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In a Perfect Way



Since I’m on a roll with the Gatto quotes, this one comes from a 1906 document by the General Education Board:

In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions 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.

The board that supplied this guiding principle was paid for by the Rockefellers who, along with other industrialists, spent more of their private money on compulsory schooling than the federal government did between 1896 & 1920.







5 Reader Responses

  1. Fell Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 1:30 pm

    Me thinks I’m gonna put my own plans off for a bit here and start something new. I am thinking a sticker campaign for high school students.

    I have recently been experimenting with stickers la Shepard Fairey before we go ahead with larger poster formats for the sides of buldings and alleyways next spring. But as an easy way to “stick it to the mothafuckin’ man” I think I could just give the power to of mischief to the students themselves.

    Create a design template that is easy to read from afar, uses the same colours and type, and start putting up these quotes you’re pulling from Gatto. I’ve meant to read more of him, but haven’t gotten around to it. Tom Robbins actually has a few good pieces on education, too.

    Giving the students the means to cause trouble, a sort of anonymous F-you to their teachers, is enough to get them to do it. The quotes are accurate and shocking, and should hopefully garner the attention of the teachers as well as parents and perhaps local newspapers in the suburbs.

    Anyone interested, I could print more and mail ’em off? Just drive down to the local high schools and hit them on doors and railings, et cetera. Once students are back in all you need to do is give them to friends’ little siblings or drop them off with the troublemakers at the smoking doors.

  2. Occult Investigator Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 1:37 pm

    That’s actually kind of a cool idea… If I knew about this stuff when I was in highschool man, I would have been going totally apeshit. Writing research papers, doing school newspaper articles, websites - it would have been all over. I would have got myself kicked out in a snap

  3. Fell Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 2:18 pm

    Yeah exactly. You can’t piss off everyone all of the time, but you can damn well make sure you’re pissing off some of the people some of the time.

    Plus, the students that research into this will be hundred times better off in the long run. I believe that proper info in the right hands can really do crazy things. It’s one thing for us to read about this, but I’m not a parent of a student. Hell, even most teachers aren’t aware of this stuff so it could be as much for them as it is for the students.

    Take cloudbusters and that Reich’s research, to us it is interesting. To farmers on the Prairies or cancer patients, it’s more of a godsend. I really wanna start disseminating stuff into proper streams. I will look more into this school sticker concept this week.

    Tim, if you have some of these quotes collected, shoot em off to me. I will edit them and make them usable and easy to read. Cheers!

  4. Fell Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 2:18 pm

    Or is it piss some off all of the time, and all of them some of the time?

  5. McCoy Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 11:13 pm

    There’s a lot of potential for this type of guerrilla dissemination. A few months back I donated a piece of art to be auctioned off to benefit AIDS research at a popular cafe. I pasted “Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola, Nature, Accident or Intentional? By Leonard G. Horowitz” about twenty time per sheet of paper times five, cut ‘em up, and sprinkled them about as I mingled.



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