80-81 The Plan Advances:Children's Court: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Plan Advances 

In the space of one lifetime, the United States was converted from a place where human 
variety had ample room to display itself into a laboratory of virtual orthodoxy — a process 
concealed by dogged survival of the mythology of independence. The cowboy and 
frontiersman continued as film icons until 1970, living ghosts of some collective national 
inspiration. But both died, in fact, shortly after Italian immigration began in earnest in the 
1880s. 

The crucial years for the hardening of our national arteries were those between 1 845 and 
1920, the immigration years. Something subtler than Anglo-Saxon revulsion against Celt, 
Latin, and Slav was at work in that period. A Utopian ideal of society as an orderly social 
hive had been transmitting itself continuously through small elite bodies of men since the 
time of classical Egypt. New England had been the New World proving ground of this 



idea. Now New England was to take advantage of the chaotic period of heavy 
immigration and the opportunity of mass regimentation afforded by civil war to establish 
this form of total State. 

The plan advanced in barely perceptible stages, each new increment making it more 
difficult for individual families to follow an independent plan. Ultimately, in the second 
and third decades of the twentieth century — decades which gave us Adolf Hitler, 
Prohibition, mass IQ-testing of an entire student population, junior high schools, raccoon 
coats, Rudy Vallee, and worldwide depression — room to breathe in a personal, peculiar, 
idiosyncratic way just ran out. It was the end of Thomas Jefferson's dream, the final 
betrayal of democratic promise in the last new world on the planet. 

When you consider how bizarre and implausible much of the conformist machinery put 
in place during this critical period really was — and especially how long and successfully 
all sorts of people resisted this kind of encroachment on fundamental liberty — it becomes 
clear that to understand things like universal medical policing, income tax, national 
banking systems, secret police, standing armies and navies which demand constant 
tribute, universal military training, standardized national examinations, the cult of 
intelligence tests, compulsory education, the organization of colleges around a scheme 
called "research" (which makes teaching an unpleasant inconvenience), the secularization 
of religion, the rise of specialist professional monopolies sanctioned by their state, and all 
the rest of the "progress" made in these seventy- five years, you have to find reasons to 
explain them. Why then? Who made it happen? What was the point? 

Children's Court 

The very clear connection between all the zones of the emerging American hive-world 
are a sign of some organized intelligence at work, with some organized end in mind. 1 For 
those who can read the language of conventional symbolism, the philosophical way being 
followed represents the extraordinary vision of the learned company of deists who 
created the country coupled to the Puritan vision as it had been derived from Anglo- 
Normans — descendants of the Scandinavian/French conquerors of England — those 
families who became the principal settlers of New England. It is careless to say that bad 
luck, accident, or blind historical forces caused the trap to spring shut on us. 

Of the various ways an ancient ideal of perfected society can be given life through 
institutions under control of the State, one is so startling and has been realized so closely 
it bears some scrutiny. As the hive-world was being hammered out in the United States 
after 1850, the notion of unique, irreplaceable natural families came increasingly to be 
seen as the major roadblock in the path of social progress toward the extraordinary vision 
of a machine-driven, Utopian paradise. To realize such a theory in practice, families must 
be on trial with each other constantly and with their neighbors, just as a politician is ever 
on trial. Families should be conditional entities, not categories absolute. This had been 
the operational standard of the Puritan settlement in America, though hardly of any other 
region (unless the Quaker/Pietist sections of the middle colonies who "shunned" outcasts, 
even if family). If, after testing, an original mother and father did not suit, then children 



should be removed and transferred to parent-surrogates. This is the basis of foster care 
and adoption. 

By 1900, through the agency of the radical new Denver/Chicago "Children's Court," one 
important machine to perform this transfer function was in place. Children need not be 
wasted building blocks for the State's purpose just because their natural parents had been. 
The lesson the new machine-economy was teaching reinforced the spiritual vision of 
Utopians: perfect interchangeability, perfect subordination. People could learn to emulate 
machines; and by progressive approximations they might ultimately become as reliable as 
machinery. In a similar vein, men and women were encouraged through easy divorce 
laws and ever-increasing accessibility to sexually explicit imagery, to delay choosing 
marriage mates. With the mystery removed, the pressure to mate went with it, it was 
supposed. The new system encouraged "trials," trying on different people until a good fit 
was found. 



The paradox that a teenage female in the year 2000 requires parental permission to be given Tylenol or have ears pierced but not, in some 
states, to have an abortion suggests the magnitude of the control imposed and atleast a portion of its purpose. 

Mr. Young's Head Was Pounded To Jelly 

T