I just remembered a really worthwhile topic I had looked into some time ago, before I had this website. It has to do with the origins of the American public education system, and how it was designed and instituted on behalf of industrialists, and other people with questionable motives.

There’s a book by this guy named John Taylor Gatto, called the Underground History of American Education, that delves very deeply into the topic. There’s a copy available to read online. There’s also a quick introductory tour overviewing the whole thing. Here’s a quote from that tour:

In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications.

Also, here’s a bunch of articles by Gatto. I like this list of essential skills, as per Harvard’s School of Government, put forth in his article, The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know?

1) The ability to define problems without a guide.
2) The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
3) The ability to work in teams without guidance.
4) The ability to work absolutely alone.
5) The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
6) The ability to discuss issues and techniques in public with an eye to reaching decisions about policy.
7) The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns.
8) The ability to pull what you need quickly from masses of irrelevant data.
9) The ability to think inductively, deductively, and dialectically.
10) The ability to attack problems heuristically.

Oh, and this is the original quote which I was looking for to begin with, about Andrew Carnegie and the Gospel of Wealth:

“….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.”

Okay, enough with the quotes for now, although I recommend very much checking out the other ones on that site for a quick summary of what Gatto talks about.

The more I read about all this kind of stuff, the more I think homeschooling is a good solution. I mean, for me personally, if I were to have kids. And assuming that I had a bunch of time to sit around and hang out with them and learn all kinds of cool shit with them. Which I assume that I would, seeing as that’s pretty much all I do now, and I fully intend to continue living like this. Taking it to another level, in fact. Although I might also consider Montessori schooling, or something along those lines. Where the teacher is supposed to act as more of a guide, and the curriculum is supposed to be centered around developing natural interests the child has. I do have to add though, that everybody I’ve ever met who was homeschooled was super fucking weird. But I’ve only ever met a handful, so it’s not really a good sampling. I think the key would be just to make sure that your kid has enough social exposure through other activities to balance out the fact that they’re not exposed to public school social environments.