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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Hi, I'm John Taylor Gatto and this is What You've Been Missing. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. Calvin Coolidge, 1933. Greetings and welcome. I'm your host and navigator, Richard Grove, and this is a very special interview episode of What You've Been Missing, featuring the gentle tone, scholarly insights, and wealth of wisdom that combines in the form of John Taylor Gatto, the legendary educator, author, and icon of liberty who offers a lifetime of perspectives on the origins, intentions, and destiny of the compulsory public school system.

This five-hour journey represents a landmark in American history and was filmed over two days on July 4th weekend, 2011, in the Constitution State of Connecticut. This is a comprehensive interview session which not only memorializes John's life's work, but also embodies a return of our birthright as human beings. Truly an event which is relevant and relative to each and every one of us.

This message applies to children and adults, parents and grandparents, students and teachers, administrators and politicians, blue collar, white collar, no collar, everyone who uses words and symbols to meet their needs, everyone who depends on accurate information to thrive and survive in this world. The purpose of this interview with John is to provide each and every individual with the essential facts which pertain to our survival here on Earth, both as individuals and as a species, and yet have been censored from our public schooling.

The envisioned outcome would be for each and every human being to possess the knowledge and understanding which allows them to exercise intellectual self-defense and self-liberty, thereby succeeding in pursuing and attaining happiness. It's designed to be shared and studied by individuals and groups, to provide the evidence, organize the ideas and facilitate the constructive conversations and actions necessary to address the root causes of our ever-growing incoherence as human beings.

Since this interview contains over 200 footnotes and references and discusses the content of more than 30 classic books essential to understanding life here on Earth, I warmly recommend that your first viewing be invested into just soaking in this information and consider it for yourself, and after thinking about it, to then view it again with the intent of looking up the references to embolden your understanding and clarify the focus of your new expanded perspectives.

This interview session could be screened over five hours, five months, or five years, as it could take that long to consume the primary and secondary source materials referred to herein. Most importantly, what you get out of the Ultimate History Lesson will be in direct proportion to the amount of attention and focus that you can invest into it.

As each hour of the interview progresses into another, you are literally crossing thresholds of discovery, and by hour five, the layers of these discoveries yield a truly inspiring realization. That being said, the conversation which forms the entirety of this interview is almost entirely composed of facts and references pointing toward a preponderance of evidence, which is, for the most part, unknown to the general public, and it has everything to do with the myriad of crises which face humanity, starting with our own incoherence and inability to problem-solve our way forward.

We're not asking you to agree with us, nor to believe what we're saying. We're simply trying to provoke you into looking into these matters for yourself by providing you with an accurate map which leads to your own factual and substantial understanding of reality. For as Aristotle once wrote, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Through these interview sessions with John, you're going to be introduced to a variety of historical personalities, and, we hope, curious to review the history which has led us to this point.

And to that end, this is not about disproving or debunking what we've been taught, so much as it is a journey of discovery to discern reality and to discover our birthright as human beings, so that we might go forward in order to meet the challenges we all face here on this planet, together.

This is truly something that corporate establishment media, public schools, and universities cannot afford to teach us. So without further ado, let us begin as they say, at the beginning. On December 15, 1935, John Taylor Gatto was born in western Pennsylvania in the coal mining and steel milling town of Monongahela, about 35 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

During his early school years, he spent a year at an elite Jesuit boarding school near Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where, as you'll soon hear, he learned to think dialectically and was beaten sufficiently by the nuns to create his "outspoken temperament," which has endured lifelong. John did undergraduate work at Cornell University, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University, and then served in the United States Army Medical Corps at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

Following Army service, John did graduate work at the City University of New York, Hunter College, Yeshiva University, the University of California, Cornell and Reed College, which is a private, independent liberal arts college located in Oregon. Like many famous American iconoclasts, John first honed his skills in a variety of professions before finding his talent for teaching, which proves to be his real gift to this world.

After almost 30 years of teaching in New York City's inner-city schools, he was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and that same year was also named New York State Teacher of the Year. Later in 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement from teaching titled "I Quit, I Think" to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, stating that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living." Soon thereafter, he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall titled "An Evening with John Taylor Gatto," which then launched a career of public speaking in the area of public school reform.

He then began a worldwide public speaking and writing career and has received several awards from libertarian organizations, including the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Educational Freedom in 1997. John has been invited to speak all around the world to share his research and has spoken to audiences in Australia, Spain, France, England, Mexico, China, and Canada, as well as every one of the 50 American states.

Since his public resignation in 1991, he has traveled over 3 million air miles, spoken at Harvard University, NASA Space Center, the White House, Smith College, Cato Institute, and many other places. He's also been a keynote speaker at over 30 state homeschool conventions, and he supports something called "unschooling" and "open source education" for personal learning.

In his book, "Weapons of Mass Instruction," here's how John defines "open source education." "Open source learning accepts that everything under the sun might be a possible starting point on the road to self-mastery and a good life. In open source, learning sequences are personally designed or personally signed off on, and everyone you encounter in life is a potential teacher.

In open source, teaching is a function, not a profession. Everyone learns and everyone can teach themselves how to learn anything, as well as learning how to teach others. In open source, students are the active initiators. You learn that you either write your own script in life, or by default, without your input, you become an unwitting actor in someone else's script.

The main thesis of John's body of work can best be illustrated, in my opinion, by asking the question, "What do public schools actually teach children?" and answering it with the main themes contained in John's first book, printed in 1992, titled "Dumbing Us Down." He makes the following observations about how public schools are designed in form and function.

"Public schooling teaches confusion by breaking coherence. It presents an ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize in order to stay in school. Public schooling teaches them to accept their class affiliation. Public schooling makes them indifferent and suppresses natural curiosity. Public schooling makes them emotionally dependent on approval from authority.

Public schooling also makes them intellectually dependent on experts and authorities to think on their behalf. Public schooling teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts and authorities, also known as provisional self-esteem. Public schooling makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, that they are always supervised, under surveillance, especially in today's society where everything online is tracked.

Information is sold in a variety of ways to a variety of predators." Bibliography. "John's poetic prose and diligent documentation can be studied in his prodigious preponderance of publications, including 'Dumbing Us Down' the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling, 1992; 'The Exhausted School,' 1993; 'A Different Kind of Teacher, Solving the Crisis of American Schooling,' 2000; 'The Underground History of American Education,' 2001; and in my opinion, this is an essential book to read as it stimulates your internal dialogue and draws questions as to why are children being methodically undermined, while simultaneously providing you with the answers and comprehensive references." John also published an article called "Against School," published by Harper's Magazine in 2003; and last but not least, "Weapons of Mass Instruction, a School Teacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling," 2008.

John's website is johntaylorgatto.com and you can help him fund his current projects, sample the "Underground History of American Education," and browse his bookstore. We've also created a special website to support your further study of this project, theultimatehistorylesson.com, which acts as a single point of access to all the media, references, notes and source materials and bonus features associated with this interview set.

Realizing that releasing this information is not enough, we've invested a great deal of effort into organizing and providing you with the research library and all the tools, methods and resources that you'll need to learn your way forward following this interview. Possibly one of the most useful tools is our use of the personal brain software to enter, organize and connect all of this information into a comprehensive big picture, literally helping you to connect all of the dots of useful information and formulate a useful understanding.

We use the brain internally to help us organize the plethora of prolific facts, artifacts and personalities that we've encountered while attempting to understand the nature of public education. In addition to hosting the brain models, theultimatehistorylesson.com also hosts the video files for this interview set, as well as the audio only versions of this interview in MP3 and CD format, so that you can listen to it on the go.

This site also hosts the footnotes, links, references and PDF versions of the classic books discussed, and in the near future we'll be adding subtitles and translation into multiple languages and much more. Theultimatehistorylesson.com links you to our educational media producing partners, as well as the Tragedy and Hope online community, wherein you can leverage the research, methods and tools in an international online community, designed to be a fear-free zone of mutual respect, wherein individual explorations are shared to empower everyone with a comprehensive understanding.

The Tragedy and Hope online community is free to those who need it, and sponsored by the individuals who can afford to support our educational projects. And since this project was funded by more than 50 individuals in the Tragedy and Hope online community, I would especially like to thank those of you who gave us the ability to invite John and produce The Ultimate History Lesson, so that this empowering information can be understood worldwide.

We also produced the Peace Revolution podcast, a virtual classroom for adults, designed to point out and provide useful perspectives, resources and organized information. Each episode contains a subject of study essential to understanding a comprehensive view of reality, all of which is focused on providing you with the history, contextual information and references, and the various methods and tools so that you can learn for yourself, that which public schools cannot afford to provide.

Specifically, we've produced episodes 41 through 45 of the Peace Revolution podcast, which feature all five hours of this interview, coupled with historical analysis and commentary, which we provide to help you really understand what's being said. These episodes amount to another 15 hours of educational content, which is also available on theultimatehistorylesson.com, providing you with the metaphorical handles, if you will, so that you can grasp this material and use it to your own advantage in everyday life.

Unlike any other interview you've ever witnessed, the conclusion of The Ultimate History Lesson is actually the starting point on your own personal journey of discovery. Due to the fact that we're trying to do something that hasn't yet been done, I've edited each hour of this interview such that from the crack of the slate until the end of the tape, you're witnessing John in a natural and forthright representation of his presence, and nothing, he states, in the coming hours has been taken out of order, out of context or otherwise adjusted for theatrical purposes, as I feel that it would not be to anyone's benefit to change the flow of energy as it happened.

These interview sessions are designed to resurrect your curiosity, stimulate your use of reason, inspire you to look around, provoke you into asking questions, sparking your creativity and your inventiveness, igniting the solution-making process in each and every one of us. Its function is to provide you with a ramp to learning, discussion, respectful debate and compassionate forms of communication, as well as constructive action.

Here's hour one of our interview with John Taylor Gatto. It's time to begin the ultimate history lesson. Thank you for tuning in and not dropping out. You know, if we're pushing that button, you get a camera credit. That's pretty good. That's right. Awesome. I don't even know that we'll need the slides necessarily.

I mean, we can start by talking about that. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Grammar, logic and rhetoric. So, grammar is the Son, logic is the Father, the Holy Ghost is rhetoric and God is the consciousness. And so, the Christian trivium came from the Greek trivium, but they used a metaphor to encode it.

Now, my question to you is, is a metaphor a lie or is a metaphor something else? I think we better start a little less abstract. One of the things that fatigue the old brain. Actually, I arrive at abstraction by arguing with myself through writing. So, everything I write goes through about 20 drafts.

And since I hand write it, it's quite painful to read and throw it out. But I don't really know what I say or I'm going to say or what I believe until I actually argue with what I think I believe. So, what do you think you believe about schooling?

I think I believe that the metaphor schooling clearly tells you what it's expected to deliver. We only use the expression one other way commonly and that's what the school of fish. And they are wonderful to watch when one fin moves, all of them have thousands of fins move. And they're instantly receptive to what the group wishes.

I don't know who gives the original signal. But, but education's diametrically opposite to that. I think it starts with the assumption that we get from a fingerprint or from DNA that no two people are alike. And that the ultimate realization of yourself is to find that uniqueness where your apparent physical resemblance to everybody else sort of dissolves as an illusion.

And you stand absolutely alone or you can select when you want to be part of the larger group. It seems clear to me that the business of schooling has done when Orwell clearly saw you do or what Walter Lippman said you do back in the 1920s. You steal the key language of the person you are the group you want to overthrow and you redefine it and people then become confused.

It's new speak in 1984. So the schooling transformation occurs when they see that the language of education is highly regarded, highly respected. And even in people who don't participate there's an urge in that direction. So you simply take the concepts and you claim that that's why people are being ritualized.

Yeah, so there. So you described that individual beings, when in groups, kind of subvert their own individual thinking power. And the law of identity, none of us can change who we are, we have to be ourselves, and that is constant throughout life. So it's about figuring out how to remain individually self-reliant and self-sufficient as going through these systems that are trying to change us and to make us less self-reliant and more.

Very much so. And I think the awareness of these contrary dynamics is what gives rise to the theories of dialectic. I mean Aristotle all the way through history, the variety of them, but they participate in the same way, is essentially asking you for your own self-defense. Not to assume that what anyone says, especially as they climb the authority ladder, is the truth.

Often the misinformation comes from innocent self-delusion, but just as often as you move up the power pyramid, it comes from a malign intent towards your own individuality. So it's like a betrayal of truth that occurs, or a betrayal of belief in some authority structure that you want to believe in is true, and then little by little you realize that it's not necessarily how it might have been presented to you?

Right. Even in your own individual inner life and consciousness. Before the cameras rolled, I said, "The way I learn what I'm thinking is to write something down that I think I believe, and then I argue with it, and it never survives. How about that?" Now what scares me is that when I go back to it year after year, most of it doesn't survive.

It takes years before I get to a core and I say, "I'm not personally capable of moving beyond this thing." So that we're so well conditioned from infancy not to see the truth or relate the truth, but to shave it, that the first step in reaching for an education, I think, is to mistrust what you most are certain of.

To mistrust that. Now it may survive, but it needs tested not once, until you're exhausted from testing it. Is the school system designed to get kids to grow into a thriving, self-responsible, self-reliant adult, or is it to whittle away curiosity and to kind of stop them from thinking for themselves?

It's certainly not the former in any way for the simple reason that throughout history, management doesn't know how to manage independent units, even partially independent units. Why shouldn't we ask, and any school people watching your film should begin immediately to ask politely, "Why are we doing this?" It's a question you never hear because it's heresy.

I mean, the beleaguered classroom teacher doesn't know why he or she's doing it. They're told to do it. Maybe they can give it a 5% personal spin. That's why they're doing it. Does it make sense for this particular life that's asking the question? You don't know, and if you started to care, the logic of schooling would dissolve.

No one is able. You can answer the question for yourself. I used to say to my classes, and over the course of 30 years teaching, I taught kids from the Gold Coast of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I taught kids from the center of Harlem and Spanish Harlem.

I would say to all of them, "You have a right at any time," you've got to be polite though because I'm just human, to say, "Why are we doing this?" If I can't produce an answer that convinces you that I believe it, then you have a right to opt out and do something else as long as you don't run wild and bring the whole house down.

It helped me grow year after year. Not that they ask very often because they're conditioned not to do that, but enough did ask that I was put on my own metal to say, "Why am I doing this?" It was a continual expansion of my own insight until politically I couldn't do it any longer.

The school, oddly enough, made me so internally famous that it drew extra attention, and my system couldn't survive under the scrutiny because they would see the disparity between what I was doing and what the protocols were. So it sounds like if I'm trying to get to the root cause of why your teaching career ended, it sounds like you started asking questions, John.

It sounds like the questions started with "Why?" with a question mark, and then maybe you were asking some other, like, the five W's plus "How?" I started asking myself questions, then forcing my classes to ask me questions and themselves questions. Eventually, the productive output of my classes was so great, inadvertently, I didn't care how the school measured, but it was so great that I would get visiting delegations, sometimes on a daily basis, for months.

And they would leave baffled because they wouldn't see the drama unfolding that they understood as schooling, and they were right. It was less and less schooling, and eventually the pressure became impossible since I set out at the beginning of the year with an inner intention, if I had 120 kids, to have 120 individually written curricula.

I never succeeded totally, but I got close enough that when the principal would drop by and only find nine people in class and say, "Where are the rest?" that I ran out of strategies to explain where the rest were. So, yeah, I couldn't operate, I couldn't function any longer, because my physical strength wasn't up to it.

How did part of the strength of your actual teaching come from releasing children from the classroom and letting them go out in the world and actually gain some useful experience? Huge amounts of it came from releasing anyone who had an independent course to follow, becoming that boy or girl's assistant, always with the mother's permission, because they couldn't deal with that kind of additional political pressure.

So, what they would learn and bring back would be like food for me, like I was 120 people simultaneously. I learned much more than I learned at the two Ivy League colleges I attended. I used to say to my wife, and it sounds fanciful as though, "Oh, he must love children," which is not true.

I love people, and people can be five years old, but people who suck their thumb and rattle and extend childhood, school's intention is to artificially extend childhood. And there really is no practical terminus for that. If they can extend it through graduate school and postgraduate, then... What is the actual reason that their childhoods are being extended?

How does it start? I think what we never discuss or that the extreme left has preempted to discuss, so they marginalize themselves, is the intimate interrelationship between the economy and the way we train the young. To the extent that we once had a wildly variegated economy. I'm quoting Abraham Lincoln in 1859, famous speech of the Wisconsin Agricultural Association.

Lincoln said, I call this mudsill theory, because he used that term. Lincoln said the British are financing the whole Western movement, and they're attempting to reinstall their class system. And so they send their young sons over to make sure that not a whole lot of attention is paid to ordinary people or people who live in simple homes that have mudsills.

He said, according to the British thinking, they're not worth training or worrying about because there's no way they can possibly improve. Lincoln said, look around you, three quarters of our population has an independent livelihood, and the quarter who doesn't works to put a little stake together to set up on their own and write their own script in life.

He said, as a consequence, we don't have proletariat as they do in Britain and Germany and in the European nations. And we are able to have a factory system where it exists in this country, which is in New England, the textile industries, a factory will have 30 or 40 employees.

They'll usually be young women waiting marriage. They'll be served tea at their machines, and they'll be opera performances stage for just to keep them at the machine because these independent livelihoods lead to totally private, independent systems of value. So the British are wrong, but of course, the Civil War changed that.

We're sold that it was a great crusade against slavery by the school system. The major historians who turned their attention to that say, I mean, to a person that slavery was already dead. It was a great transformation on the part of plantation owners, but because the wives of the plantation owners were scratching their head and saying, you know, the boss, my husband vanishes for a couple of days.

We have all these new slaves and they're not black anymore. They're very shades of brown. So they I'm thinking right now, I think Vern Parrington, but a number of historians 50 years ago said slavery was on its last legs because the Southern woman wouldn't stand for it any longer.

Russia, I believe, had freed the serfs. Necessity to get rid of the Southern politicians who were trained in dialectical thinking, in rhetoric, and could run circles around the Northern politicians in Congress. They could produce the most compelling arguments for this or that. And so the South had to be gotten rid of.

From my understanding, those dry goods like cotton from the South that were produced by slaves were then going to factories in the North. And the factory owners in the North figured out that the slave owners were paying too much overhead. It costs a lot to keep a whole family fed, etc.

And there were letters exchanged and they actually discovered it was cheaper. Why not make everyone a slave who doesn't know that they're a slave? A wage slave. Right, right. And what happens is morale collapses. So you have to care for them. The discussions on the highest level among Northern industrialists was, why should we have to support Deadwood here?

And we could do that if they were wage slaves. Yeah, yeah. And furthermore, people like Count Tolstoy was well aware of the hard core underneath the romantic arguments. And so were a number of other people. But the public dependent upon media and pulpits, which were subsidized by the owners, they couldn't find a zone where they could think clearly or someone would say, yeah, here's the truth.

Think about it. Early forms of mass media propaganda from the pulpit or the newspaper. Or the Chautauquans. Oh, absolutely. The Chautauquans were put together by intent. The family that began Harper's Publishers and had the very prestigious journal of the time, Harper's Weekly. Lewis Lapham, the Lapham family? Well, Lapham's very latter day.

His grandfather was in charge of Harper's though. He was mayor of San Francisco, I believe. He was when the UN came in. He told me that his boyhood was filled with foreign dignitaries in the home. His house guests were thrown back glass of wine. So you can actually trace the small number of families behind the Chautauquans, which were the most compelling mass media of the day.

And you'd hear about what was going on in Boston and Cincinnati. And you'd want that. And selectively, ideas and ways of thinking were introduced to the best people. And they used their local prestige to make sure that, you know, it's a natural process. So what we got was a second American revolution between, oh, I don't know, 1865 and about 1910.

This time the British won. Again, but they didn't win by force of arms, but by force of insight into the way opinion is created. And when the skilled workers who had intense pride and really were the key to the prosperity of early industrial operation, commercial operation, when the skilled workers understood their power, then industry and commerce were mechanized intensely.

And you wiped out the need for skill. You took less quality, but now you had less contention, less argument. Carnegie was instrumental in eliminating the influence of skilled labor. And it continued right to the 20th century. What influence have the Rockefellers had on organized labor, skilled labor, education? The Rockefeller family can actually be traced way back in Dutch history.

There's an ancestor of the Rockefellers who set up a rather detailed plan for global government hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And that is one of these flow charts that showed how you were going to do that or not. But the great irony, of course, is that Rockefeller and Carnegie's families were fringe people in the United States.

But using their brilliant insight into leverage and how it works, both were able to take nothing and pyramid it into quite a bit. Rockefeller actually, his father I believe, but it may have been his grandfather, fled a rape charge, sort of like Strauss-Kahn's up in Bainbridge, New York. He had been charged with rape of a maid and fled.

Rockefeller threw their weight behind, this is emblematic of how they were, behind Horatio Alger, who also had been charged with rape up here in Connecticut, in the Newsboys' lodging house. And if you read a wonderful book that exists, a limited edition but it's kept continuously in print, called "The Rise of the Dangerous Classes in New York City" by the creator of American adoption.

When I started a research school, I kept running into the same people who put the adoption institution together in the school and see one much more important than the other. But still, the same names flowed in and out of one another. Charles Loring Brace, who I believe his father was the publisher of the Hartford Courant.

He was sure in his early diary, he'd say, "I must find a way to become nationally famous." In Yale, he wrote that he didn't have any idea how he was going to do that. But finally it occurred to him that with these masses of immigrants being brought in to break the Irish labor monopoly in the mines and the mills, that the easiest way to lower the unit cost of labor was to bring the husband and the wife into the labor force.

Or you double the size of the labor force, you cut the unit value of labor in half. But you couldn't do that as long as they were worried about their kids. So now you have the impetus to enlarge the social work industry, to corrupt the legislatures, to give it the power to break families apart.

And what do you do with the kids? Well, the expression put up for adoption tells you, you don't want them anywhere in the neighborhood. You want them far away. So you put them in boxcars. This great secret monstrous event in America that goes on for 40, 50 years. Boxcars full of the children of the labor sent west.

They started upstate New York. That was too close. So they kept going farther and farther west. And then they'd stop at a whistle stop and a platform would be brought out, the boxcar would open, the children would be put up for adoption. They had a preference for who they wanted to adopt.

They wanted Lutherans to adopt because they had the Episcopal idea of hierarchy, but they were just dumb farmers. They couldn't think clearly. It was free labor. Hey, and that will end the future career of these immigrants. What stopped putting children up for adoption was the police chiefs of the West.

I think the year was 1888, but give me a few years either way. They wrote a stinging attack on this practice, not on moral grounds, but they said crime is everywhere in the West. And if you go to the psychological abstracts, you'll find that an enormous number of adopted children, for example, six of the 10 leading mass murderers in American history, but all forms of crime, because when you break the bond with the natural, you can't put substitutes in place.

Again, not morally. There's a recent physiological theory called mirror neurons that you learn to use your own biological equipment by watching people who have the same or nearly identical biological. When you remove that, even if the family that you're transferred to has money and savoir faire and civil, they're more so, doesn't matter.

You're actually imitating things that your physiology can accommodate as a consequence, you get incrementally more and more crazed inside and angry. One of the things, of course, school does is it prevents these kind of connections between different areas from occurring. That's what the short answer test is about, and Oxford and Cambridge got rid of it 100 years ago, because they said people who do well on short answer tests, they memorize bits of information, but they don't connect the bits of information.

When they seem to be able to connect the bits of information, it's because they've memorized someone else's connections. The better the school, the more sets of connections you'll memorize, but you can't do that for yourself. It's like these machines, you guys are all too young to remember. They used to sell machines that would relieve the stress of lifting weights.

You put the weight in your hand, but the machine would lift your arm in the way. Only trouble was, your muscle knew the difference. But the people buying the machinery didn't. Well, it looks exactly the same. Anyway, put me back on course here. Is there any connection between frustration and aggression, and what effect does schooling have on that?

Well, you answer your own question by asking it. Connections, intimate. School removes your volition in all important ways. Even who you speak to are not the arts of association as valuable or more valuable than anything else you learn when you're young. I read how executive hiring is done, and it almost never has to do with your training in whatever you're being hired for.

I'm thinking of Apple now, I believe. Is this the person we would like to have around three years from now? And bend an elbow with, or play golf with, or just talk with? And that's why you're passed from set of executives to set of executives. So they can sign off, "Yeah, he's okay." But we don't tell kids that, right?

It's people who have the highest grade point average and the highest SAT scores. Well, I spent an hour years, well, not too long ago, within 10 years, with the admissions officer for Harvard College. And about 30 years ago, an hour with the admissions director at Princeton. And let me tell you, their polite dismissal of grades and SAT scores was intimidating to listen to, as if you'd have to be crazy to let somebody in.

Let me see if I can condense how you get into Harvard or Princeton. Of course, you get into both by donating a building. But how do other people get in? They're being analyzed on the basis of their ability to either become wealthy or famous. Either one will work. Famous, like wearing a billboard saying, "I went to Princeton." There's that actress Jodie Foster, "I went to Princeton." Look at where the rest of the actors and directors went.

They didn't go anywhere. Jodie did, so that's one we hear about. It's the Harvard lady said, "We look for a record of excellence." And what does excellence consist of? It's sometime in the first 18 years of your life, figuring out how to add value to the people around you.

Although I shouldn't say this, in a way that catches public attention. So you might walk across the United States or bicycle the perimeter of the country or row across the Atlantic Ocean as a physical way. You might start a little charity or set up some weather service or some pollution monitoring around Hartford.

There are a substantial number, a small fraction, but a substantial number of kids doing this as we sit here. They're writing a record of being able to add value to the community around them. And then the other fellow, the Princeton guy, said the same thing in different words. I asked him, what, this is about '68 roughly.

I asked him, "What part of a resume, submitted, do you look at first?" And the answer, metaphorically, because my jaw had opened, "Hobbies," he said. I said, "I've been taught all my life, leave that off because it's not your main." He said, "On the contrary, it's the only honest information you're likely to get." How does someone spend their time when it's their free choice to spend?

He said, "It's a window into their mind and their heart." What kind of hobbies? He said, "Well, ideally someone would have a physical hobby, an intellectual hobby, and a social hobby because that would show they're exploring these large, well, physical hobbies. You mean football, baseball?" "Well," he said, "it's better than nothing, but we would prefer not to see team sports." I said, "I've been told all my life that team sports identify your ability to work in a team." He said, "What happens in a team sport is if you decide to dog it, it's very hard to tell which guy on the line has dogged it or not or which running back has gone down quicker than he should have gone down." He said, "We prefer solo hobbies that involve physical danger." "You mean you want kids to put their necks at risk?" "For example, what?" I said.

He said, "Well, horseback riding is a dead giveaway. The horse weighs a half a ton or more. If you do trail riding and you don't know what you're doing, your head gets caught on a branch and you're the headless horseman. If the horse doesn't like you, it'll roll over on top of you." And I know immediately because that last time I rode a horse was down in Veracruz, Mexico.

The horse didn't like me. It took me out on the main highway with crazed Mexican drivers going 100 miles an hour and 18 wheelers, and it laid down on top of me. I was terrified because I could see these trucks coming. It didn't like that last time I rode.

So he said, "You have to actually know what you're doing. You can't say, 'Is this an A job or a B job?' if you live and are intact with it." Then he said, "Sailing a small boat, these little 12-footers, outside of land. If you don't know what you're doing, you end up in the middle of the Atlantic.

Or if wind comes up, you can't see landmarks because of the waves." I said, "But those things are associated with the prosperous classes. What could somebody in ordinary circumstances do?" He said, "Well, we just let somebody in." This is probably one of the nicest factoids in my mind in my life.

"We just let someone in who invented his own sport and kept records competing against himself, his past performance, his present performance." It was--get ready for this, visualize this--seatless unicycle riding over broken terrain. If I had 10 lifetimes, the thought of doing that wouldn't occur. You start getting on a unicycle, let alone one without a seat, let alone riding it over broken terrain.

So they let him in because they knew he was on the fast track. So we tell these lies. And of course, many of the people who tell the lies believe the lies. "Well, surely they're going to take valedictorians." Well, last year Harvard turned down 8 out of every 10 valedictorians who applied.

And the 2 they took in, they didn't take in because there were valedictorians there. So by removing this component from the student imagination, you can control to some extent who even applies to Harvard and then who gets in, who applies because they don't know what they're doing. What's the IT garbage in, garbage out?

So what I would do was I would examine-- I have a friend who started a tutoring service called the Princeton Review. And, oh, 20 years ago, they were charging $300 an hour. I have no idea what they charge now. But what they did was crack the code of the questions on standardized tests.

And he--Adam Robinson was his name. He took his money and left the Princeton Review to his partner. But Adam has written a book well worth, I think, your group looking up, called "What Smart Students Know," Random House, "What Smart Students Know." Adam was certain that you could pass standardized tests without having any knowledge of the subject as long as you understood the constraints, the test, the question architects were under.

For example, two of the four answers offered are always so absurd that if you know that, now you're left with a 50/50 guess. I had figured out when I was in high school that if you had some way to measure the angles on the little geometric figures on the test that you didn't need to know.

You could arrive at the answer simply by simplistic means. The evidence that all of us know standardized tests don't measure what they claim to measure is that nobody, I mean nobody you encounter on the upper reaches of society would dream of hiring somebody on the basis of those tests or in grade point averages.

You'd be playing Russian roulette because they measure nothing. The grades largely measure that you memorize what you're told to memorize. I mean there are a few other things, but that's the core art of it. So now you know you have somebody obedient and probably for a clerk that is a good measure.

Not for someone who has to adapt to changing circumstances, you know by the natural selection process of reality. It's fairly easy without being a wise guy or very learned as long as you retain the ability to think independently from the data in front of you to penetrate the masks, the contentions that don't conform to everyday reality.

So no one will hire you as a CEO and ask you what you're saying. But if you examine the data that's available about big time politicians, now we have, and I don't think it surprised anybody, that George Bush, the most recent one, was a C average in high school, prep school, and a C average at Yale.

What does surprise people is that the candidate he ran against was a C average in prep school and a C average at Yale and a lower C average than George Bush's on the carry of Massachusetts. The fact that the best evidence that the nation has been schooled to the point of extinction is that they were fraternity brothers at Yale in a fraternity, I'll skip its interesting reputation, it only has 15 members, and they were fraternity brothers at Yale.

There's 308 million of us. I mean, mathematically, I wouldn't know how to set the odds, but they would be stupendous. No one mentioned it, or if they did, it was to quickly get over that. That should have been headlines on the New York Times and the Washington Post. Fraternity brothers at Yale run for president.

You wouldn't need to mention that it was the Skull and Bones fraternity. So, when the skew from sanity is of that magnitude, you should not expect much to come from the watchdogs of our liberty and our best interests. How could that happen unless, there's a Jewish expression, chutzpah, unless this feeling of contempt for ordinary people was very dramatic.

I'm sure someone in the council will allow that to happen, said, maybe someone will notice. To dismiss that shows you how powerless. To believe, for example, another example, that the recent banking crisis, you know, the real estate bubble is an oddity in American banking. There have been five such since 1961, savings and loan, technology bubble.

There have been five of those, and the central figure in all five is the Citibank of New York. Now, sometimes it's called First National, that's back in '61. Then it becomes Citibank, then it merges with another huge core, and it becomes Citigroup. But the mentality loose on that level shows utter contempt for the safeguards built into, you know, the founding documents, or built into tradition as ordinary people, and includes upper middle class ordinary people, expected to be, it doesn't exist.

Now, what we've run into is a people infinitely more sophisticated than us, with a 5,000 year civilization, who are even more amoral than we are, and look at starving 3 million people to death as they did 20 years ago. Is there any shortage of people? I mean, they're already running circles.

I've spoken in China half a dozen times for various groups, and the Chinese government is a little bit worried, not a lot, that their system of schooling, very like ours, except more disciplined, it seems to constrain the inventive imagination. The reason they're not worried is they don't recognize copyright law or patent law, so they have access to anything there.

But they will not accept, they keep asking me back, they will not accept that the system they're applying to the young mind is guaranteed to foreclose the imagination that produces the invention. So, I mean, I'm happy to take their money and get a chance to see Xi'an and Shanghai and Beijing, but they will follow the course we follow, it'll just take a little bit longer, that's all.

Your turn. In China they have the outcome-based education system, but they're seeking to tweak it so that they can kind of improve it. They said, "We want to keep our people under control, but we want them to be more creative and productive and efficient and happy while they're doing it." Now, the question is, if America has become more incoherent, wouldn't that be a function of the Prussian education system, outcome-based education being used to control the workers and make more profits, and now it's just run its course?

It's run its course. We're exhausted now. Our schooling is exhausted and the national vitality has been exhausted. I'm glad you used the term "incoherence." About three or four years ago, the Financial Times of London, on the editorial page, accused us of being an incoherent society, you may have read the same piece I did, that we had lost a reason to be a nation at all, because subsidizing bankers and drug companies wasn't a sufficient reason to proceed in history.

Yeah, we're incoherent. We don't... Nation comes from the root, family. And we no longer have a concern other than a rhetorical concern with one another. I mean, obviously, there are many individual exceptions to that, but the government clearly has no such concern. We have evolved an economy that depends upon constant warfare.

And even though it was stretching it in Iraq and Afghanistan, when those are over, we must have another conflict. We're going to have to stretch it even further, and maybe attack small islands, Fiji maybe, because they represent a menace. Being a child of World War II, the idea of calling something a war, where the enemy has no army, navy, air force, intelligence service, where they blow up their feet in their underwear, it just stretches the bounds of the ridiculous to call it a war.

We got an object lesson from a television comedian who said, "When you fly planes into a building, it certainly shows you have courage." And that was temporarily the end of his career. You do not speak in opposition to the main force driving events. Yeah, yeah, no. To look at America between, let me roughly say, 1800 and 1865, and then from momentum right up to the First World War, there's this explosion of invention, and it comes from the unlikeliest places.

It does not come from university-trained inventors. It comes from everywhere. It's the way people saw the world around them. They saw the elements, the raw material. They processed it a slightly different way, and then they had the expanse of the rhetorical capacity to say, "Hey, look, there's a better way to do this." It was happening so frequently that a crisis occurred in capitalism.

And without understanding this crisis, you really can't understand why our schools of the product, of the Rockefeller family, the Carnegie family, the Astor family, the Vanderbilt family, the great capitalist families, they understood that the real problem in successful capitalism is assembling capital, getting people to give you their savings and the promise that you'll give them more back.

But if you have people in an inventive matrix who can look at the way the expense of business is doing things, open up across the street and either do it cheaper or better or simply open up somewhere else where no one is doing it, capital is always at great risk.

So, oddly enough, I don't want to claim credit for what really is a brilliant insight, but I want to claim credit. It was openly discussed, let me say, from 1880 to 1900. We were being forcibly converted from an economy of small farmers, small engineers, entrepreneurs, into a corporate economy.

And these men doing it, they weren't intellectual dumb cops. They could see that as long as the American inventiveness was loose like a wild beast, they were going to have a lot of trouble pulling cash. Someone would say, but I saw, you know, Jack, and he went belly up.

So, Prussian schooling, which for a different reason, had been out to destroy the imagination. And let me say to anyone listening to this, when someone makes a reckless statement like that, you make sure they can document it. And I will document it as long as you're willing to walk to your local public library.

Because in every public library worth its salt in the United States, and in every college library, you will find a collection of essays by a Prussian philosopher, Johann Fichte, who was the immediate heir to the University of Berlin's philosophy department, which had been under Immanuel Kant. Fichte wrote a series of, it was over a dozen public essays to the Prussian king from, let's say, let me say, 1808 to about 1818.

They're called Addresses to the German Nation. And the provocative event that set the first one off was the Prussian army, which was the Prussian economy, renting soldiers, stealing other people's stuff, had been whipped by Napoleon's amateur army at the Battle of Vienna in 1806. And Fichte said it was because this demon imagination was loose among ordinary soldiers, and in situations, they would override the orders from headquarters about what to do, and that's why we lost.

Now, what should fascinate anyone listening is that's exactly what the so-called liberal philosopher Spinoza in Holland had said in 1690 in a book called Tractatus Religio Politicus. Spinoza said that the ordinary population was so psychologically diseased, murderously so, there was no way to heal it. Just as Fichte 125 years later said, there was no way to heal the disobedience gene in people who thought for themselves.

Fichte said we have to set up a system of forced schooling, universal forced schooling, in which we destroy the imagination, spells, ordered lessons, constant testing, rankings. Now, if it were only those two major figures, but you now can go back a few hundred years in history to John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, which is this thick, tiny print, but if you ever go mad and actually force yourself to read it, rather than to read what an encyclopedia tells you it says, you'll find that Calvin says that the saved are saved before they're born, the damned, who are 19 to 1, are damned before they're born, and no amount of good work or behavior can save the damned, and no amount of evil behavior can damn the saved.

The expression that used to be pretty common, but has vanished, I think on purpose, is justified sinners. The saved are justified sinners who can do anything. They can corporate bomb civilian populations, whether they're Nazis or Americans. You know, you've done no harm, according to Calvin. Calvin said the only way the elect, he called the saved, the elect will ever be saved, because they're outnumbered so heavily, is to set up a system of universal compulsion schooling with the intention of destroying the imagination and filling the head with garbage.

And I know I said the same thing. Fichte said the same thing. I think we just ran out of tape. Is that what happened? Is that one still running? But it has no micro. All right. So we're going to take a 10-minute break. Oh, good. We're going to change the tapes.

We're going to turn all these lights out. We're going to turn the AC back on and cool you off. If you want to get up and move around, use the bathroom. Major minds with a lot of influence who-- Can I have you hold that? Oh, sure. All right. Roll cameras.

That's what happens when you got real talent. It just goes. Four cameras rolling. Red dots, everybody. Cool. So we have this ominous continuity among major minds with a lot of influence, including transatlantic influence on the states. We have, prior to the break, Fichte in Prussia, Spinoza in Holland, and Calvin really beginning in Geneva and spreading all over where his theology spread.

But the father of this, at least in the form of written documentation that's easily available, has to be Plato, the Greek aristocrat who speaks through the mouth of Socrates and writes two influential utopias, one well-known, the Republic, and one not so well-known, the Laws, which is the product of his mature reflection on what needs to be done.

And all four of these men--and we could, if we had time, do 40-- but these four major names spanning European history agree that the ordinary population is A) very dangerous to the social order if it learns how to think and if its imagination remains intact. And furthermore, we have this corollary that there is no way to improve this.

And what I've left out is the killer app that occurs in the middle to the end of the 19th century from one of the wealthiest families on planet Earth, the family of Charles Darwin and their former Anglican minister-trained son, Charles, who in his second major publication, The Descent of Man, says that the evolutionarily retarded are fatally dangerous to the physical integrity of the human race, the advance of civilization, because if the few evolutionarily advanced, like the Scandinavian blondes and the English blondes, crossbreed, God forbid, with the Irish or the Spanish, evolution will march backwards into the swirling mists of the dawnless past, and nothing can change that.

Maybe a few million years might change it, certainly nothing that current generations can do. Darwin, of course, is in every school, including every elementary school in the United States, probably the world, and no one bothers to mention that he doesn't say the human race is evolving. There's a few, a fraction are evolving.

Now put yourself, if you're watching this, in the position of a responsible person who learns that. Someone who's made worldly success, has a little bit of time on their hands and resources, and now you know that if these ordinary people walking around in the American democracy, if they happen to crossbreed with your daughter, evolution is going to march backwards.

You now have a justification, beginning in 1871, second to none. You can argue with Calvin, you can argue with Spinoza, you can argue with Plato, you can argue with Fichte. This is science and mathematics. And furthermore, and an unknown connection that has for some reason escaped the attention of the Darwinians, Darwin's earlier cousin, Thomas Malthus, has said there is no way mathematically to feed the poor, because if you feed them, they'll reproduce more successfully, and then there'll be twice as many, then four times as many.

The population expands geometrically, but food only arithmetically. And of course in Darwin's diaries he said that his pursuit of the secrets of biology are stimulated by the work of his cousin Malthus. Now we have, after Darwin's two blockbusters, the second of which... I'm going to raise my hand from now on.

What's the full name of Darwin's origin of species? The progress of the favored races. And he does not use the term race the way we do. He recognizes about 57 separate races, of which the Irish are on the very bottom. Thank goodness he said that, because respectable percentage of every audience I speak to, you'd otherwise be reluctant to say these things.

It's derived from, anybody here derived from a partial Irish background. You know, he said the Irish are hopeless. There is no hope for the Irish. Of course, what's left out of simply relating what Darwin said is his training as an Anglican minister. And if you happen to pick up the Anglican book of common prayer, hundreds and hundreds of years preceding Darwin, you find that God's will is to divide all the living creatures and plants into an infinite number of layers, and to attempt to leave the layer you're placed in is the worst sacrilege at all.

So, Darwin's theory fully explicated is the Anglican homily of obedience. Homily of obedience says exactly what Darwin says hundreds of years ago. Don't try to get out of your biological category because it's hopeless. And prior to that, don't try to get out of your spiritual category because it's hopeless.

There's a great similarity between the two ideas. Now, if you set out to find evidence that this is so, it's much easier than simply setting out to look at the abundance of natural forms. So, the real actor in the piece, Darwin's a shy man, fantastically wealthy. That's been left out of all.

Fantastically wealthy. The high-tech, upper-class purchase of the day was Wedgwood pottery, and that's the source of the Darwin family wealth. So, Darwin's first cousin is a man I was taught in high school back in the early 1950s, is estimated to be the most intelligent single human being ever lived.

I was told that over and over. His name, Francis Galton, a world-famous explorer, mathematician, inventing little statistical formulae to discriminate shades of quality that the schools are infested with. And he has, Mr. Galton, a worldwide following of Galton clubs, including in the United States. He makes several pilgrimages to the U.S.

to spread the insight that a menace to the human race exists in 95% of the population, and there has to be a way to put them, render them harmless. So, school recommended by Fichte, Spinoza, Calvin, and Plato, that's the way to do it. And we'll defend this with precise mathematical science.

We will keep to ourselves the biological reason. Meanwhile, we've got to find a way for the biologically advanced to breed with one another. If you will trace the founding years of the elite private boarding schools in the United States, with the exception of no more than six, you will discover that all of the male and female emerge in the 30, including the women's colleges, the seven sisters, in the 30 years after the descent of man, which will be in every respectable library in the United States, and of course overseas too.

I urge you, especially if you're Irish, to pick it up and read it. You will not be disappointed to find yourself at the bottom of all the races on earth, just as the English without Darwin would have agreed. Well, anyway, so this package of high-level evidences, contentions, is capstone with scientific mathematical evidence and the proselytizing of Francis Galton, vigorous, rigorous.

Out of that comes, in the period right after the American First World War, a phenomenon in country fairs all over America called the Better Families competitions. You set up the criteria for ranking, and you present your daughters like prize heifers to be rated by the judges. So, we have a series of these reinforcements of Darwinian theory, which is really a reinforcement of Anglican theology, or Calvinist theology, or Platonic philosophy, or Fichtian philosophy, or if you want to go liberal, of Spinoza philosophy, until finally we get to this capstone.

Now, the cap is off the tunnel to hell, because not only are people justified in setting up a form of schooling that's anti-educational, but they're doing either nature's work or the Lord's work. You decide. You want to go Calvin, you're doing the Lord's work. You want to go nature, you go Spinoza.

Yeah, yeah. So, all of this wonderfully rich fabric of foundation is right on the surface. Someone has to point your attention to it. Please, no one watching say, "Oh, this fellow Gatto has spun off, you know, this phenomenal, interesting, but wacky theory." I didn't spin off anything. I took the dots and I connected them.

And I said, "They're identical from 300 BC until post-Darwin-Gaunton comes a German, a Prussian psychophysicist named Wilhelm Wundt, who is the premier behavioral psychologist on earth." And now let me spring a bombshell on all of you. The only place in the world for a long, long time you could get a PhD degree was either Prussia, University of Berlin, Leipzig, these little nests of Germanic countries.

So, from all over the world came the sons of the most powerful families. Beginning in 1814 or '16 in the United States, when the guy who later became the governor of Massachusetts went over to get his PhD degree. By the 1870s, 1880s, it was a flood from Japan, from Russia, from everywhere.

And now they return to their home countries, not because they have a PhD degree or they made presidents of universities, heads of government bureaus, because their families have clout. And now that's become the ticket to intellectual management. That's how these Prussian ideas spread like wildfire. There's only one university in the United States who doesn't have a president with a Prussian PhD, and he's close.

I think he has a French PhD, because the French scrambled to try to get that degree too. That's Titchener at Cornell, the head of all the heads of psych departments, Prussian PhDs. So you now get this kernel of ideas, whether fanciful or scientific, everywhere from Japan. I mean, everywhere the same ideas.

The Japanese Constitution in 1868 is scrapped, and the Prussian Constitution translated into Japanese. I mean, we're talking here the domination of ideas that's so interesting that what should make you suspicious is that no one ever heard of it. They heard of this detail, this detail. Why hasn't anyone joined them together?

Well, I'll tell you what. A big-shot professor at Columbia Teachers College told me 12 years ago when I bearded him in his den, and I said, "Doug, surely you know these things. Why is a junior high school teacher left to beat the drum?" He looked at me, and he said, "Not a good way to get tenure." That's all he said, and I knew, I knew that financial finally prize or penalty is enough to control the way we all think.

These things have been studied since the collegia in ancient Rome. Armies have put together these insights. Churches have put together these insights and passed them down in an unbroken string to their sons usually, and of course the daughters catch as catch can, but eventually to both. If I could notice the pattern that you're describing, it seems that people are irrational.

They come up with ideas of utopias, and then they, in order to get this utopia, compulsory schooling, and then they found a bunch of different ways, the latest using science to make people think that this is how it has to be, but when you look at the real effects of Darwin in the form of, say, eugenics and the role it played in America.

That's called, Golden is the inventor, his first cousin is the inventor of eugenics and the chief global distributor. There's one major exception to this, and the people who claim to be a follower of the exception claim to have read his book like the Bible, have never seen him say what I'm about to say.

I'm talking about the so-called father of capitalism, the wealth of nations, Adam Smith, who in the first 15 pages says there's no difference between the Duke's son and the street sweeper's son, except early training. A dead giveaway that this idea was known to be highly dangerous, and I don't think this has ever occurred in publishing that I know of before or since.

In the 1809 reprint of Wealth of Nations, because it immediately became an international must-read, the publisher of the book, a man with the ironic name of William Playfair, an economist, takes his own author to task in the preface of the book. He said the social order would be destroyed by telling people that they were all capable of intellectual development.

The only way we've progressed through thousands of years of history is to make them think they depend on our goodwill, you know, for their bread and butter, let alone their safety and everything else. It's a scathing upbraid of his own immortal author, Adam Smith. But Smith is, as far as I can see, other than minor figures like Florence Nightingale, I'm not even sure about her, he's the only one who says what ought to be obvious on the face of it.

It became obvious to me when I was given five classes a day to teach in the middle of Manhattan's Gold Coast of the Upper West Side. So I taught the sons and daughters of the media darlings and the sons and daughters of the professoriate and the doctors and lawyers, but I also taught the kids from Spanish Harlem and from black Harlem who'd never eaten off a tablecloth in their life, nor was I raised with a very democratic outlook.

It wasn't an undemocratic outlook, but it wasn't stressed. You could hardly call my family, in modern terms, liberal, although I hope we'll discuss that's not a dirty word at all, it's what you ought to be aiming to be. And because my German grandfather, who cried out in the middle of the street in Maun City for German victory during the Second World War, even though his son was an infantry commander at the Battle of the Bulge, but he was calling for German victory.

Let me see if I can tone down my enthusiasm. A large percentage of the population at that time was German. Oh, right now. There was a whole swing of pro-German up until like 1913, and then all of a sudden the Germans were Huns and ad hominem attacks. Adolf Hitler, the reason you don't find Mein Kampf everywhere isn't that it's a dull book.

There's a center section that's a tribute to the United States as the pure Germanic country on earth. The 10-foot portrait of Henry Ford behind Hitler's desk and Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward L. Bernays, was the public relations man for Nazi Germany. That's why you don't find--that would disturb people to know.

It's best they don't know that stuff. Anyway, I partly out of a kind of natural egalitarianism that comes from a strong working class population around Pittsburgh who will break your nose if you insult them rather than beg for mercy, I decided--and partly because of laziness-- I decided with my five classes a day to impose the same material on all five classes, the same quality of discourse, make no differentiation at all.

It certainly made my life easier. But what I had done was throw away the assigned curriculum, which I believe was Jack London. And nothing wrong with Jack London. He's a lot of fun to read. But if you want to exercise your mental muscles, that's not the way to go.

And I had taken from Cornell and Columbia and Reed College in Oregon, which are the major colleges I attended, I had taken a level of text fully equal to that. And what I discovered was, apart from cosmetic differences, maybe a little less grammatical, maybe shorter papers and stuff, that the level of intellect in the ghetto black population and the ghetto Hispanic population was really quite equal to the others.

That wasn't a political belief I wanted to impose. Let me give you one example. I had a little black kid named Gregory Smith. Gregory, I hope somehow or other you're alive and you're listening to this. And I'm replacing Jack London with Moby Dick, the most difficult American novel ever written that explores all the great ideas of European history, predestination and all the rest.

And I'm holding forth on those ideas at the same time we're reading a book that's way beyond anything in difficulty I've ever read. And I hear a crash. I look and Gregory Smith has fallen asleep and crashed to the floor. Well, I'm fresh out of Pittsburgh. And the way we deal with people like that is to kick the soles of their feet.

They wake up real--that's what the cops do to us when we're making out under cars around Pittsburgh. If our feet stick out, they kick our feet. So anyway, Gregory wakes up and I'm very insulting. And he said, "I don't need to pay attention. I learned that stuff in third grade.

We're in eighth grade now." So I'm really insulting, but I say, "What do you mean you learned that in third grade?" He said, "Well, I learned that there are these sets of ladies who weave your future and you can't change it. Either the norns in Scandinavia or the fates in Greece." And as I was reeling back from that, because he had made a connection, Cornell and Columbia never made for me, between predestination and these.

He said, "And I learned these things from the visiting science teacher called genes and chromosomes, and they dictate the color of your hair and how you scratch your nose. You can't change that. So I don't need to listen to you talk about predestination." Well, at that minute, I mean at that exact second, I said, "This kid has written a PhD thesis that will become a book.

It will make his living for the rest of his life, and he's Gregory Smith, a stupid kid." And then I completely opened my eyes, and sure enough, behind the street idiom was active mentality and fresh ideas. It just had been treated with such disrespect for so many years, it wasn't worth bothering to waste it on a schoolteacher.

It revolutionized my teaching. But then over the balance of the--that was the first year I taught. Of the 29 years I taught, I decided to use the fresh eyes and perspectives of the so-called hopeless ghetto kids, and huge benefits flowed to me, and I hope some to them too, because I took what they wanted to do seriously.

If Jamal Watson wanted to do nothing but draw comic books in the back of the class, I would go back and use my superior experience, not intelligence, and say, "Listen, Jamal, I used to read comic books, and if you want to do this seriously, you're doing it wrong." He'd get angry and say, "I'm the best in the school." I'd say, "Yeah, maybe," I said, "but in a real comic book, all the panels aren't the same size.

Look at the one you're copying from. They're all different sizes to show movement. And in a real comic book, the figures don't stay inside of the-- the head comes out, the fist comes out." I said, "Look, you're copying, and you don't see that. Why don't you take a week out of school, go to the local public library.

I'll cover for you. Take down a stack of books on graphic art and learn what you're doing. I mean, that's a worthwhile use of your time." So I found out that each person--one girl wanted to do nothing but swim, and she snored in class. And when I finally said to her, "What's going on?" She said, "I've devoted my life to being an Olympic swimmer." She was 13.

And I said, "Well, why don't you do that for the rest of the year? You can do it in school. We don't have a swimming pool." But there are about 150 public swimming pools in New York City. Why don't you plot them out on a map with pins or stickers, visit every one of them, set up a rating for these swimming pools-- concentration of chemicals in the water, depth of the pool, length of the lane, lighting, access costs-- and you will produce an information reference that will make you somebody.

Because I'll go around to the local public library and say you're doing it, and could you be catalogued? Because who else has such a reference as this? Well, she was. Her life was transformed because I treated her time and with respect. But meanwhile, if you took any--I mean any of the subject areas, you could find that she was developing muscles in each one of them.

We got a call from New York--that's a city magazine in New York-- about midway through the school year, and they said they had heard about this and they wanted to buy the data, and they would pay $500 for it. I said, "Do you mean you want to publish your article?" "Well, no, we would put our own writer's name on it." This girl, I doubt if she'd ever seen a $10 bill in her life.

I'm offering her $500. She said, "No, it's mine. If they want to use it, they'll put my name on it," which they weren't willing to do. But I know that was the beginning of a transformation in her life. A famous American writer, somebody that--the New York senator from Harvard, what was his name?

He had a fruity voice, very famous one. Go back 10 years. Who am I talking about? He wrote-- No, prior to that, but coincided with Cuomo. No, he was--he had written books about the plight of poverty, but they weren't sympathetic books. He was nationally famous, and he was so florid as a public figure that-- In any case, I had a friend who had flunked out of Cornell.

I'm reluctant to mention his name with that because he's a nationally famous writer about assassinations, and this famous New York senator said publicly that he was the world's foremost assassination expert. Well, you now know that he was a flunk out from Cornell. How did this happen? Because when he saw the Kennedy assassination, I had driven him to Cornell, and he was trying to plead his way back in, and Kennedy was assassinated.

We stayed up all night. We both agreed if anything happened to the assassin that none of the information could be trusted in the next morning or afternoon, and that was it for the assassin. So he went back to Cornell as a flunk out, talked a big-time professor, Andrew Hacker, whose dad started the general studies program at Columbia, and to giving him a PhD or the beginning of one without ever going to class.

He would spend all his time writing a book about not the Kennedy assassination, about the composition of the Warren Commission, which I thought was a very clever way to sidestep all the yellow journalism stuff. It became Inquest, it was called. It became a national bestseller. It led to an all-expenses-paid PhD at Harvard.

Then he wrote a book about the De Beers diamond mines. They took him in in South Africa as a house guest for a long, long time, and he wrote a book saying diamonds are essentially worthless with thousands of years of flawless diamonds already put away. Then he talked his way into the NBC newsroom and wrote this magnificent investigative study called News from Nowhere about how news actually is selected for transmission.

In other words, everything he touched was--this is a flunk out from college. So all of these anomalies from the Harlem kids, the Spanish Harlem kids, from my flunk-out Cornell friend, finally shook my belief in what I had been taught, that it's an orderly universe, merit determines, and I could begin to see around me all the narratives that were disconnected from reality.

They hardly were hidden at all. They were all weapons of mass destruction narratives. And they occurred over and over and over again in every aspect, including in the world of medicine and nutrition. There seemed to be no ethical or moral break on what insiders were able to say and all the other insiders would agree with, so that when I turned to what obviously was wrong with school, was that we were creating--I, as a school teacher, was creating the hideous discipline problems that we then said we must have money to relieve.

That it seemed like a closed universe in which one hand washed the other one. That all these horrible kids from horrible ghettos were perfectly able to rise into valuable contributors and it wasn't a very long distance to go. For example, I remember one--I started a school year with-- they were trying to get rid of me as a teacher.

They gave me the worst class on the eighth grade. The kids were huge. They had no tradition of scholarship at all. But I determined to utterly ignore that and to say that we were going to start with Shakespeare's three most important plays and if they could master the parts, that I was willing to cut them loose from school for months and they could travel around to elementary schools, put these plays on and then talk about the problems of staging them, of mastering the character or something or other.

And I'd say ten days went by, it was as if I was in a Harvard seminar and all of a sudden some kid burst out laughing in the middle of, "Oh, this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, resolve itself into a dip." "What are you laughing about? Don't you know?" He said, "We're the dumb class." And from that point on, it was no longer easy because the other dumb kids had had the illusion.

But it wasn't an illusion. Broken. But we still got some good work done. We invent the problems that we then have to solve. That's what I think all experts do. I don't think, including brain surgery, that there's anything the human skill is capable of. It's very hard to learn.

It takes some time. You can benefit from prior experience, but it doesn't take anywhere near the time expense. So the point is that individuals have an innate, infinite potential and we're not limited by genes or species or race. Even the lost too. People wish to learn. It used to be called emulation.

You're around somebody who can do something well. Of course you respect--I mean, you're watching how they do it. We talked earlier about the disadvantage adopted kids have. When you watch your mother and father, and you're 14 months old and have no language, you're still seeing how they deal with frustration, how they merge with one another or not contend with one another.

You're seeing so many hundreds of skills that, in fact, you're biologically programmed to imitate. Later, when the mind kicks in, you have some selection, which ones to--and which ones to-- but we don't allow that to happen because the very first thing schools do is strip the experience base away.

The easiest way to turn your kids into geniuses, I mean, by the time they're seven, is just to front load huge amounts of experience, including dangerous experience. My favorite story is Richard Branson tells it in his autobiography. His mother, who was an airline stewardess in 1946, flying the Atlantic, so not exactly the safest thing to do, she was desperate that he wouldn't become dependent.

And so when he was four years old, picture 48 months, she drove him miles from their London home in Chamblee Green and asked him if he thought he could find his way home from there, and he said he thought he could. "Get out and do so," then she said.

And now he said, "Where is he? He doesn't even have many words." So eight or nine hours later, when he finds his way home, he said nothing in his life ever seemed hard for him to do again. He drops out of high school, never goes to college, has his first million bucks by the time he's 19 by figuring out what people need and want and giving it to them cheaper or better or bringing anyone to offer it.

What would our society be if we put millions of people through the same experience? I think it would be closer to what colonial America was than early federal America, when nobody wanted to work for somebody else. They wanted an independent livelihood. It would be closer to that than the corporate hell that we have now, when the corporations following perfectly rational logic have begun to need less and less people, but they have such political control over the legislatures and the federal government that there's no way to arrest this progress.

Furthermore, as I spoke at General Motors about 10 years ago, a mid-level executive told me when I asked him, "You know, you guys had the world. There wasn't any competition. What happened?" You know, I remember when Jap cars came in, they had names like the Bluebird and the Fair Lady.

I mean, it was a joke. What happened? And he said, "What happened was this, that engineering, which used to be the fast track to the executive suite and profit sharing and all the rest of that good stuff, being the fast track, finance became the fast track, taking these huge profits, speculating in variable rate mortgages and foreign currencies, that became the road.

The same thing that happened to the steel industry in Pittsburgh. It wasn't moved out of Pittsburgh because any of them were losing a penny. They were making great profit. It's just the Harvard B-School boys said, "Look, you can take this money, make a lot more and not work." Of course, that would get rid of 100,000 steel workers and truck drivers, but who the hell cares about them?

Didn't Darwin say they're not evolving? They're all Irish anyway. Well, this is a juxtaposition between eugenics and that type of mentality where people are under control and someone like Branson who gets to go on Walkabout, which is a rite of passage, which was around in the founding of this country with high literacy rates.

And so when we had a high entrepreneurship, self-reliance, literacy rates, people who had critical thinking and knew how to deal with problems on their own, because if not, you might die. Or other people think badly of you if you say, "I want a job." You know, "What do you want to do?" Right, right.

But these different compartments are intimately interlocked. So by studying one and the other as if you're going to pass a short answer test, you're disabling your-- Fragmenting. Yeah, yeah. The synthesizing part of your mind, which is what enables you to strike out so that history doesn't infinitely repeat itself.

But now that's been restricted to such a small fragment of the population that we're in desperate trouble internationally because the Chinese, the Japs, the Malaysian can do this brain paralysis much better than we can because they have traditions that allow that. And we still turn out on the Fourth of July and say, "Home of the free, land of the brave," whatever.

So if someone were to walk away from this segment saying, "What did he say?" It's that the bad things done in school have been intellectually justified. And you're not going to change that set of mind. So all the effort you make to systematically change schooling is a huge waste of time, energy, and resources because now the majority of the important people in the country make their living either directly from that or indirectly because you no longer have a critical mind.

And what is the definition of marketing that when I took marketing at Columbia, they taught me it's overcoming sales resistance. Well, if there is no sales resistance, you know, you do that by juggling balls and dancing. Here's a pretty girl, buy the product, you can have her. You know, it's quite a pickle that we're in.

Our managers don't think they're in a pickle, but they are too because the Chinese, for example, are so much more well-versed, you know, in screwing rival power. We've only been around a few hundred years. They're reeling us in very nicely, thank you. If they cashed in the bonds they hold right now, just forget the dollar is paper.

Give us our money back. How are populations kind of prepared and indoctrinated and conditioned into receiving, you know, such low-- they provide such low resistance to the Ponzi scheme mentality of the predators. Yeah, well, the interesting thing about leverage, and it has been studied since ancient Rome, is you don't have to do everybody.

You just have to do a few opinion makers. They do the rest. Here's how Andrew Carnegie did it with the Protestant churches of the United States. He simply, in one fell swoop, donated a brand-new organ to every church in the United States. This didin'-a-little atheist opened his purse. Everybody got a new organ.

Do you suppose there was much-- anyone turned the organ down, or there was much resistance? Now, you accept the organ, but, you know, you grew up in a Christian tradition. Don't you thank Mr. Carnegie for his organ? Don't you, being human, hope that something else will follow that organ?

And you bet you do. How did Carnegie and Rockefeller get a hold of the schools? There were no pensions for teachers. The government didn't set up the pension system. Rockefeller and Carnegie set up the pension system out of their own pockets. And, of course, they didn't give it to everybody.

Your school had to conform with what they said was a balanced educational diet. Four credits of-- whatever they were-- two credits of math, whatever they were. You could compete for the pensions if you followed the Carnegie credit system. Is there any school in the country who didn't? I never heard of one.

How could you? Because the local parents would say, "What are you, nuts? You're not taking this free money? I mean, what you're doing isn't so great anyway. Why don't you do it his way?" So this whole religion of leverage, which has just accumulated over more than 2,000 years, is utterly unknown except to seminar courses at the most elite colleges.

You may have a rough idea what leverage means from a physics course and see how-- you know, connections. But you don't have any idea how you can plan the future for an entire region or a nation or a city by using leverage. The Chautauquans used the leverage. The best leverage available wasn't the newspapers, although it was good.

It was the pulpits. So mixed in with the real things the Chautauquans wanted to teach were traveling Christian ministers. The whole Harper's Publishing empire is-- I think it's Methodist, but don't hold me to that. Maybe it's Baptist. I think the Rockefellers are Baptist. But they're not Baptist like other-- you know, there's about 40 kinds of Baptist.

There's one small fragment of Baptist who are like Episcopalians. I forget the name of it. When I was studying the Quaker transformation from pious, humble people to among the most powerful-- certainly the most powerful small sect in the country, there are only 100,000 Quakers. They've had two American presidencies out of 40.

So that's 5%. And they're-- Nixon being the most recent, right? Nixon and Hoover. So you can't think clearly. And all you computer folk know, unless the data is available, you can't think clearly. Well, someone knew that thousands of years ago. What data to remove? How to spin a local authority into your scheme?

Let him do the work. School teachers, I was about to say by and large are innocent. They're all innocent because if they're not innocent, they're gotten rid of. They're drawn out of a pool of college graduates. The New York Times says are the lowest single-scoring graduates on standardized exams, except for school administrators, who of all the coherent occupational groups in the country, they're 50 points below the teacher group.

So the managers, so-called, are the dumbest people of all. They know that their paycheck depends on-- because there's 20 people to take their job. They don't want to-- they may sit in a parents' meeting and say, "We've got to do something different." But they're listening to the Tom Toms telling them what to do different.

And of course, what to do different always says, "Identify the most influential parents." They're not always the richest. Do something different for those people. They'll be gone in three or four years. They go back and do what you always did. If you looked at schools in 1905 and schools today, the correspondences are overwhelmingly similar.

You would not say, "Wow." You would say, "Hey, history hasn't moved." Frederick Gates helped out Rockefeller at a time when the family was getting a bad reputation, and like Carnegie, they were having a lot of labor disputes. How does the idea of philanthropy and altruism affect American education? Philanthropy and altruism, as it occurs through the institution of the private corporate foundation, is the explanation for what's called American education, let's us call it American schooling.

That's a pretty comprehensive condemnation. Do I have any evidence for that? Yes, I do. The two congressional investigations of where schools came from, one in 1915 by a guy named Walsh, one in 1959 by a guy named Carroll Reese, both came to the identical conclusion that all the mysteries vanish, at least source mysteries, when you see how the foundations, which don't spend very much money, use leverage to control the curriculum, the testing system, the public perception of what's going on, and of those foundations, until very recently, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford were the ringleaders.

They had divided responsibility. Ford took... Let me not misstep here. Owen Gaither was in charge of Ford at the time, and he had met with Norman Dodd, and Gaither says, "Well, Mr. Dodd, we have directors from the White House, and we at the Ford Foundation are ex-CIA, or OSS." The White House, back in the '20s and '30s, set up conferences of experts in order to homogenize expert opinion, because inside the expert body there were colossal names, and if they spoke, all the other cords fell into line.

I think Ford took over the psychological output of schooling. Rockefeller and Carnegie, in different ways, were attempting to globalize this thing. The Carnegie Foundation still today, if you go up to their library, I think it's in Austin or around there, and just read their annual report for the Carnegie Corporation, everything you ever saw on the front page of the New York Times in relation to schooling was cooked up in the project offices, and then it's dumped on the world through the control of the media.

How's the media control? Well, it's controlled through advertising. That's all. You can use your friends to buy more or buy less. When they come and say, "Why aren't you advertising?" We say, "Well, your point of view is so radical." Advertising? It's done. All right, cool. Let's take at least a 15-minute break, cool this room off.

I think the mechanics of how it's done is the most useful thing to someone just new to this, because they say, "Well, it seems like everyone would have to be in on this." No, only a few. Right, absolutely. Yeah, we can cover that. We'll cool the room off. Let's get the lights off.

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