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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