28. A Change In The Governing Mind: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
CHAPTER
TWO An Angry Look at Modern
Schooling Today 's corporate sponsors
want to see their money used in ways to line up with business objectives.... This is a young generation of
corporate sponsors and they have discovered
the advantages of building long-term relationships with educational
institutions. — Suzanne Cornforth of
Paschall & Associates, public relations consultants. As quoted in The New York Times, July 15, 1998
A
Change In The Governing Mind
Sometimes the best hiding place is right
in the open. It took seven years of reading and
reflection for me to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young
by force was a creation of the four
great coal powers of the nineteenth century. It was under my nose, of course, but for years I avoided seeing what
was there because no one else seemed to
notice. Forced schooling arose from the new logic of the Industrial Age
— the logic imposed on flesh and blood
by fossil fuel and high-speed machinery.
This simple reality is hidden from view by
early philosophical and theological
anticipations of mass schooling in various writings about social order
and human nature. But you shouldn't be
fooled any more than Charles Francis Adams was fooled when he observed in 1880 that what was being cooked
up for kids unlucky enough to be snared by
the newly proposed institutional school net combined characteristics of
the cotton mill and the railroad with
those of a state prison.
After the Civil War, Utopian speculative
analysis regarding isolation of children in
custodial compounds where they could be subjected to deliberate molding
routines, began to be discussed
seriously by the Northeastern policy
