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insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six
years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts,
training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like
work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists,
dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers,
whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except
corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the
company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the
dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command
system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles
against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by
attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot
respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has
escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the
stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the
system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die
there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely
engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in
harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which
once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a
rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan
reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the
nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem
of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect
of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the
net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families,
individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren’t aware they were trading for a regular
corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the
quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very
well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the
new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It
was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group
of honorable men, all honorable men—but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost
all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming
consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring
conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When
we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a
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