Re: Education is everything
[Rod Dreher  03/17 08:43 AM]

Jason has a point. The retired NYC schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto has detailed in his “Underground History of American Education” how the men who set up the US system of public education and funded the education colleges had Progressive theories of human behavior — including flat-out eugenicist ideas for remaking the masses according to a scientifically efficient model — in mind. They set out to produce mass men (and women) who would be conformist, unattached to tradition and family, and consumerist — because that was what industrial society needed, or so they believed. (You can see an outline of Gatto’s ideas here, and read the entire book, chapter by chapter, here — it’s amazing stuff). Allan Carlson explores the anti-family, statist, utopian roots of American education in this lecture, to wit:

Horace Mann of Massachusetts, the acknowledged "father" of the Common Schools in the mid-19th Century, held a similar attitude. Citing the "neglect," ignorance, and inefficiencies of families in his state, he underscored the special brutality of what he labeled "monster families," deemed totally unworthy of their children. Indeed, Mann linked the "common school" system to a vision of the later welfare state, where government simply assumed the role of parent. As he wrote in his school report for 1846: "Massachusetts is parental in her government. More and more, as year after year rolls by, she seeks to substitute prevention for remedy, and rewards for penalties."

The Common School Journal, founded by Mann and colleagues in 1838, featured the deconstruction of family life as one of its regular themes. Passages included:

· the public schools succeed because "parents, although the most sunken in depravity themselves, welcome the proposals and receive with gratitude the services of moral philanthropy in behalf of their families";

· "[T]hese are ...illustrations of the folly of a parent, who interferes with and perplexes a teacher while instructing or training his child";

· "the little interests or conveniences of the family" must be subordinate to "the paramount subject" of the school; and

· "there are many worthless parents."

Such sentiments spread with public education across the country over the middle decades of the 19th Century. John Swett, an early superintendent of the California state schools, was blunt in his opinion that the state must supplant the family. In his 1864 report to the state legislature, Swett explained that "the child should be taught to consider his instructor superior to the parent in point of authority. ... The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous. ... Parents have no remedy as against the teacher."

F.W. Parker, the so-called "father of progressive education" and inspiration for John Dewey, told the 1895 convention of the National Education Association (NEA) that "the child is not in school for knowledge. He is there to live, and to put his life, nurtured in the school, into the community." The family home and religious faith simply must give way to a grander vision. As Parker concluded: "Every school in the land should be a home and heaven for children."