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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