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

Everything You Know about Schools is Wrong
genetic laws, including mutations in fruit flies. Mutation appeared to
open.the door to the scientific control of all life.
In Muller's mind, as to Galton and Darwin before him, planned
breeding of human beings was the key to paradise. His thinking was
enthusiastically endorsed by great scientists and by powerful economic
interests alike. Muller won the Nobel Prize and reduced his
scheme to a 1,50o-word Geneticists' Manifesto, signed by 22 distinguished
American and British biologists. State action should separate
worthwhile breeding stock from the great mass of evolutionary dead
end material. The Manifesto can still be Googled. What had been discussed
behind closed doors in the 1870S, before we had forced schooling,
had broken through into public discourse, at least in high policy
circles, and in the writings of sophisticated literary artists like F. Scott
Fitzgerald. A movement away from democratic egalitarian ideals was
underway, which Fitzgerald alludes to in The Great Gatsby.
In simple language, on the most basic level of institutional management,
smart kids had to be kept from stupid ones; Horace Mann's
common school notion that all levels of society would mix together in
the classroom to create social harmony was now officially stone dead,
except for rhetorical purposes. A few months before the Manifesto began
circulating aggressively, an executive director of the National Education
Association announced the NEA expected "to accomplish by
education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion
and force:' That's straightforward enough, isn't it
World War II drove the eugenic project underground, but hardly
slowed its advance. Following the end of hostilities, school became
an open battleground between old-fashioned, modest, reading, writing
and arithmetic ambitions of historic schooling, and proponents of
advanced academic thinking, located mainly in project offices of great
corporate non-profit foundations like Carnegie and Rockefeller -
men who worked diligently to lead institutional schooling toward a
scientific rationalization of all social affairs. Two congressional investigations,
one in 1915 and one in 1959, came to the identical conclusion
that school policy in the new pedagogical order was being deliberately