According to Carl F. Kaestle, “Literacy was quite general in the middle reaches of society and above. The best generalization possible is that New York, like other American towns of the Revolutionary period, had a high literacy rate relative to other places in the world, and that literacy did not depend primarily upon the schools.” Another indication of the high rate of literacy is book sales. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in a colonial population of 3 million (counting the 20 percent who were slaves)the equivalent of 10 million copies today. In 1818, when the United States had a population of under 20 million, Noah Webster’s Spelling Book sold over 5 million copies. Walter Scott’s novels sold that many copies between 1813 and 1823, which would be the equivalent of selling 60 million copies in the United States today. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper sold millions of copies. John Taylor Gatto notes that Scott’s and Cooper’s books were not easy reading. European visitors to early nineteenth-century America – such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre du Pont de Nemours marveled at how well educated the people were.’
So what happened to change this happy state of educational affairs in the US?
In truth the highly educated US population in 1900 was a tribute to the vitality and drive of ordinary USans rather than their leaders. For instance it is not generally understood that the libertarian streak in the US was not endorsed by many key figures in the Revolutionary period and later community leaders. For instance Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence. was an early proponent of state control of education.” In 1786, Rush devised a plan for public schools in Pennsylvania. He wrote:
‘It is necessary to impose upon them [children] the doctrines and discipline of a particular church. Man is naturally an ungovernable animal, and observations on particular societies and countries will teach us that when we add the restraints of ecclesiastical to those of domestic and civil government, we produce in him the highest degrees of order and virtue.’
Sheldon Richman says of Rush:
‘Rush saw the schools as the means to “convert men into republican machines. This must be done if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state.” He also saw the schools as essential for making up for the failings of the deteriorating family. As he put it, “Society owes a great deal of its order and happiness to the deficiencies of parental government being supplied by those habits of obedience and subordination which are contracted at schools.” He was clear about the role of schools. “The authority of our masters [should] be as absolute as possible,” he said. “By this mode of education, we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic.” He took that position because he believed that useful citizens were manufactured from children who “have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age.”
… What should the state schools teach the student? “He must be taught to amass wealth, but it must be only to increase his power of contribution to the wants and needs of the state.” Furthermore, this signer of the Declaration said, “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.”
Similarly, Richman quotes Archibald D. Murphey, founder of the North Carolina public schools, writing in 1816:
‘In these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience be formed …. Their parents know not how to instruct them…. The state, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts trained to virtue.’
Horace Mann, a former Calvinist, and many other US educators and sociologists in the 19th century were enamoured of similar anti-personal, anti-social and anti-freedom ideas.
For instance in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling John Taylor Gatto tells us:
‘A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores. Prussia’s ultimate goal was to unify Germany; the Americans’ was to mold hordes of immigrant Catholics to a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influences.’
Sheldon Richman says:
Gatto emphasizes how the Prussian model set the standard for educational systems right up to the present. “The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders,” he writes. He says the American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children “to obedience, subordination, and collective life.” Thus, memorization outranked thinking. Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented “subjects” and school days were divided into fixed periods “so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.” Third, the state was posited as the true parent of children. All of this was done in the name of a scientific approach to education, although, Gatto says, “no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or what learning is of most worth.”
Gatto’s reference to the so-called ‘scientific approach to education’ refers to Wundtian psychology and the absurd behaviorist theories that emerged from it and insinuated themselves into US education in the 20th century.
Richman quotes Horace Mann and other movers and shakers in US education in the 19th century at some length but the above references give you the picture. Clearly the dumbing down of USans did not emerge from left field. It was always in the minds of the planners well before 1900.
Wilhelm Wundt created the modern version of so-called scientific psychology by drawing together earlier thinking but his real achievement was in establishing his laboratory at Leipzig University in 1875 and attracting students who would subsequently spread his theories all over the US and Europe. Wundt’s theories had great appeal for the Rothschilds and would have suited their plans for humanity perfectly. Wundt asserted that humans are devoid of spirit and self-determinism (and hence free will) and that man is just the sum of his experiences. This atheistic, materialist philosophy dominated his approach to study of the human psyche. Indeed in practical terms he virtually denied the existence of the psyche and this enabled him to reduce the study of “man” to an external, physiological examination of stimulus and response. He said:
“The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurones, sequence in time, belongingness and satisfying consequences.’
[Pintner, Rudolph.et al., An Outlineof Educational Psychology, rev.ed.(New York: Barnes & Noble,1934), 79.
If one assumes (as did Wundt) that there is nothing there to begin with but a physical body, brain and nervous system, then one must try to educate by inducing sensations in that nervous system. Through these experiences the individual will learn to respond to any given stimulus, with the “correct” response. The child is not, for example, thought capable of volitional control over his actions, or of deciding whether he will act or not act in a certain way: His actions are thought to be preconditioned and beyond his control, because he is a stimulus-response mechanism. According to this thinking, the child IS his/her reactions. Wundt’s thesis laid the philosophical basis for the principals of physical conditioning later developed by Pavlov (who studied physiology in Leipzig, in 1884, five years after Wundt had inaugurated his laboratory there). It also provided the basis upon which American behavioural psychologists like Watson and Skinner justified lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy; as well as for schools oriented away from the development of intellect; and the emergence of a society more and more blatantly devoted to the gratification of sensory desires at the expense of responsibility and achievement. (See Paolo Lionni’s PDF book “The Leipzig Connection” pp 9 – p16)
Wundt’s Ph.D. students were numerous and they flooded the US towards the end of the 19th century finding little difficulty in securing positions of influence at major American universities. Many became successful to a marked degree; often training scores, and even hundreds of Ph.D. students in psychology; and contributing to new associations and publications in this new field of study (psychology) and almost without exception all of them became involved in another field which lay open to the advance of German psychology – the field of education. (Lionni, op cit.pp 12 – 20)
Sooo, why did such success attend upon ALL of these budding psychologists? Chance you say? Happenstance? Synchronicity, the coincidence of just having the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time? Well, my take is different. I say that the money, influence and publicity needed to launch Wundt’s wonderful new atheistic oriented materialistic theories upon the unsuspecting world was the secret Rothschild bankster cabal in combination with its Khazar Zionist and Bolshevik revolutionary cadres. That money and influence was not just active in Germany, the early centre of Rothschild power, but by 1875 it had already extended to the US via ‘The London Connection’ (the city of London bankers) and to the rest of the Anglo-European world (ie almost globally) via the British and Dutch Empires. The Rothschilds also assisted the Khazarian Rockefeller in his meteoric rise to wealth and power in the US in the latter half of the 19th Century.
So it would have been no great stretch for ‘The London Connection’ and Rockefeller to secretly support Wundt’s first US protégé, G Stanley Hall, in the establishment of the (AJP) in 1887. Piece of cake mate! And guess what? The AJP gave American Journal of Psychology”adherents of the new psychology not only a storehouse for contributions both experimental and theoretical, but a sense of solidarity and independence” [Murphy& Kovach, p 175 – Quoted by Lionni, Ibid. pp15 – 21] Would not all would-be benefactors of humanity like to get such support? For instance wouldn’t Nicola Tesla, Royal Raymond Rife and Wilhelm Reich and their disciples have been grateful for even a small portion of the support and influence lavished on Wundtian psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? You betcha they would! But what did they get? Two of them were incarcerated as lunatics, effectively on the say-so of Wundtian psychology practitioners and the third was reduced to penury by J P Morgan and his associates.
In effect nascent Wundtian psychology adherents were being cosseted and nurtured so that they might form part of the new priesthood that would man the 20th century materialist Khazarian Crusade and Corporatist Inquisition designed to crucify all heretics and destroy all heresies that sought to improve humanity’s consciousness and quality of life against the wishes of the Rothschild and Rockefeller led global bankster cabal
In 1904, Hall published American Psychological Association`Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education‘. I think the title says it all. Was there nothing Hall and his “psychology” did not know? Anyway, John Dewey studied under Hall for a year and got his doctorate from John Hopkins University in 1884. Dewey published “Psychology”, the first American text book on the revised subject in 1886. In 1895 Dewey joined the faculty of the Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago as head of the departments of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy (teaching).
In the 19th century, in parallel with the rise of Wundtian psychological ideas and practices, John D. Rockefeller was greatly assisted towards achievement of his monopolistic railroad, oil and financial empire by the Rothschilds. Presumably the reason Dewey received Rockefeller preferment was his attitude to the new psychology and education of the young. He reckoned that `to put the child in possession of his fullest talents, education should be active rather than passive; that to prepare the child for a democratic society, the school should be social rather than individualist …’
In effect Dewey wanted schools to feed experiential data to young brains and nervous systems, rather than teaching mental skills. Clearly his aims have been realized in America and to a large degree in many other countries. To achieve this, “schools” no longer seek to have teachers facilitate education in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography etc but rather they are required to guide in the socialization of the child – a role previously undertaken by parents, siblings, extended family, neighbors, the local community, church congregations et al. Teachers’ functions today revolve around leading children to adapt to the specific behavior required in order to get along in the group and thence society.
In `My Pedagogic Creed’ John Dewey states:
The school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.
Moreover public schools must `take an active part in determining the social order of the future … according as the teachers align themselves with the newer forces [?!] making for social control of economic forces.’
[Quoted in Allen, Gary, “Hands off our Children,” American Opinion, XVIII,No, 9 (October, 1975), 3.]
So, teachers MUST align themselves to the “new” forces making for social control of economic forces. Righttt! Gotcha! No worries mate. She’ll be apples. And WHAT, exactly, are the “inherited resources of the race” that schools are to BRING the child to share? Free range slavery? Excessive, Pavlovian eating and habits of social intercourse? consumerism? Using “own powers” to ensure (compete for) a place at the “social” feeding trough?
For Dewey, as for Wundt, man was an animal, alone with his reactions, and entirely dependent upon experiential data. He believed that teachers were not instructors, but designers of learning experiences on the Pavlovian model. Dewey promoted and implemented the inter-changeability of psychology and education and is regarded as the Father of the abomination that is American Education today. BUT he had help. James McKeen, Francis Galton, James Mark Baldwin, Andrew C Armstrong, Charles Judd, James Earl Russell, Frank & Charles McMurray, and Edward Lee Thorndike (who reckoned that:`psychology was the science of the intellect, character and behaviour of animals, including man’ and who spent 30 years at Columbia Teachers College “teaching” that philosophy to huge numbers of “teachers”) and others.
Thorndike equated children with the rats, monkeys, fish, cats and chickens upon which he experimented in his laboratory and was prepared to apply what he found there to learning in the classroom. He extrapolated “laws” from his research into animal behaviour which he then applied to the training of teachers; who then took what they had learned to every corner of the US and ran their classrooms, curricula, and schools on the basis of this new “educational” psychology.
In his book `The Principles of Teaching based on Psychology’ (1906), Thorndike defines the art of teaching thus:
`… the art of giving and withholding stimuli with the result of producing or preventing certain responses. In this definition the term stimulus is used widely for any event which influences a person, — for a word spoken to him, a look, a sentence which he reads, the air he breathes, etc., etc… the aim of the teacher is to produce desirable and prevent undesirable changes in human beings by producing and preventing certain responses…’
Thorndike based social conditioning of individuals on what he called the “law of effect”. This thinking favours a society that operates more on the basis of fear and gratification than on the basis of reason or responsibility. Apparently this “schooling” has led children to expect to receive what is pleasurable, and what they desire, because they have learned in school that what is pleasurable is good, and what isn’t pleasurable, isn’t good. This is the legacy of the stimulus-response teaching developed by Thorndike and transmitted to hundreds of thousands of teachers through the medium of “educational” psychology inculcated at the Columbia Teachers’ College in New York.
Before “educational” psychology swamped the field, good behaviour was considered its own reward; and the idea of rewarding a child for behaving like a human being would only occur to someone who supposed that a child is essentially (ie only) an animal and would have seemed like an open invitation to blackmail to any sensible 19th century parent.
Thorndike, like Dewey and other Wundtians, thought that man is just a social animal that must learn to adapt to his environment, instead of learning how to ethically adapt the environment to suit his needs and those of society. Individual evolvement and development of individual abilities has to give way to social conformity and adaptation under today’s Wundtian inspired education systems. Modern education systems have thus largely become factories for the production of “well-adjusted” (ie psychically conditioned, socially engineered) children and citizens.
The real agenda of the Wundtians and their hidden bankster and corporatist sponsors was revealed by Thorndike:
`Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness. That the typical school overemphasises instruction in these formal, academic skills as a means of fostering intellectual resources … is a justifiable criticism. …Elimination of unessentials by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum.’
Thorndike, Edward L., and Arthur Gates, ‘Elementary Principles of Education’ (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 308.[quoted by Lionni op cit p36 – p45].
Thorndike stated the three main functions of the elementary school as follows:
(1) to provide for each child six years of experience designed to enable him to make at each step in the period adjustments to the most essential phases of life … To adjust this general education to each child requires a considerable degree of specialisation in accordance with individual differences. Consequently the elementary school has a second function, namely:
(2) to determine as accurately as possible the native intellectual capacities, the physical, emotional, temperamental, recreational, aesthetic, and other aptitudes of children. Since some pupils will find it necessary or advisable to enter a vocation in the middle teens, a third function is essential in some degree, namely:
(3) to explore the vocational interests and aptitudes of pupils and to provide some measure of vocational adjustment for those who will leave school at the earliest legal age. (Ibid. 310) [See also Lionni, Ibid. p 37-46]
Phew! That’s a lot of work for elementary school teachers to perform, especially as most of it used to be done by each individual with assistance from his family, relatives and local community. So why the heavy work load? What’s the point, apart from confining the average child to a supervised and controlled institution for most of his days until society allows him to go to work?
Well, the base reason is to condition the child to authority and the need to “fit in” to society – item (1). Item (2) is where society decides each child’s future ie s/he will be a drone essentially sitting on top of the mass of workers in society or be one of the workers. This is to be determined by each child’s reaction to schooling reinforced by psychological testing (ie more work for the psychological priesthood). As the assumption is that all humans are essentially mere animals, a child’s response to the “stimulus” of “education” is the determining factor. As the teaching “stimulus” was assumed to be the same for all in any class (an obvious fallacy) then it followed that those who did not respond well – those experiencing lesser so-called learning rates and other difficulties were intellectually inferior – because Thorndike’s premise was that intelligence is permanently set before the student enters school (Ibid, chapters X, XIII, passim.). This easy conclusion absolves teachers and schools from any responsibility for students not learning. Why? Well, if half the class learns and the other half does not the problem must lie with the students who do not learn because they (allegedly) received the same stimuli. Psychological testing with its cultural and other biases helped to reinforce such conclusions.
Thorndike’s point (3) provided for the system to condition those destined to do society’s dirty and unpleasant work to their destiny and to stream them into it.
Thorndike concluded that some students just won’t make it, and that it’s better to determine through educational testing who they will be, early enough so they can be shunted into useful vocational training. His rationale for vocational discrimination and selection through testing was to provide the theoretical basis for yet another kind of discrimination. From 1913 on, psychologist H.H.Gooddard (who invented the term “moron”) used psychological testing to allegedly “prove’ the feeble-mindedness of great numbers of Jews, Italians, Hungarians, Russians and other Eastern Europeans attempting to emigrate to America through Ellis Island. The result was that they were forced to leave the US, the country they had sacrificed so much to reach, and return to Europe in time to experience WWI. In the years before the US stopped accepting large numbers of emigrants in 1921, Louis Terman and Robert Yerkes and others used psychological testing to fuel xenophobia by allegedly “proving” the racial dullness” of the Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and the alleged general “feeblemindedness” of the “colored race”. The social effects of the false racial ideas, massive sterilization campaigns, and other brutal eugenics measures spawned by the psychological testing movement have yet to dissipate.(Thorndike and Gates, op, cit, 320).
To create the compulsory formal US education system would cost an absolute fortune. Who had the money? Well, as it turns out, the new Wundtian behavioural psychologists who sought to exercise their ideas in the US educational field found themselves swamped with money from John D Rockefeller Sr. and his so-called philanthropic trusts.
No one amassed more wealth more quickly than J.D. Rockeller through his oil interests. In the early 1900’s he amassed the equivalent of $663 billion in today’s dollars. Other emergent industrialists created great wealth for themselves with legendary names like J.P. Morgan, Carnegie, Mellon, Guggenheim, Vanderbilt, Peabody and Ford. Today we know them by the foundations they created, totaling over $550 Billion in todays dollars, and by their vast corporate holdings and businesses (Chase Bank, Ford Motor Company, J.P. Morgan Bank, Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, etc.).
With their incredible sudden wealth also came enormous tax bills. Their solution was to create for themselves, with the help of bought politicians, tax-exempt non-profit organizations or NGO’s. In 1900, there were 21 corporate NGO’s and by 1990, some 50,000 had spawned. Through the creation of the NGO’s not only could they shelter wealth but were also able develop a new science called “Scientific-Social Engineering” to influence federal, state and local politicians and the public at large for their own wishes, desires and needs.
Through newly created social propaganda campaigns, created by the likes of Walter Lipmann and Edward Bernays, the Fathers of Marketing and Propaganda respectively, they were able to regularly sell the public at will on the idea that their NGO’s were solely philanthropic and for the good of all.
In his book, “PR! A Social History of Spin”, Stewart Ewen writes:
“Novel strategies of social management and the conviction that a technical elite might be able to engineer social order were becoming attractive…Accompanying a democratic current of social analysis that sought to educate the public at large, another – more cabalistic – tradition of social-scientific thought was emerging, one that saw the study of society as a tool by which a technocratic elite could help serve the interests of vested power.”
These ‘Titans of Industry’, as the PR men dubbed them, were at the top and the planned to stay at the top for generations to come. Their strategy was to keep the working middle class from ever rising to power through controlling of the public education systems in the United States. When you are at the top you spend a lot of time and money making sure you stay at the top and the last things these Robber Barons would allow is for the uprising of the middle class into their hierarchy.
With such large controlling wealth through their foundations came a resilient web of many useful ‘friends’ in the political arena and in business. With connections in banking, Wall Street, law firms, media executives and proprietors along with behind the scenes PR firms they could ensure any type publicity and financial backing they wished including the masking of their true agendas. Through the largess of their foundations the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Guggenheim Foundations colluded to begin the process of designing our current public education system.
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