History of Our Modern Educational System

–John Taylor Gatto

Perhaps the greatest of school’s illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families — to level the playing field, so to speak. Let’s see what’s really behind these illusions:

THE MAKERS OF MODERN SCHOOLING

The real makers of modern schooling weren’t at all who we think.
Not Cotton Mather
or Horace Mann
or John Dewey.

The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:
Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron.
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil.
Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty.
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance.

Rich white 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.

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