gat

attention diverted, until the next upwelling of outrage. These strategies of opinion management
are taught calmly through elite graduate university training in the best schools here, as was true in
Prussia. Corporate bureaucracies, including those in the so-called public sphere, know how to
wear out critics. There is no malicious intent, only a striving for efficiency.
Something has been happening in America since the end of WWII, accelerating since the flight of
Sputnik and the invasion of Vietnam. A massive effort is underway to link centrally organized
control of jobs with centrally organized administration of schooling. This would be an American
equivalent of the Chinese "Dangan"—linking a personal file begun in kindergarten (recording
academic performance, attitudes, behavioral characteristics, medical records, and other personal
data) with all work opportunities. In China the Dangan can’t be escaped. It is part of a web of
social controls that ensures stability of the social order; justice has nothing to do with it. The
Dangan is coming to the United States under cover of skillfully engineered changes in medicine,
employment, education, social service, etc., seemingly remote from one another. In fact, the
pieces are being coordinated through an interlink between foundations, grant-making government
departments, corporate public relations, key universities, and similar agencies out of public view.
This American Dangan will begin with longer school days and years, with more public resources
devoted to institutional schooling, with more job opportunities in the school field, more emphasis
on standardized testing, more national examinations, plus hitherto unheard of developments like
national teaching licenses, national curricula, national goals, national standards, and with the great
dream of corporate America since 1900, School-to-Work legislation organizing the youth of
America into precocious work battalions. A Dangan by its nature is always psychopathic. It buries
its mistakes.
3What I would never do is to argue that the damage to human potential is adequately caught in
the rise or
fall of SAT scores or any other standardized measure because these markers are too
unreliable—besides being far too prone to strategic manipulation. The New York Times of March
9, 2003, reported in an article by Sara Rimer that Harvard rejects four valedictorians out of every
five, quoting that school’s director of admissions as saying: "To get in [Harvard], you have to
present some real distinction..." A distinction which, apparently, 80 Percent of "top" students
lack.
4Different addictive readers of school histories might tally eight crises or five, so the stab at
specificity
shouldn’t be taken too seriously by any reader. What it is meant to indicate is that careful
immersion in pedagogical history will reveal, even to the most skeptical, that mass schooling has
been in nearly constant crisis since its inception. There never was a golden age of mass schooling,
nor can there ever be.
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