gat

The National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Foundation, the Ad Council, the
Business Roundtable, and other business-relevant private associations publicized the need for
school change, told the public how children should act, what they should honor, what behaviors
would be rewarded. A steadily lengthening school year led to an extended career ladder,
specialization, and a credential-oriented society. School people were assigned the role of bringing
about a conflict-free world by teaching indirectly that the preemption of work by corporations and
professions (later by government) was right, proper, and "scientific."
The Irish historian and philosopher W.E.H. Lecky, in his history of European rationalism,
(Rationalism in Europe), predicted that temptations posed by a forced assemblage of children
would prove in the end too strong to resist, powerful interests would inevitably manipulate
schooling to serve their own agendas:
The opinions of ninety-nine persons out of every hundred are formed mainly by
education, and a Government can decide in whose hands the national education
is to be placed, what subjects it is to comprise, and what principles it is to
convey.
"If all paths of honor and wealth" are monopolized, said Lecky, the powerful motive of
self-interest will be enough to bring most students to heel:
The simple fact of annexing certain penalties to the profession of particular
opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite opinions, while it will
undoubtedly make many hypocrites, will also make many converts.
—Rationalism in Europe (1883)
Once a system of reward and punishment is set up and broadcast by frequent public examples of
its power in action, the nature of argument is almost predetermined, although subjects of such a
regimen may be "entirely unconscious of the source of their opinions." Once the doctrine of
"exclusive salvation" for the cooperative (and damnation for the critic) is clearly established,
rulers will never be seriously questioned, thought Lecky.
By 1899 William H. Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, descendant of the man for
whom the Baldwin locomotive was named, demonstrated how well the school lesson had been
learned and how forcible could be its application. Baldwin was a member of the Peabody/
Rockefeller/Carnegie "Southern Education Board," self-appointed to bring the benefits of
Northern schooling to the war-ravaged South. Although in the beginning of its career freed blacks
were treated to the same type of rigorous, classically oriented schooling we would call "liberal"
today—meaning one designed to liberate the judgment from prejudice and ignorance—as time
passed it began to seem impolitic to so treat blacks as equals. It alienated important elements in
the Southern white community who were more important fish for the Northern school net to land.
Thus a decision was made to jettison equality as a goal and make labor-value the most important
determinant of which way each group would be schooled.
Table of Contents
Page 404