222. The Planetary Management Corporation: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Planetary Management Corporation 

Who governs? To what degree may rule be exercised arbitrarily? These are political 
questions of forced schooling. In a free society contention is liberty's friend. Conflict 
extended indefinitely is our personal guarantee there will always be a way out of being 
suffocated by the will of another. 



In a free society, the power situation must always be kept fluid, even though a high price 
in inefficiency, instability, and frustration is paid by the ruling group or coalition for that 
fluidity. As long as liberty is cherished beyond efficiency, the price will be paid. It is only 
a short leap to deduce the political crime of mass forced schooling: it amputates the 
argument and replaces it with engineered consensus. Once such a peace-making 
apparatus is built, its interior drive to self-preservation and growth will organize its line 
and staff personnel around a single-minded logic of orthodoxy. But that orthodoxy will 
always be committed to the service of the economy, not to the interests of its nominal 
clientele. 

The New York Times of January 18, 2001, had this to say on Page A22 about the 
economic politics of schooling: "Education aid is distributed through at least 55 different 
formulas so technical only a select few can pretend to understand them." What explains 
this: Accident? Stupidity? No, neither: "The school formulas are incomprehensible in 
order to disguise how the system really works" — an explanation attributed by the Times 
to an "influential" politician, otherwise unidentified. 

As schooling encroaches further and further into family and personal life, monopolizing 
the development of mind and character, children become human resources at the disposal 
of whatever form of governance is dominant at the moment. That confers a huge 
advantage on the leadership of the moment, allowing it to successfully reproduce itself, 
foreclosing the strength of its competitors. Schooling becomes what is the ultimate form 
of subsidy for corporate and status welfare, a destroyer of the free market. 

Without opposition made possible by the education (rather than schooling) of children, a 
Planetary Management Corporation is our certain destiny — and just as certain to be 
followed sometime after its birth by a dissolution into chaos, the fate of all empires. Our 
school tragedies are an early warning of something inherent in the laws of human 
thermodynamics. Chaos increases steadily in closed systems cut off from the outside, 
overorganization precipitates disorganization. Where the developing consciousness of 
children cries out for jazz, what it gets instead is a scale exercise. 



Chapter Eighteen