From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Mon Aug 12 2002 - 11:32:33 MDT
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Is this supposed to be a a humorous analogy? Or do you really believe
> that there is a conspiracy to destroy family values and brainwash kids?
> Are you claiming that advertising and Barney and the public school
> system are somehow all controlled by a single source for the same hidden
> agenda?
>
> This is a serious question.
While it's possible things have recently changed for the better, my
answer is yes, I really believe in this conspiracy. Not as hidden secret
masters conspiracy but as a set of memes. On this I rely primarily on
the writings of John Taylor Gatto, who was supposedly NY state Teacher
of the Year in 1991. Google him.
I'll copy a few quotes from an article of his entitled 'Some Lessons
from the Underground History of American Education' (in the new disinfo
book 'Everything You Know is Wrong').
<<School was looked upon from the first decade of the 20th century as a
branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time
[...] social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what
they were doing. This candor can be clearly heard in a speech Woodrow
Wilson made to businessmen before the First World War:
'We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a
very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privelege of a
liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult
manual tasks.'
By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under
control of a group referred to ... as 'the Education Trust'. ... The
chief end, wrote the British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd in 1918 was to
'impose on the young the idea of subordination.'
At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent
livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be put to
death, at least among the common population, the immense capital
investments that mass industry required for equipment weren't
conceivably justifiable.>>
(BTW, 'Yankee entrepreneurialism' is what keeps me here in the good ole
USA instead of returning to my socialist paradise home country)
<<I know how difficult it is for most of us ... to comprehend that
long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to
dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition
of Ellwood P. Cubberly's _Public Education in the United States is
explicit about what happened and why. ...>>
<<Arthur Calhoun's 1919 _Social History of the Family_ notified the
nation's academics that was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest
wish of utopian writers was coming true. The child was passing from the
family 'into the custody of community experts' [and that eventually we
would see public education] 'designed to check the mating of the
unfit'>>
<<Rockefeller had been inspired by the work of Eastern European
scientist Hermann Muller to invest heavily in genetics. Muller had used
X rays to override genetic law, inducing mutations in fruit flies. This
seemed to open the door to scientific control of life itself.
[...]
Muller would win the Nobel Prize, reduce his proposal to a 1500 word
_Geneticists' Manifesto_, and watch with satisfaction as 22
distinguished American and British biologists of the dat signed it. The
state must prepare to consciously guide human sexual selection, said
Muller. School would have to separate worthwhile breeders from those
slated for termination.
Just a few months before this report, an executive director of the NEA
announced that his organization expected 'to accomplish by education
what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force'>>
I could quote much more, but my fingers are getting tired and plenty of
Gatto material should be googleable.
HTH,
-Mike
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