36. Change Agents Infiltrate: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Change
Agents Infiltrate
By 1973, 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
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