17 The Underground History of American Education: The Platonic Ideal by John Taylor Gatto

The Platonic Ideal
The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges.
Intense development of the Platonic ideal of comprehensive social control through schooling suddenly reappeared twothousand years later in eighteenth-century France at the hands of a philosophical cultus known to history as philosophes, enthusiastic promoters of the bizarre idea of mass forced schooling. Most prominent among them, a self-willed man named Jean Jacques Rousseau. To add piquancy to Rousseau’s thought, you need to know that when they were born, he chose to give away his own five offspring to strangers. If any man captures the essence of enlightenment transformation, it is Rousseau.

The Enlightenment "project" was conceived as a series of stages, each further leveling mankind, collectivizing ordinary humanity into a colonial organism like a volvox. The penetration of this idea, at least on the periphery of our own Founders’ consciousness, is captured in the powerful mystery image of the pyramid on the obverse of our Great Seal.⁵ Of course, this was only one of many colors to emerge with the new nation, and it was not the most important, an inference that can be drawn from the fact that the pyramid was kept from public notice until 1935. Then it appeared suddenly on the back of our one dollar bill, signaling a profound shift in political management.

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5The eye-topped pyramid. This notion is taken specifically from religious and philosophical prescriptions of Hidnuism, Buddism, and Confucianism which occupied a prominent position in English thought during the last half of the eighteenth century, perhaps because major fortunes were being built through contact with the East. The mentality of oriental rulers fascinated the thrones of Europe. For instance, a Chinese court minister had propounded a strategy known as "The Policy of Keeping People Dumb." Such thinking inspired similar notions in the West.