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

Everything You Know about Schools is Wrong 19
its schools almost at once! It was from Washington's bribes, subsidies,
and cajolings that institutional schooling spread, not from the merit
of the idea.
The myth of a golden age of public schooling is the creation of Ellwood
P. Cubberley, Dean of Teacher Education at Stanford University.
There never was such a thing. Cubberley rose to become a leader
of the school group around WWI, and remained a close associate of
all other names of consequence in the founding period. He acted, de
facto, as a beloved historian of American schooling until theI960s.
Eliminating Local Voices
At the start of the compulsion era there were approximately 135,000
separate citizen school boards, perhaps more, each with seven to nine
very solid and very local men and women as board members, watchdogs
over the local institution. Messy as their operation was - and
you can get a sample of how they worked by reading Edward Eggleston's
little 19th century classic, The Hoosier Schoolmaster - they
were models of democratically elected republicanism. But local oversight
promised nothing but trouble to those who wanted national
uniformity. That centrali:z;ation was never likely to happen as long as
community boards held sway, with local philosophies and overly sentimentalized
personal connections with parents.
Almost at once, even before compulsion had claimed every American
state, a process of consolidation began, intended to curb localism.
By arranging for larger and larger bureaucratic units, only those
with funds enough and reputation to campaign at large beyond the
neighborhood could be elected. These mergers were sold as efficiency
measures to save taxpayers money, but an oddity occurred - as the
districts were enlarged, costs went up, not down, and continued upward
in subsequent years. With local watchdogs gone, tendencies to
use mass schooling as a cash cow were exploited by every special interest
group with political friends ..
Inside of a century the number of boards was reduced to 15,000.
And each decline in the absolute number of school boards made their