63. Munsterberg And His Disciples: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

63. Munsterberg And His Disciples: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
CHAPTER FIVE   
 True Believers And The Unspeakable Chautauqua 

      A very small group of young psychologists around the turn of the century were able to  create and market a system for measuring human talent that has permeated American  institutions of learning and influenced such fundamental social concepts as democracy,  sanity, justice, welfare, reproductive
rights, and economic progress. In creating, owning,  and advertising this social technology the testers created themselves as professionals.  

— Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the  History of Intelligence Testing 

      I have undertaken to get at the facts from the point of view of the business men — citizens  of the community who, after all, pay the bills and, therefore, have a right to say what they  shall have in their schools. 
      — Charles H. Thurber, from an address at the Annual Meeting of the National Education  Association, July 9, 1897 

63. Munsterberg And His Disciples  
     The self-interested have had a large hand conceiving and executing twentieth-century  schooling, yet once that's said, self-interest isn't enough to explain the zeal in confining  other people's children in rooms, locked away from the world, the infernal zeal which,  like a toadstool, keeps forcing its way to the surface in this business. Among millions of  normal human beings professionally associated with the school adventure, a small band  of true believers has been loose from the beginning, brothers and sisters whose eyes  gleam in the dark, whose heartbeat quickens at the prospect of acting as "change agents"  for a purpose beyond self-interest. 
      For true believers, children are test animals. The strongest belt in the engine of schooling  is the strand of true belief. True believers can be located by their rhetoric; it reveals a  scale of philosophical imagination which involves plans for you and me. All you need  know about Mr. Laszlo, whose timeless faith song is cited in the front of this book (xiii),  is that the "we" he joins himself to, the "masters who manipulate," doesn't really include  the rest of us, except as objects of the exercise. Here is a true believer in full gallop.  School history is crammed with wild-eyed orators, lurking just behind the lit stage. Like  Hugo Munsterberg.  
     Munsterberg was one of the people who was in on the birth of twentieth-century mass  schooling. In 1892, a recent emigre to America from Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory of  physiological psychology at Leipzig, in Saxony, he was a Harvard Professor of  Psychology. Munsterberg taught his students to look at schools as social laboratories  suitable for testing theory, not as aggregates of young people pursuing their own  purposes. The St. Louis Exposition of 1904 showcased his ideas for academicians all     over the world, and the popular press made his notions familiar to upper middle classes