Fascism then, fascism now

A long time ago, I read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a futuristic novel in which humans are grown in labs and designed to be of a certain class (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon). As babies they are trained by Pavlovian methods-- loud noises and electric shocks. In school they are taught to memorize not just ordinary facts but a prescribed class consciousness. Henry Ford is their God, and their lives are in every way mechanized. Any disobedience and you're sent to the superintendent of psychology.

When I first read the book, I enjoyed it, but it didn't resonate, it didn't creep me out the way it does now. I didn't understand that when it was published in 1932, the scientific management of the entire population, a forced regimentation carried out through eugenics, behaviorism, and schooling, was exactly where we were headed. I didn't realize then that Hitler never had an original idea in his life. I didn't realize that, for instance:

Some of the primary and more famous Americans and companies that were involved with the fascist regimes of Europe [from the 1920s to the 1940s] are: William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric.

After all, the European fascists had a lot of the same ideas as the powerful elite in our own country. The Nazis didn't spring up out of nowhere, nor were many wealthy people shocked by their ideals-- at the start.

The reason for my detour into history is that public schooling as we know it was designed during this era, directed by a powerful and well-funded group know as the Educational Trust. As I have mentioned somewhere before, Rockefeller and Carnegie gave more funding to the public schools from 1900 to 1920 than did the US government. Let me give some examples of the oppressive intent of leading educators, from John Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, Chapter 2:

Meanwhile, at the project offices of an important employer of experts, the Rockefeller Foundation, friends were hearing from Max Mason, its president, that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, "the control of human behavior." This dazzling ambition was announced on April 11, 1933. Schooling figured prominently in the design.

An executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected "to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force."

The Nazis wanted children to be raised by the State rather than in families, though this was not entirely implemented. But in the US schools were also used to usurp the role of the family. At a time when Woodrow Wilson was publicly announcing that most children should forego a real education and be prepared for manual labor, one does wonder if there was much academic purpose to public schooling at all. Consider this (still Gatto):

Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 Social History of the Family notified the nation’s academics what was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts."

. . .

[In 1929], the famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced, "Academic subjects are of little value." William Kirkpatrick, his colleague at Teachers College, boasted in Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.

These "experts" were experts in the scientific management of people, which is to say, they were expert in oppression and regimentation. Consider the words of Ellwood Cubberley, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education:

Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.

. . .

Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand.

Eugenic engineering of the populace was also to be put in place through the schools:

Rockefeller had been inspired by the work of Eastern European scientist Hermann Müller to invest heavily in genetics.... Müller preached that planned breeding would bring mankind to paradise faster than God. His proposal received enthusiastic endorsement from the greatest scientists of the day as well as from powerful economic interests.

Müller would win the Nobel Prize, reduce his proposal to a fifteen-hundred-word Geneticist's Manifesto, and watch with satisfaction as twenty-two distinguished American and British biologists of the day signed it. The state must prepare to consciously guide human sexual selection, said Müller. School would have to separate [out] worthwhile breeders....

You might think that these overtly fascist intentions on the part of the creators of modern mass schooling had faded with time. But John Gatto also pored over government documents from the 1960s and found continuing evidence of similar intentions:

[T]he gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967.... The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators—nothing less than "impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in which "few will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which "each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings.... Readers learned that "chemical experimentation" on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced schooling.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear.

You might think that somehow these fascist influences have been overthrown, but then why do we have poll results like these, from earlier this year?

A significant number of US high-school students regard their constitutional right to freedom of speech as excessive, according to a new survey.

Over a third of the 100,000 students questioned felt the First Amendment went "too far" in guaranteeing freedom of speech, press, worship and assembly.

Only half felt newspapers should be allowed to publish stories that did not have the government's approval.

I've mentioned in previous posts that while 35% of American adults feel politics and government are too complicated to understand, only 4% of homeschool graduates agree. Schooling is capable of removing the will to democracy, it would appear.

So here I am, so far outside the box in my attitudes toward schooling that I hardly know where to start or what to say the next time someone asks why we've decided to homeschool. "Because the fascists aren't getting my children" won't go over too well.

And yet what can I say, when I keep coming across quotations like these?

Is it not ironic that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?
– Royce Van Norman, "School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47(1966):315-16


The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - "state indoctrination."
– Jonathan Kozol


Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.
– Winston Churchill


Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
– Vladimir Lenin


Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
– Joseph Stalin