212. A Quality Education: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

212. A Quality Education: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

A Quality Education 

   The mantra of "a quality education," was an invention of the real-estate industry in the  first decade after the end of WWII, or at least that business

was the chief distributor of  the deceptively destructive notion. The cry of quality education became the spearhead of  a bold and complex scheme to increase the supply of real-estate product-by dissolving  the small-farm belts which surrounded cities in those days and converting the farm fields  into housing plots. The U.S. government was a major partner in this undertaking, which  serves as a useful illustration of how byzantine a reality schooling at the hands of a  political state must always be. Government had its own motives, as you'll soon see.  

      The partnership came about in this fashion. Long before the war's end-during the Teddy  Rossevelt administration, in fact, as closely as I can figure-a seldom spoken of policy  idea had taken root which directed the U.S. government to create a centralization of the  national food supply as a tool of efficient political management. Since Prussia's social-  class system was not available to organize this process, it would be done through  successively corporatizing American agriculture, with strong government assistance  through legislation, subsidies, selective purchasing, and indirect advocacy. The small  farm family and its children were too formidable an obstacle to efficient governance to be  allowed to continue in their independent ways unchecked. 

      The mechanism hit upon to terminate wholesale the little farms was a series of  fantastically accelerated school tax increases whose collective effort over time could not  be borne by farmers operating only slightly above the subsistence level. Popular support  for these taxes among non-farmers was achieved by a long-term propaganda campaign  which radically redefined good education to include football stadiums with lights, band  uniforms, huge cafeterias, bus systems large enough to meet the needs of a small city  though used only a couple hours a day, costly standardized testing, and many similar  additions which once would surely have appalled ordinary citizens with both their high  cost-and bizarre irrelevance. 

      Yet, in an Alice-in-Wonderland twist, high cost was the very point: without high cost  there would be no need for new taxes; without taxes no leverage to force small farms  onto the housing market, and more importantly, no augmentation of institutional  schooling's ability to serve the purposes of social engineering.   

      Between 1945 and 1965 school taxes had risen only 12 percent nationally, on average,  but over the next ten years they more than doubled, and between 1977 and 1993 they  tripled from this new high-altitude base! This six-fold increase over three short decades  broke small farmers in large numbers, dumping more than a million small farms onto the  housing market. Although completely unheard of in the well-mannered and well-  controlled journalistic "debate" about public schooling, this adventure in commanding a  society and an economy was a decisive turning point in the strange career of post-WWII  public education. For years it was unheard of to think of a school board without at least  one member representing real estate interests, usually the loudest voice demanding  "quality education". 

      The rootless people who accumulated on this once productive farmland offered little  resistance to further centralization of school governance, although the farmers they  replaced surely would have. As commuters, what interested them most was that schools  become places of feeding, recreation, socialization, health care, and life counseling for  their children. It was the Prussian formula reborn in late twentieth century America, a  formula which allowed displacement of social management into the right hands. Thus is  institutional schooling always more than it seems.