ANYONE interested in "what happened to our democracy"

[lostnfound]

ought to read the jaw-dropping and eye-opening book "The Underground History of American Education".

Ever ask yourself: "why is our society so passive in the face of authority and authoritarianism?"
Are you very aware of such aspects of American society as
- the class system
- the propaganda system
- the 'media bubble' (is there also a 'school bubble'?)
- corporatist takeover of government
- the march toward totalitarianism (of the corporate capitalist variety)?
If so, this book will give you a new perspective on these subjects, and you will see an "elephant in the living room".

WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE CHILDREN, if you are interested in topics of politics, populist democracy, propaganda systems, globalization, fascist or corporate takeover of government, etc., you will get a lot out of reading this book. It traces historic class struggles, schemes to dumb down the masses, the replacement of character-building education with the school as a source of worker widgets (my term) for corporations. Besides which, the electorate -- the people you are trying to persuade or motivate -- has spent 12 formative years in schools, and (good, great or bad teachers aside) the very nature or structure of compulsory schooling has taught them to subjugate themselves to the will of authority. Are they passive or self-reliant? Do they feel empowered or do they feel irrelevant to power? Maybe it's not a coincidence or an accident. No..it's more of a plan.

It's not exactly a partisan book, though oddly enough, it certainly could be held up by libertarians, anti-fascist liberals, or anarchists. There are sections of the book that will seem to strike a chord with left-wing conspiracy theorists and others that might appeal to Christian homeschoolers. The thread that seems to run throughout is anti-authoritarian.

To whet your appetite, or provide a sampling -- the entire book is available free online -- here are a few excerpts and links to chapters that are particularly relevant:

Extending Childhood

By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."

At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be extinguished, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren’t conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents.

Bad Character As A Management Tool Contains outline of disgusting but telling essay by Mort Zuckerman (the ultraconservative owner of US News & World Report) highlighting 4 reasons why American economy is "superior" (American worker is a pushover; workers in America live in constant panic; abstract formulas (of profit), not people, make decisions; endless consumption). Gatto writes,

I have little doubt the fantastic wealth of American big business is psychologically and procedurally grounded in our form of schooling. The training field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about.

The end of competition & America is massified

Psychopathic Programming

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.

What really goes on

Two social revolutions become one

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.
...
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 conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.

Four kinds of classrooms

[malaise]

1. Thanks

I'll order that later

[flashl]

2. How do Americans reconcile the competing realities

of the working poor with degrees standing in soup lines on the way to work and the increased need to raise education standards?

NCLB is pure gamesmanship and a distraction on par with the subprime saga and the $300 trillion derivatives black hole.

An allege education crisis delays America’s awareness that there’s simply NOT ENOUGH JOBS for America's college bound graduates.

[lostnfound]

3. Gatto's term "massification" rings a bell with me as a root cause

Mass advertising creates mass tastes and mass demand. Even our service sectors such as restaurants and beauty shops have turned into chains, and the opportunity and satisfaction of working for a chain is a lot different than being a sole proprietor.

How does this fit with your comment? One reason that there's not enough jobs is that the economy has systematically squelched small-scale alternatives to the megacorps.

[flashl]

4. Good point and great post.