Flame On: Public Schools Create Mindless Drones

Most of us assume that the current public school system was well-planned and researched, with the goal of giving America’s kids a good education and form the foundation to “live the American dream.” It couldn’t possibly have the goals of making children conform, accept authority without critical judgement, and filter them so they can be slotted into the appropriate social cog. No, of course not.

There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. But are they just theorizing, or can we find the truth behind the school system?

John Taylor Gatto was a public school teach for thirty years and was teacher of the year for both New York State and NYC. He’s dug into the past to find the real history of the American public school system — where it came from (Prussia), who its proponents were (society’s elite), and what its goal are (create a docile labor force).

Gatto found many of these ideas presented in The Principles of Secondary Education (1918), a book by Alexander Inglis.

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Read Gatto’s article Against School for a brief introduction to the history of the public school system. To delve deeper, he’s made his book The Underground History of American Education freely available online.

[The topics for Flame On are chosen by the individual poster, not by an Urban Monarch consensus. Consequently, the posts don’t represent Urban Monarch’s opinions as a whole (and not even necessarily the opinions of the individual poster)]