise to insiders when academic integrity was destroyed. Cubberly’s House History of American Education refers directly to this episode. Conant and Cubberly both knew each other and spoke frequently. They knew what they were doing, but maintained their heroic stance in the service of corporate America all the same. Kids would be forced to do duty for the state, the brainwashing and social engineering of their innocent lives and the abject rape of their freedoms would be something difficult to explain to the general public.

A book called: “Philosophy of Education” by Robert Ulich, a prominent Harvard professor, put it this way: “ We are producing more and more people who will be dissatisfied because the artificially prolonged time of formal schooling will arouse in them hopes which society cannot fulfill... These men and women will form the avant garde of the disgruntled. It is no exaggeration to say people (like these) were responsible for World War II.” (Remember, I have talked a lot about fascism in our schooling.) This is, of course, nothing new, for Toynbee in his tome Study of History claimed the same thing and has been used as a guide for the speculation of the events of history for a long time now. This concept, that serious intellectual schooling of a universal nature was a sword pointed at the established order, has been a common theme in the west since the Tudors, and has also been openly discussed since 1890.

After World War I, the German people found themselves with an inexcusable high rate of unemployment. These people all went back to school, college specifically. Like the G.I. Bill, this was a short term solution to the problems of high unemployment. What happened as a result still leaves a mark on us today. Germany found itself with a general public that was well educated and resentful. Try to imagine homeless people with degrees and no where to use them, with no work to pay for their tuition. The dramatic rise of tent cities all across America of entire families without work and homes should raise serious concerns in us all.

This is no easy issue to deal with. From a management perspective it is no less cynical than it is pragmatic. Most continuing education beyond a college degree is easy to earmark as a temporary solution to the fact that most employment in the U.S. is now part time or short term employment, in fact, the figures I believe are about 50-60%. In an increasingly centralized workplace, one with no end in sight,

all employment is categorized into four branches: corporate, governmental, institutional, and professional. Once work has been channeled in this fash

ion, one that mimics a true monopoly of employment, fear of too many smart people is a real and present danger. Smart people revolt. Just ask France. Both history itself and Senator Ulich would bear witness to this fact.

Debate over public schools and the overwhelming reality of what our kids are now subject to (just consider the lottery for an education scenes in the movie Waiting for Superman) become academic themselves when we understand the ideas of people like, Inglis, Conant, Ulich, and Kotsching. If we don’t address the philosophies, the atheism, the existentialism, the government social engineering which sentences the largest part of our population to lives that are practically devoid of meaning and turns them into unwitting gerbils on a treadmill for corporate America, we might as well just stop complaining.

Liberty, equality,

fraternity, or death.

Some end notes:

1) U.S. Office of Education

OEC-O-9-320424-4042 (B10) 2) Th

e Cloning of the American Mind (Huntington House 1998) 3) The National Adult Literacy Survey : the disaster of a change in the teaching of reading methodology. The ability to parrot information instead of being able to understand difficult text had a dramatic rise, and this happened on purpose. 4) Reduced Recidivism and Increased Employment Opportunity Through Research Based Reading Instruction, Michael S. Brunner, (United States department of Justice 1992) 5) Retarding America, Michael S. Brunner (Halcyon House 1993) 6) Reading Failure and Juvenile Delinquency (Reading Reform Foundation) 7) The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne, schooling chosen for the characters child

no coincidence for the author writing at this time.

I would like to thank the sources I received information for this series of blogs from. It’s my wish that the information be out there, circulating among a public that is clearly upset and doesn’t understand why, that is the only motivation for blogs like this one. Your help is invaluable.