Today, I am reading stuff by and about John Taylor Gatto, who I learned about from Mike’s weblog. He is all about showing how modern American schooling was set up to promote an agenda of social management, in order to produce docile workers for corporations, whose responses and ideas were all roughly the same, and could be calculated mathematically. It’s the kind of shit I always thought about and suspected, but never really heard anybody delve into too deeply. I’m gonna paste in whatever worthwhile things I come across today about this. Here’s the first:

From a page with a series of quotes:

“‘….The next step came in 1890, when Andrew Carnegie wrote eleven essays, called The Gospel of Wealth. In it he said that capitalism (free enterprise) was stone cold dead in the United States. It had been killed by its own success. That men like himself, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Rockefeller now owned everything. They owned the government. Competition was impossible unless they allowed it. Which, human nature being what it is, was a problematical thing.

Carnegie said that this was a very dangerous situation, because eventually young people will become aware of this and form clandestine organizations to work against it. Ultimately they’ll bring down this edifice. You’ve got to read all eleven essays, sometimes several times, and only then the majesty of the design emerges. Carnegie proposed that men of wealth re-establish a synthetic free enterprise system (since the real one was no longer possible) based on cradle-to-grave schooling. The people who advanced most successfully in the schooling that was available to everyone would be given licenses to lead profitable lives, they would be given jobs and promotions and that a large part of the economy had to be tied directly to schooling.’”