45. A
System Of State Propaganda: The Underground HIstory of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
A
System Of State Propaganda
Something strange is going on in schools and has been
going on for quite some time.
Whatever it is does not arise from the main American traditions. As
closely as I can track the thing
through the attitudes, practices, and stated
goals of the shadowy crew who
make a good living skulking around
educational "laboratories," think tanks, and foundations, we are experiencing an
attempt, successful so far, to reimpose the strong-state, strong social class attitudes of England and
Germany on the United States — the very attitudes we threw off in the American Revolution. And in this
counter-revolution the state
churches of England and Germany have been replaced by the secular church
of forced government
schooling.
Advertising, public relations, and
stronger forms of quasi-religious propaganda are so pervasive in our schools, even in "alternative"
schools, that independent judgment is
suffocated in mass-produced secondary experiences and market-tested
initiatives.
Lifetime Learning Systems, one of the many new corporations formed to
dig gold from our conditions of
schooling, announced to its corporate clients, "School is the ideal
time to influence attitudes, build
long-term loyalties, introduce new products, test-market, promote sampling and trial usage — and
above all — to generate immediate sales."
Arnold Toynbee, the
establishment's favorite historian in mid-twentieth-century America, said in his monumental Study
of History that the original promise of universal education had been destroyed as soon as the school laws were
passed, a destruction caused by
"the possibility of turning education to account as a means of amusement
for the masses" and a means
of "profit for the enterprising persons by whom the amusement is purveyed." This opportunistic
conversion quickly followed mass schooling's introduction when fantastic profit potential set powerful
forces in motion:
The bread of
universal education is no sooner cast upon the water than a shoal of
sharks arises from the depths and
devours the children's bread under the educator's very eyes. In Toynbee 's analysis "the
dates speak for themselves":
The edifice of universal education was, roughly speaking, completed...
in 1870; and the Yellow Press was
invented twenty years later — as soon, that is, as the first generation of children from the national schools had
acquired sufficient purchasing power — by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the
educational labour of love could be
made to yield a royal profit. But vultures attending the inception of forced
compulsion schooling attracted more
ferocious predators:
[The commercial institutions that set about at once to prey on forced
mass schooling] attracted the
attention of the rulers of modern... national states. If press lords could
make millions by providing idle
amusement for the half-educated, serious statesman could draw, not money perhaps, but power from
the same source. The modern dictators have deposed the press lords and substituted for crude and
debased private entertainment an
equally crude and debased system of state propaganda.
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