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associations, grant-making bodies, and national media inoculated the learning system with these
ideas, and local managers grew fearful of punishment for opposition.
In 1962, an NIMH-sponsored report, "The Role of Schools in Mental Health," stated
unambiguously, "Education does not mean teaching people to know." (emphasis added) What
then? "It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave," a clear echo of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s "dream" from an earlier part of the century (See page 45). Schools were behavioral
engineering plants; what remained was to convince kids and parents there was no place to hide.
The report was featured at the 1962 Governor’s Conference, appearing along with a proclamation
calling on all states to fund these new school programs and use every state agency to further the
work. Provisions were discussed to overturn resistance on the part of parents; tough cases, it was
advised, could be subjected to multiple pressures around the clock until they stopped resisting.
Meanwhile, alarming statistics were circulated about the rapid growth of mental illness within
society.
The watershed moment when modern schooling swept all competition from the field was the
passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 (ESEA). The Act allocated
substantial federal funds to psychological and psychiatric programs in school, opening the door to
a full palette of "interventions" by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, agencies, and
various specialists. All were invited to use the schoolhouse as a satellite office, in urban ghettos,
as a primary office. Now it was the law.
Along the way to this milestone, important way stations were reached beyond the scope of this
book to list. The strand I’ve shown is only one of many in the tapestry. The psychological goals of
this project and the quality of mind in back of them are caught fairly in the keynote address to the
1973 Childhood International Education Seminar in Boulder, Colorado, delivered by Harvard
psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce. This quote appears to have been edited out of printed transcripts
of the talk, but was reported by newspapers in actual attendance:
Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because
he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our
elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being,
and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as
teachers to make all these sick children well—by creating the international
child of the future.
Perhaps it’s only a fortuitous coincidence that in the ongoing psychologization of schools
from1903 onwards, the single most prominent thread—the nearly universal prescription for
better-ment offered by every agency, analyst, and spokesperson for mental health—has been the
end of competition in every aspect of training and the substitution of cooperation and intergroup,
interpersonal harmony. In utopia, everyone has a fixed place. Envy and ambition are unwelcome,
at least among the common classes. The prescription should sound familiar, we’ve encountered it
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