gat

stupendous damage on the libertarian rights and privileges bequeathed to Americans by the
nation’s founders.
Profits from the industrial engine signed the checks for many nineteenth-century educational
experiments like New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in Indiana. They bought Fanny
Wright her school advocacy platform and helped her impose it on the Philadelphia Workingman’s
Party agenda in 1829. Many of the nineteenth-century experimental social colonies looked upon
themselves as early emanations of utopia, previews whispering to men and women what might be,
if only they turned their backs on the past and schooled for a new day. The brevity of these
experiments did nothing to discourage their successors.
The coal of Westphalia in association with the iron of Lorraine welded the scattered states of
Germany into a ferocious utopian empire in the last half of the nineteenth century. That empire,
birthplace of successful, mass forced schooling, made war upon the world, spreading its
conception of research universities and its Spartan state philosophy of universal indoctrination and
subordination all over the planet. In 1868, Japan adopted large parts of the Prussian constitution
together with the Prussian style of schooling. The garment that coal fashioned for Aryan children
was worn enthusiastically by coal-free Nipponese as their own.
German mental science came to rule the classrooms of the world in the early twentieth century,
nowhere more thoroughly than in coal-rich and oil-rich America. America provided a perch from
which to study people closely and resources with which to find ways to bring them into
compliance. Even without intense ideological motivation driving the project, the prospect of a
reliable domestic market which could be milked in perpetuity would have been incentive enough
to propel the school project, I believe.
These new studies growing out of the coal-swollen ranks of leisured academic lives suggested
there should be radical changes in the mental diet of children. A plan emerged piecemeal in these
years to be slowly inserted into national schooling. Seen from a distance a century later, it is
possible to discern the still shimmering outline of a powerful strategy drawing together at least ten
elements:
1. Removal of the active literacies of writing and speaking which enable individuals to link
up with and to persuade others.
2. Destruction of the narrative of American history connecting the arguments of the
Founding Fathers to historical events, definingwhat makes Americans different from
others besides wealth.
3. Substitution of a historical "social studies" catalogue of facts in place of historical
narrative.
4. Radical dilution of the academic content of formal curriculum which familiarized
Table of Contents
Page 202