bnc wrote:
The public school system was intended to create a populace competent enough to hold down a job and pay taxes, but not intelligent imaginative, inquisitive, or independent enough to question the system (the Prussian system, which our public schools were directly developed from). Also, the school system was intended to "Protestantize" the large number of Catholic children who immigrated here or were born of recent immigrants during the 1800s. In fact, in the northeast there was a time were being a Protestant was required in order to be a teacher. Recently, the apparent shift in school priorities from learning to social engineering isn't really a shift at all; it is just the same machinery being used in the same way but for somewhat different ends.
Reminds me of something from Albert Jay Nock. I wanted to quote his remark that the purpose of public education was to teach people just enough to read advertisements in the newspaper and follow instructions at work, but can't find the reference.
Here are a few quotes that lay out the situation, first, from some of those influential in the US public education system:
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." Woodrow Wilson in a speech to businessmen, and from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909
"In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way." John D. Rockefeller General Education Board (1906)
"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." Elwood Cubberly, future Dean of education at Stanford, in his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College
"Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand." Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education
"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role." William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889
"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent." John Dewey, American educator
"Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants' of a single family rather than the "needs' of society. " Association of California School Administrators
Now, from those who understand the system:
"That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else." H. L. Mencken
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing." John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt (New York: Random House, 1939), pp. 1033–34
"For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life — to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this — a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one." Herbert Spencer, 1850
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." Aldous Huxley, forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition