220. The Culture Of Big Business: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Culture Of Big Business
Between 1890 and 1930, the culture of big business took
over the culture of public
education, establishing scientific management and corporate style as the
predominant imperative. Although
linkages between business and education elites
were complex, the goals and values of business
established the rules by which both played. And while schools proved unwilling to dare influencing business, the
reverse was far from true.
Businessmen dominated the political
movement in schools to abolish the system of local control through wards nearly universal at the end of the
nineteenth century. Along with professionals,
businessmen served disproportionately on new streamlined school boards. Business language permeated the
corridors of school management. Businessmen and their wives were the political force behind Froebelian
kindergartens which removed young
children from family influence, and they were behind vocational schooling,
which left no romantic dreams for
ordinary children.
The National Association of
Manufacturers, the National Civic Foundation, the Ad Council, the Business Roundtable, and other
business-relevant private associations
publicized the need for school change, told the public how children
should act, what they should
honor, what behaviors would be rewarded. A steadily lengthening school year
led to an extended career ladder,
specialization, and a credential-oriented society. School people were assigned the role of
bringing about a conflict-free world by teaching indirectly that the preemption of work by corporations and
professions (later by government)
was right, proper, and "scientific."
The Irish historian and philosopher
W.E.H. Lecky, in his history of European rationalism, {Rationalism in Europe), predicted that temptations posed by
a forced assemblage of children
would prove in the end too strong to resist, powerful interests would
inevitably manipulate schooling to
serve their own agendas:
The opinions of
ninety-nine persons out of every hundred are formed mainly by education, and a Government can decide
in whose hands the national education is to be placed, what subjects it is to comprise, and what principles
it is to convey.
"If all paths of
honor and wealth" are monopolized, said Lecky, the powerful motive of self-interest will be enough to bring
most students to heel:
The simple fact of
annexing certain penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite
opinions, while it will undoubtedly make many hypocrites, will also make many converts. — Rationalism in Europe (1883)
Once a system of reward and punishment is set up and
broadcast by frequent public
examples of its power in action, the nature of argument is almost
predetermined, although subjects
of such a regimen may be "entirely unconscious of the source of their
opinions." Once the doctrine
of "exclusive salvation" for the cooperative (and damnation for
the critic) is clearly
established, rulers will never be seriously questioned, thought Lecky.
By 1899 William H. Baldwin, president of
the Long Island Railroad, descendant of the man for whom the Baldwin locomotive was named, demonstrated
how well the school lesson had
been learned and how forcible could be its application. Baldwin was a member of the Peabody/
Rockefeller/Carnegie "Southern Education Board," self- appointed to bring the benefits of
Northern schooling to the war-ravaged South. Although in the beginning of its career freed blacks were treated to
the same type of rigorous,
classically oriented schooling we would call "liberal" today —
meaning one designed to liberate
the judgment from prejudice and ignorance — as time passed it began to
seem impolitic to so treat blacks
as equals. It alienated important elements in the Southern white community who were more important
fish for the Northern school net to land. Thus a decision was made to jettison equality as a goal and make
labor-value the most important
determinant of which way each group would be schooled.
There is perhaps no
more naked statement of the political uses of schooling on record than Baldwin's official word about
"The Present Problem of Negro Education," delivered before the Capon Springs Conference on
Southern Education (1899):
Know that it is a crime for any teacher,
white or black, to educate the Negro for positions which are not open to him.
Important liberals
like Edgar Gardner Murphy (whose descendants are still active in American schooling) and other leading
progressive humanists hastened to agree with Baldwin. In David Tyack's analysis, these men sought to
develop an applied technology of school decision-making similar to
technologies of production and management then transforming the bureaucratized corporate economy. This
technology reflected evolutionary
presuppositions, rooting its values in supposed evolutionary laws. Ideals could be hierarchically arranged and
pinned down on a scale of races, classes, sexes, and historical stages grounded allegedly in nature itself.
According to James Russell, for thirty
years dean of Teachers College, the purpose was to equip teachers and administrators for "missionary
service." What we are looking to
discover through building this new institution, said Russell, is
"the modern significance of
the old doctrines of original sin and salvation by grace — to bring forth works
meet for repentance."
'(emphasis added)
Teachers College,
Stanford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Michigan, Yale, etc., were the West Points of the Educational
Trust, men like Ellwood P. Cubberley its
generals. Cubberley, also writer and editor of Houghton Mifflin's
education series, the largest and
most successful set of professional books published for school people in
the first half of the twentieth
century, legitimized by his influence the new reforms of vocational guidance, "junior"
high schools, hygiene programs, and more. The book series gave him great power to shape the new
science of education, making him a fortune. Its effects on school management were vast.
Cubberley wrote, "One bright child
may easily be worth more to national life than thousands of low mentality." He taught influential
schoolmen that genetic endowment
explained success and failure in the social order and taught thousands
of politicians the same lesson as
well. Cubberley was one of a small band of leaders who invented professional school administration as
an occupation, and professional school
administration created the tracking system so that different grades of
evolutionary raw material could be
processed in different ways — one of many innovations science and business efficiency seemed to demand.
In doing so, a strong class system possessing nearly the strength of a caste system was created, with
important political implications for
every American child.
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