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innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."
Conant is a school name that resonates through the central third of the twentieth century. He was
president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. His book The American High School Today (1959),
was one of the important springs that pushed secondary schools to gigantic size in the 1960s and
forced consolidation of many small school districts into larger ones. He began his career as a
poison gas specialist in WWI, a task assigned only to young men whose family lineage could be
trusted. Other notable way stations on his path being that of an inner circle executive in the top
secret atomic bomb project during WWII, and a stint as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany
during the military occupation after 1945. From Lewisite gas to nuclear explosions (or high
schools), Conant delivered.
In his book Conant brusquely acknowledges that conversion of old-style American education into
Prussian-style schooling was done as a coup de main, but his greater motive in 1959 was to speak
directly to men and women of his own class who were beginning to believe the new school
procedure might be unsuited to human needs, that experience dictated a return to older
institutional pluralistic ways. No, Conant fairly shouts, the clock cannot be turned back! "Clearly,
the total process is irreversible." Severe consequences would certainly follow the break-up of this
carefully contrived behavioral-training machine: "A successful counterrevolution...would require
reorientation of a complex social pattern. Only a person bereft of reason would undertake [it]."
Reading Conant is like overhearing a private conversation not meant for you yet fraught with the
greatest personal significance. To Conant, school was a triumph of Anglo/Germanic pragmatism,
a pinnacle of the social technocrat’s problem-solving art. One task it performed with brilliance
was to sharply curtail the American entrepreneurial spirit, a mission undertaken on perfectly
sensible grounds, at least from a management perspective. As long as capital investments were at
the mercy of millions of self-reliant, resourceful young entrepreneurs running about with a gleam
in their eye, who would commit the huge flows of capital needed to continually tool and retool the
commercial/industrial/financial machine? As long as the entire population could become
producers, young people were loose cannon crashing around a storm-tossed deck, threatening to
destroy the corporate ship. Confined, however, to employee status, they became suitable ballast
upon which a dependable domestic market could be erected.
How to mute competition in the generation of tomorrow? That was the cutting-edge question. In
his take-no-prisoners style acquired mixing poison gas and building atomic bombs, Conant tells us
candidly the answer "was in the process of formulation" as early as the 1890s. By 1905 the nation
obeyed this clarion call coast to coast: "Keep all youth in school full time through grade twelve."
All youth, including those most unwilling to be there and those certain to take vengeance on their
jailers.
President Conant was quick to acknowledge that "practical-minded" kids paid a heavy price from
enforced confinement. But there it was—nothing could be done. It was a worthy trade-off. I
suspect he was being disingenuous. Any mind sophisticated enough to calculate a way to
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