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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ A short, angry history of modern schooling. And really what it is, is the 900-page book I've just finished, condensed to one hour. So, I would have given you a five-minute break before starting, but somebody's a harsh taskmaster here. The information's rather dense, and rather than rely on my own failing memory, I'll work from notes.

I'll apologize in advance, but this is very, very, very strong stuff. Mass schooling of the young by force is a creation of the four great coal powers of the 19th century. Germany, England, France, and the United States. Its final conception, structure, and later development arises from the logic that fossil fuel, used in conjunction with machinery, imposes on society.

This reality is masked by an earlier anticipation of mass schooling in certain utopian and religious writings about social order and human nature. But make no mistake, in the Western world there was never any such animal as mass schooling until coal came along, paired with machinery. You shouldn't be fooled any more than Charles Francis Adams was when he observed in 1880 that what was being fashioned for children, unfortunate enough to be caught in the proposed school net, which hadn't happened up to then, combined the characteristics of the cotton mill, said Adams, and the railroad with those of a state prison.

That's the Adams who had two presidents in his family. After the Civil War, certain utopian speculations about isolating children in compounds and subjecting them to deliberate molding routines began to be discussed seriously by the policymaking managers of business, government, and university life. These discussions were inspired by the potential for centralized mass production made possible by coal-driven machinery, railroad development that was also dependent on coal, and startling new inventions like the telegraph.

The principal motivation for this revolution in family and community life wasn't only greed for money, although that was there, but also the philosophical conviction which approached a religion in its intensity that early indoctrination would lead to an orderly, scientific society led by the best people, unhampered by the democratic tradition or American libertarian attitudes.

Forced schooling was the prescription to make the bulk of the population alike, dependent on remote authority, not local authority, for allocation to one or another station in the economy. No more Ben Franklins, no more Tom Edisons were going to be allowed. Individuals would be prevented from taking up their lives until an advanced age.

During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. In the late 19th century, a special concept was invented to lock older children in place. It was called adolescence, and that was a phenomenon unknown to the human race before that time. And the infantilization of young people did not stop at the end of the 19th century, but it continued right on through the 20th.

Child labor laws were extended to cover more and more occupations. The permissible age of leaving school became higher and higher. The number of occupations not demanding schooling became fewer and fewer. You notice I use the term schooling and not education. By the 1970s, it was not unusual to find graduate students well into their 30s.

From the start, there was a purpose behind schooling, which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted, but concentrated on what a highly centralized economy and a strong political state was thought to need. What that was can be seen from this excerpt from a speech Woodrow Wilson made to businessmen in 1914.

I'm quoting Wilson without changing a word. "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class, a very, very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific, difficult manual tasks." By 1917, the major administrative jobs across America in schooling were under the control of a group of interests referred to in the press as the Education Trust.

That term vanishes somewhere in the middle 1930s, but it's quite common in the newspapers of the teens and the 20s. At the first meeting of the Education Trust, the attendees included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. "The chief end of the new education," wrote Benjamin Kidd in 1918, "was to," I'm quoting, "impose on the young the ideal of subordination." The primary target of the first 30 years of forced schooling was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America.

Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing with one another for the favor of the boss, not as entrepreneurs like Ben Franklin competing to serve the public. It was believed that only in this way could the menace of overproduction in America be contained. You'd have to, ladies and gentlemen, read into the primary sources, as I've spent years reading, to see how often the term "overproduction" emerges in these discussions of businessmen between 1880 and 1910.

They were terrified that the early tradition of America, that people worked for themselves, would continue, and that this would make it impossible for large central corporations to get financing to work, since their machinery costs so much money. Who would constantly replace that machinery if at any moment the peril of thousands of people opening small competing interests were a loss?

So it had to be put to death. In 1919, Arthur Calhoun's "Social History of the Family" informed the nation that the child was passing from the family, I'm quoting now, "into the custody of community experts." And he offered a significant prophecy, that we could expect in time to see a system of public education, "designed to check the mating of the unfit." In 1922, Mayor Hyland of New York City, alluding specifically to actions in schools of the Rockefeller Foundation and other corporate interests, said in a public speech that the schools had been seized as an octopus would seize its prey by, quote, "an invisible government." You'll find that reference in Diane Ravitch's book, "The Great School Wars." Be good now, later.

The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling, as well as for the stock market. A book called "A Sociological Philosophy of Education," published in 1928, claimed it is the business of teachers to run not merely the school, but the world. In 1929, the famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced, I'm quoting, "academic subjects are of little value." His colleague at Teachers College, William Kirkpatrick, boasted in his book, "Education and the Social Crisis," that the whole traditional system of rearing the young was being made over by experts.

Meanwhile, in the project offices of an important employer of those experts, the Rockefeller Foundation, executives were hearing from its president, Max Mason, on April 11, 1933. Don't say that I'm not giving you very specific references. It can't be checked. That a comprehensive program was underway to rationalize social control and the control of human behavior, inspired by the genetic work of an Eastern European scientist, Herman Muller, at the University of Texas.

Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other large private foundations had been investing heavily in genetics. Muller had used x-rays to override genetic law, inducing mutations in fruit flies. And that set off a line of thinking that it might be possible to create life and shape it as you wanted to. Muller preached that planned breeding was necessary to bring mankind progress, and his proposal received enthusiastic endorsement from most of the greatest scientists of the day.

He reduced it to a 1,500-word geneticist manifesto, and 22 distinguished American and British biologists signed it. "The conscious guidance by the state of human sexual selection is called for," said Muller. What was wanted, he said, was a project of racial hygiene, such as the policy makers in Germany were pioneering-- a program where eugenics was state policy and where scientific research shaped society.

A February 1934 progress report from the Rockefeller endowments asked the question, "Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed in the future superior men?" Just a few months before this report appeared, the executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected--I'm quoting directly now-- "to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force." You can't get it much clearer than that, can you?

Between 1967 and 1974, teacher training all over the United States was covertly revamped through the coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations, think tanks, global corporations, universities, and several other interests working through the United States Office of Education and through key state ed departments like those in California or New York.

The most important documents in this transformation were three, and I'm going to name them for you. Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives was the first. An extensive government exercise in futurology called Designing Education for the Future was the second, and the Behavioral Teacher Education Project was the third. That was an enormous manual of over 1,000 pages, which in time impacted on every school in the United States.

While other documents exist, these are the most important representatives of the whole. They'll serve to make clear to you what project is underway, and I'll take them one by one. Designing Education, produced by the Federal Education Department, redefined education after the Prussian fashion as, quote, "a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character." State education agencies would henceforth act as on-site federal enforcers, ensuring compliance of local schools with Washington directives.

It proclaimed that each state education department, quote, "must be an agent of change." State departments were, quote, "to lose their identity as well as their authority in order to form a partnership with the federal government." Now, I think you and I both are aware that what we're talking about here is a form of treason.

There is no mention whatsoever in any of the founding documents of this country of federal involvement in education. It's not just an academic thing. It was deliberately kept away from the central political power because of the obvious chance to pervert it if it were handed to the power that controlled the army.

The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Teacher Education Project, outlined the teaching reforms to be forced on America after 1967. So we're talking about 31 years ago. If you ever want to hunt this thing down, it bears the US Office of Education contract number, and I can give it to anyone afterwards.

I have it here, but I won't bother to read the 44 digits. The document sets out clearly the intention of its creators, nothing less, I'm quoting from the document now, than the 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 multipurpose identification number which enables employers and other controllers, that's a direct quote from the document, to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that chemical experimentation on minors would be normal procedure in the post-1967 world.

That is surely a pointed foreshadowing of the massive riddle and interventions which accompany the practice of forced schooling at present. The Teacher Education Project identified the future as one, I'm quoting again, in which a small elite will control all important matters, one in which participatory democracy will largely disappear.

It was your tax money or your father's and mother's that paid for this document. Children will be made to see through school experience that their classmates, this is a very subtle point, so I'll start that again, children will be made to see through school experience that their classmates are so irresponsible and inadequate that they must be controlled and regulated for society's good.

That's of a category I think equivalent to the wag your dog scenario that I think we're going through right now. According to the project, post-modern schooling will focus, this is a direct quote, on pleasure cultivation and other attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world. Notice how the tremendous rise in school violence and general school chaos in the late 1960s can be seen as providing a reasonable justification for the sharp constriction of traditional intellectual schooling.

Each outburst of childish disorder echoing through the press was like an advertisement promoting the need to surrender community control to the management of experts and for the introduction of emergency measures like special education and Ritalin. Anyone who taught school during that period in a large city as I did will remember how teachers and administrators were suddenly stripped of any effective ability to discipline children by the intervention of outside agencies.

You are at liberty to decide whether that was coincidental or not. It makes sense though, doesn't it, that irresponsible, semi-literate children kept in that condition by authority will become irresponsible and semi-literate adults and that such people can't be trusted with decisions. The National Teacher Training Document informed teacher educators that under these circumstances teachers were to be trained as therapists, translating prescriptions of social psychologists into practical action in the classroom.

The third of the new gospel texts was Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy. In his own words, I'm quoting, "a tool to classify the way individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some unit of instruction." Using the methods of behavioral psychology, children would learn improper thoughts, feelings, and actions and have their improper attitudes brought from home remediated.

In all stages of school manipulation, testing would be essential to locate the child's changing mind on an official rating scale. Bloom's taxonomy spawned a number of important descendants which you've heard of. Mastery learning was one, outcomes-based education a second, and the current school-to-work government-business collaboration a third. Each was designed to classify individuals for the convenience of social managers and to control the mind and movements of the young.

But what was the purpose? Why was this being done? A major piece of the answer can be found by reading between the lines of an article which appeared several months ago in the June 1988 issue of Foreign Affairs. Written by the owner of U.S. News and World Report, the essay praises the American economy and predicts that its lead over Europe and Asia is so psychological in nature that no nation can possibly catch up to us because our workers are unique.

Unless you believe in master race biology, this advantage can only have come from school training of the American young, in school and out, by indoctrination techniques which produce attitudes useful to management. And what are those attitudes? Folks, would it be possible if we took a five-minute break? These lights are a little bit bright, and I just need a short rest owing to advanced age.

But in five minutes, I promise you that I'll answer the question I just asked. Just rest for five. I bet you need it more than I do. ...offers from a strong craft tradition. The workers demand a large voice in decision-making. "Asia's even worse off," says Zuckerman competitively, "because although the worker is silenced in Asia, religion, tradition, and government over there interfere with what a business can do." So that's his first case, that the American worker--that's your sons and daughters grown up--is a pushover.

Next, says Zuckerman, "Workers in America live in constant panic. They know companies here owe them nothing. There's no outside power to appeal to. Fear is our secret supercharger. It gives management here a flexibility that other nations will never have to such an extent." And some of the evidence he offers for that is really compelling.

He said, "In 1996, after five years of record economic expansion, half the employees of large firms feared being laid off." "The best part of that," said Zuckerman, "was that it represents double the number of people worrying five years ago when things weren't nearly as good. So fear keeps a break on American wages." Next, he says, "In the United States, what look like managerial decisions are actually made by abstract mathematical rules, which are manager-proof as well as worker-proof.

No sentimentality, no ideological treachery by a soft-hearted boss can make more than temporary inroads on corporate momentum here because the accountant's bottom line rules everything." And finally, he says, "Our endless consumption completes the golden circle. Consumption driven by a nonstop American addiction to novelty, which provides American business with the only reliable domestic market in the world.

Elsewhere in hard times, business dries up because people sit on their money. But here, no. Here we shop till we drop. We mortgage our futures in bad times as well as good." And I think Zuckerman is right. There isn't much doubt that the fantastic wealth of American big business is psychologically and procedurally grounded and that the training for this mental state and the necessary docility it requires comes from the American classroom.

Schools must train individuals to respond as a mass, to be frightened, envious, bored, emotionally needy, and generally incomplete. It's common sense a successful mass production economy has to have such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like the Amish have require individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation.

But ours requires a well-managed mass, leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient, people who believe the difference between Coke and Pepsi is a subject worth arguing about. We need people for this economy who learn that status is purchased so that when you buy something you're immediately dissatisfied with it because it's not producing the rush that you expected from the advertising.

We need people who learn that others manage our lives, that most people, including our own parents, are ignorant and irrelevant, that God is an obsolete fancy not worth bothering about, and that ultimate satisfaction comes from official approval. The fantastic wealth of American big business is a direct result of school training.

Schools training children to be fearful, bored and addicted to novelty, suspicious of themselves and others, and voiceless in important matters. That's what the bells are for, they say, and now for something different. The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, as I think Inge represented well to you, nor are schools supposed to.

School has been engineered to serve a particular kind of economy and a strictly layered social order, not to benefit kids and families. That's why it has to be compulsory. The prime directive of schooling is to retard maturity and wholeness. School is the first impression children get of organized society, and like most first impressions, it is the lasting one.

The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poison to healthy human development are easy to spot, and I'll give you a small package of these. The work with which most classrooms engage the child is not significant work. It doesn't satisfy real needs, pressing on the individual, and doesn't answer real questions that experience raises in the young mind.

It doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The psychological effect of making work external and foreign to individual longings, experience, questions, and problems renders the victim listless. Growth and mastery only come to those who vigorously self-direct. We've known that for thousands of years. If you doubt it, examine the differences between elite education in any century you choose and the direction of common training.

I'll be talking a little specifically about this tomorrow morning. Initiating, creating, reflecting, and other things like that, active things, are precisely what the structure of schooling is set up to prevent on one pretext or another. As I watched it happen for 30 years, it takes about three years to break most kids.

Three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do. And I must say, Inga, if you're here, you added another dimension to this for me by showing that formula that only one third of the time inside of school, it's like the army, you're actually doing anything at all.

In such environments, songs, smiles, bright colors, and cooperative games do the work better than angry words and punishments. Has it ever struck you as odd that the Prussian government-- now, of course, we don't have a nation called Prussia anymore because the nation called Prussia overwhelmed the other 171 German states and Germany became Prussia or greater Germany was Prussia and we got the two great wars of the century from Prussia.

Has it ever struck you as odd that the Prussian government was so sympathetic and helpful to the experiments of Friedrich Freubel, the inventor of kindergarten, and to Heinrich Pestolazzi, who was the inventor of Fun and Games Elementary School? Both those guys were underwritten by the Prussian government. All their assistants were Prussian government agents.

It's a little strange to think of the guys with the points on their helmet and all the funny balloons, but there was a method to that madness. The strongest meshes of the school net are totally invisible. Constant bidding for a stranger's attention creates a chemistry whose products are the common characteristics of modern school children-- whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty.

The unceasing competition for official attention-- have you ever seen the little arms go out of the sockets, jumping out of the seat--in the dramatic fishbowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive. The procedure is identical to that which causes caged rats to develop eccentric mannerisms when they have to press a bar for food on an aperiodic reinforcement schedule, where food is delivered but at random, but the rat doesn't know that.

Much of the bizarre behavior school kids display is a function of the reinforcement schedule and the endless confinement and inactivity which slowly drives children insane. Trapped children, like trapped rats, need close management, as any rat psychologist will tell you. See, I'm more eloquent when I'm seated. And you will be too when you get to be my age and weight.

In the first decades of the 20th century, a small group of famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, of Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Coverley of Stanford, and a handful of others, together with their corporate and financial allies, like J.P. Morgan, Vincent Astor, Commodore Whitney, Andrew Carnegie, and John D.

Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state, as it had been done nearly a century before in Prussia. A higher mission for this project existed too, one to catch the imagination of dreamers and to fire the blood. School was to serve as an instrument for managing evolution, establishing the preconditions for selective breeding.

In Thorndike's memorable words, and you remember Thorndike is the creator of what we call educational psychology, in Thorndike's memorable words, this had to be done quickly before the new industrial masses, quote, "take things into their own hands." Standardized testing would eventually be used to separate those fit to breed and fit to work from those unfit.

Because of its traditions, however, America was a resistant population on which to experiment. But thanks to the patronage and the interest of various international business people, a group of academic social engineers was able to visit mainland China in the first three decades of the 20th century. Someone really ought to make a movie about what I'm going to tell you next.

And live there as John Dewey lived in post-revolutionary China for two years. In China, these men could test pedagogical theory on a docile and bewildered population which had recently lost its ancient form of governance. Important school superintendents were in on this work, although the general public is in the dark about it to this day.

For example, I'd like you to listen to Dr. H.B. Wilson, superintendent of the Topeka schools, writing in his book, which absolutely nobody read or would want to read. It's called Motivation of Schoolwork. He wrote it in 1916, but this one paragraph was worth the agony of reading his whole book.

The introduction of the American school into the Orient has broken up 40 centuries of tradition. It has given us a new China, a new Japan, and is working marked progress in Turkey and the Philippines. The schools are in a position to determine the lines of progress. The Chinese Revolution was Western-inspired and Western-financed, just as the Russian Revolution soon was to be.

And it placed that nation in a favorable state of disintegration for laboratory testing of pedagogical mind-alteration technology. Out of this ferment rose a Chinese tracking practice built on the ancient habit of character references, modernized and bureaucratized. It's called in China the Dangan. It is a continuous, lifelong personnel file exposing a student's intimate history from birth through schooling and then through life.

The Dangan constitutes a comprehensive overthrow of privacy, and today nobody works in China without a Dangan. By the mid-1960s, preliminary work on an American Dangan was taking place in schools as information reservoirs attached to schooling began to store personal data about individual children. A new class of expert, like Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie Foundation, began to urge the collection of data and its unification in computer code to enhance cross-referencing with all the other data banks.

By 1971, psychologists in the pay of government and private foundations were justifying surreptitious data gathering from children as the moral right of institutions. I want to take you back a few years again. Between 1896 and 1920, a small number of powerful industrialists, together with their private foundations, sponsored university administrators, house experts, and house politicians spent more money on mass forced schooling than the government did.

Indeed, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller together spent more money than the government did on schooling between 1900 and 1920. In this laissez-faire fashion, a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. I don't blame you if you're a little surprised by this data, but as my publisher was quite surprised by it, and when I demonstrated its validity from the documents of the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation-- there are others as well, but those are major players-- they wouldn't allow it to be printed.

I thought it was written. It's in public domain. They said they didn't want the hassle. If you want to know the motives of this project, you need only read the first public mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board that was printed in its first report to well-wishers, issued in 1906.

And I'm going to read you the first paragraph, and I guarantee you it's utterly unbelievable. And if you have children, this ought to be as chilling as anything you've heard recently. "In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own will upon a grateful and responsive folk." Can you believe people actually wrote this and printed it?

"We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets, men of letters. We shall not search for artists, painters, musicians, lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of which we have an ample supply.

The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way." The real purpose of modern schooling was announced by Edward Ross of the University of Wisconsin in the same year that was written. Ross is generally considered one of the three founders of the 20th century discipline called sociology.

And in a book bluntly called Social Control, Ross wrote, I'll quote directly, "Plans are underway to replace family, church, and community with propaganda, education-- he meant schooling-- and mass media. People," he informed his readers, "are only little plastic lumps of dough." Another insider of modern schooling, H.H. Goddard, chairman of the psychology department at Princeton, called government schooling in 1920, quote, "the perfect organization of the hive," close quote.

Goddard wrote that standardized testing was to cause the lower classes to confront their biological inferiority, sort of like wearing a dunce cap. In time, it would discourage their reproduction. By 1971, the US Office of Education, now deeply committed to gaining access to the private lives and thoughts of children, granted contracts for seven volumes of so-called change agent studies to the Rand Corporation.

Change agent training was launched with federal funding under the Education Professions Development Act. Soon, the Change Agent's Guide to Innovation in Education appeared. Grants were then awarded to colleges for the training of change agents, while six more Rand manuals were printed and distributed to teacher training courses. In 1989, a senior director of the Mid-Continent Regional Education Laboratory told the 50 governors of the United States assembled in Kansas City for their annual meeting the following-- this is a direct quote, not a word is changed-- "what we're into is the total restructuring of scientific scholarship, specifically the importation of German research university values to America at the end of the 19th century covered the track of what was going on." What American colleges had traditionally thought about college work is that it was about teaching and learning.

It was about individual student growth in intellect. But that's not the way the German system worked. What a German research university was about was direct service to corporations in the political state using students who paid for the right to donate their services free, along with the paid professional academics.

In return for demonstrating, a student demonstrating that he or she had trained adequately and was loyal, the German system then reserved jobs and professional licenses for the appropriate graduates. The University of Chicago, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Columbia Teachers College, MIT, and Cornell, all colleges endowed by great industrialists, together with the state-endowed university movement represented by schools like Michigan or Wisconsin or Ohio State, joined in concert with the old line aristocratic American colleges like Yale and Dartmouth, who were flag bearers for the English social class theory to provide a new and daring purpose for wealth to aspire to, not just spending your money, not just having big parties, but mastering the secrets of evolution and driving society toward a managed scientific utopia.

Indiana University-- I don't believe-- I've never encountered this piece of information, which I dug up. I had been asked to speak at a conference in San Francisco by the Cato Institute last year called the Bionomics Conference. And there were so many-- it was at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The only reason I went was so I never would have been able to afford to stay at the Mark Hopkins.

And I took my cat and smuggled it into the room. We had four days of-- anyway, there were so many references at this conference to evolution that I said, what is this cockamamie bionomics? And I started to search and hunt. And I stumbled across it. And you're about to get it now.

But you and I and the Bionomics Conference people must be the only people in the world who know this. Indiana University provides a good picture of the strategy developing outside the irrelevant debate conducted in the public press. By 1900, a special discipline existed at Indiana only for elite students handpicked by the college president who had created and taught the course.

It was called bionomics. And it dealt with the why and how of producing a new evolutionary ruling class. The president of the college is a famous name in American college history. His name is David Starr Jordan. And Jordan did so well in the middle of nowhere, he was soon invited to join the major leagues of university existence.

The invitation was extended by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford. And Jordan became the first president of Stanford University, where he remained for 30 years. But what, you might say, does this have to do with public schooling? Just this. Bionomics gets its direct connection with forced government schooling in this fashion.

When he left Indiana, Jordan took along with him to Stanford his star bionomics protege, a 24-year-old named Elwood Cumberley. And in short order, Cumberley was made dean of teacher education at Stanford. Within two decades, he was the head of a syndicate controlling school administrative posts from coast to coast.

He was the most influential schoolman in 20th century American history. He was also the official historian of American schooling. All the myths you've heard come from Cumberley's history of American education, which for 50 years was the dominant textbook in teacher training institutions. Did bionomics have any effect on life in the state of Indiana, where so many sons of prominent Indiana families had studied its arguments for controlled breeding and elimination of the unfit?

The answer is yes. The very first formal legislation making forced sterilization by the state a legal act was passed in the state of Indiana. And its practice there became the law of the land in the famous 1927 Supreme Court test case, Buck versus Bell, in which Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion, allowing the sterilization of 17-year-old Carrie Buck to prevent her from having degenerate offspring.

That's a quote from the Supreme Court decision. 20 years later-- I've never met anybody who knows this. So if someone in here knew this, could you just sort of raise your hands. I'll know that someone in the world knows this. 20 years later, after Buck versus Bell, in the trial of the German doctors at Nuremberg after the Second World War, the Nazi physicians testified that their precedents were importantly American ones and that their name for forced sterilization had been the Indiana procedure.

To say this bionomical spirit infected schooling is to say that birds fly. Once you know it's there, the principle is easily tracked. I'm going to track a little bit of it for you so that the groove will be worn, and you'll find that you'll be able to add components to this track very easily just reading the press and watching television.

In 1922, Walter Lippman's book Public Opinion demanded severe restrictions on public debate. Those are Lippman's words. In light of the enormous number of feeble-minded Americans, said Lippman, the old ideal of participatory democracy is insane. This theme of scientifically controlled breeding interacted in a complex fashion with the German ideal of a scientific society run by experts and the ideal of the British state religion and political society that God himself had appointed the social classes to create a kind of Darwinian caste-based schooling run at long distance through experts unseen who manipulated hired hands called schoolteachers and school administrators.

And all this was for the ultimate good of the best breeding stock. In 1928, Sigmund Freud's favorite nephew, Edward L. Bernays, who is the creator of the craft that we call today public relations, said in his book Crystallizing Public Opinion that, quote, "Invisible power is now in control of every aspect of American life.

Democracy," said Bernays, "is only a front for skillful wire-pulling, tricks the new sciences of mental manipulation, could place at the disposal of policy people for a price." By 1944, the jettisoning of natural rights resonated through every corner of American academic life. Any academic who expected free money from foundations, corporations, or government would play the scientific management string on his loot.

In 1961, the German concept of the political state as a fatherland surfaced in John F. Kennedy's inaugural address in which his listeners were lectured, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." And in 1995, Time magazine-- I believe it's February, the first issue in February-- lectured its readers in a cover story that, quote, "Democracy is in the worst interest of national goals.

The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management." Now the secret was in the open. The original American commonwealth ideal had been repudiated by its guardians. In the same year, some of the methodology used to achieve this repudiation was brought to light in a long documentary film, which I'll bet shows around Nashville.

It's called Manufacturing Consent. It was about the career of the legendary MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the world's foremost linguistic scholar. But Chomsky's interests haven't been in linguistics for at least 20 years. In the film, Chomsky confirmed a growing popular suspicion that the news you hear is tightly controlled. He showed that all the news in the world, pouring through mass channels, is under the direction of 23 global corporations, which spread propaganda on every side of every issue, thus constricting public imagination, wherever important interests are in question.

School was an important terminal on a production line to create a utopian world resembling a gigantic Epcot Center, or perhaps the Mother Chautauqua of late 19th century fame, a utopia before its time. There was only one important eugenical limitation on this school-created utopia to come. It wasn't intended for everyone, at the most for 20% of the existing population.

And out of Johns Hopkins University in 1996 came this chilling piece of supporting data. I'm going to quote from the Hopkins report. "The American economy has grown massively since the mid 1960s, but workers' real spendable wages are no higher than they were 30 years ago. The purchasing power of a working couple in 1995 was, after inflation was factored in, the same as earned by a single working man 90 years earlier." This steep decline in American common prosperity then forced both parents from home and forced their kids into the managed world of daycare and extended schooling.

And although you and I have been harangued endlessly century long that enlarging the scope of schooling would cause wealth to be more evenly spread, exactly the reverse has occurred. Wealth was 250% more concentrated by 1998 than it was in 1898. "I don't mean to be inflammatory," he said, "but it's as if government school has made people dumber, not brighter, made families weaker, not stronger, has ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God, has set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another, and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of our national community." Real school reform would have to overthrow a powerful form of mental conditioning which has taken a century to implant.

To one degree or another, all of us have been indoctrinated in a variety of ways to believe that the American experiment which promised ordinary people sovereignty over their own lives was wrong-headed and childish. Real school reform would have to defeat the belief learned in school and reinforced through the media that ordinary people are too stupid, too irresponsible, too childish to be trusted to look out for themselves.

When children are encouraged to run wild in school and to become stupid there, this poisonous lesson is hammered home for the rest of us day after day. We've all experienced it. No wonder we all believe it. The premises of scientific schooling seem impossible to dispute. So thoroughly have they been demonstrated by the form of forced schools which corporations and the federal government imposed on us a century ago.

After all, why should hopelessly ignorant people be allowed to make decisions, even intimate personal ones like how to raise their own children? Certified experts are available who know vastly more about everything and anything. Thus has the Protestant Reformation, whose brightest product was America, been thrown on the scrap heap.

Because if there's any bedrock of the Protestant Reformation, it was Luther's declaration, every man his own priest. Jefferson and Madison must have been loony to want us to trust the common people. Now let me take in conclusion a stab at a reply. To have better schools that served families and communities and individuals, instead of suffocating them, we would need to trash certain assumptions.

We would need to abandon entirely the idea that any such sociological reality as mass man actually exists, except in the minds of those who benefit from such a belief. We would have to believe what our fingerprints and our intuition tell us, that no two people are alike, that nobody can be accurately described by numbers and graphs, that trying to do this sets up an endless chain of future grief.

We would have to accept that a fantasy like scientific pedagogy is impossible because each person has a private and a singular destiny. We would need to transfer faith from school and corporate experts and behave as if these principles were true, as over a million homeschooling families in this country do.

We would need to wake up and admit that knowledge is a far cry from wisdom, that each American has the right to live as he or she deems wise, and if the way individuals choose to live and raise their kids means disaster for global corporations, as surely the way of life the Amish embraced, if it were embraced by too many, would mean disaster, then that fateful choice still needs to be honored because it is protected by the law that defines America, our founding documents.

It's high time we all remembered what mankind needed and America for in the first place. The brilliant dialectical balance struck by our founders was the only way to keep power weak and off balance, official power and popular power both. Popular will would beat back government tyranny, government would check popular tyranny over minority rights.

This constant confrontation, this unwinnable war between two flawed collectivizing principles, coercive government and bullying public opinion, will always produce liberty for those who want it. In the stalemate, liberty escapes as long as the argument is kept alive. It's only through enforced consensus, the product of too much and the wrong kind of schooling, that America can fail.

America is about argument, about doing things our own way. It is still the only place on the planet where one can publicly oppose authority without being beaten or killed or severely intimidated for that act of free will. The U.S. Supreme Court wrote in the flag burning case that the only true test of freedom is the right to differ about things that touch the heart of the existing order.

And the court was right. That truly is the standard. Let us strike to the heart of this thing then and take back our children from the management engineers. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. God bless you all. Thank you. Well, you just heard what my publisher doesn't want the rest of the country to hear.

They really had, they've kept my book for a year. I mean, they want the book, but they don't want the quotes from the foundation documents and from the various social engineers, which are pretty easy to trace once you know they're there. Anyway. Thank you. See you tomorrow morning.