220. The Culture Of Big Business: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Culture Of Big Business 

Between 1890 and 1930, the culture of big business took over the culture of public 
education, establishing scientific management and corporate style as the predominant 
imperative. Although linkages between business and education elites were complex, the 
goals and values of business established the rules by which both played. And while 
schools proved unwilling to dare influencing business, the reverse was far from true. 

Businessmen dominated the political movement in schools to abolish the system of local 
control through wards nearly universal at the end of the nineteenth century. Along with 
professionals, businessmen served disproportionately on new streamlined school boards. 
Business language permeated the corridors of school management. Businessmen and 
their wives were the political force behind Froebelian kindergartens which removed 
young children from family influence, and they were behind vocational schooling, which 
left no romantic dreams for ordinary children. 

The National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Foundation, the Ad 
Council, the Business Roundtable, and other business-relevant private associations 
publicized the need for school change, told the public how children should act, what they 
should honor, what behaviors would be rewarded. A steadily lengthening school year led 
to an extended career ladder, specialization, and a credential-oriented society. School 
people were assigned the role of bringing about a conflict-free world by teaching 
indirectly that the preemption of work by corporations and professions (later by 
government) was right, proper, and "scientific." 



The Irish historian and philosopher W.E.H. Lecky, in his history of European rationalism, 
{Rationalism in Europe), predicted that temptations posed by a forced assemblage of 
children would prove in the end too strong to resist, powerful interests would inevitably 
manipulate schooling to serve their own agendas: 

The opinions of ninety-nine persons out of every hundred are formed mainly by 
education, and a Government can decide in whose hands the national education is to be 
placed, what subjects it is to comprise, and what principles it is to convey. 

"If all paths of honor and wealth" are monopolized, said Lecky, the powerful motive of 
self-interest will be enough to bring most students to heel: 

The simple fact of annexing certain penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and 
rewards to the profession of opposite opinions, while it will undoubtedly make many 
hypocrites, will also make many converts. 
— Rationalism in Europe (1883) 

Once a system of reward and punishment is set up and broadcast by frequent public 
examples of its power in action, the nature of argument is almost predetermined, although 
subjects of such a regimen may be "entirely unconscious of the source of their opinions." 
Once the doctrine of "exclusive salvation" for the cooperative (and damnation for the 
critic) is clearly established, rulers will never be seriously questioned, thought Lecky. 

By 1899 William H. Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, descendant of the 
man for whom the Baldwin locomotive was named, demonstrated how well the school 
lesson had been learned and how forcible could be its application. Baldwin was a 
member of the Peabody/ Rockefeller/Carnegie "Southern Education Board," self- 
appointed to bring the benefits of Northern schooling to the war-ravaged South. Although 
in the beginning of its career freed blacks were treated to the same type of rigorous, 
classically oriented schooling we would call "liberal" today — meaning one designed to 
liberate the judgment from prejudice and ignorance — as time passed it began to seem 
impolitic to so treat blacks as equals. It alienated important elements in the Southern 
white community who were more important fish for the Northern school net to land. Thus 
a decision was made to jettison equality as a goal and make labor-value the most 
important determinant of which way each group would be schooled. 

There is perhaps no more naked statement of the political uses of schooling on record 
than Baldwin's official word about "The Present Problem of Negro Education," delivered 
before the Capon Springs Conference on Southern Education (1899): 

Know that it is a crime for any teacher, white or black, to educate the Negro for positions 
which are not open to him. 

Important liberals like Edgar Gardner Murphy (whose descendants are still active in 
American schooling) and other leading progressive humanists hastened to agree with 
Baldwin. In David Tyack's analysis, these men sought to develop an applied technology 



of school decision-making similar to technologies of production and management then 
transforming the bureaucratized corporate economy. This technology reflected 
evolutionary presuppositions, rooting its values in supposed evolutionary laws. Ideals 
could be hierarchically arranged and pinned down on a scale of races, classes, sexes, and 
historical stages grounded allegedly in nature itself. 

According to James Russell, for thirty years dean of Teachers College, the purpose was to 
equip teachers and administrators for "missionary service." What we are looking to 
discover through building this new institution, said Russell, is "the modern significance 
of the old doctrines of original sin and salvation by grace — to bring forth works meet for 
repentance." '(emphasis added) 

Teachers College, Stanford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Michigan, Yale, etc., 
were the West Points of the Educational Trust, men like Ellwood P. Cubberley its 
generals. Cubberley, also writer and editor of Houghton Mifflin's education series, the 
largest and most successful set of professional books published for school people in the 
first half of the twentieth century, legitimized by his influence the new reforms of 
vocational guidance, "junior" high schools, hygiene programs, and more. The book series 
gave him great power to shape the new science of education, making him a fortune. Its 
effects on school management were vast. 

Cubberley wrote, "One bright child may easily be worth more to national life than 
thousands of low mentality." He taught influential schoolmen that genetic endowment 
explained success and failure in the social order and taught thousands of politicians the 
same lesson as well. Cubberley was one of a small band of leaders who invented 
professional school administration as an occupation, and professional school 
administration created the tracking system so that different grades of evolutionary raw 
material could be processed in different ways — one of many innovations science and 
business efficiency seemed to demand. In doing so, a strong class system possessing 
nearly the strength of a caste system was created, with important political implications for 
every American child. 

Four Kinds Of Classroom