Reply #19: The Makers of Modern Schooling

[T.Ruth2power]

The real makers of modern schooling weren't at all who we think.


Not Cotton Mather


or Horace Mann

The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:


Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...



Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...


Men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social efficiency" movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.


The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose.

The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management.

Teachers and principals, “scientifically”certified in teachers college practices, were made unaware of the invisible curriculum they really taught.



The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/