36. Change Agents Infiltrate: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Change Agents Infiltrate 

By 1971, the U.S. Office of Education was deeply committed to accessing private lives 
and thoughts of children. In that year it granted contracts for seven volumes of "change- 
agent" studies to the RAND Corporation. Change-agent training was launched with 
federal funding under the Education Professions Development Act. In time the 
fascinating volume Change Agents Guide to Innovation in Education appeared, following 
which grants were awarded to teacher training programs for the development of change 
agents. Six more RAND manuals were subsequently distributed, enlarging the scope of 
change agentry. 

In 1973, Catherine Barrett, president of the National Education Association, said, 
"Dramatic changes in the way we raise our children are indicated, particularly in terms of 
schooling. ..we will be agents of change." By 1989, a senior director of the Mid-Continent 
Regional Educational Laboratory told the fifty governors of American states that year 



assembled to discuss government schooling. "What we're into is total restructuring of 
society." It doesn't get much plainer than that. There is no record of a single governor 
objecting. 

Two years later Gerald Bracey, a leading professional promoter of government schooling, 
wrote in his annual report to clients: "We must continue to produce an uneducated social 
class." Overproduction was the bogey of industrialists in 1900; a century later 
underproduction made possible by dumbed-down schooling had still to keep that disease 
in check. 

Bionomics