john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction

Weapons of Mass Instruction 107
to which he and Smith belonged was held together by deliberately
depriving most people of information they needed to maximize opportunities.
If secrets were promiscuously distributed, the ladders of
privilege would collapse, their own children would be plunged back
into the common stew. It was unthinkable. The familiar expression, "a
little knowledge is a dangerous thing" was Playfair's invention."Proper"
schooling teaches "negatively;' it never allows the working classes or
the poor "to read sufficiently well to understand what they do read:'
Set down clearly over 200 years ago here is the recipe for the
schools we commonly experience. Playfair argued that public instruction
would ruin national prosperity, not enhance it. And who is to say
he is wrong as long as prosperity is reckoned in dollars and cents."The
education of the middling and lower ranks" has to be put aside, to be
replaced with psychological conditioning in habits and attitudes of
deference, envy, appetite, and mistrust of self, if the system of capitalism
is to survive with all the benefits it provides.
"A smattering of learning is a very dangerous thing;' he said, not
because ordinary people are too dumb to learn; just the opposite, they
are too smart to be allowed to learn. People become dangerous when
too many see through the illusions which hold society together.
Long ago in China, Playfair's philosophy had been given a name
by the emperors in pre-history. It was called "The Policy of Keeping
People Dumb:' The only change the passage of millennia brought in
this leadership perspective was in the form of a change in style - in
the modern era leaders no longer spoke openly about this great secret
of management.
The Lincoln Elective Program
Lincoln Academy, New York City, 1985. A public junior high school,
despite its fancy name, located next door to a housing project for the
poor, far from the center of Manhattan's dynamic Upper West Side.
The West Side of Manhattan is world-famous, a zone of substantial
accomplishment, wealth, and power. Home to Columbia University;
Fordham; Julliard; Barnard; the Jewish Theological Seminary;