General education discussion

Good point, but I highly doubt the dudes upstairs are gonna be down with critical thinking focused education

archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758

"School is the cheapest police," Horace Mann once said. It was a sentiment publicly
spoken by every name — Sears, Pierce, Harris, Stowe, Lancaster, and the rest —
prominently involved in creating universal school systems for the coal powers. One has
only to browse Merle Curti's The Social Ideas of American Educators to discover that the
greatest social idea educators had to sell the rich, and which they lost no opportunity to
sell, was the police function of schooling. Although a pedagogical turn in the Quaker
imagination is the reason schools came to look like penitentiaries, Quakers are not the
principal reason they came to function like maximum security institutions. The reason
they came to exist at all was to stabilize the social order and train the ranks. In a
scientific, industrialized, corporate age, "stability" was much more exquisitely defined
than ordinary people could imagine. To realize the new stability, the best breeding stock
had to be drawn up into reservations, likewise the ordinary. "The Daughters of the Barons
of Runnemede" is only a small piece of the puzzle; many more efficient and subtler
quarantines were essayed.

Perhaps subtlest of all was the welfare state, a welfare program for everybody, including
the lowest, in which the political state bestowed alms the way the corporate Church used
to do. Although the most visible beneficiaries of this gigantic project were those groups
increasingly referred to as "masses," the poor were actually people most poorly served by
this latter-day Hindu creation of Fabian socialism and the corporate brain trust.
Subsidizing the excluded of the new society and economy was, it was believed, a
humanitarian way to calm these troubled waters until the Darwinian storm had run its
inevitable course into a new, genetically arranged Utopia.

In a report issued in 1982 and widely publicized in important journals, the connection
between corporate capitalism and the welfare state becomes manifest in a public
document bearing the name Alan Pifer, then president of the Carnegie Corporation.
Apparently fearing that the Reagan administration would alter the design of the Fabian
project beyond its ability to survive, Pifer warned of:

A mounting possibility of severe social unrest, and the consequent development among
the upper classes and the business community of sufficient fear for the survival of our
capitalist economic system to bring about an abrupt change of course. Just as we built the
general welfare state. ..and expanded it in the 1960s as a safety valve for the easing of
social tension, so will we do it again in the 1980s. Any other path is too risky.

In the report quoted from, new conceptions of pedagogy were introduced which we now
see struggling to be born: national certification for schoolteachers, bypassing the last
vestige of local control in states, cities, and villages; a hierarchy of teacher positions; a
project to bring to an end the hierarchy of school administrators — now adjudged largely
an expenditure counter-productive to good social order, a failed experiment. In the new
form, lead teachers manage schools after the British fashion and hire business
administrators. The first expressions of this new initiative included the "mini-school"
movement, now evolved into the charter school movement. Without denying these ideas
a measure of merit, if you understand that their source is the same institutional
consciousness which once sent river ironclads full of armed detectives to break the steel
union at Homestead, machine-gunned strikers at River Rouge, and burned to death over a
dozen women and children in Ludlow, those memories should inspire emotions more
pensive than starry-eyed enthusiasm.

[Citation Needed]

they are unironically mind control centers.
The only reason they exist is to make sure your kids grow up as mind slaves

This is all very useful info thank you user. My suspicions about our public schools have been confirmed I'm afraid

Shit

It's a famous set of experiments that gets referenced often. I forget the name, bu I'll keep looking.

Attached: John Taylor Gatto Against School six purposes public education alexander inglis harvard.png (782x1024, 208K)

>I get that it's a solid idea
>Most of the time I was there I felt like I was just being programmed into becoming a mindless beta who doesn't question anything.

Use that self-realization to question the statement you made. How is it a solid idea? How is it better than the alternatives?

I always knew it was fucked, but could never put my finger on it.

A preliminary explanation is in order. Prior to coal and the inventiveness coal inspired,
no harm attended the very realistic American dream to have one's own business. A
startling percentage of Americans did just that. Businesses were small and local, mostly
subsistence operations like the myriad small farms and small services which kept home
and hearth together across the land. Owning yourself was understood to be the best thing.
The most radical aspect of this former economy was the way it turned ancient notions of
social class privilege and ancient religious notions of exclusion on their ears.

Yet, well inside a single generation, godlike fossil fuel power suddenly became available.
Now here was the rub, that power was available to industrialists but at the same time to the most resourceful, tough-minded, independent, cantankerous, and indomitable group of ordinary citizens ever seen anywhere. A real danger existed that in the industrial
economy being born, too many would recognize the new opportunity, thus creating far
too much of everything for any market to absorb.

The result: prices would collapse, capital would go unprotected. Using the positive
method of analysis (of which more later), one could easily foresee that continuous
generations of improved machinery (with never an end) might well be forthcoming once
the commitment was made to let the coal genie completely out of the bottle. Yet in the
face of a constant threat of overproduction, who would invest and reinvest and reinvest
unless steps were taken to curtail promiscuous competition in the bud stage? The most
efficient time to do that was ab ovo, damping down those qualities of mind and character
which gave rise to the dangerous American craving for independence where it first began,
in childhood.

Attached: kalergi mongrel race mixing future slaves serfs.jpg (672x508, 85K)

The older economy scheduled for replacement had set up its own basic expectations for
children. Even small farmers considered it important to toughen the mind by reading,
writing, debate, and declamation, and to learn to manage numbers well enough so that
later one might manage one's own accounts. In the older society, competition was the
tough love road to fairness in distribution. Democracy, religion, and local community
were the counterpoise to excesses of individualism. In such a universe, home education,
self-teaching, and teacher-directed local schoolhouses served well.

In the waning days of this family-centered social order, an industrial replacement made
necessary by coal lay waiting in the wings, but it was a perspective still unable to purge
itself of excess competition, unable to sufficiently accept government as the partner it
must have to suppress dangerous competition — from an all-too-democratic multitude.

Then a miracle happened or was arranged to happen. After decades of surreptitious
Northern provocation, the South fired on Fort Sumter. Hegel himself could not have
planned history better. America was soon to find itself shoehorned into a monoculture.
The Civil War demonstrated to industrialists and financiers how a standardized
population trained to follow orders could be made to function as a reliable money tree;
even more, how the common population could be stripped of its power to cause political
trouble. These war years awakened canny nostalgia for the British colonial past, and in
doing so, the coal-driven society was welcomed for the social future it promised as well
as for its riches.

Abraham Lincoln really fucked us with compulsory school. He didn't end slavery, he reformed it.

Attached: AbrahamLincoln The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of governm (850x400, 52K)

I meant it sounds like a good idea. Like saying "educate our kids for a better tomorrow!" Of course we should get kids educated, I think that's a solid idea. We just aren't really doing it

bump

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Fpbp