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

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