36. Change Agents Infiltrate: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

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

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 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