Whenever we think of or try to imagine slavery, especially American slavery, we see blacks out in a field dressed in rags.   Perhaps a mule nearby.  But the Civil War and the 13th Amendment began their work of changing those images.  Now we see Mexicans out in the fields dressed in rags.  They became the new cheap labor force - for the fields.

But the new industrialists needed workers for their factories who would show up, do what they’re told, not complain, not require a lot of money, and continue working for as long as they were physically able (sounds much like the old slavery, albeit with some new, more modern and 'legal,' ways of producing such a slave).

Henry Ford once said, “If I tell these men to be here at 4 a.m. on that corner, and not to be late, they’ll show up on that corner at or before 4 a.m.”  How did so many men (and later women) become so conditioned to the job?  How did they become so obedient to the new industrial boss man?  The answer is simple, industry and government combined forces to produce an education system that would produce a new slave; a slave that would think he or she was 'free.'  And that slavery-development system is still very much in effect in late 2007. 

In 1888, just 119 years ago (much of the following comes from the website The Memory Hole and the writing of John Taylor Gatto), the Senate Committee on Education reported, “We believe that [home] education is one of the principal causes of discontent of [the] late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.”

In his book Walking On Water, Derrick Jensen writes, “Industrial educators set out to rectify this problem.  How?  As industrial educator and philosopher John Dewey said, ‘Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.’

“In 1906, Elwood Cubberly, who later became dean of education at Stanford [University], gave his answers [for the reason there was so much discontent during the late years of the laboring classes]: Schools should be factories ‘in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.’

“Then...the Rockefeller Education Board, [perhaps THE] major backer of the movement for compulsory public schooling, gave its reasons for putting its money into that movement: ‘In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands.  The present educational conventions [i.e., the development of children’s intellects and characters in homes and local schools] 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 (our italics). 

“’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 home school] in an imperfect way.’”

As you read the above, keep in mind the source: the Rockefeller Education Board.  This "board" was established in 1903 by John D. Rockefeller to aid education in the U.S. "without distinction of race, sex or creed."  And so the task was to make slaves of everyone who entered the classroom.  And where did that “automata” - that behavior that would bring men out of their beds at 4 a.m. on a cold Detroit winter morning at Henry’s call - come from?  “William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education from 1889 to 1906, wrote: ‘Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed customs.  This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of (or take over; the bringing under other's control) the individual’” (our italics).

The late actor Sterling Hayden recoiled at how complete the “subsumption of the individual” was as he recalled hearing the sound of the early morning subway train - the “tooterville trolley” -  as it headed out of Connecticut toward New York City.  All lined up in their three-piece suits heading for the Big Apple.  The train would stop and thousands would head into and fill up all the skyscrapers.  After work they would file out and into the nearest bars.   Hayden believed he was witnessing a human tragedy that made Shakespeare look like Huck Finn.

Do we still wonder why kids hate school?  Do we still wonder why so many drop out and can’t connect with a society that has stolen their individuality?  An individuality they can’t find for the rest of their lives.  Do we still wonder why people can trash the wild places and not feel badly about it?  Numberless millions of people do not know who they really are.  They only know they’re angry at EVERYTHING: the mark of a missing soul.  They really don’t want to be angry, but it’s there.  In our next blog we’ll ask “Who Are You, Really?”