80. The Plan Advances: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archve.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