Public schools serve to manufacture a manageable population and to put down dissent and originality
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
- To make good people.
- To make good citizens.
- To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Children serve to inject new ideas into the system of cultural evolution, and Children and babies act independently without caring what others will think. H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not: “…to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.” This is carried out through Alexander Inglis six basic functions of school.
References
- Gatto, T., John. (1992). Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Chapter 6. Against School (p. 108). Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers.