The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
cantrip.org

Great, we're trained to be automatons.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

An annoying quirk of Gatto is that he usually doesn't cite his sources formally because he thinks making the reader peruse the entire primary text to fact check him encourages intellectual curiosity and independent thinking. That being said, many of the excerpts he uses are now in public domain and take about 30 seconds to Google. (For example Gatto is using the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey to make the above claims, which you can download as a PDF from the National Center of Education Statistics.)

Anyway the whole book can be found here:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm

Gatto's book makes a pretty good argument that this is the case, although mostly accidently as opposed to the result of any secret conspiracy. Gatto does dig up some pretty telling quotes though. For example,

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."-- Woodrow Wilson, from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909

I actually went to the New York public library a couple of years ago and found a copy of the speech in the collection of Woodrow Wilson's papers. Here is the full quote in context:

"I do not wonder at it. I think it is hardly just to blame those who have brought this situation about, because this change in modern life has come upon us suddenly. It has confused us. We are in an age so changeful, so transitional, I do not wonder that this confusion has come into our education, and I do not blame anybody. I do not see how it could have been avoided, how we could have avoided trying our hands at a score of things hitherto unattempted to determine at least if they were possible or not. Therefore this is not a subject for cynical comment, this is not a subject for criticism. It is a subject for self-recognition. The present need is that we should examine ourselves and see whether this be true or not; and, if it is true, ask ourselves whether the air has cleared enough, and whether our experiment has gone far enough, to make a definite program, to make a radical change, in the things we have attempted. This is the moment for counsel. The thing that is imperative upon our conscience is that we should ask ourselves whether it be possible to do it differently and better." [...]

"Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. You cannot train them for both in the time that you have at your disposal. They must make a selection, and you must make a selection. I do not mean to say that in the manual training there must not be an element of liberal training; neither am I hostile to the idea that in the liberal education there should be an element of the manual training. But what I am intent upon is that we should not confuse ourselves with regard to what we are trying to make of the pupils under our instruction. We are either trying to make liberally-educated persons out of them, or we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines, or else we do not know what we are trying to do."