Think Of The Homeless
There are over 30 million Americans who live on the streets of our nation. Can you consider giving something to a shelter near you? Your fellow human beings need socks because they walk everywhere. Food and shelter are great too, if they will take them. So please give.
Secrets of Our
Educational System
part 4
The concept of an administrative utopia is a particular kind of dreaming by those with access to power. They are driven by an urge to direct the lives of others, organizing them for production, combat or detention. What are the operating principles of administrative utopias? They are hierarchy, discipline, regimentation, strict order, rational planning, a geometrical environment, production lines, cell blocks and a form of welfarism. I have just described public schools and also some private schools. These are laboratories for studying the technology of subjugation. In much the same way as fetishists enjoy the bound helplessness of a victim, schools practice a form of pornographic art, i.e. the total control and surveillance of the helpless. The aim and mode of administrative utopia is to bestow order and assistance on an unwilling population, to provide food and clothing, to schedule it, much the same as a health care bill that is voted down by the majority of a democracy and yet is still instituted in the name of government knowing what is best. Phrenologist George Combe wrote to Horace Mann, now of the Mann schools, in 1843: “The Prussian and Saxon governments by means of their schools and their just laws and rational public administration are doing a good deal to bring their people into a rational and moral condition. “ This was an answer to Mann’s previous inquiry of Combe as to the effectiveness of Prussian schooling. Previously a Senate House committee had been convinced to study the system Mann had suggested which was also financed by Industrialist Edmond Dwight, which would create a teacher’s college. After it’s study and the revelation of the Prussian system that was to be pervasive within the school board, the House denied the motion and told Dwight to take his money back.
The House had discovered that this school board of unitarians were actually out to install a Prussian system of education in Massachusetts. This would put a monopoly of power in just a few hands, a paradigm adverse to the true spirit of democratic systems. Interestingly, this didn’t stop Mann and his political cronies as the vote of the House went into the majority in Mann’s favor. One has to wonder how many House of Representatives sold their souls that day and the future of education down the river. Even in this day there was an argument over illegal immigration coming into the country to provide cheap labor. Mann thought the religious orthodox of his day was his greatest enemy, but to the contrary, Baptist, Congregational and Presbyterian all supported the idea of government schooling being a necessity to combat the influx of those immigrants who were mostly Catholic. Little did they realize the harbinger of doom secular schooling would provide for their denominations.
In much the same fashion as Kierkegaard constructed his thesis on existentialism, Mann forged his love for the Prussian school system based upon what he felt it was, not on his actual experience. He had visited the schools there during the closed months and found inspiration from empty halls and barren school rooms. He was amazed that he saw not one teacher holding a school book, but instead teaching from their own inner dialogue. Where he saw these teachers one can only conjecture. “The finest collection of men I have ever seen,” wrote Mann. “Full of intelligence, dignity, benevolence, kindness and bearing...Never have I witnessed an instance of harshness and severity. All is kind, encouraging, animating, sympathizing.” On the basis of imagining this Utopian school, Mann made a special plea for the changes in the teaching of reading. He criticized the standard practice of beginning with the alphabet and moving on to collecting syllables. He urged his readers to instead teach the meaning of entire words from the beginning. “Our greatest error in teaching begins with the alphabet.” He said. Empty classrooms are a great basis by which to forge educational revolution.
Mann filed a report to the Boston school committee at this time called the “Seventh”, in which he described his so called experiences while in Prussia with the school system there. All on his own, he decided that we Americans were falling behind the superior educational system of the Prussians and he implored the board to adopt a professional corps of teachers in much the same manner as he had seen (remember, he actually saw nothing). The board members rejected his report as nothing short of propaganda. They charged him with elitism and an attempt to sway the ignorant for support of unsubstantiated information. They also claimed that the teacher oriented, non-book method of teaching promoted a kind of reliance upon others to do productive work and was aimed at breaking the habit of independent work by creating an audience of spectators. They also did not believe in the word method of teaching and defended the alphabet formation of words for reading. They also found it dangerous to insist that learning was better served by discipline than by interest. “Duty comes first,” they said. “Pleasure comes from the discharge of duty.”
Sixty years later... Industrialists and financiers of the day were busy attempting to transfer power over money and interest rates from elected representatives of the American people to a “federal reserve” of centralized private banking interests. On September 13, 1909, George Reynolds, the president of the American Bankers Association declared himself in favor of a central bank modeled after the German Reichsbank. As he spoke, the schools of the United States were being forcibly rebuilt on Prussian lines.
President Howard Taft, also supported the serious consideration of a centralized bank built upon the German model. The Wall Street Journal also reported that an important step in the education of Americans was about to take place and move from the realm of theory to practical politics in pedagogy as well as finance. There is a book from 1935 called, The Life and Work of the Citizen, written by Howard C. Hill. This book was being used in the Chicago experimental high school being run by the University of Chicago. The book is covered by images of the fasces. An image that represents the binding of government and corporation together in one unit. It is a picture of a double headed axe surrounded by tied up wooden sticks. Wasn’t Mussolini a fascist? I think so.
For Americans however, the sticks are wrapped around a sword in the image. There are fierce military eagle images soaring around the pages. The title page of this book has a weird spiral looking interlocking of hands, arms and wrists that looks for all the world like an early incarnation of the German swastika, or should I say Nazi swastika. Law, order, science and trades, and their unification is the representation of united strength. The strength of America is in the First Amendment guarantee of argument, the right to free speech and the ability to vote of the majority of the citizenry. The Prussian connection shifts the focus to one of cooperation. The working class becomes the watched puppet of the professional classes under the control of law and order.
Despite Mann being rejected for his ideas, the Prussian ideal had still managed to insinuate itself into American schooling. During the late years of the 19th century, as the American school system churned out its first phalanx of graduates infected by the Prussian system, there were those who witnessed the change over as it happened. These folks were all schooled in the old fashioned, productive methods not influenced by the government and corporate control systems put in place for the younger students coming up from grade school.
The year was 1867, and the world famous American physician and academic Vincent Youmans has this to say at a lecture to the London College of Preceptors as to the school institution that had just come into being: “School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain. It is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are frequently aggravated by the lessons of school.”
Thirteen years later, another famous commentary had this to say:
“Many had hoped that by giving a partial teaching to great numbers of persons, a thirst for knowledge might be awakened. Thus far the results have not equaled expectations. Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have cause to congratulate ourselves.” - Francis Parkman
In 1885 the President of Columbia said:
“The results actually attained under our present system of instruction are neither very flattering nor very encouraging.”
In 1895 the President of Harvard said:
“Ordinary schooling produces dullness. A young man or woman whose intellectual powers are worth cultivating cannot be willing to cultivate them by pursuing phantoms as the school now insist upon.” It had been 43 years since the inception of forced schooling when the President made the above remark.
Following this there was a great transformation into an even more scientific form of pedagogy that took place in the early 1900’s. Four years before WWII broke out, a well known European thinker and school man, Paul Geheeb, who was buddies with Einstein (Yes! THE Einstein.) Herman Hess, and Albert Schwietzer, made a commentary on English and German schooling types: “The dissatisfaction with public schools is widely felt. Countless attempts to reform them have failed. People complain about the over burdening of schools; educators argue about which parts of the curriculum should be cut; but school cannot be reformed with a pair of scissors. The solution is not to be found in educational institutions.”
In 1930, the yearly lectures at Harvard made the same case: “We have absolutely nothing to show for our colossal investment in common schooling after 80 years of trying.”
Thirty years later, the Annual Report to the Carnegie Corporation in 1960 added this: “Too many young people gain nothing from school except the conviction that they are misfits.”
Much to the pain of the makers of the film, Waiting for Superman, the record after 1960 doesn’t improve. The stupidity of 1867, the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness of 1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960, has continued into the 2000’s. We drop three times more cash into the school system than we did in 1930, and thus we buy only more of what mass schooling has wrought upon us. If there was ever an argument for a return to home schooling, this is it.Cultic Practices
The best record of the changeover from old style American free market schooling to the laboratory variety under the watch of Big Brother, is a tome long out of publication. It’s a book written by insiders that will raise the hair on the back of your neck. It’s called the Principles of Secondary Education (1918). It offers an account of the experiment from the personal experience of an important revolutionary. His name is Alexander Inglis.
If you think all this I have written about there being a government purpose behind forced schooling is a lot of “hooey”, find this book and you’ll be in for a surprise. Clearly, he states in this book, that the number one priority of the vast enterprise was to place control of the new social and economic machinery out of the reach of the general public.
These social engineers had a real problem, however, namely, working in a democracy. It isn’t all that efficient or predictable, and therefore proposes specific challenges. School was designed, in fact, to be antidemocratic. How many high school teachers can I name that often said things like, “This isn’t Burger King, you can’t have it your way.”
Nelson Aldrich Jr., wrote to his grandfather, Senator Aldrich (one of the principle architects of the Federal Reserve, constructed while Inglis’ cohort built the schools, both sharing the same prime directive: to remove the economic machinery from the reach of the general public) caught the attitude of the builders in their essence in a book named: Old Money. Grandfather, Aldrich Jr. wrote, believed that history, evolution and saving the world were to be found in men like himself, his family and those just like them all the way through history, from the dawn of time. But, the price of such heroism was eternal vigilance against those who could never emerge. Those who would resent the idea that for them to ever get ahead would take the wildest stroke of luck.
Alexander Inglis was also of Aldrich’s class. He wrote quite plainly about the number one purpose of school being created to serve a common economy and command society. A “command society” being one in which THEY could “command”. This controlling coalition was to be drawn from important institutional stakeholders in the future. A future that always saw them at the top of it. For Inglis, school was a referendum on creating a fixed reaction to authority. Therefore, when children grow and become employed, they accept whatever management throws at them. Money and power are the new god.
The second function of school is a diagnostic function. School determines each student’s proper role that they are to fill. This is logged mathematically on cumulative records to justify the next function, sorting. Individuals are to be trained only so far as their pre-judged likely destination in the great machine will take them. And this is to hold them from taking one step beyond this point.
The fourth function is conformity. Kids are to be made alike in order to serve the predictability of service to the market and political research. Since these fellows have all the bucks, is it no wonder rap music has become the success it has, and yet, how legitimate is rap to music at all?
Then there is the hygienic function, this not having to do with cleanliness, but with suitability. Those deemed not fit for reproduction are tagged socially in such a way that they grow old and alone and probably die that way too. This is some of the horse hockey that Darwinian ideas, adopted as a solution to Biblical truth by the school system, have brought to the social landscape. You think I am kidding? You think I am wrong? Just ask any black woman if black men secretly believe that the more beautiful females belong to another color. Men in general have been brainwashed to think so.
Lastly comes the propaedutic function, a big word that means that a small section of the children in school will be marked early on as the future managers to be trained to take over the system. These are the new guardians of the system, watching over a dumbed down public, rendered sophomoric, in order that the government and economic life can be managed with a minimum of hassle. Think about this the next time you see the mandatory health bill coming out of Washington with its 40 million pages and the President says, “Don’t worry about what it says, trust me, it’s best for all of us.” Is the comedy show “Two and a Half Men” one of your favorites? It’s supposed to be, you won’t find a better living example of social sophisms.
And there is the formula for today’s schools: adjustment, diagnosis, sorting, conformity, racial hygiene, and continuity. According to James Bryant Conant, another elitist big money man, the school transformation had been ordered by industrialists who were altering the nature of the industrial process. His book, “The Child, The Parent and The State (1949), reads like the worst of science fiction Utopian societies that go wrong. The difference is that now we can’t just turn the page. We can’t just put the book up on the shelf for later. You and I might think we are where we are in life because of free will and our own individual talents and abilities, but industrialists of the past would have something more chilling to say about that concept.
More on this in the final installment.
Hitler loved the Sci Fi Book: Metropolis
Secrets of Our
Educational Systempart 3“It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, than to see their real importance and value.” ~Author: Georg HegelLet’s say that you have a difficult time believing that all the information I have gone over isn’t just a conspiracy theory. May I introduce Mr. William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. Harris had a profound effect on all of our schools, he standardized them and also Germanized them. Here’s a few words from Mr. Harris himself:“Ninety nine students out of 100 are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident, but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”- The Philosophy of Education (1906) Harris, “Lord of American schooling”, German philosophy major, publisher of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (which trained a generation of American intellectuals in the ideas of Kant, transcendental metaphysical idealist philosopher, and Hegel, atheist existentialist equivocator. Hegel being the man who gave us scientifically age graded classrooms to replace the successful mixed age school practice.) Harris is quoted as saying: “The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop power to withdraw from the external world.”- The Philosophy of Education (1906)Alone in the CrowdNearly a hundred years ago Harris believed that self-alienation was the secret to successful industrial society. When you stand at a machine all day, or sit at a computer, chatting with all your stranger/friends on Facebook, you require an ability to withdraw from life. How else could human beings tolerate this except to having been prepared for it by Birkenhead drills? For Harris, school was successful preparation for a life of alienation. Harris was the main formative voice in America for what school was to be in a modern, scientific state. Historians commonly treat him as an old-fashioned defender of high academic standards, but this is an overly simplified analysis. As a philosophical Hegelian (AEE), he believed that children where the property of the state, a state that had a vested interest in disposing of them as it pleased. Some of these children would receive intellectual training, most would not. Any distinction that can be made between Harris and later weak-curriculum advocates (those interested in stupefication for everyone) is far less important than the substantial agreement in both camps that parents or the local tradition could no longer determine the child’s future.Not until the days of Conant, would anyone else have access to important salons of power as Harris did. Over his career he gave inspiration to the fixations of Andrew Carnegie, the steel man who not only has a finger in building the nations library system, but he also first imagined the unlimited power of making income by having the entire economy drafted to cradle-to-grave schooling. If you would like to see how American society arrived at the place where it is today, one need only read The Empire of Business (1902) or Triumphant Democracy (1886).Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” idea took his peers by storm at the same moment the great schooling re-structuring had its beginning. The concept that the wealthy owed the public a duty to control everything in the public interest was an uncanny echo of Carnegie’s boyhood experiences watching the elitists of Britain and the teachings of its State religion. The Thought Police, They Live in my HeadEvery upper class in history has specified what can be known. History is written by the victors. The establishment of a grammar and vocabulary for the common folk is a trademark of the class control by the upper class. If we unwittingly accept a concept such as “globalization”, then we have committed ourselves to a blue print for future society. It’s a future that brings with it an irresistible curriculum. Ever since the days of Aristotle, those who study such things have understood that work is the vital self-theater of knowing one’s self. Schooling in concert with the controlled workplace is the best solution to discourage imagination. Where did these “Orwellian” ideas come from? How did they become a part of the paradigm of the times for those who believed in progressiveness? Walt Whitman had this to say: “Only Hegel is fit for America”. That’s Hegel, the atheist. Hegel, the existentialist. Hegel the protean Prussian philosopher capable of being “Karl Marx” like on one hand and J. P. Morgan on the other. He believed that history itself could be controlled by the deliberate provoking of crises. (9/11 anyone?) William Torry Harris was a big believer in what Hegel had to say. Hegel was a big believer in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was a spoiled rich kid brat who never held a job but wanted to become famous by writing books on philosophy that had many words but really said nothing. Harris made it his “raison d’ etre” to make forced schooling the tool by which the ideas of Hegel could direct history and change America to fit their ideals, and then of course to infect the world.What Has a Million Legs and Can't Walk?Harris was inspired by the idea that forced schooling would create a population so dependant on leaders that schism and revolution would become things of the past. If a “World-State” could be constructed by Hegelian tactical manipulation, and school plans imposed upon it, history itself would stop. Man would be in control, well, at least those men and their cohorts would be. We’d all be a society of people just waiting around for someone to tell them what to do. I’ve heard sales training spout the same diatribe: “People are just waiting around for you to tell them what to do, and what they should do is buy our product.” The psychological tool is alienation. Turning kids away from themselves and any individual strength they may refer to, also their families, and their culture and also God himself. No countervailing force could intervene in the life of each child that made up a society and thus before people even knew what was happening, because they were innocent children, they had been directed and controlled from outside forces they have no clue even exist.If you have read my other blog post on “Neo-Think” or “Neo-Tech”, you know that this material; from which the movie series “The Matrix” was inspired promotes and “sells” the same Hegelian ideas. It’s no small coincidence that their huge atheist volumes include an entire novelized example of a school teacher who tried to enlighten her class that God doesn’t exist, and then suffered terribly at the hands of mean old Christian believers who came together to stop her. The writers of these tomes are Hegelian controlled too, and I would imagine they have little idea as to the extent of their situation. (...maybe)Big money steel man Andrew Carnegie used his wealth and influence to keep Harris the Hegelian as the U.S. Commissioner of Education for approximately sixteen years, long enough to set the stage of an era of scientific management in American schooling, or “Fordism” as the Soviets put it. (Neo-Think is a big purveyor of “Fordism”, also.) This brought about the rise of the multi layered school bureaucracy. But it would be wrong to think of Harris and his kind as merely a tool of business interest. What they were about, as Neo-Think will tell you, is the creation of a living breathing NEW FAITH to replace Christianity. This Christianity, of course being the one which was turned apostate in the 20’s-30’s, and failed them as World War II proved their utopian ideas of man’s progress as false. Was it a coincidence that this all happened at just the time when dreamers of the empire of business for an Anglo-American world state were beginning to consider worldwide schooling as the most direct route to their destination? Nope. It’s the oldest battle in the history of mankind, going all the way back to Genesis. Both movements, the centralization of the economy and the centralization of schooling were aided in a big way by the lack of effectiveness of old-line protestant denominations to combat this rising tide in a meaningful way. The “Social Gospel” ideology, financed by important industrialists, mixed God and church with standards of business, entertainment and government. Religion became something about social programs. The idea of money being able to buy your salvation is an old social control tool that anyone who knows history can recognize, but few did. The dean of Chicago’s school of divinity, Shailer Matthews, and president of the federal council of churches wrote a tome called Scientific Management of Churches (1912). He believed that American Protestants should sacrifice independence and autonomy and adopt the structure of corporations. “If this seems to make the Church something of a business,” he wrote. “Then so be it!” The corporate message was now the way to Jesus he told them. In the years before the first world war, a consortium of private foundations drawing on industrial wealth began slowly working toward a long range goal of lifelong schooling and a thoroughly rationalized global economy and society. Their plans, however, due to their being atheists, didn’t include the interference of the owner and creator of the universe, and this is where they went wrong from the get go.And Speaking of that Neo-Think Teacher ScenarioIn an interesting twist, the start up of public school mass education actually did bring about an uprising of parents of all classes. Around 1850, the main topic of conflict in the reports of school committees was between the state and the general pubic about the inception of public schooling. The old “yeoman class”, those people who were used to taking care of themselves and providing meaning for their lives, lead this charge. A little town in Cape Cod, called Barnstable, was the standard bearer for this revolt. The school committee mourned the absence of a governing or controlling body on the part of the parents and also the resulting “wild wood weeds” that their children were becoming. Parents had become apathetic, and therefore the schools were rendered inefficient.In much the same way as national health care has been forced down the throat of America’s citizens, most who lived in the mid 1800’s rejected the notion of forced schooling. Building the Education State, by Bruce Curtis (1836-1871), recounts the intense aversion to forced schooling that flooded across the national scene like a plague. Schools were burned to the ground and many teachers run out of town by torch and pitchfork mobs. If students were kept after school, parents would break them out, so to speak.In Saltfleet Township, students rebelled and locked a teacher in the classroom. They pelted him with mud and mire from the surrounding area in an unprecedented attack, and the parents showed up to provide a cheering section. Why did this all happen? Well, Miss Annabelle can tell you for sure. The parents and students were motivated by the sudden transformation of intentions of schools - a change from teaching literacy to one of molding social identity. They weren’t stupid, just uneducated. (Miss Annabelle is the atheist teacher from Neo-Think books who was “sadly victimized” for her stance against God.) The first effective American compulsory schooling in the modern era was a reform school movement which know nothing legislatures of the 1850’s put into the hopper with their radical new adoption law. Objects of reformation were announced as follows: respect for authority, self control, self discipline. The properly reformed boy acquires a “fixed” character, one that can be planned for in advance by authority in keeping with the efficiency needs of business and industry.Resistance is Futile, You Will Be AbsorbedReform meant the total transformation of character, behavior modification, a complete makeover. By 1857, a few years after stranger adoption was kicked off as a new policy by the state, foster parenting was now considered a major strategy for the reform of youth. The first step was for the state to become the de facto parent of the child. The 1850’s marked the beginning of a new era in schooling. It was believed that for the first time in history the State was now acting in the role of a parent by taking lost children under its wing and restructuring them. The State set out to prove by its efforts that delinquency was caused by deficient homes, not external conditions, and therefore industry and slumlords everywhere got off the hook. Schooling was to be the best family structure system and replace the “weaker” home life family of the child.Most don’t realize that it is no matter of chance that teachers are mostly female in our day and age. In the early 1800’s, beginning around 1840 or so, male teachers were purged from the system on purpose and replaced with female counterparts. Women were paid slightly more than men in order to shame men into seeking other avenues. This was all part of a well conceived stratagem: “Experience teaches that these boys, many of whom have never had a mother’s affection, need the softening and refining influence only a woman can give, we have, therefore replaced men with female counterparts wherever we can.”Public document for the State of Massachusetts, (1864) tells of the increasing occurrence of parents coming to school to collect their own children only to find that their children had been given away to others. This was something called the “parens patriae power”. The State was quoted as saying, “We have felt it to be our duty to decline giving them up to their parents and have placed as many of them as we could with farmers and mechanics.”I would imagine that for the small farming communities of the day, this was a horror story beyond belief. Well, of course, it would be... for anyone... anywhere.... at anytime.more on this in part 4
Secrets of Our
Educational System
part 2
In the early 1800’s, the leaders of Prussia took it upon themselves to bend schooling to the service of big business and the political state. A century later, a small group of now famous academics followed suit here in America. Symbolically led by persons such as John Dewey, perhaps the most destructive philosophical force to influence education here in America, and also an admitted atheist; if not in word then certainly in deed. And also Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall, and some power hungry others; they were all financed by major corporate and financial allies such as Morgan, Whitney, Rockefeller and “shamanist” Andrew Carnegie.Cubberley outlined the motus operandi this way: “The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided.” The term national need is, of course, dependent upon one’s view point, even if there is a large crowd of others involved. The NEA sharpened its position and our own understanding of this by specifying that “school serve as an effective use of capital”, through which our “unprecedented wealth producing power has been gained.” Looking beyond the rhetoric of those on either side of the political equation, these statements display the intended influence over schooling that the powers that be had in mind.We're better Than That Now...In cooperation with the pervasive thinking of the day, that of mankind having progressed beyond what was considered “painful truth” displayed in the last thousand years of man’s history by most of the “dark ages”, the designers and managers of this schooling project had a seemingly helpful and not harmful concept in mind, firmly entrenched within their humanist philosophy. That concept being that the home and the church existing as the primary leader of tomorrow’s children was now an anachronism. There was now suddenly, as there had not been before, a new age of mankind upon us, and this captured the dreamers and the zealots in their “progressive” hearts and minds. The entire academic community had been Darwinized by now, despite the lack of real science present within the paradigm, and academia was now committed to managing evolutionary destiny. Don’t be mislead by this, their directive had everything to do with dealing with Christianity and the Bible. It had been the main thrust of intellectuals from the 1800’s and into the 1900’s to deal with the perceived threat of competitive control that the Bible and also religion itself held for humanist organizations, organizations like the NEA.One could make the case that America and Britain have an ego problem due to their believing that the personal national history that the battle over the Bible involves in our societies is somehow superior to the rest of the world. India, Africa, China and even Russia have major world histories of which most of the subject matter is NOT a battle of social and religious control maneuvering society and re-writing history (considering the role of the Bible), but actually, that is precisely the point. The nations of Britain and America have had this battle, and have brought the world forward in the smallest increment of time and influence beyond that of any of those nations mentioned, as a few others have ever done. Just consider how long India, Russia, the Arab Nations and most of the world have remained exactly as they are for a very long time, and in the same span of time America and North Western Europe have been liquid in their changing form. Historic freedom traditions make for a frustrating place to initiate a managerial revolution, and America was nothing if not committed to the freedoms of the individual. Economic giants committed to the purpose of social engineering did much to finance the work of those who took their concept to the mainland of China. There they launched something called the “new thought tide”. John Dewey himself lived there in China for two years, his pedagogical theories absorbed by the youth of the day with little concern as to their effectiveness. This new thought was then tested on a bewildered population that had been recently stripped of its ancient form of governance. The new Russian state was also effected in the same way around 1920. The American public had little idea that such things were going on. Big city superintendents got wise however, to the fact that they were part of a global experiment.H. B. Wilson. Superintendent of the Topeka Schools:“The introduction of the American school into the orient has broken up 40 centuries of conservatism. It has given us a new China and Japan, and is working marked progress in Turkey and the Philippines. The schools are in a position to determine the lines of progress.”-Motivation of School Work (1916)
The Western inspired and financed Chinese revolution, following right behind the last attempt by the Chinese government to prevent the British government market in narcotic drugs there, made it easy for experiments in mind altering technology to be performed. Something called “The Dangan” was born at this time. It was a universal tracking procedure, used to create a lifelong personnel file exposing every student’s intimate life from cradle to grave. In China there is no privacy. Everyone who works only works with a Dagan.Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie endowments, had his grubby little fingers in the personal data collection of students in the United States as far back as the 1960’s. This information was unified with computer code for easy cross referencing. Tyler though it was the moral right of institutions to gather data on everyone and anyone.Industrialists, financiers and charitable foundations, paid for university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spending more money on forced schooling than the government itself. With huge investments of money controlling all the top positions of schooling, the public was now subject to a system of modern schooling in which they had NO participation. The motives for this are mixed, of course, but George Orwell couldn’t have said it better: “In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions, i.e. intellectual and character education, fade from our minds. Unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children.... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”- Mission statement of Rockefellers General Education Board (1906)
Back to WWII.... againWay back when, at the start of America’s involvement in World War II, millions of American men showed up at registration offices to take low level academic tests before induction. The schooling of the men who were involved in the years from ‘42-’44, happened during the ‘30’s. (Here comes the statistics, but there is a point, so please don’t let your eyes glaze over just yet.) Eighteen million men where tested during this time, and 17.2 million where judged to have the minimum competence in reading that is required for soldiering. That’s 96%! Now it is true that this was a dip in numbers from the 98% of the voluntary enlistees from over a decade before, however, the difference was negligible. 1945 saw the end of WWII and six years later America went to war in Korea. Two million men were tested for military service this time in the same fashion as those from World War II, this time however, 600,000 men were rejected. All one needed to be able to do was read at a fourth grade level in order to serve, but the literacy rate had dropped to 81% this time. The Korean war group had received its schooling in the 1940’s. These folks had more years in school, more professionally trained teachers and more scientifically selected text books than the World War II men. Interestingly, they could not read or write or count or speak or even think as well as the earlier, less schooled contingent. (Home schooling, anyone?) Vietnam involvement began in the mid 1960’s and by the time it ended in 1973, the number of non-inductable soldiers had risen to 27% of the total pool. (Down to 73%). Vietnam serving kids had been schooled in the 60’s and 70’s, they had it even better as far as the provision of education in their school lives. Over the three wars illiteracy had gone from 4% (1941) to 19% (1952) to 27% in 1970. A large chunk of that last figure had immense trouble simply running their own lives without some type of outside assistance.These military statistics don’t have any kind of “study group” looking into why things mean what they do and how they can be changed, like high school and college educational associations often do, and therefore military education testing remains a constant over time. There is no information inflation that happens with school testing due to the ever changing methods by which tests are scored in schools.Back in 1840, statistics from the state of Connecticut showed the illiteracy rate as 1 out of every 579 citizens. What was considered illiterate back then you ask? A popular novel of the day was Last of the Mohicans, by Cooper. It sold so well that comparable novels of today would have to sell more than 10 million copies to match it. Today if a novel sells 10,000 copies in a year, it is considered a hit. An uncut version of Mohicans is rich in philosophy, history, culture and manners, politics, geography and human motives and actions. It is GREAT writing. In 1818, the United States was overrun with farm folk, and also a lack of colleges and universities (in comparison to what we have today). Here’s Some Amazing Stats of Which Most People Have Been Lead to Believe OtherwiseIn 1940 the literacy rate for African-Americans stood at 80%. Despite all the disadvantages that they went through in those days, four out of five were still literate. Sixty years later, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the national Assessment of Educational Progress show that 40% of African-Americans and 17% of Whites are completely illiterate. Black illiteracy doubled in 60 years and white illiteracy quadrupled. We spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago, but 60 years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read. Go back and look at the prison statistics over the years also, spending being 33,000 dollars a year per prisoner in the United States today and each student costing about 3,500 dollars a year. Illiteracy rates among prisoners is sky high.The Bell CurveThere’s a famous best seller called The Bell Curve, that says that these statistics are the result of selective breeding. Smart people get together with smart people and so on conversely. As their kids have kids and then those kids have more kids, the differences between the groups become larger. The stats provided are quite impressive, but they are also predicated upon the information solely provided by educational institutions, with no reference at all toward the information provided by the military.The drop in illiteracy between WWII and Korea happened in a decade. Not even Darwin himself would argue that survival of the fittest unfolds in this manner. The Bell Curve writers would have you believe that African-American illiteracy is genetically programmed, and so is the violence that they experience on an everyday basis. But that’s just not fair, for much of the contradictory evidence that exists is ignored. Statistics can often say what you want them to say, but not if all points are considered honestly.Statistics of black persons from other parts of the world tell a different story than those that are revealed solely in America. Compare the current African-American illiteracy rate at 56% with that of Jamaicans at 98%, that’s higher than the white population of America at 83%. Hooked on Phonics?So what happened? If it is not a matter of genetics, then what? During the second world war, American public schools had a major change. They converted to non-phonetic ways of teaching reading. Students were no longer taught to look at words as a collection of letters and to sound them out. They began instead, to teach the “whole word” method. Meanings of words were memorized through sheer repetition. This is the method you and I know quite well from our days with Dick and Jane, Doctor Suess and the Pig who did a Jig. This was no mistake, with the destructive monster of existentialism running wild in our education system, it was easier to control the future populace by teaching them the meaning of words according to the desired results. I know, that sounds a bit impossible, but it is not that hard to spread confusion and then weaken a populace’s resistance in the future; especially if they already agree with you as to the meaning of things, due to their upbringing. Car salesman do this sort of thing all the time. They make a career of it.Referring back to the prison population, over 80 percent of them are illiterate, according to statistics from the Justice Department. Poor reading ability creates frustrated and angry citizens. The inability to keep up or even earn an honest living, creates criminals. I realize there is more to this equation, but I am endeavoring to stay on topic, not ignore outside statistics. As reading ability plummeted in America, fewer people could even read the Bible, and crime has risen proportionately. Don’t think the Bible has nothing to do with this, it is at the center of the whole matter of social control. In the 1950’s, out of wedlock births doubled, and then in the 60’s bizarre violence on a daily basis became commonplace in everyday life. But who remembers that world? Oh yes, my parents used to comment all the time about how they missed the days when you could sleep with the windows open at night. When I was seven years old, my mother used to go into the grocery store and let me wait in the car until she came back. Can you do these things today? You had better not!Let Me Read That For You...In plain and simple terms, literacy was abandoned as the primary goal by schooling, White people were in a better position than black people because they inherited a 300 year tradition of HOME SCHOOLING that taught how to read with matching spoken sound with letters. Home schooling also adjusted the student upwards from the dumbed down teaching being proliferated among early 20th century schools. African-Americans had been forbidden to learn during their time of slavery and as late as 1930 they only acquired three or four years of schooling on average. When teachers suddenly stopped teaching students how to read, an entire population was left behind. Now the black populace had to trust the school authorities to a much greater extent than their white counterparts had to.In 1952 the Army hired hundreds of psychologists to try and find out how those 600,000 high school students I talked about earlier, had FAKED illiteracy. Once the phycologists told the Army that the kids were not faking, the Army realized that something horrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. The problem had begun back in the 30’s, and the switch back to the system of teaching reading that worked should have been made at this time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. What were 5th graders reading back in 1882? Shakespeare, Thoreau, Washington, Twain, Holmes, Webster, Carroll, Jefferson, Emerson and others like them. What are they reading today? Pick up a copy of Last of the Mohicans yourself, see if you can read it. You know, it’s the book where the MASH TV character Hawkeye Pierce got his name.more to come in part 3
Secrets of Our
Educational SystemPart 1
Waiting in Vain for SupermanA 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