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creation of Fabian socialism and the corporate brain trust. Subsidizing the excluded of the new
society and economy was, it was believed, a humanitarian way to calm these troubled waters until
the Darwinian storm had run its inevitable course into a new, genetically arranged utopia.
In a report issued in 1982 and widely publicized in important journals, the connection between
corporate capitalism and the welfare state becomes manifest in a public document bearing the
name Alan Pifer, then president of the Carnegie Corporation. Apparently fearing that the Reagan
administration would alter the design of the Fabian project beyond its ability to survive, Pifer
warned of:
A mounting possibility of severe social unrest, and the consequent
development among the upper classes and the business community of sufficient
fear for the survival of our capitalist economic system to bring about an abrupt
change of course. Just as we built the general welfare state...and expanded it in
the 1960s as a safety valve for the easing of social tension, so will we do it
again in the 1980s. Any other path is too risky.
In the report quoted from, new conceptions of pedagogy were introduced which we now see
struggling to be born: national certification for schoolteachers, bypassing the last vestige of local
control in states, cities, and villages; a hierarchy of teacher positions; a project to bring to an end
the hierarchy of school administrators—now adjudged largely an expenditure counter-productive
to good social order, a failed experiment. In the new form, lead teachers manage schools after the
British fashion and hire business administrators. The first expressions of this new initiative
included the "mini-school" movement, now evolved into the charter school movement. Without
denying these ideas a measure of merit, if you understand that their source is the same institutional
consciousness which once sent river ironclads full of armed detectives to break the steel union at
Homestead, machine-gunned strikers at River Rouge, and burned to death over a dozen women
and children in Ludlow, those memories should inspire emotions more pensive than starry-eyed
enthusiasm.
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