159.The General Education Board And Friends: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
General Education Board And Friends
Reading
through the papers of the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board
— an endowment rivaled in school policy
influence in the first half of the twentieth century only by Andrew Carnegie's various
philanthropies — seven curious elements force
themselves on the careful reader:
1)
There appears a clear intention to mold people through schooling. 2) There is a
clear intention to eliminate tradition
and scholarship. 3) The net effect of various projects is to create a strong class system verging on
caste. 4) There
is a clear intention to reduce mass critical intelligence while supporting infinite specialization. 5) There is clear intention to weaken parental influence. 6) There is clear intention to overthrow accepted custom. 7) There is striking congruency between the cumulative purposes of GEB projects and the Utopian precepts of the oddball religious sect, once known as Perfectionism, a secular religion aimed at making the perfection of human nature, not salvation or happiness, the purpose of existence. The agenda of philanthropy, which had so much to do with the schools we got, turns out to contain an intensely political component.
is a clear intention to reduce mass critical intelligence while supporting infinite specialization. 5) There is clear intention to weaken parental influence. 6) There is clear intention to overthrow accepted custom. 7) There is striking congruency between the cumulative purposes of GEB projects and the Utopian precepts of the oddball religious sect, once known as Perfectionism, a secular religion aimed at making the perfection of human nature, not salvation or happiness, the purpose of existence. The agenda of philanthropy, which had so much to do with the schools we got, turns out to contain an intensely political component.
This is not to deny that genuine altruistic
interests aren't also a part of philanthropy, but as Ellen Lagemann correctly reflects in her
interesting history of the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, Private Power for the Public Good,
"In advancing some interests,
foundations have inevitably not advanced others. Hence their actions must have political consequences, even when
political purposes are not avowed or even
intended. To avoid politics in dealing with foundation history is to
miss a crucial part of the
story."
Edward Berman, in Harvard Education Review, 49
(1979), puts it more brusquely. Focusing
on Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford philanthropies, he concludes that the "public rhetoric of disinterested
humanitarianism was little more than a facade" behind which the interests of the political state
(not necessarily those of society) "have been actively furthered." The rise of foundations
to key positions in educational policy
formation amounted to what Clarence Karier called "the development
of a fourth branch of government, one
that effectively represented the interests of American corporate wealth."
The corporate foundation is mainly a
twentieth-century phenomenon, growing from
twenty-one specimens of the breed in 1900 to approximately fifty
thousand by 1990. From the beginning,
foundations aimed squarely at educational policy formation. Rockefeller's General Education Board
obtained an incorporating act from Congress in
1903 and immediately began to organize schooling in the South, joining
the older Slater cotton/woolen
manufacturing interests and Peabody banking interests in a coalition in which Rockefeller picked up many of the
bills.
From the start, the GEB had a mission. A
letter from John D. Rockefeller Sr. specified
that his gifts were to be used "to promote a comprehensive
system." You might well ask what
interests the system was designed to promote, but you would be asking the
wrong question. Frederick Gates, the
Baptist minister hired to disburse Rockefeller largesse, gave a terse explanation when he said,
"The key word is system." American life was too unsystematic to suit corporate genius.
Rockefeller's foundation was about systematizing us.
In
1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of
these new foundations of Carnegie,
Rockefeller, and of other corporate families. After a year of testimony it concluded:
The domination of men in whose hands the
final control of a large part of American
industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly
extended to control the education and
social services of the nation.
Foundation
grants directly enhance the interests of the corporations sponsoring them,
it found. The conclusion of this
congressional commission:
The
giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free
of any statutory entanglements so they
can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially
increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.
Foundations automatically make friends
among banks which hold their large deposits, in
investment houses which multiply their monies, in law firms which act as
their counsels, and with the many firms,
institutions, and individuals with which they deal and whom they benefit. By careful selection of
trustees from the ranks of high editorial personnel and other media executives and proprietors,
they can assure themselves press support,
and by engaging public relations counselors can further create good
publicity. As Rene Wormser, chief counsel
for the second congressional inquiry into foundation life (1958), put it:
All
its connections and associations, plus the often sycophantic adulation of the
many institutions and individuals who
receive largesse from the foundation, give it an enormous aggregate of power and influence.
This power extends beyond its immediate
circle of associations, to those who hope to benefit from its bounty.
In 1919, using Rockefeller money, John
Dewey, by now a professor at Columbia
Teachers College, an institution heavily endowed by Rockefeller, founded
the Progressive Education Association.
Through its existence it spread the philosophy which undergirds welfare capitalism — that the bulk
of the population is biologically childlike,
requiring lifelong care.
From the start, Dewey was joined by other
Columbia professors who made no secret that
the objective of the PEA project was to use the educational system as a
tool to accomplish political goals. In
The Great Technology (1933), Harold Rugg elucidated the grand vision:
A
new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions of
individual minds and welding them into a
new social mind. Old stereotypes must be broken up and "new climates of opinion" formed in
the neighborhoods of America.
Through the schools of the world we shall
disseminate a new conception of
government — one that will embrace all the activities of men, one that
will postulate the need of scientific
control. ..in the interest of all people.
In similar fashion, the work of the Social
Science Research Council culminated in a
statement of Conclusions and Recommendations on its Carnegie
Foundation-funded operations which had
enormous and lasting impact upon education in the United States. Conclusions (1934) heralded the decline of
the old order, stating aggressively that "a new age of collectivism is emerging" which
will involve the supplanting of private property by public property" and will require
"experimentation" and "almost certainly... a larger measure of compulsory cooperation of
citizens... a corresponding enlargement of the
functions of government, and an increasing state intervention... Rights
will be altered and abridged."
(emphasis added)
Conclusions
was a call to the teachers colleges to instruct their students to
"condition" children into an
acceptance of the new order in progress. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were to be marginalized as irrelevant, even
counterproductive. "As often repeated, the
first step is to consolidate leadership around the philosophy and
purpose of education herein
expounded." (emphasis added) The difficulties in trying to understand what
such an odd locution as "compulsory
cooperation" might really mean, or even trying to determine what historic definition of
"education" would fit such a usage, were ignored. Those who wrote this report, and some of
those who read it, were the only ones who held
the Rosetta Stone to decipher it.
In
an article in Progressive Education Magazine, Professor Norman Woelfel
produced one of the many children and
grandchildren of the Conclusions report when he wrote in 1946: "It might be necessary for us to
control our press as the Russian press is controlled and as the Nazi press is
controlled....", a startling conclusion he improved upon in his book Molders of the American Mind (1933) with
this dark beauty: "In the minds of men
who think experimentally, America is conceived as having a destiny which
bursts the all too obvious limitations
of Christian religious sanctions."
The
Rockefeller-endowed Lincoln Experimental School at Columbia Teachers
College was the testing ground for
Harold Rugg's series of textbooks, which moved 5 million copies by 1940 and millions more after that.
In these books Rugg advanced this theory:
"Education must be used to condition the people to accept social
change. ...The chief function of schools
is to plan the future of society." Like many of his activities over
three vital decades on the school front,
the notions Rugg put forth in The Great Technology (1933), were eventually translated into
practice in urban centers. Rugg advocated that the major task of schools be seen as
"indoctrinating" youth, using social "science" as the "core of the school curriculum" to
bring about the desired climate of public opinion. Some attitudes Rugg advocated teaching were
reconstruction of the national economic
system to provide for central controls and an implantation of the
attitude that educators as a group were
"vastly superior to a priesthood":
Our
task is to create swiftly a compact body of minority opinion for the
scientific reconstruction of our social
order.
Money for Rugg's six textbooks came from
Rockefeller Foundation grants to the Lincoln
School. He was paid two salaries by the foundation, one as an
educational psychologist for Lincoln,
the other as a professor of education at Teachers College, in addition to salaries for secretarial and research
services. The General Education Board provided
funds (equivalent to $500,000 in year 2000 purchasing power) to produce
three books, which were then distributed
by the National Education Association.
In
1954, a second congressional investigation of foundation tampering (with
schools and American social life) was
attempted, headed by Carroll Reece of Tennessee. The Reece Commission quickly ran into a buzzsaw of
opposition from influential centers of
American corporate life. Major national newspapers hurled scathing
criticisms, which, together with
pressure from other potent political adversaries, forced the committee to disband prematurely, but not before there
were some tentative findings:
The power of the individual large
foundation is enormous. Its various forms of patronage carry with them elements of thought control.
It exerts immense influence on educator,
educational processes, and educational institutions. It is capable of
invisible coercion. It can materially
predetermine the development of social and political concepts, academic opinion, thought leadership, public
opinion.
The power to influence national policy is
amplified tremendously when foundations act
in concert. There is such a concentration of foundation power in the
United States, operating in education
and the social sciences, with a gigantic aggregate of capital and income. This Interlock has some of the
characteristics of an intellectual cartel. It operates in part through certain intermediary
organizations supported by the foundations. It has ramifications in almost every phase of
education.
It
has come to exercise very extensive practical control over social science and
education. A system has arisen which
gives enormous power to a relatively small group of individuals, having at their virtual command
huge sums in public trust funds.
The power of the large foundations and the
Interlock has so influenced press, radio,
television, and even government that it has become extremely difficult
for objective criticism of anything the
Interlock approves to get into news channels — without having first been ridiculed, slanted and
discredited.
Research in the social sciences plays a key
part in the evolution of our society. Such
research is now almost wholly in the control of professional employees
of the large foundations. Even the great
sums allotted by federal government to social science research have come into the virtual control
of this professional group.
Foundations have promoted a great excess of
empirical research as contrasted with
theoretical research, promoting an irresponsible "fact-finding
mania" leading all too frequently
to "scientism" or fake science.
Associated with the excessive support of
empirical method, the concentration of
foundation power has tended to promote "moral relativity" to
the detriment of our basic moral,
religious, and governmental principles. It has tended to promote the concept
of "social engineering," that
foundation-approved "social scientists" alone are capable of guiding us into better ways of living,
substituting synthetic principles for fundamental principles of action.
These foundations and their intermediaries
engage extensively in political activity, not in the form of direct support of candidates or
parties, but in the conscious promotion of
carefully calculated political concepts.
The
impact of foundation money upon education has been very heavy, tending to promote uniformity in approach and method,
tending to induce the educator to become an
agent for social change and a propagandist for the development of our
society in the direction of some form of
collectivism. In the international field, foundations and the Interlock, together with certain intermediary
organizations, have exercised a strong effect
upon foreign policy and upon public education in things international.
This has been accomplished by vast
propaganda, by supplying executives and advisors to government, and by controlling research through the power
of the purse. The net result has been to
promote "internationalism" in a particular sense — a form
directed toward "world
government" and a derogation of American nationalism, [emphasis
added]
Here we find ourselves confronted with the
puzzling duty of interpreting why two
separate congressional committees convened fifty years apart to study
the workings of the new foundation
institutions, one under a Democratic Congress, one under a Republican Congress, both reached essentially the same
conclusions. Both adjudged foundations a
clear and present danger to the traditional liberties of American
national life. Both pointed to the use
of foundation influence to create the blueprint of American school life. Both saw that a class system in America had
emerged and was being supported by the
class system in schooling. Both called for drastic action. And both were
totally ignored.
Actually the word "ignored" doesn't
begin to do justice to what really occurred. These congressional investigations — like Sir
Walter Scott's difficult to obtain Life of Napoleon Bonaparte — have not only vanished from
public imagination, they aren't even alluded to
in press discussions of schooling. Exactly as if they had never
happened. This would be more
understandable if their specific philanthropies were dull, pedestrian
giveaways designed to distribute
largesse and to build up good feeling toward the benevolence of colossal wealth and power. But the reality is
strikingly different — corporate wealth
through the foundations has advanced importantly the dumbing down of
America's schools, the creation of a
scientific class system, and important attacks on family integrity, national identification, religious
rights, and national sovereignty.
"School is the cheapest police,"
Horace Mann once said. It was a sentiment publicly spoken by every name — Sears, Pierce, Harris,
Stowe, Lancaster, and the rest — prominently
involved in creating universal school systems for the coal powers. One has only to browse Merle Curti's The Social Ideas
of American Educators to discover that the
greatest social idea educators had to sell the rich, and which they lost
no opportunity to sell, was the police
function of schooling. Although a pedagogical turn in the Quaker imagination is the reason schools came to
look like penitentiaries, Quakers are not the
principal reason they came to function like maximum security institutions.
The reason they came to exist at all was
to stabilize the social order and train the ranks. In a scientific, industrialized, corporate age,
"stability" was much more exquisitely defined than ordinary people could imagine. To realize
the new stability, the best breeding stock
had to be drawn up into reservations, likewise the ordinary. "The
Daughters of the Barons of
Runnemede" is only a small piece of the puzzle; many more efficient and
subtler quarantines were essayed.
Perhaps subtlest of all was the welfare
state, a welfare program for everybody, including the lowest, in which the political state
bestowed alms the way the corporate Church used
to do. Although the most visible beneficiaries of this gigantic project
were those groups increasingly referred
to as "masses," the poor were actually people most poorly served
by this latter-day Hindu creation of
Fabian socialism and the corporate brain trust.
Subsidizing the excluded of the new society and economy was, it was believed,
a humanitarian way to calm these
troubled waters until the Darwinian storm had run its inevitable course into a new, genetically
arranged Utopia.
In
a report issued in 1982 and widely publicized in important journals, the
connection between corporate capitalism
and the welfare state becomes manifest in a public document bearing the name Alan Pifer, then
president of the Carnegie Corporation.
Apparently fearing that the Reagan administration would alter the design
of the Fabian project beyond its ability
to survive, Pifer warned of:
A
mounting possibility of severe social unrest, and the consequent development
among the upper classes and the business
community of sufficient fear for the survival of our capitalist economic system to bring about an
abrupt change of course. Just as we built the
general welfare state. ..and expanded it in the 1960s as a safety valve
for the easing of social tension, so
will we do it again in the 1980s. Any other path is too risky.
In
the report quoted from, new conceptions of pedagogy were introduced which we
now see struggling to be born: national
certification for schoolteachers, bypassing the last vestige of local control in states, cities,
and villages; a hierarchy of teacher positions; a project to bring to an end the hierarchy of
school administrators — now adjudged largely
an expenditure counter-productive to good social order, a failed
experiment. In the new form, lead
teachers manage schools after the British fashion and hire business administrators. The first expressions of this
new initiative included the "mini-school" movement, now evolved into the charter school
movement. Without denying these ideas a
measure of merit, if you understand that their source is the same
institutional consciousness which once
sent river ironclads full of armed detectives to break the steel union at Homestead, machine-gunned strikers
at River Rouge, and burned to death over a
dozen women and children in Ludlow, those memories should inspire emotions
more pensive than starry-eyed
enthusiasm.
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