Education System

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“The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun”.  John D. Rockefeller

In the 1880s Rockefeller Sr. hired Frederick Taylor Gates, a Baptist minister as his financial adviser and to manage his wealth-concealing philanthropic trusts. Gates had worked to distribute George A. Pillsbury’s last philanthropies before his death.  Thus the great monopolist Rockefeller solved what he called “the difficult art of giving”: ‘If a combination to do business is effective in saving waste and in getting better results, why is not combination far more important in philanthropic work?’ – [ Rockefeller, John D., Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (Toronto: McClannand & Goodchild, 1909),165.]

The game plan was simple: Funnel large sums of Rockefeller money into setting up a philanthropic monopoly (with some moneys also contributed by other industrial barons) then distribute the money in a way guaranteed to ensure Mr. Rockefeller the respect and admiration of those portions of society that had criticized his excessive wealth and the manner in which he gained it. In effect Gates found a way to launder Rockefeller money.

But to do this Gates and Rockefeller’s son John D. Rockefeller Jr., had to undermine the existing indigenous American educational system which was deeply rooted in the beliefs and practices of the Puritan Fathers, the Quakers, and early American patriots and philosophers. Jefferson had maintained that in order to preserve liberty in the new nation, it was essential that its citizenry be educated, whatever their income. Throughout the country, schools were established almost immediately after the colonization of new areas. Fine school systems were established by the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.

The free school movement in New York, under the aegis of DeWitt Clinton and Horace Mann, was also flourishing. Moreover, at this time a large number of “normal schools” (so-called due to their role in setting the norms and standards of education) were turning out thousands of well-trained teachers each year. Major universities had been established early in the country’s history, and annually graduated intensely literate and well-educated people who were to be the leaders of the nation.2

The result was that, except in the rural South, high school graduates in 1900 were truly educated, fluent in English language, history, and culture, and possessing the skills needed to succeed in life. But the South was devastated by the Civil War, and during the reconstruction period traditional values and institutions were greatly disrupted. Rural areas had few schools, even for the white children, and fewer still for the children of parents recently freed from slavery. The confusion and disruption in the rural South gave Gates the right circumstances for implementation of his plans for Rockefeller’s philanthropy.

In 1902 Gates gained the approval of Rockefeller Sr. and his son and a group of noted Southern educators to charter the General Education Board, for “the promotion of education within the United States without distinction of race, sex, or creed.” It was to be a philanthropic monopoly. In the words of Gates:
‘The object of this Association is to provide a vehicle through which capitalists of the North who sincerely desire to assist in the great work of Southern education may act with assurance that their money will be wisely used.’

Starting with a $1 million Rockefeller donation the General Education Board soon absorbed the smaller existing Slater and Peabody philantrophic education Funds. Gates stated the Education Board’s aims in its Occasional Letter No 1:

‘In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural 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, editors, 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 an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.’

A similar view of the power of philanthropy was expressed by Board trustee Waiter Hines Page who later became editor of the Atlantic Monthly, ambassador to Great Britain, and early advocate of America’s entry into World War I) when he told the first executive secretary of the Board, Wallace Buttrick:

‘…the world lies before us. It’ll not be the same world when we get done with it that it was: before: bet your last penny on that will you!’

J.D. Rockefeller added another $10 million in 1907, and a later a further sum of $32 million. Through subsequent decades Rockefeller granted some $7.5 billion. With significant money buys significant influence and loyalty.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Gates sought more effective ways of investing the Rockefeller fortune towards, in Fosdick’s words  “this goal of social control”. ‘These men … conspired to control American education while buttressing the Rockefeller fortune against all attacks, ensuring that their autocratic views would prevail. With the General Education Board, Rockefeller’s “education trust,” a virtually unlimited source of funds was to be made available to the Wundtian psychologists’ ambitious designs on American education.’

The prime mechanism of the Rockefeller social control education strategy was its funding of the New York Teachers College on 120th street. Receiving multiple massive donations from the Rockefellers this College grew rapidly, covering an entire city block crammed with seven buildings. It operated from early morning to ten o’clock at night, for ten months of the year…Its enrollment was greater than all but 19 US universities and only Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago had more students seeking advanced education in 1912. In fact, Teachers College became the fourth largest graduate school in the US.

Thus Teachers College was able to expand at a time critical to its success and immediately following a massive population increase among US school-age children. US public school enrollments rose from 9,900,000 in 1880 to 12,700,000 in 1890 and continued to rise rapidly thereafter. The number of colleges increased from 350 in 1880 to nearly 500 in 1900, with college enrollment doubling over the same period, and continuing to expand into the early years of the new century.

Teachers College was well established and ready to fill that need for teachers with a methodology most schools of education didn’t have— the Wundtian “educational” psychology. The year after Rockefeller’s General Education Board had set Teachers College financially on its feet, Thorndike published the first volume of his masterwork, Educational Psychology. By 1904, he was entrenched as full professor and head of the new department of educational psychology at Teachers College. That same year, after a decade in Chicago experimenting with children, John Dewey joined the faculty of Columbia University as a member of the departments of philosophy and education, in a unique position to influence advanced students in Teachers College. With Russell, Cattell, Thorndike, and the other Wundtians, Dewey created an amalgam of “educational” psychology and socialism that became known as “Progressive Education.” This education system was pumped out by Columbia’s Teachers College for the next half-century and slowly but surely became typical in schools all over the US.

Dewey and Thorndike treated the schoolroom as a “great laboratory” in which to do their research and refine “the modification of instincts and capabilities into habits and powers.” But there was no large laboratory school at Columbia, no institution filled with willing or unknowing subjects for the great psychological experiments of the Wundtians at Teachers College until 1917 when an offer to establish such a laboratory school came from Abraham Flexner of the General Education Board.

Abraham Flexner, an effective fund-raiser, experienced educator and organizer, felt he had the solution to both the supposed failure of
American education and to the need of the General Education Board to disburse the Rockefeller millions.  Educated at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Berlin, he apparently had little contact with the Wundtian psychologists at those institutions. His experience in education consisted of 15 years of running his own preparatory school in
Louisville, Kentucky, and from his studies in German and American education while a researcher at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in New York City.

In 1913, Flexner left the Carnegie Foundation and went to work for the General Education Board, first as assistant secretary for four years, then as secretary (principal executive officer) running the operations of the Board for eight years in partnership with its president, Wallace Buttrick. As the resident intellectual and educator on the Board, Flexner specialized in education and saw more clearly than anyone else just how the Rockefeller money could be used to further his aims.

Flexner also attacked American medical education and caused the number of medical schools in the United States to drop from 147 to 95.

Naturopathic medicine declined because it was proving particularly unsusceptible to Rockefeller funding. Over the years (until 1960), the General Education Board would give a total of over $96 million 9 to medical schools which, like Johns Hopkins, disregarded naturopathy, homeopathy, and chiropractic in favor of medicine based on the use of surgery and chemical drugs. The Board’s sponsorship of chemical medicine on the one hand and psychology on the other would culminate in 1963 when a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins developed the use of Ritalin to “treat” children who were regarded as “troubled” or too active.

The effects of this merger of chemical medicine and Wundtian psychology upon American education are thoroughly documented in The Myth of the Hyperactive Child, and Other Means of Child Control, by Divoky and Schrag. [ Peter, and Diane Divoky, The Myth of the Hyperactive Child & Other Means of Child Control (New York: Random House, 1975)]

In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these newly created NGO foundations. The commission after a year of testimony concluded:

“The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation. The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.”

Flexner’s other major contribution to the transformation of American education and society came in 1916, with his plan to create an experimental laboratory school, backed by Rockefeller money, which would be a showplace for the Progressive Education practices of Dewey and Thorndike. Flexner wrote a short tract called “A Modern School.” [ Flexner, Abraham, “A Modern School,” Occasional Papers, No. 3 (New York: General Education Board, 1916)]. In it, Flexner attacked traditional American education and proposed a sharp break with workable educational practices. His experimental school would eliminate the study of Latin and Greek. Literature and history would not be completely abolished, but new methods would be instituted for teaching these subjects, classical literature would be ignored, and formal English grammar would be dropped. Lionni says: ‘Flexner wasn’t just throwing out the baby with the bath water; he was blowing up the tub.’  For a deeper account of the broad general effects of this type of merger, see Schrag’s devastating Mind Control (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

Flexner’s proposals had the full weight of the Rockefeller millions behind them and despite spirited opposition in an editorial in The New York Times followed by other journals and debates in the Senate they prevailed. After 1917 the takeover was rapid and thorough. Even before the opposition began to die down, Flexner and Teachers College went ahead with their plans for a laboratory school. Flexner had wanted to call it “The Modern School” (from the title of his booklet), but the phrase was so disliked that he decided to name it the Lincoln School.

The General Education Board funded the Lincoln School in midtown Manhattan and in 1920 built a new school near Teachers College. In 1926 Teachers College received massive endowment funding to run the Lincoln School.

Wundtian psychology and Rockefeller money were thus combined in an institution whose goal “was the construction of new curricula and the development of new methods.” Textbooks were created; standard teaching practices revised, and a course of study organized on the principles developed at Teachers College by Thorndike and Dewey. More than a thousand educators visited this fully fledged prototype school during year 1923-1924. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., sent four of his five sons to study at the Lincoln School, with results that were predictable had he read the works of Thorndike and Dewey:

…Laurance [Rockefeller] gives startling confirmation as to ‘Why Johnnie [sic] Can’t Read.’ He says that the Lincoln School did not teach him to read and write as he wishes he now could. Nelson, today, admits that reading for him is a ‘slow and tortuous process’ that he does not enjoy doing but compels himself to do. This is significant evidence in the debate that has raged about modern educational techniques.

The Lincoln School was really a failure (though in the context of the Khazarian banksters’ secret intention to destroy US education it was probably a success) and it was closed in 1946, and replaced by the Institute of School Experimentation, which carried on the task of remodeling American education.

The Guggenheim Foundation agreed to award fellowships to historians recommended by the Carnegie Endowment. Gradually, through the 1920′s, they assembled a group of twenty promising young academics, and took them to London. There they briefed them on what was expected of them when they became professors of American history. That twenty were the nucleus of what was eventually to become the American Historical Association. The Guggenheim Foundation also endowed the American Historical Association with $400,000 at that time.

By 1950 the Rockefeller Foundation endowed Columbia Teachers College in New York City, formerly named the Russell’s Teacher College, produced one-third of all presidents of teacher-training institutions, one-fifth of all American public school teachers, and one-quarter of all superintendents.

J.D Rockefeller and family additionally funded and founded the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University (which focused on offering only postgraduate and postdoctoral education), the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health as well as the Rockefeller University Press.

They also controlled, and continue to maintain ownership control in, school textbook companies and scholastic literature copy rights used in the public school systems thus being able to direct the historical narrative used in schools through Guggenheims American Historical Society. Rockefeller support of Wundtian psychology with its bestial basis and precepts continued throughout the 20th century in US education and molded not only the US education system but through it, virtually all aspects of American life.

Additionally, through use of political favors and influence as well as the structuring of public educational taxes through property ownership, these few NGO Foundations were able to mold educational policy and control the flow of funds to school districts and community colleges at the Federal levels.

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“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.“    – David Rockefeller from his autobiography entitled “Memoirs” pgs. 404 & 405.

At the same time as Henry Ford was developing the assembly line for mass quantity automobile production, J.D. Rockefeller was extracting and selling ever greater quantities of oil to be used in automobiles. It is a little known fact, possibly due to Rockefeller’s influence as to our U.S. history, that the first Model A’s and T’s that came off the Ford assembly lines had a simple switch where the autos could run on either alcohol or gasoline. This was because at the time, in the early 1900′s, we were and Agrarian Society, with few gas stations across the country. Ford’s cars allowed drivers to be able to get alcohol fuel from farms across the country.

When J.D. Rockefeller could not convince Mr. Ford to produce his cars to run only on oil, he along with Joseph Kennedy, (JFK and RFK’s Father) manufactured the era of Prohibition in the 1920′s so that every new car would be forced to run on his oil and he used his newly created PR firms to sell the country that Prohibition was solely a social issue.

In 1936, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tires, General Motors and Mack Trucks created the fictitious ”United Cities Motor Transport Company” which succeeded in buying up most electric trains in cities from Seattle to Philadelphia so that everyone would then have to use personal automobiles for transportation.  (A good documentary of this revisionist history can be found in the movie “Taken For A Ride”.)

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“The power of the individual large foundation is enormous. Its various forms of patronage carry with them elements of thought control. It exerts immense influence on educator, educational processes, and educational institutions. It is capable of invisible coercion. It can materially predetermine the development of social and political concepts, academic opinion, thought leadership, public opinion.

The power to influence national policy is amplified tremendously when foundations act in concert. There is such a concentration of foundation power in the United States, operating in education and the social sciences, with a gigantic aggregate of capital and income. This Interlock has some of the characteristics of an intellectual cartel. It operates in part through certain intermediary organizations supported by the foundations. It has ramifications in almost every phase of education.”  -John Taylor Gatto, author of “The Underground History of Education” and Thrice NY Teacher of the Year

In 1954, a special Congressional Committee investigated the interlocking web of tax-exempt foundations to see what impact their grants were having on the American people. The Reece Committee, as it became known, stumbled onto the fact that some of these foundations had embarked upon a gigantic project to rewrite American history and incorporate it into new school text books.

Norman Dodd, the Reece committee’s research director, found, in the archives of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the following remarkable statement of purpose:

“The only way to maintain control of the population was to obtain control of the education in the U.S. They realized this was a prodigious task so they approached the Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that they go in tandem so the portion of education which could be considered domestically oriented would be taken over by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the portion which was oriented to international matters be taken over by the Carnegie Endowment.”

Dodd proceeded to show that the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Endowment were using funds excessively on projects at Columbia, Harvard, Chicago University and the University of California, in order to enable oligarchical collectivism.

Dodd further stated:

“The purported deterioration in scholarship and in the techniques of teaching which, lately, has attracted the attention of the American public, has apparently been caused primarily by a premature effort to reduce our meager knowledge of social phenomena to the level of an applied science.”

Mr. Dodd’s research staff had discovered that in 1933-1936, a change took place which was so drastic as to constitute a revolution.”

The Reece Commission also indicated conclusively that:

• The responsibility for the economic welfare of the American people had been transferred heavily to the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
• That a corresponding change in education had taken place from an impetus outside the local community.
• That this “revolution” had occurred without violence and with the full consent of an overwhelming majority of the electorate.

Mr. Dodd stated that this revolution “could not have occurred peacefully or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it.”

According to Mr. Dodd, grants given to these Foundations had been used for:

 –  Training individuals and servicing agencies to render advice to the Executive branch of the Federal Government.

 –  Directing education in the United States toward an international view-point and discrediting the traditions to which it (formerly) had been dedicated.

 – Decreasing the dependency of education upon the resources of the local community and freeing it from many of the natural safeguards inherent in this American tradition.

  – Changing both school and college curricula to the point where they sometimes denied the principles underlying the American way of life.

  – Financing experiments designed to determine the most effective means by which education could be pressed into service of a political nature.”

Mr. Dodd cited a book called “The Turning of the Tides”, which documented the literature from various tax-exempt foundations and organizations like UNESCO, showing that they wished to install a centralized World Government.

The Reece Commission quickly ran into a buzzsaw of opposition from influential centers of American corporate life. Major national newspapers hurled scathing criticisms, which, together with pressure from other potent political adversaries, forced the committee to disband prematurely without action.

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Additionally, in 1951, Hon. John T. Wood (Idaho), House of Representatives, added these remarks in the Congressional record on the Report to the American People on UNESCO (United Nations for Education, Science and Culture Organization). From the Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 82nd Congress, First Session on Thursday, October 18, 1951:

“UNESCO’s scheme to pervert public education appears in a series of nine volumes, titled ‘Toward Understanding’ which presume to instruct kindergarten and elementary grade teachers in the fine art of preparing our youngsters for the day when their first loyalty will be to a world government, of which the United States will form but an administrative part…

The program is quite specific. The teacher is to begin by eliminating any and all words, phrases, descriptions, pictures, maps, classroom material or teaching methods of a sort causing his pupils to feel or express a particular love for, or loyalty to, the United States of America. Children exhibiting such prejudice as a result of prior home influence – UNESCO calls it outgrowth of the narrow family spirit – are to be dealt an abundant measure of counter propaganda at the earliest possible age. Booklet V, on page 9, advises the teacher that:

‘The kindergarten or infant school has a significant part to play in the child’s education. Not only can it correct many of the errors of home training, but it can also prepare the child for membership, at about the age of seven, in a group of his own age and habits – the first of many such social identifications that he must achieve on his way to membership in the world society.’”  

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