The discussion today is about how the fad of the day will always come first. Then, sometime later, the things that matter come to the fore.
Mentioned in this podcast:
Here is Dean Russell telling the NEA that the rabble (that’s you) simply cannot learn the stuff that the top of the pyramid learn. The book is Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States
By David Nasaw:
Here is the an explanation from John Taylor Gatto, then the actual text from the Rockefeller Foundation’ General Educational Board’s Occasional Letter #1:
From Gatto’s magisterial “The Underground History of American Education:
Occasional Letter Number One Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spent more money on forced schooling than the government itself did. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were spending more themselves. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear a few excerpts from the first mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board as they occur in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):
“In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
Please re-read those statements a few times. As someone who has been in the school business for 27 years, nothing has changed. As a matter of fact, It’s gotten worse as instead of watered down education, we shove frivolous topics and concepts into our students’ heads.
Here is reality catching up with everyone, summed up in one picture.
Reality ALWAYS Lags Behind the Pump