gat

propaganda, by supplying executives and advisors to government, and by
controlling research through the power of the purse. The net result has been to
promote "internationalism" in a particular sense—a form directed toward
"world government" and a derogation of American nationalism. [emphasis
added]
Here we find ourselves confronted with the puzzling duty of interpreting why two separate
congressional committees convened fifty years apart to study the workings of the new foundation
institutions, one under a Democratic Congress, one under a Republican Congress, both reached
essentially the same conclusions. Both adjudged foundations a clear and present danger to the
traditional liberties of American national life. Both pointed to the use of foundation influence to
create the blueprint of American school life. Both saw that a class system in America had emerged
and was being supported by the class system in schooling. Both called for drastic action. And both
were totally ignored.
Actually the word "ignored" doesn’t begin to do justice to what really occurred. These
congressional investigations—like Sir Walter Scott’s difficult to obtain Life of Napoleon
Bonaparte—have not only vanished from public imagination, they aren’t even alluded to in press
discussions of schooling. Exactly as if they had never happened. This would be more
understandable if their specific philanthropies were dull, pedestrian giveaways designed to
distribute largesse and to build up good feeling toward the benevolence of colossal wealth and
power. But the reality is strikingly different—corporate wealth through the foundations has
advanced importantly the dumbing down of America’s schools, the creation of a scientific class
system, and important attacks on family integrity, national identification, religious rights, and
national sovereignty.
"School is the cheapest police," Horace Mann once said. It was a sentiment publicly spoken by
every name—Sears, Pierce, Harris, Stowe, Lancaster, and the rest—prominently involved in
creating universal school systems for the coal powers. One has only to browse Merle Curti’s The
Social Ideas of American Educators to discover that the greatest social idea educators had to sell
the rich, and which they lost no opportunity to sell, was the police function of schooling.
Although a pedagogical turn in the Quaker imagination is the reason schools came to look like
penitentiaries, Quakers are not the principal reason they came to function like maximum security
institutions. The reason they came to exist at all was to stabilize the social order and train the
ranks. In a scientific, industrialized, corporate age, "stability" was much more exquisitely defined
than ordinary people could imagine. To realize the new stability, the best breeding stock had to be
drawn up into reservations, likewise the ordinary. "The Daughters of the Barons of Runnemede"
is only a small piece of the puzzle; many more efficient and subtler quarantines were essayed.
Perhaps subtlest of all was the welfare state, a welfare program for everybody, including the
lowest, in which the political state bestowed alms the way the corporate Church used to do.
Although the most visible beneficiaries of this gigantic project were those groups increasingly
referred to as "masses," the poor were actually people most poorly served by this latter-day Hindu
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