A_Short_Angry_History_of_Modern_Schooling_by_John_Taylor_Gatto
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00:00:31.300 | A short, angry history of modern schooling.
00:00:34.800 | And really what it is, is the 900-page book I've just finished, condensed to one hour.
00:00:42.300 | So, I would have given you a five-minute break before starting, but somebody's a harsh taskmaster here.
00:00:52.300 | The information's rather dense, and rather than rely on my own failing memory, I'll work from notes.
00:01:03.800 | I'll apologize in advance, but this is very, very, very strong stuff.
00:01:11.300 | Mass schooling of the young by force is a creation of the four great coal powers of the 19th century.
00:01:21.300 | Germany, England, France, and the United States.
00:01:26.300 | Its final conception, structure, and later development arises from the logic that fossil fuel,
00:01:34.300 | used in conjunction with machinery, imposes on society.
00:01:40.300 | This reality is masked by an earlier anticipation of mass schooling in certain utopian and religious writings
00:01:50.300 | about social order and human nature.
00:01:53.300 | But make no mistake, in the Western world there was never any such animal as mass schooling
00:02:01.300 | until coal came along, paired with machinery.
00:02:06.300 | You shouldn't be fooled any more than Charles Francis Adams was when he observed in 1880
00:02:13.300 | that what was being fashioned for children, unfortunate enough to be caught in the proposed school net,
00:02:21.300 | which hadn't happened up to then, combined the characteristics of the cotton mill, said Adams,
00:02:28.300 | and the railroad with those of a state prison.
00:02:33.300 | That's the Adams who had two presidents in his family.
00:02:37.300 | After the Civil War, certain utopian speculations about isolating children in compounds
00:02:46.300 | and subjecting them to deliberate molding routines began to be discussed seriously
00:02:53.300 | by the policymaking managers of business, government, and university life.
00:03:00.300 | These discussions were inspired by the potential for centralized mass production made possible
00:03:08.300 | by coal-driven machinery, railroad development that was also dependent on coal,
00:03:15.300 | and startling new inventions like the telegraph.
00:03:18.300 | The principal motivation for this revolution in family and community life wasn't only greed for money,
00:03:26.300 | although that was there, but also the philosophical conviction which approached a religion
00:03:33.300 | in its intensity that early indoctrination would lead to an orderly, scientific society
00:03:42.300 | led by the best people, unhampered by the democratic tradition or American libertarian attitudes.
00:03:51.300 | Forced schooling was the prescription to make the bulk of the population alike,
00:03:58.300 | dependent on remote authority, not local authority, for allocation to one or another station in the economy.
00:04:07.300 | No more Ben Franklins, no more Tom Edisons were going to be allowed.
00:04:12.300 | Individuals would be prevented from taking up their lives until an advanced age.
00:04:20.300 | During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years.
00:04:27.300 | In the late 19th century, a special concept was invented to lock older children in place.
00:04:34.300 | It was called adolescence, and that was a phenomenon unknown to the human race before that time.
00:04:43.300 | And the infantilization of young people did not stop at the end of the 19th century,
00:04:49.300 | but it continued right on through the 20th.
00:04:52.300 | Child labor laws were extended to cover more and more occupations.
00:04:58.300 | The permissible age of leaving school became higher and higher.
00:05:04.300 | The number of occupations not demanding schooling became fewer and fewer.
00:05:10.300 | You notice I use the term schooling and not education.
00:05:15.300 | By the 1970s, it was not unusual to find graduate students well into their 30s.
00:05:22.300 | From the start, there was a purpose behind schooling,
00:05:26.300 | which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted,
00:05:31.300 | but concentrated on what a highly centralized economy and a strong political state was thought to need.
00:05:40.300 | What that was can be seen from this excerpt from a speech Woodrow Wilson made to businessmen in 1914.
00:05:50.300 | I'm quoting Wilson without changing a word.
00:05:54.300 | "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education,
00:06:00.300 | and we want another class, a very, very much larger class of necessity,
00:06:05.300 | to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific, difficult manual tasks."
00:06:16.300 | By 1917, the major administrative jobs across America in schooling
00:06:23.300 | were under the control of a group of interests referred to in the press as the Education Trust.
00:06:31.300 | That term vanishes somewhere in the middle 1930s,
00:06:35.300 | but it's quite common in the newspapers of the teens and the 20s.
00:06:41.300 | At the first meeting of the Education Trust,
00:06:44.300 | the attendees included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford,
00:06:52.300 | the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association.
00:06:57.300 | "The chief end of the new education," wrote Benjamin Kidd in 1918,
00:07:03.300 | "was to," I'm quoting, "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."
00:07:11.300 | The primary target of the first 30 years of forced schooling
00:07:16.300 | was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America.
00:07:20.300 | Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing with one another
00:07:26.300 | for the favor of the boss,
00:07:29.300 | not as entrepreneurs like Ben Franklin competing to serve the public.
00:07:35.300 | It was believed that only in this way could the menace of overproduction in America be contained.
00:07:43.300 | You'd have to, ladies and gentlemen, read into the primary sources,
00:07:47.300 | as I've spent years reading,
00:07:49.300 | to see how often the term "overproduction" emerges in these discussions of businessmen
00:07:56.300 | between 1880 and 1910.
00:07:59.300 | They were terrified that the early tradition of America,
00:08:03.300 | that people worked for themselves, would continue,
00:08:07.300 | and that this would make it impossible for large central corporations to get financing to work,
00:08:15.300 | since their machinery costs so much money.
00:08:18.300 | Who would constantly replace that machinery
00:08:22.300 | if at any moment the peril of thousands of people opening small competing interests were a loss?
00:08:30.300 | So it had to be put to death.
00:08:33.300 | In 1919, Arthur Calhoun's "Social History of the Family"
00:08:38.300 | informed the nation that the child was passing from the family,
00:08:43.300 | I'm quoting now, "into the custody of community experts."
00:08:48.300 | And he offered a significant prophecy,
00:08:51.300 | that we could expect in time to see a system of public education,
00:08:57.300 | "designed to check the mating of the unfit."
00:09:02.300 | In 1922, Mayor Hyland of New York City,
00:09:07.300 | alluding specifically to actions in schools of the Rockefeller Foundation
00:09:14.300 | and other corporate interests,
00:09:16.300 | said in a public speech that the schools had been seized as an octopus would seize its prey
00:09:24.300 | by, quote, "an invisible government."
00:09:28.300 | You'll find that reference in Diane Ravitch's book, "The Great School Wars."
00:09:33.300 | Be good now, later.
00:09:35.300 | The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling,
00:09:40.300 | as well as for the stock market.
00:09:43.300 | A book called "A Sociological Philosophy of Education," published in 1928,
00:09:50.300 | claimed it is the business of teachers to run not merely the school, but the world.
00:09:57.300 | In 1929, the famous creator of educational psychology,
00:10:03.300 | Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College,
00:10:06.300 | announced, I'm quoting, "academic subjects are of little value."
00:10:12.300 | His colleague at Teachers College, William Kirkpatrick,
00:10:16.300 | boasted in his book, "Education and the Social Crisis,"
00:10:21.300 | that the whole traditional system of rearing the young was being made over by experts.
00:10:29.300 | Meanwhile, in the project offices of an important employer of those experts,
00:10:35.300 | the Rockefeller Foundation,
00:10:37.300 | executives were hearing from its president, Max Mason, on April 11, 1933.
00:10:46.300 | Don't say that I'm not giving you very specific references.
00:10:50.300 | It can't be checked.
00:10:52.300 | That a comprehensive program was underway to rationalize social control
00:10:59.300 | and the control of human behavior,
00:11:02.300 | inspired by the genetic work of an Eastern European scientist,
00:11:07.300 | Herman Muller, at the University of Texas.
00:11:10.300 | Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other large private foundations
00:11:15.300 | had been investing heavily in genetics.
00:11:19.300 | Muller had used x-rays to override genetic law,
00:11:24.300 | inducing mutations in fruit flies.
00:11:27.300 | And that set off a line of thinking that it might be possible
00:11:32.300 | to create life and shape it as you wanted to.
00:11:38.300 | Muller preached that planned breeding was necessary to bring mankind progress,
00:11:45.300 | and his proposal received enthusiastic endorsement
00:11:50.300 | from most of the greatest scientists of the day.
00:11:53.300 | He reduced it to a 1,500-word geneticist manifesto,
00:11:59.300 | and 22 distinguished American and British biologists signed it.
00:12:06.300 | "The conscious guidance by the state of human sexual selection is called for," said Muller.
00:12:14.300 | What was wanted, he said, was a project of racial hygiene,
00:12:19.300 | such as the policy makers in Germany were pioneering--
00:12:24.300 | a program where eugenics was state policy
00:12:28.300 | and where scientific research shaped society.
00:12:33.300 | A February 1934 progress report from the Rockefeller endowments
00:12:39.300 | asked the question, "Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics
00:12:46.300 | that we can hope to breed in the future superior men?"
00:12:51.300 | Just a few months before this report appeared,
00:12:54.300 | the executive director of the National Education Association
00:12:59.300 | announced that his organization expected--I'm quoting directly now--
00:13:04.300 | "to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force."
00:13:13.300 | You can't get it much clearer than that, can you?
00:13:18.300 | Between 1967 and 1974, teacher training all over the United States
00:13:26.300 | was covertly revamped through the coordinated efforts
00:13:30.300 | of a small number of private foundations, think tanks, global corporations, universities,
00:13:38.300 | and several other interests working through the United States Office of Education
00:13:44.300 | and through key state ed departments like those in California or New York.
00:13:50.300 | The most important documents in this transformation were three,
00:13:54.300 | and I'm going to name them for you.
00:13:57.300 | Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives was the first.
00:14:02.300 | An extensive government exercise in futurology called
00:14:07.300 | Designing Education for the Future was the second,
00:14:11.300 | and the Behavioral Teacher Education Project was the third.
00:14:16.300 | That was an enormous manual of over 1,000 pages,
00:14:21.300 | which in time impacted on every school in the United States.
00:14:25.300 | While other documents exist, these are the most important representatives of the whole.
00:14:31.300 | They'll serve to make clear to you what project is underway,
00:14:36.300 | and I'll take them one by one.
00:14:38.300 | Designing Education, produced by the Federal Education Department,
00:14:43.300 | redefined education after the Prussian fashion as, quote,
00:14:49.300 | "a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character."
00:14:57.300 | State education agencies would henceforth act as on-site federal enforcers,
00:15:04.300 | ensuring compliance of local schools with Washington directives.
00:15:09.300 | It proclaimed that each state education department, quote,
00:15:13.300 | "must be an agent of change."
00:15:16.300 | State departments were, quote, "to lose their identity as well as their authority
00:15:22.300 | in order to form a partnership with the federal government."
00:15:26.300 | Now, I think you and I both are aware that what we're talking about here is a form of treason.
00:15:34.300 | There is no mention whatsoever in any of the founding documents of this country
00:15:39.300 | of federal involvement in education.
00:15:43.300 | It's not just an academic thing.
00:15:45.300 | It was deliberately kept away from the central political power
00:15:50.300 | because of the obvious chance to pervert it
00:15:55.300 | if it were handed to the power that controlled the army.
00:15:59.300 | The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Teacher Education Project,
00:16:05.300 | outlined the teaching reforms to be forced on America after 1967.
00:16:12.300 | So we're talking about 31 years ago.
00:16:15.300 | If you ever want to hunt this thing down, it bears the US Office of Education contract number,
00:16:22.300 | and I can give it to anyone afterwards.
00:16:24.300 | I have it here, but I won't bother to read the 44 digits.
00:16:29.300 | The document sets out clearly the intention of its creators,
00:16:33.300 | nothing less, I'm quoting from the document now,
00:16:36.300 | than the impersonal manipulation through schooling of a future America
00:16:42.300 | in which few will be able to maintain control over their opinions.
00:16:47.300 | An America in which each individual receives at birth a multipurpose identification number
00:16:54.300 | which enables employers and other controllers, that's a direct quote from the document,
00:17:00.300 | to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary.
00:17:08.300 | Readers learned that chemical experimentation on minors
00:17:12.300 | would be normal procedure in the post-1967 world.
00:17:18.300 | That is surely a pointed foreshadowing of the massive riddle and interventions
00:17:24.300 | which accompany the practice of forced schooling at present.
00:17:29.300 | The Teacher Education Project identified the future as one, I'm quoting again,
00:17:34.300 | in which a small elite will control all important matters,
00:17:39.300 | one in which participatory democracy will largely disappear.
00:17:44.300 | It was your tax money or your father's and mother's that paid for this document.
00:17:49.300 | Children will be made to see through school experience that their classmates,
00:17:54.300 | this is a very subtle point, so I'll start that again,
00:17:58.300 | children will be made to see through school experience that their classmates
00:18:03.300 | are so irresponsible and inadequate that they must be controlled and regulated for society's good.
00:18:12.300 | That's of a category I think equivalent to the wag your dog scenario
00:18:20.300 | that I think we're going through right now.
00:18:24.300 | According to the project, post-modern schooling will focus,
00:18:35.300 | this is a direct quote, on pleasure cultivation and other attitudes and skills
00:18:41.300 | compatible with a non-work world.
00:18:45.300 | Notice how the tremendous rise in school violence and general school chaos
00:18:50.300 | in the late 1960s can be seen as providing a reasonable justification
00:18:57.300 | for the sharp constriction of traditional intellectual schooling.
00:19:01.300 | Each outburst of childish disorder echoing through the press
00:19:06.300 | was like an advertisement promoting the need to surrender community control
00:19:11.300 | to the management of experts and for the introduction of emergency measures
00:19:17.300 | like special education and Ritalin.
00:19:21.300 | Anyone who taught school during that period in a large city as I did
00:19:26.300 | will remember how teachers and administrators were suddenly stripped
00:19:32.300 | of any effective ability to discipline children by the intervention of outside agencies.
00:19:40.300 | You are at liberty to decide whether that was coincidental or not.
00:19:46.300 | It makes sense though, doesn't it, that irresponsible, semi-literate children
00:19:51.300 | kept in that condition by authority will become irresponsible and semi-literate adults
00:19:59.300 | and that such people can't be trusted with decisions.
00:20:03.300 | The National Teacher Training Document informed teacher educators
00:20:08.300 | that under these circumstances teachers were to be trained as therapists,
00:20:14.300 | translating prescriptions of social psychologists into practical action in the classroom.
00:20:23.300 | The third of the new gospel texts was Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy.
00:20:28.300 | In his own words, I'm quoting, "a tool to classify the way individuals are to act,
00:20:35.300 | think, or feel as the result of some unit of instruction."
00:20:41.300 | Using the methods of behavioral psychology, children would learn improper thoughts,
00:20:48.300 | feelings, and actions and have their improper attitudes brought from home remediated.
00:20:54.300 | In all stages of school manipulation, testing would be essential
00:21:00.300 | to locate the child's changing mind on an official rating scale.
00:21:06.300 | Bloom's taxonomy spawned a number of important descendants which you've heard of.
00:21:12.300 | Mastery learning was one, outcomes-based education a second,
00:21:18.300 | and the current school-to-work government-business collaboration a third.
00:21:23.300 | Each was designed to classify individuals for the convenience of social managers
00:21:30.300 | and to control the mind and movements of the young.
00:21:34.300 | But what was the purpose? Why was this being done?
00:21:40.300 | A major piece of the answer can be found by reading between the lines of an article
00:21:45.300 | which appeared several months ago in the June 1988 issue of Foreign Affairs.
00:21:54.300 | Written by the owner of U.S. News and World Report,
00:21:59.300 | the essay praises the American economy and predicts that its lead over Europe and Asia
00:22:06.300 | is so psychological in nature that no nation can possibly catch up to us
00:22:13.300 | because our workers are unique.
00:22:16.300 | Unless you believe in master race biology,
00:22:20.300 | this advantage can only have come from school training of the American young,
00:22:25.300 | in school and out, by indoctrination techniques which produce attitudes useful to management.
00:22:33.300 | And what are those attitudes?
00:22:35.300 | Folks, would it be possible if we took a five-minute break?
00:22:40.300 | These lights are a little bit bright, and I just need a short rest owing to advanced age.
00:22:47.300 | But in five minutes, I promise you that I'll answer the question I just asked.
00:22:53.300 | Just rest for five. I bet you need it more than I do.
00:22:56.300 | ...offers from a strong craft tradition.
00:23:00.300 | The workers demand a large voice in decision-making.
00:23:04.300 | "Asia's even worse off," says Zuckerman competitively,
00:23:08.300 | "because although the worker is silenced in Asia,
00:23:12.300 | religion, tradition, and government over there interfere with what a business can do."
00:23:19.300 | So that's his first case, that the American worker--that's your sons and daughters grown up--is a pushover.
00:23:27.300 | Next, says Zuckerman, "Workers in America live in constant panic.
00:23:33.300 | They know companies here owe them nothing.
00:23:37.300 | There's no outside power to appeal to.
00:23:40.300 | Fear is our secret supercharger.
00:23:43.300 | It gives management here a flexibility that other nations will never have to such an extent."
00:23:51.300 | And some of the evidence he offers for that is really compelling.
00:23:55.300 | He said, "In 1996, after five years of record economic expansion,
00:24:02.300 | half the employees of large firms feared being laid off."
00:24:08.300 | "The best part of that," said Zuckerman, "was that it represents double the number of people
00:24:14.300 | worrying five years ago when things weren't nearly as good.
00:24:19.300 | So fear keeps a break on American wages."
00:24:24.300 | Next, he says, "In the United States, what look like managerial decisions
00:24:30.300 | are actually made by abstract mathematical rules,
00:24:35.300 | which are manager-proof as well as worker-proof.
00:24:40.300 | No sentimentality, no ideological treachery by a soft-hearted boss
00:24:46.300 | can make more than temporary inroads on corporate momentum here
00:24:51.300 | because the accountant's bottom line rules everything."
00:24:56.300 | And finally, he says, "Our endless consumption completes the golden circle.
00:25:03.300 | Consumption driven by a nonstop American addiction to novelty,
00:25:08.300 | which provides American business with the only reliable domestic market in the world.
00:25:15.300 | Elsewhere in hard times, business dries up because people sit on their money.
00:25:21.300 | But here, no. Here we shop till we drop.
00:25:25.300 | We mortgage our futures in bad times as well as good."
00:25:30.300 | And I think Zuckerman is right.
00:25:32.300 | There isn't much doubt that the fantastic wealth of American big business
00:25:38.300 | is psychologically and procedurally grounded
00:25:42.300 | and that the training for this mental state
00:25:45.300 | and the necessary docility it requires comes from the American classroom.
00:25:51.300 | Schools must train individuals to respond as a mass,
00:25:57.300 | to be frightened, envious, bored, emotionally needy, and generally incomplete.
00:26:04.300 | It's common sense a successful mass production economy has to have such a clientele.
00:26:11.300 | A small business, small farm economy like the Amish have
00:26:16.300 | require individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation.
00:26:24.300 | But ours requires a well-managed mass, leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless,
00:26:33.300 | godless, and obedient, people who believe the difference between Coke and Pepsi
00:26:39.300 | is a subject worth arguing about.
00:26:45.300 | We need people for this economy who learn that status is purchased
00:26:51.300 | so that when you buy something you're immediately dissatisfied with it
00:26:56.300 | because it's not producing the rush that you expected from the advertising.
00:27:02.300 | We need people who learn that others manage our lives,
00:27:06.300 | that most people, including our own parents, are ignorant and irrelevant,
00:27:12.300 | that God is an obsolete fancy not worth bothering about,
00:27:17.300 | and that ultimate satisfaction comes from official approval.
00:27:23.300 | The fantastic wealth of American big business is a direct result of school training.
00:27:31.300 | Schools training children to be fearful, bored and addicted to novelty,
00:27:37.300 | suspicious of themselves and others, and voiceless in important matters.
00:27:43.300 | That's what the bells are for, they say, and now for something different.
00:27:49.300 | The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn,
00:27:55.300 | as I think Inge represented well to you, nor are schools supposed to.
00:28:02.300 | School has been engineered to serve a particular kind of economy
00:28:08.300 | and a strictly layered social order, not to benefit kids and families.
00:28:14.300 | That's why it has to be compulsory.
00:28:17.300 | The prime directive of schooling is to retard maturity and wholeness.
00:28:23.300 | School is the first impression children get of organized society,
00:28:29.300 | and like most first impressions, it is the lasting one.
00:28:34.300 | The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poison to healthy human development
00:28:41.300 | are easy to spot, and I'll give you a small package of these.
00:28:48.300 | The work with which most classrooms engage the child is not significant work.
00:28:54.300 | It doesn't satisfy real needs, pressing on the individual,
00:28:59.300 | and doesn't answer real questions that experience raises in the young mind.
00:29:04.300 | It doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life.
00:29:10.300 | The psychological effect of making work external and foreign to individual longings,
00:29:17.300 | experience, questions, and problems renders the victim listless.
00:29:24.300 | Growth and mastery only come to those who vigorously self-direct.
00:29:31.300 | We've known that for thousands of years.
00:29:35.300 | If you doubt it, examine the differences between elite education in any century you choose
00:29:42.300 | and the direction of common training.
00:29:44.300 | I'll be talking a little specifically about this tomorrow morning.
00:29:48.300 | Initiating, creating, reflecting, and other things like that, active things,
00:29:54.300 | are precisely what the structure of schooling is set up to prevent on one pretext or another.
00:30:03.300 | As I watched it happen for 30 years, it takes about three years to break most kids.
00:30:10.300 | Three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do.
00:30:17.300 | And I must say, Inga, if you're here, you added another dimension to this for me
00:30:23.300 | by showing that formula that only one third of the time inside of school,
00:30:31.300 | it's like the army, you're actually doing anything at all.
00:30:37.300 | In such environments, songs, smiles, bright colors, and cooperative games
00:30:45.300 | do the work better than angry words and punishments.
00:30:49.300 | Has it ever struck you as odd that the Prussian government--
00:30:54.300 | now, of course, we don't have a nation called Prussia anymore
00:30:57.300 | because the nation called Prussia overwhelmed the other 171 German states
00:31:05.300 | and Germany became Prussia or greater Germany was Prussia
00:31:12.300 | and we got the two great wars of the century from Prussia.
00:31:17.300 | Has it ever struck you as odd that the Prussian government
00:31:20.300 | was so sympathetic and helpful to the experiments of Friedrich Freubel,
00:31:26.300 | the inventor of kindergarten, and to Heinrich Pestolazzi,
00:31:31.300 | who was the inventor of Fun and Games Elementary School?
00:31:36.300 | Both those guys were underwritten by the Prussian government.
00:31:40.300 | All their assistants were Prussian government agents.
00:31:44.300 | It's a little strange to think of the guys with the points on their helmet
00:31:49.300 | and all the funny balloons, but there was a method to that madness.
00:31:55.300 | The strongest meshes of the school net are totally invisible.
00:32:00.300 | Constant bidding for a stranger's attention creates a chemistry
00:32:06.300 | whose products are the common characteristics of modern school children--
00:32:11.300 | whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty.
00:32:18.300 | The unceasing competition for official attention--
00:32:23.300 | have you ever seen the little arms go out of the sockets,
00:32:26.300 | jumping out of the seat--in the dramatic fishbowl of a classroom
00:32:31.300 | delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom,
00:32:36.300 | little people with no apparent purpose for being alive.
00:32:42.300 | The procedure is identical to that which causes caged rats
00:32:48.300 | to develop eccentric mannerisms when they have to press a bar for food
00:32:54.300 | on an aperiodic reinforcement schedule,
00:32:58.300 | where food is delivered but at random, but the rat doesn't know that.
00:33:04.300 | Much of the bizarre behavior school kids display
00:33:08.300 | is a function of the reinforcement schedule
00:33:11.300 | and the endless confinement and inactivity
00:33:15.300 | which slowly drives children insane.
00:33:18.300 | Trapped children, like trapped rats, need close management,
00:33:23.300 | as any rat psychologist will tell you.
00:33:29.300 | See, I'm more eloquent when I'm seated.
00:33:34.300 | And you will be too when you get to be my age and weight.
00:33:40.300 | In the first decades of the 20th century,
00:33:43.300 | a small group of famous academics,
00:33:47.300 | symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike,
00:33:51.300 | of Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Coverley of Stanford,
00:33:56.300 | and a handful of others,
00:33:58.300 | together with their corporate and financial allies,
00:34:01.300 | like J.P. Morgan, Vincent Astor, Commodore Whitney, Andrew Carnegie,
00:34:08.300 | and John D. Rockefeller,
00:34:10.300 | decided to bend government schooling to the service of business
00:34:15.300 | and the political state,
00:34:17.300 | as it had been done nearly a century before in Prussia.
00:34:23.300 | A higher mission for this project existed too,
00:34:27.300 | one to catch the imagination of dreamers and to fire the blood.
00:34:32.300 | School was to serve as an instrument for managing evolution,
00:34:38.300 | establishing the preconditions for selective breeding.
00:34:43.300 | In Thorndike's memorable words,
00:34:45.300 | and you remember Thorndike is the creator
00:34:48.300 | of what we call educational psychology,
00:34:51.300 | in Thorndike's memorable words,
00:34:54.300 | this had to be done quickly before the new industrial masses,
00:34:59.300 | quote, "take things into their own hands."
00:35:03.300 | Standardized testing would eventually be used
00:35:06.300 | to separate those fit to breed and fit to work from those unfit.
00:35:13.300 | Because of its traditions, however,
00:35:16.300 | America was a resistant population on which to experiment.
00:35:23.300 | But thanks to the patronage and the interest
00:35:25.300 | of various international business people,
00:35:28.300 | a group of academic social engineers
00:35:31.300 | was able to visit mainland China
00:35:34.300 | in the first three decades of the 20th century.
00:35:37.300 | Someone really ought to make a movie about what I'm going to tell you next.
00:35:41.300 | And live there as John Dewey lived in post-revolutionary China
00:35:46.300 | for two years.
00:35:47.300 | In China, these men could test pedagogical theory
00:35:52.300 | on a docile and bewildered population
00:35:56.300 | which had recently lost its ancient form of governance.
00:36:01.300 | Important school superintendents were in on this work,
00:36:06.300 | although the general public is in the dark about it to this day.
00:36:11.300 | For example, I'd like you to listen to Dr. H.B. Wilson,
00:36:16.300 | superintendent of the Topeka schools,
00:36:19.300 | writing in his book, which absolutely nobody read
00:36:23.300 | or would want to read.
00:36:24.300 | It's called Motivation of Schoolwork.
00:36:27.300 | He wrote it in 1916, but this one paragraph
00:36:31.300 | was worth the agony of reading his whole book.
00:36:36.300 | The introduction of the American school into the Orient
00:36:41.300 | has broken up 40 centuries of tradition.
00:36:46.300 | It has given us a new China, a new Japan,
00:36:49.300 | and is working marked progress in Turkey and the Philippines.
00:36:54.300 | The schools are in a position to determine the lines of progress.
00:37:00.300 | The Chinese Revolution was Western-inspired
00:37:04.300 | and Western-financed, just as the Russian Revolution
00:37:08.300 | soon was to be.
00:37:10.300 | And it placed that nation in a favorable state
00:37:13.300 | of disintegration for laboratory testing
00:37:16.300 | of pedagogical mind-alteration technology.
00:37:20.300 | Out of this ferment rose a Chinese tracking practice
00:37:25.300 | built on the ancient habit of character references,
00:37:30.300 | modernized and bureaucratized.
00:37:33.300 | It's called in China the Dangan.
00:37:36.300 | It is a continuous, lifelong personnel file
00:37:41.300 | exposing a student's intimate history from birth
00:37:44.300 | through schooling and then through life.
00:37:47.300 | The Dangan constitutes a comprehensive overthrow
00:37:52.300 | of privacy, and today nobody works in China
00:37:57.300 | without a Dangan.
00:37:59.300 | By the mid-1960s, preliminary work on an American Dangan
00:38:05.300 | was taking place in schools as information reservoirs
00:38:09.300 | attached to schooling began to store personal data
00:38:14.300 | about individual children.
00:38:17.300 | A new class of expert, like Ralph Tyler
00:38:21.300 | of the Carnegie Foundation, began to urge
00:38:25.300 | the collection of data and its unification
00:38:28.300 | in computer code to enhance cross-referencing
00:38:32.300 | with all the other data banks.
00:38:35.300 | By 1971, psychologists in the pay of government
00:38:39.300 | and private foundations were justifying
00:38:43.300 | surreptitious data gathering from children
00:38:46.300 | as the moral right of institutions.
00:38:52.300 | I want to take you back a few years again.
00:38:55.300 | Between 1896 and 1920, a small number
00:39:01.300 | of powerful industrialists, together with their
00:39:04.300 | private foundations, sponsored university administrators,
00:39:09.300 | house experts, and house politicians
00:39:12.300 | spent more money on mass forced schooling
00:39:15.300 | than the government did.
00:39:17.300 | Indeed, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller
00:39:20.300 | together spent more money than the government
00:39:23.300 | did on schooling between 1900 and 1920.
00:39:28.300 | In this laissez-faire fashion, a system
00:39:31.300 | of modern schooling was constructed
00:39:34.300 | without public participation.
00:39:36.300 | I don't blame you if you're a little surprised
00:39:39.300 | by this data, but as my publisher was quite surprised
00:39:44.300 | by it, and when I demonstrated its validity
00:39:48.300 | from the documents of the Carnegie Foundation
00:39:51.300 | and the Rockefeller Foundation-- there are others as well,
00:39:53.300 | but those are major players-- they wouldn't
00:39:58.300 | allow it to be printed.
00:40:00.300 | I thought it was written.
00:40:02.300 | It's in public domain.
00:40:04.300 | They said they didn't want the hassle.
00:40:08.300 | If you want to know the motives of this project,
00:40:10.300 | you need only read the first public mission statement
00:40:14.300 | of Rockefeller's General Education Board
00:40:17.300 | that was printed in its first report to well-wishers,
00:40:21.300 | issued in 1906.
00:40:23.300 | And I'm going to read you the first paragraph,
00:40:26.300 | and I guarantee you it's utterly unbelievable.
00:40:29.300 | And if you have children, this ought
00:40:32.300 | to be as chilling as anything you've heard recently.
00:40:37.300 | "In our dreams, people yield themselves
00:40:40.300 | with perfect docility to our molding hands.
00:40:44.300 | The present education conventions
00:40:47.300 | of intellectual and character education
00:40:50.300 | fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition,
00:40:54.300 | we work our own will upon a grateful and responsive folk."
00:40:59.300 | Can you believe people actually wrote this and printed it?
00:41:03.300 | "We shall not try to make these people
00:41:05.300 | or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning
00:41:10.300 | or men of science.
00:41:12.300 | We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets,
00:41:17.300 | men of letters.
00:41:18.300 | We shall not search for artists, painters, musicians, lawyers,
00:41:23.300 | doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen,
00:41:28.300 | of which we have an ample supply.
00:41:32.300 | The task is simple.
00:41:34.300 | We will organize children and teach them
00:41:37.300 | in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are
00:41:41.300 | doing in an imperfect way."
00:41:45.300 | The real purpose of modern schooling
00:41:47.300 | was announced by Edward Ross of the University of Wisconsin
00:41:51.300 | in the same year that was written.
00:41:54.300 | Ross is generally considered one of the three founders
00:41:57.300 | of the 20th century discipline called sociology.
00:42:02.300 | And in a book bluntly called Social Control, Ross wrote,
00:42:07.300 | I'll quote directly, "Plans are underway
00:42:10.300 | to replace family, church, and community with propaganda,
00:42:16.300 | education-- he meant schooling-- and mass media.
00:42:20.300 | People," he informed his readers,
00:42:22.300 | "are only little plastic lumps of dough."
00:42:27.300 | Another insider of modern schooling, H.H. Goddard,
00:42:31.300 | chairman of the psychology department at Princeton,
00:42:34.300 | called government schooling in 1920, quote,
00:42:38.300 | "the perfect organization of the hive," close quote.
00:42:44.300 | Goddard wrote that standardized testing was
00:42:47.300 | to cause the lower classes to confront
00:42:50.300 | their biological inferiority, sort of like wearing a dunce
00:42:55.300 | cap.
00:42:56.300 | In time, it would discourage their reproduction.
00:42:59.300 | By 1971, the US Office of Education,
00:43:07.300 | now deeply committed to gaining access
00:43:10.300 | to the private lives and thoughts of children,
00:43:14.300 | granted contracts for seven volumes of so-called change
00:43:19.300 | agent studies to the Rand Corporation.
00:43:22.300 | Change agent training was launched with federal funding
00:43:26.300 | under the Education Professions Development Act.
00:43:30.300 | Soon, the Change Agent's Guide to Innovation in Education
00:43:34.300 | appeared.
00:43:35.300 | Grants were then awarded to colleges
00:43:38.300 | for the training of change agents,
00:43:40.300 | while six more Rand manuals were printed and distributed
00:43:45.300 | to teacher training courses.
00:43:49.300 | In 1989, a senior director of the Mid-Continent Regional
00:43:54.300 | Education Laboratory told the 50 governors of the United States
00:43:59.300 | assembled in Kansas City for their annual meeting
00:44:04.300 | the following-- this is a direct quote,
00:44:07.300 | not a word is changed-- "what we're into
00:44:10.300 | is the total restructuring of scientific scholarship,
00:44:14.300 | specifically the importation of German research university
00:44:19.300 | values to America at the end of the 19th century
00:44:24.300 | covered the track of what was going on."
00:44:27.300 | What American colleges had traditionally
00:44:31.300 | thought about college work is that it
00:44:34.300 | was about teaching and learning.
00:44:36.300 | It was about individual student growth in intellect.
00:44:40.300 | But that's not the way the German system worked.
00:44:43.300 | What a German research university was about
00:44:47.300 | was direct service to corporations
00:44:50.300 | in the political state using students
00:44:53.300 | who paid for the right to donate their services free,
00:44:58.300 | along with the paid professional academics.
00:45:01.300 | In return for demonstrating, a student demonstrating that he
00:45:06.300 | or she had trained adequately and was loyal,
00:45:09.300 | the German system then reserved jobs and professional licenses
00:45:14.300 | for the appropriate graduates.
00:45:17.300 | The University of Chicago, Stanford, Johns Hopkins,
00:45:21.300 | Columbia Teachers College, MIT, and Cornell,
00:45:25.300 | all colleges endowed by great industrialists,
00:45:29.300 | together with the state-endowed university movement represented
00:45:33.300 | by schools like Michigan or Wisconsin or Ohio State,
00:45:37.300 | joined in concert with the old line
00:45:40.300 | aristocratic American colleges like Yale and Dartmouth,
00:45:44.300 | who were flag bearers for the English social class theory
00:45:48.300 | to provide a new and daring purpose for wealth
00:45:52.300 | to aspire to, not just spending your money,
00:45:55.300 | not just having big parties, but mastering
00:45:58.300 | the secrets of evolution and driving society
00:46:02.300 | toward a managed scientific utopia.
00:46:07.300 | Indiana University-- I don't believe--
00:46:10.300 | I've never encountered this piece of information,
00:46:13.300 | which I dug up.
00:46:15.300 | I had been asked to speak at a conference in San Francisco
00:46:19.300 | by the Cato Institute last year called the Bionomics Conference.
00:46:24.300 | And there were so many-- it was at the Mark Hopkins Hotel.
00:46:29.300 | The only reason I went was so I never
00:46:32.300 | would have been able to afford to stay at the Mark Hopkins.
00:46:36.300 | And I took my cat and smuggled it into the room.
00:46:40.300 | We had four days of-- anyway, there
00:46:46.300 | were so many references at this conference to evolution
00:46:51.300 | that I said, what is this cockamamie bionomics?
00:46:54.300 | And I started to search and hunt.
00:46:57.300 | And I stumbled across it.
00:46:59.300 | And you're about to get it now.
00:47:00.800 | But you and I and the Bionomics Conference people
00:47:04.800 | must be the only people in the world who know this.
00:47:08.300 | Indiana University provides a good picture
00:47:12.300 | of the strategy developing outside the irrelevant debate
00:47:16.300 | conducted in the public press.
00:47:19.300 | By 1900, a special discipline existed at Indiana only
00:47:25.300 | for elite students handpicked by the college president who
00:47:29.800 | had created and taught the course.
00:47:31.300 | It was called bionomics.
00:47:34.300 | And it dealt with the why and how
00:47:36.300 | of producing a new evolutionary ruling class.
00:47:42.300 | The president of the college is a famous name
00:47:45.300 | in American college history.
00:47:46.300 | His name is David Starr Jordan.
00:47:49.300 | And Jordan did so well in the middle of nowhere,
00:47:53.300 | he was soon invited to join the major leagues of university
00:47:57.300 | existence.
00:47:58.300 | The invitation was extended by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford.
00:48:03.300 | And Jordan became the first president
00:48:07.300 | of Stanford University, where he remained for 30 years.
00:48:11.300 | But what, you might say, does this
00:48:13.300 | have to do with public schooling?
00:48:15.300 | Just this.
00:48:16.300 | Bionomics gets its direct connection
00:48:19.300 | with forced government schooling in this fashion.
00:48:23.300 | When he left Indiana, Jordan took along with him
00:48:26.300 | to Stanford his star bionomics protege, a 24-year-old named
00:48:32.300 | Elwood Cumberley.
00:48:34.300 | And in short order, Cumberley was made dean of teacher
00:48:37.300 | education at Stanford.
00:48:40.300 | Within two decades, he was the head of a syndicate
00:48:44.300 | controlling school administrative posts
00:48:47.300 | from coast to coast.
00:48:49.300 | He was the most influential schoolman
00:48:53.300 | in 20th century American history.
00:48:56.300 | He was also the official historian
00:48:58.300 | of American schooling.
00:49:00.300 | All the myths you've heard come from Cumberley's history
00:49:04.300 | of American education, which for 50 years
00:49:08.300 | was the dominant textbook in teacher training institutions.
00:49:13.300 | Did bionomics have any effect on life in the state of Indiana,
00:49:18.300 | where so many sons of prominent Indiana families
00:49:21.300 | had studied its arguments for controlled breeding
00:49:25.300 | and elimination of the unfit?
00:49:28.300 | The answer is yes.
00:49:30.300 | The very first formal legislation making forced
00:49:34.300 | sterilization by the state a legal act
00:49:38.300 | was passed in the state of Indiana.
00:49:40.300 | And its practice there became the law of the land
00:49:43.300 | in the famous 1927 Supreme Court test case, Buck versus Bell,
00:49:49.300 | in which Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion,
00:49:53.300 | allowing the sterilization of 17-year-old Carrie Buck
00:49:58.300 | to prevent her from having degenerate offspring.
00:50:02.300 | That's a quote from the Supreme Court decision.
00:50:07.300 | 20 years later-- I've never met anybody who knows this.
00:50:12.300 | So if someone in here knew this, could you just sort of raise
00:50:16.300 | your hands.
00:50:17.300 | I'll know that someone in the world knows this.
00:50:19.300 | 20 years later, after Buck versus Bell,
00:50:22.300 | in the trial of the German doctors at Nuremberg
00:50:26.300 | after the Second World War, the Nazi physicians
00:50:29.300 | testified that their precedents were importantly American ones
00:50:35.300 | and that their name for forced sterilization
00:50:38.300 | had been the Indiana procedure.
00:50:42.300 | To say this bionomical spirit infected schooling
00:50:47.300 | is to say that birds fly.
00:50:50.300 | Once you know it's there, the principle is easily tracked.
00:50:55.300 | I'm going to track a little bit of it for you
00:50:57.300 | so that the groove will be worn, and you'll
00:50:59.300 | find that you'll be able to add components to this track
00:51:03.300 | very easily just reading the press and watching television.
00:51:07.300 | In 1922, Walter Lippman's book Public Opinion
00:51:11.300 | demanded severe restrictions on public debate.
00:51:15.300 | Those are Lippman's words.
00:51:17.300 | In light of the enormous number of feeble-minded Americans,
00:51:20.300 | said Lippman, the old ideal of participatory democracy
00:51:25.300 | is insane.
00:51:27.300 | This theme of scientifically controlled breeding
00:51:31.300 | interacted in a complex fashion with the German ideal
00:51:35.300 | of a scientific society run by experts
00:51:39.300 | and the ideal of the British state religion
00:51:42.300 | and political society that God himself
00:51:45.300 | had appointed the social classes to create
00:51:48.300 | a kind of Darwinian caste-based schooling run at long distance
00:51:53.300 | through experts unseen who manipulated hired hands called
00:51:57.300 | schoolteachers and school administrators.
00:52:00.300 | And all this was for the ultimate good
00:52:03.300 | of the best breeding stock.
00:52:06.300 | In 1928, Sigmund Freud's favorite nephew,
00:52:10.300 | Edward L. Bernays, who is the creator of the craft that we
00:52:15.300 | call today public relations, said in his book Crystallizing
00:52:20.300 | Public Opinion that, quote, "Invisible power is now
00:52:24.300 | in control of every aspect of American life.
00:52:28.300 | Democracy," said Bernays, "is only a front
00:52:32.300 | for skillful wire-pulling, tricks the new sciences
00:52:36.300 | of mental manipulation, could place at the disposal
00:52:40.300 | of policy people for a price."
00:52:43.300 | By 1944, the jettisoning of natural rights
00:52:48.300 | resonated through every corner of American academic life.
00:52:52.300 | Any academic who expected free money from foundations,
00:52:56.300 | corporations, or government would
00:52:58.300 | play the scientific management string on his loot.
00:53:02.300 | In 1961, the German concept of the political state
00:53:08.300 | as a fatherland surfaced in John F. Kennedy's inaugural address
00:53:14.300 | in which his listeners were lectured,
00:53:16.300 | "Ask not what your country can do for you,
00:53:20.300 | but what you can do for your country."
00:53:23.300 | And in 1995, Time magazine-- I believe it's February,
00:53:28.300 | the first issue in February-- lectured its readers
00:53:31.300 | in a cover story that, quote, "Democracy
00:53:34.300 | is in the worst interest of national goals.
00:53:37.300 | The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman
00:53:41.300 | in the street to interfere in its management."
00:53:45.300 | Now the secret was in the open.
00:53:47.300 | The original American commonwealth ideal
00:53:51.300 | had been repudiated by its guardians.
00:53:54.300 | In the same year, some of the methodology
00:53:57.300 | used to achieve this repudiation was brought to light
00:54:01.300 | in a long documentary film, which I'll
00:54:03.300 | bet shows around Nashville.
00:54:05.300 | It's called Manufacturing Consent.
00:54:08.300 | It was about the career of the legendary MIT professor Noam
00:54:13.300 | Chomsky, the world's foremost linguistic scholar.
00:54:17.300 | But Chomsky's interests haven't been in linguistics
00:54:20.300 | for at least 20 years.
00:54:22.300 | In the film, Chomsky confirmed a growing popular suspicion
00:54:28.300 | that the news you hear is tightly controlled.
00:54:31.300 | He showed that all the news in the world,
00:54:34.300 | pouring through mass channels, is
00:54:36.300 | under the direction of 23 global corporations, which
00:54:40.300 | spread propaganda on every side of every issue,
00:54:45.300 | thus constricting public imagination,
00:54:48.300 | wherever important interests are in question.
00:54:52.300 | School was an important terminal on a production line
00:54:56.300 | to create a utopian world resembling a gigantic Epcot
00:55:00.300 | Center, or perhaps the Mother Chautauqua
00:55:03.300 | of late 19th century fame, a utopia before its time.
00:55:08.300 | There was only one important eugenical limitation
00:55:12.300 | on this school-created utopia to come.
00:55:15.300 | It wasn't intended for everyone, at the most
00:55:19.300 | for 20% of the existing population.
00:55:23.300 | And out of Johns Hopkins University in 1996
00:55:28.300 | came this chilling piece of supporting data.
00:55:32.300 | I'm going to quote from the Hopkins report.
00:55:35.300 | "The American economy has grown massively since the mid 1960s,
00:55:41.300 | but workers' real spendable wages are no higher
00:55:45.300 | than they were 30 years ago.
00:55:48.300 | The purchasing power of a working couple in 1995
00:55:54.300 | was, after inflation was factored in,
00:55:58.300 | the same as earned by a single working man 90 years earlier."
00:56:05.300 | This steep decline in American common prosperity
00:56:10.300 | then forced both parents from home
00:56:13.300 | and forced their kids into the managed world of daycare
00:56:17.300 | and extended schooling.
00:56:19.300 | And although you and I have been harangued endlessly
00:56:23.300 | century long that enlarging the scope of schooling
00:56:27.300 | would cause wealth to be more evenly spread,
00:56:30.300 | exactly the reverse has occurred.
00:56:33.300 | Wealth was 250% more concentrated by 1998
00:56:40.300 | than it was in 1898.
00:56:43.300 | "I don't mean to be inflammatory," he said,
00:56:46.300 | "but it's as if government school has made people dumber,
00:56:50.300 | not brighter, made families weaker, not stronger,
00:56:55.300 | has ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God,
00:57:00.300 | has set the class structure in stone
00:57:03.300 | by dividing children into classes
00:57:06.300 | and setting them against one another,
00:57:08.300 | and has been midwife to an alarming concentration
00:57:12.300 | of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction
00:57:15.300 | of our national community."
00:57:18.300 | Real school reform would have to overthrow
00:57:21.300 | a powerful form of mental conditioning
00:57:24.300 | which has taken a century to implant.
00:57:27.300 | To one degree or another, all of us
00:57:30.300 | have been indoctrinated in a variety of ways
00:57:33.300 | to believe that the American experiment which promised
00:57:36.300 | ordinary people sovereignty over their own lives
00:57:40.300 | was wrong-headed and childish.
00:57:43.300 | Real school reform would have to defeat the belief
00:57:46.300 | learned in school and reinforced through the media
00:57:50.300 | that ordinary people are too stupid, too irresponsible,
00:57:54.300 | too childish to be trusted to look out for themselves.
00:57:59.300 | When children are encouraged to run wild in school
00:58:03.300 | and to become stupid there, this poisonous lesson
00:58:07.300 | is hammered home for the rest of us day after day.
00:58:11.300 | We've all experienced it.
00:58:13.300 | No wonder we all believe it.
00:58:15.300 | The premises of scientific schooling
00:58:18.300 | seem impossible to dispute.
00:58:21.300 | So thoroughly have they been demonstrated
00:58:23.300 | by the form of forced schools which
00:58:26.300 | corporations and the federal government imposed on us
00:58:30.300 | a century ago.
00:58:31.300 | After all, why should hopelessly ignorant people
00:58:35.300 | be allowed to make decisions, even intimate personal ones
00:58:39.300 | like how to raise their own children?
00:58:42.300 | Certified experts are available who
00:58:45.300 | know vastly more about everything and anything.
00:58:50.300 | Thus has the Protestant Reformation,
00:58:54.300 | whose brightest product was America,
00:58:57.300 | been thrown on the scrap heap.
00:58:59.300 | Because if there's any bedrock of the Protestant Reformation,
00:59:03.300 | it was Luther's declaration, every man his own priest.
00:59:10.300 | Jefferson and Madison must have been loony
00:59:13.300 | to want us to trust the common people.
00:59:16.300 | Now let me take in conclusion a stab at a reply.
00:59:20.300 | To have better schools that served families and communities
00:59:25.300 | and individuals, instead of suffocating them,
00:59:28.300 | we would need to trash certain assumptions.
00:59:32.300 | We would need to abandon entirely the idea
00:59:35.300 | that any such sociological reality as mass man
00:59:40.300 | actually exists, except in the minds of those who benefit
00:59:44.300 | from such a belief.
00:59:46.300 | We would have to believe what our fingerprints
00:59:49.300 | and our intuition tell us, that no two people are alike,
00:59:53.300 | that nobody can be accurately described by numbers and graphs,
00:59:57.300 | that trying to do this sets up an endless chain of future grief.
01:00:03.300 | We would have to accept that a fantasy like scientific pedagogy
01:00:08.300 | is impossible because each person has
01:00:11.300 | a private and a singular destiny.
01:00:14.300 | We would need to transfer faith from school and corporate experts
01:00:19.300 | and behave as if these principles were true,
01:00:22.300 | as over a million homeschooling families in this country do.
01:00:27.300 | We would need to wake up and admit that knowledge
01:00:31.300 | is a far cry from wisdom, that each American has the right
01:00:35.300 | to live as he or she deems wise, and if the way individuals
01:00:40.300 | choose to live and raise their kids means disaster
01:00:44.300 | for global corporations, as surely the way of life
01:00:48.300 | the Amish embraced, if it were embraced by too many,
01:00:52.300 | would mean disaster, then that fateful choice
01:00:55.300 | still needs to be honored because it is protected
01:00:58.300 | by the law that defines America, our founding documents.
01:01:03.300 | It's high time we all remembered what mankind needed
01:01:07.300 | and America for in the first place.
01:01:10.300 | The brilliant dialectical balance struck by our founders
01:01:14.300 | was the only way to keep power weak and off balance,
01:01:19.300 | official power and popular power both.
01:01:22.300 | Popular will would beat back government tyranny,
01:01:26.300 | government would check popular tyranny over minority rights.
01:01:31.300 | This constant confrontation, this unwinnable war
01:01:36.300 | between two flawed collectivizing principles,
01:01:40.300 | coercive government and bullying public opinion,
01:01:44.300 | will always produce liberty for those who want it.
01:01:48.300 | In the stalemate, liberty escapes as long as the argument
01:01:53.300 | is kept alive.
01:01:55.300 | It's only through enforced consensus, the product of too much
01:02:00.300 | and the wrong kind of schooling, that America can fail.
01:02:05.300 | America is about argument, about doing things our own way.
01:02:10.300 | It is still the only place on the planet where one can publicly
01:02:14.300 | oppose authority without being beaten or killed
01:02:18.300 | or severely intimidated for that act of free will.
01:02:22.300 | The U.S. Supreme Court wrote in the flag burning case
01:02:27.300 | that the only true test of freedom is the right to differ
01:02:32.300 | about things that touch the heart of the existing order.
01:02:36.300 | And the court was right. That truly is the standard.
01:02:41.300 | Let us strike to the heart of this thing then
01:02:44.300 | and take back our children from the management engineers.
01:02:47.300 | Thank you very much.
01:02:49.300 | [applause]
01:02:56.300 | Thank you. Thank you all.
01:02:59.300 | Thank you. God bless you all.
01:03:02.300 | [applause]
01:03:08.300 | Thank you.
01:03:10.300 | [applause]
01:03:13.300 | Well, you just heard what my publisher doesn't want
01:03:18.300 | the rest of the country to hear.
01:03:23.300 | They really had, they've kept my book for a year.
01:03:27.300 | I mean, they want the book, but they don't want the quotes
01:03:31.300 | from the foundation documents and from the various social engineers,
01:03:37.300 | which are pretty easy to trace once you know they're there.
01:03:42.300 | Anyway.
01:03:44.300 | Thank you. See you tomorrow morning.
01:03:47.300 | [applause]
01:03:52.300 | [music]