I have been reading John Taylor Gatto’s “The Underground History of American Education” in an effort to further understand the direction our society appears to be headed.The book is available on the internet, free, on his web site. This book is so gripping, and so few parents I know have even heard of John, that I decided to summarize, and add my thoughts as well, as I plow through the massive undertaking that is his book.
My take on Chapter One: The Way It Used To Be:
America was built from the bottom up by men who were peasants and did not fit in from whence they came. Early American school teachers were not very well-educated themselves but demanded each student take responsibility for themselves. With the decline of Calvinism, failure was recognized as a result of deficient character and could be remedied only from the inside of a person through courage, determination, honesty, and hard work. As a consequence, children were welcomed into apprenticeships and learned as they went along. Breaking down the social class barriers was the key to a highly-educated population in early America. Robert Owen and John Dewey attempted progressive schools with no discipline, but these failed. In the free-man mind set of Americans of pre-1900, learning was your own personal responsibility and did not require a school.
Free men were not the pedagogues of ancient Rome. Athens was a place of educated free-men, all capable of doing any job required of the society, and yet there were no schools. The schools were in Sparta where the family was used only as a convenience to the state, which appeared at it’s face a democracy – built with an executive branch containing two legislative bodies, likely modeled on the democracies of the Sumerians. But Sparta was unique for its time in that it was controlled in fact by a small group of elite “Euphors” who conducted the state policy. This evil system was the “democracy” modeled by Machiavelli (1532) and Hobbes (in 1651) as well as by the military state of Prussia – which is responsibly for the structure and intent of all modern western schooling, as well as eugenics.
After Rome dissolved in the sixth century, Catholic churches began teaching in informal settings and these sessions led to a Catholic education focused on the expansion of the mind. Social control reared its head again in the eighteenth century in France through a re-writing of the Platonic ideal of a comprehensive social control through schooling. Jean Jacques Rousseau helped to develop this concept in France as “philosophes” (a group promoting mass schooling). In fact progression through the Enlightenment was a series of stages each further leveling and collectivizing mankind into a colonial organism.
Forced schooling was irresistible to the French in the 1790’s, using utopian worlds as their targeted goal. Utopian schooling is never about learning but instead intent on transforming human nature to become less aggressive and more peaceful (or Oriental, as the Europeans thought). This in itself was a fallacy as the East was not a peaceful society by any means, just a society controlled by a cycle of avoidance followed by aggression.
The encroachment of utopian ideals snuck into early America just as it had in France. By 1784, Boston businessmen overthrew the democratic town meeting to reinstall social order in their minds. Unitarians (liberal Christian sects) and Universalists worked to give society the appearance of democracy while controlling the intellect of its membership. By 1825, America’s larger cities were filled with Lancaster Schools. The Lancaster School was actually a Hindu invention borrowed by the British, and even the Anglican church, for the express purpose of retarding intellectual development in order to maintain a caste system. In the west, these schools were used to occupy and control the poor. This is why elite were willing to pay a tax to maintain the policy of free schooling for the poor children. It was a very effective way of controlling the practice of begging on the city streets. Lancaster Schools and their proponents evolved into Whiggery – a neo-Anglican governing idea promoted and developed by Horace Mann and others before the Whigs mutated into Democrats and Republicans. In fact, escape from Whiggery was one of the strong driving forces for westward migration in 1800’s America.
The founders of America were young, highly-educated, self-taught men who lived in a country with literacy rates that were nearly 100% and children grew up with a set of morals that hinged on self-sufficiency and responsibility for their own fate. Most educated men and women were their own teachers, with their parents, their society, and their religion demanding only one thing of them: sound judgment. Sadly all this has been eroded by progressives and today we in America are back to Lancaster Schools and their caste-controlling Hindu roots. Plato and the French enlightenment are back in the form of liberals and progressives to destroy America’s great experiment by creating a society monitored and controlled from cradle to grave by craven, evil men under the guise of good.
