From "An Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto Between 1836 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, engaged in a massive and intentional subsidy of university chairs, they paid for university research, they paid their carefully chosen professors to rewrite all the major histories in their terms and selected carefully screened school administrators for the schools and colleges, they spent far more money on forced schooling than did the governments of England, America, Gernamy, France and many others combined. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were still spending more than the state themselves. Over a hundred years of investment! In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear a few excerpts from the first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board as they occur in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906): "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. 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 among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way." In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure: "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
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