gat

By the end of WWI, the labor market and much state/municipal contracting in America was
effectively controlled by Fabian-minded administrators, selected by Fabian-minded university
placement rings, all nourished by rich contracts garnered with the assistance of political clubs.
Whether any of these actually had any connection to the Fabian brain trust (few did) was
irrelevant. The atmosphere of schooling was saturated with its disciplined notions of utopia.
Another natural force was at work as well. With each passing decade, there accumulated more
reasons to defend schools exactly as they were, not on ideological grounds at all but as a jobs
project and a contract-distribution station. Millions had a financial stake in keeping schools as
they were. The true philosophical and economic focus of the thing needed be known only to a
handful of well-positioned social engineers in universities, foundations, and private associations.
The thing ran on momentum now. The reach of schooling grew longer without any special effort.
Secondary school enrollment went from 15 percent of the population in 1910 to 40 percent in
1930, to 90 percent in 1960, and to blanket coverage by 1970. Almost every alternative to a
well-schooled destiny was squeezed out, show business careers being a notable exception for the
thoughtful to contemplate.
With this development, the job pool established by institutional schooling became the leading
single source of work in the United States, the very heart of the economy in small cities, towns,
and villages. In this way school became a major foundation for local elites, directly and indirectly,
through contract and hiring powers. All over America school became the core of local economies
while, ironically, at the same time local minds and local customs were being rigorously barred
from the policy table of American life. The money served as an effective incentive to self-destruct.
Local schools and school boards began to behave as foreign intelligence bodies implanted in the
cells of a host creature, parasitic growths on local life, remote-controlled from state and federal
offices which dissolved local integrity by overriding its imperatives. Managers of this simulated
"local" schooling descended on towns out of Stanford, Chicago, or Columbia Teachers almost on
a status and income level with the ranking local leadership. As the century wore on, even the
lowliest pedagogues were surprised to find themselves near the top of local wage scales.
By the 1970s, schools were plunged headlong into a political campaign to redefine national
purpose as international purpose, and to formally redefine Democracy as the ritual democracy
allowed by democratic elites. Control of schooling by then was so dispersed that power could
hardly be located at all in the hands of local administrators and school boards. The world designed
by Plato and Thomas Hobbes had become reality. If you could not locate power you could not
tamper with it. Local control passed into the realm of fiction as distantly prepared instruction
entered schooling from state and federal agencies; the inner reality was that it had not been
prepared even there but in colleges, foundations, corporations, and also—a noteworthy new
development—in the offices of various United Nations agencies.
6 Mosca’s answer to the problem of political stability can be read clearly in the blatantly anti-democratic first edition
of this often revised and reprinted classic. (Later editions are subtler with the central message concealed somewhat
Table of Contents
Page 398