Taking Back Our Stolen History
John O’Donnell on the Education System: “It is Simply to Reduce as Many Individuals as Possible to the Same Safe Level, to Breed and Train a Standardized Citizenry”
John O’Donnell on the Education System: “It is Simply to Reduce as Many Individuals as Possible to the Same Safe Level, to Breed and Train a Standardized Citizenry”

John O’Donnell on the Education System: “It is Simply to Reduce as Many Individuals as Possible to the Same Safe Level, to Breed and Train a Standardized Citizenry”

John O’Donnell, “Capitol Stuff,” From an article in the Daily News, May 12, 1954:

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else . . . Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible.

“Dodd has advised his House committee employers to bear down upon evidence that grants, made chiefly by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, were used toward ‘directing education toward an international viewpoint and discrediting the traditions to which it had been dedicated, changing both school and college curricula to the point where they sometimes denied principles underlying the American way of life . . . ’”