The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

EDUCATION 299Midwest, the free school movement in New York, and a large number of“normal schools,” so named for helping to set the norms for education. Bythe start of the twentieth century, the United States was home to manymajor universities, which turned out thousands of well-trained teacherseach year.Lionni noted: “Educational results far exceeded those of modernschools. One has only to read old debates in the Congressional Record orscan the books published in the 1800s to realize that our ancestors of acentury ago commanded a use of the language far superior to our own.Students learned how to read not comic books but the essays of Burke,Webster, Lincoln, Horace, Cicero. Their difficulties with grammar wereovercome long before they graduated from school, and any review of atypical elementary school arithmetic textbook printed before 1910 showsdramatically that students were learning mathematical skills that few ofour current high school graduates know anything about. The high schoolgraduate of 1900 was an educated person, fluent in his language, history,and culture, possessing the skills he needed in order to succeed.”The agenda behind Rocke feller’s creation of the GEB may have beenrevealed in correspondence from Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s choiceto head the board.Gates wrote, “In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the peopleyield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The presenteducation conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition,we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive ruralfolk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children intophilos ophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raiseup from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shallnot search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors,preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply.“The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautifulone, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life justwhere they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do ina perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfectway, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.”Paolo Lionni wrote: “It would be false to say [John D. Rocke feller] was