gat

eyond its immediate circle of associations, to those who hope to benefit from
its bounty.
In 1919, using Rockefeller money, John Dewey, by now a professor at Columbia Teachers
College, an institution heavily endowed by Rockefeller, founded the Progressive Education
Association. Through its existence it spread the philosophy which undergirds welfare capitalism—
that the bulk of the population is biologically childlike, requiring lifelong care.
From the start, Dewey was joined by other Columbia professors who made no secret that the
objective of the PEA project was to use the educational system as a tool to accomplish political
goals. In The Great Technology (1933), Harold Rugg elucidated the grand vision:
A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions of
individual minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old stereotypes
must be broken up and "new climates of opinion" formed in the neighborhoods
of America.
Through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of
government—one that will embrace all the activities of men, one that will
postulate the need of scientific control...in the interest of all people.
In similar fashion, the work of the Social Science Research Council culminated in a statement of
Conclusions and Recommendations on its Carnegie Foundation–funded operations which had
enormous and lasting impact upon education in the United States. Conclusions (1934) heralded
the decline of the old order, stating aggressively that "a new age of collectivism is emerging"
which will involve the supplanting of private property by public property" and will require
"experimentation" and "almost certainly...a larger measure of compulsory cooperation of
citizens...a corresponding enlargement of the functions of government, and an increasing state
intervention... Rights will be altered and abridged." (emphasis added)
Conclusions was a call to the teachers colleges to instruct their students to "condition" children
into an acceptance of the new order in progress. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were to be
marginalized as irrelevant, even counterproductive. "As often repeated, the first step is to
consolidate leadership around the philosophy and purpose of education herein expounded."
(emphasis added) The difficulties in trying to understand what such an odd locution as
"compulsory cooperation" might really mean, or even trying to determine what historic definition
of "education" would fit such a usage, were ignored. Those who wrote this report, and some of
those who read it, were the only ones who held the Rosetta Stone to decipher it.
In an article in Progressive Education Magazine, Professor Norman Woelfel produced one of the
many children and grandchildren of the Conclusions report when he wrote in 1946: "It might be
necessary for us to control our press as the Russian press is controlled and as the Nazi press is
controlled....", a startling conclusion he improved upon in his book Molders of the American
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