Inputs and Outputs: Education and its maintenance of the social order

News from the West's great post, The Education System Was Designed To Keep Us Uneducated and Docile, traces the roots of the US system and its quest to maintain social order and dominant power structures. While I love John Dewey, the post points out even Dewey's references to students as products to be molded within a specific social order. John Taylor Gatto, retired NYC teacher and former NYC and NYS Teacher of the Year, unearths these problems in his book The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling. (Full text available for free online.)

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day.

Educational Leadership Conference at Yale

Levers for Change

Hosted by The Yale School of Management
Friday, February 13th, 2009 at The Omni Hotel in New Haven, CT

Features:

• Dennis Walcott, Deputy Mayor of Education and Community Development, New York City
  
• Roland Fryer, Economist and Professor, Harvard University (this guy)
  

Panelists Include:

• Bob Wise, President, Alliance for Excellent Education
  
• Norman Atkins, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Teacher U
  
• Amy McIntosh, Chief Talent Officer, NYCDOE
  
• Michael Bennet, Superintendent, Denver Public Schools
  
• Gillian Smith, Chief Marketing Officer, Teach for America
  

It's sponsored by The Broad Foundation, The Charter Oak Challenge Foundation, and ConnCAN.

Definitely the corporate-leaning side of ed reform folks...

Some Questions on Education, Business, and Power

I don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future of their people or of an organization without talking about education. Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future. --Wilma Mankiller, first woman elected Chief of the Cherokee Nation

(Thanks, Education for Liberation and NYCore for including this quote in your Plan Book.)

A book to add to your list- The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses by Larry Cuban.

"Ford Motor Company would not have survived the competition had it not been for an emphasis on results. We must view education the same way," the U.S. Secretary of Education declared in 2003.

That's a pretty scary statement.

Who runs our schools? The biggest names:

• Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education: never a teacher.
  
• Rod Paige, Former Secretary of Education: never a teacher (As far as I can tell. Anyone know for sure?) Majored in Phys. Ed and went straight to college sports coaching. Involved in that famous Texas Miracle, err...Myth...
  
• Joel Klein, Chancellor, NYC Department of Education: never a teacher.

Is a business mentality the solution to our troubled education system? Should hedge fund managers be running charter schools? What happens when we place test results as the bottom line? 

Should private schools be for-profit?