the hidden agenda of traditional schooling:
a brief history of education
“I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”
– John D. Rockefeller
“In our dream people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands.”
– Excerpt from the Board of Education’s first-ever mission statement
“Ninety-nine students out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom.
This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined,
is the subsumption of the individual.”
– William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education
These words, along with many others that will follow, were what first opened our eyes to a deeper truth about our educational system in America.
It was around 2020 that Pat and I started really digging into the history of American schooling. Out of pure interest, and a desire for greater context into how we got where we are today, we started journeying through the evolutionary history of education -- from our hunter-gatherer ancestors to ancient Greece, medieval Europe, early America, the Industrial Revolution, and contemporary schooling as we know it today. What we found were some truly mind-altering, eye-opening truths that have changed how we view our educational system forever.
Here we’d like to share a very brief, summarized overview, with a special emphasis on some of the more shocking aspects within recent history. Of course, it should go without saying that this does not mean that the entire history of modern education is nefarious or without virtue. However, this is the main focus of this particular piece because to us, it is by far and away what speaks the loudest.
(NOTE: We’d like to mention right out of the gate that we are in no way experts on this subject, and that most of our education on this topic has come from brilliant historians, teachers, and researchers. We highly recommend that you refer to the resource list at the end of this document, so that you can do you own research and glean information directly from these brilliant sources.)
So, let’s start at the very beginning…
It’s easy for most of us modern humans to assume that we’re lightyears more evolved than our primitive hunter-gatherer ancestors. After all, we drive around in cars, live in heated and air-conditioned homes, have unlimited access to food via grocery stores, and have even traveled to the moon. These everyday conveniences would have been incomprehensible, mind-blowing miracles to humans of the past.
Because early human lives seemed “simpler,” it would be easy to assume that they required less education. But the truth is, their lives were extremely knowledge- and skill-intensive. There was a tremendous amount of information and experience that had to be transmitted to children in order for them to master their environment and be able to not only survive but thrive -- and there was really no such thing as “specialization,” so each and every one of them had to essentially acquire the entirety of their cultural knowledge.
It's important to realize that 99.9% of all the humans that have ever lived on this planet have accomplished this goal entirely without schooling. In fact, there seems to be a universally accepted truth across all indigenous cultures that says the best way for kids to learn has always been, and will always be, through play and the free exploration of their interests and environment.
Play was the most highly valued activity for children in these cultures, because adults understood that play is precisely what leads to skill mastery. These children spent the majority of their time observing, admiring and mimicking the adults in their lives, and playing pretend in the very roles that they would grow up to occupy.
Boys typically played hunting and tracking games and were allowed to use potentially dangerous adult tools because the adults understood that that’s what was required to master them. Over time, they built their competency with these tools to the point that they could use them in increasingly effective ways, eventually growing up to join the hunting parties and contribute real sustenance to their camp.
Girls typically played at food and medicine gathering, infant care, basket-weaving, cooking and other predominantly female activities, building their skillset steadily over time as their contributions became increasingly valuable.
And of course, all of this play took place in age-mixed groups, where the younger children learned from the older children, and the older children practiced the nurturing and guidance of the younger children.
The hunter-gatherer way of life may have been knowledge- and skill-intensive, but it wasn’t necessarily work-intensive. Pleasure and play were deemed equally as important as the completion of tasks. In fact, the completion of tasks generally was pleasurable… Work and play were two sides of the same coin. But all of that started to change with the advent of agriculture.
The agricultural revolution, beginning in the fertile crescent around 12,000 years ago, changed the fate of humans in profound ways… both for better and worse.
On the one hand, we now had a greater degree of control in securing our food and averting starvation. We were able to settle down, stay in one place, build sturdier, more secure shelters, and have a choice in what we grew and ate.
On the other hand, we traded our freedom for security, leisure for toil, and community for separation. Children paid this price as well, as they became less free to pursue their own interests, and more obligated to work on behalf of the entire family.
To quote Peter Gray, whose brilliant book “Free to Learn” talks about this in depth… “Agriculture fostered values that were negatives among hunter-gatherers: toil, child labor, private ownership, greed, status and competition.”
Agriculture may have been one of the greatest evolutionary leaps for humanity, but it was only the beginning of child servitude. By the Middle Ages, feudalism became the predominant social system in Europe, and this meant that royalty and wealthy nobles owned all the land, and the serfs were allowed to live on and work that land, in exchange for payments and services to their overlords.
It became increasingly difficult to branch out, and almost impossible to climb to a higher level of status or wealth, so the serfs, as well as their children were bound to the land, working from dawn until dusk just to get by. Hierarchy ruled this era.
And perhaps no other group in history leveraged the power of hierarchy as successfully as the church of the Middle Ages. In the same way that the economic hierarchy ruled the material world of land ownership, the religious hierarchy ruled the world of truth and knowledge – they owned the monopoly on education -- and it was carefully guarded and scarcely dispensed.
This period was dominated by one virtue in particular, which was drilled into the masses by whatever means possible… this was the virtue of obedience. If you didn’t unconditionally accept the doctrine of the church with unquestioned obedience, you were subject, no matter your age, to being beaten, tortured, killed and damned to an eternity in hell. It’s no wonder we refer to this era as the Dark Ages.
Over the centuries, as the power of the church and the monarch waned, and governments around the world began assuming control, they started to realize that education could be used as a tool to mold citizens according to their will. And they looked to two of the most successful nations in history ever to accomplish this (though in drastically different ways) -- the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC.
Athens, known as the City of Genius, produced more brilliant minds than any other place in the world, and any other time in history before or since. The height of Athens saw what just might be the greatest Golden Age of learning our world has ever seen.
The Athenians loved to learn, and they were passionate about holistic education. They sought to not only strengthen their minds, but their bodies and their character as well. They believed that education should make you a better person, and their pursuit of personal mastery was based on this foundational goal.
They were so skilled in such a wide range of fields that the government distributed its most responsible public positions by lottery system, under the assumption that all Athenian citizens would be competent to serve in the highest possible way. Athenian democracy was direct, rather than representative… everyone was expected to take part. Some scholars argue that the Athenian approach to education and civilization was the pinnacle of human achievement, and even after more than two thousand years, we’ve never quite been able to replicate it (though of course, like anything else, it wasn’t entirely without fault… they did execute Socrates, after all).
Meanwhile, Sparta was using the same principles, but taking a very different approach to educating its citizens. Where Athenians valued freedom, democracy, and individual growth, Spartans were driven by values such as collectivism, obedience, and military might.
Their education was organized around the concept of cradle-to-grave training, in which children were handed over to the state from an extremely early age so that they could be molded into some of the greatest warriors of all time. Spartan schools were built specifically to serve the state (and the military in particular) and this effectively produced one of the greatest militaries the world has ever seen.
Sparta’s national success led other governments to realize that there were unique advantages to mandating government schooling for their citizens. They began to see that state-controlled education is a powerful way to habituate citizens from a very early age to “collective” values, and that government schooling has the power to quite literally keep people governable -- in other words, controllable.
We see this clearly in the example of Prussia in the late 18th century, which was a Northern German state that consciously modeled itself after Sparta and went on to literally inspire the compulsory schooling model we now know today.
Much like Sparta, the Prussians began viewing schooling as a state function that was essential for national security. Raising compliant citizens was the primary goal. As Herman Francke, developer of the standardized curriculum in Prussia said, “The formation of the child’s character involves the will as well as the understanding. Above all, it is necessary to break the natural willfulness of the child. The schoolmaster’s most important task is that of making the will obedient.”
This level of controlled schooling led to tremendous national success in regard to both military and industrial endeavors. Prussia became a world power, and other countries started taking notes. This inevitably led to the rollout of national schooling in countries all over Europe, and eventually in America.
But early America didn’t start out that way…
Early America was based on the values of freedom, self-responsibility, and ingenuity. Many of the most important and influential people who shaped this country were in fact homeschoolers, in that they never (or very minimally) attended formal schooling, and were successfully self-taught in the many subjects they came to master. Even those that did receive formal schooling did so in a way that took their education into their own hands, studying the subjects they found relevant to their interests and endeavors.
It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that America began showing interest in adopting the more Prussian model of state-mandated schooling. Prior to this, schools were privately run and locally controlled, and literacy rates were high.
In 1852 Massachusetts passed the nation’s very first compulsory education legislation. This law required children from every city and town to attend primary school, where they were to learn basic grammar and arithmetic. What most people don’t know is that prior to the enforcement of these mandates, the state literacy rate was 98%. Afterward, that figure never again reached above 91%. Today, it’s a mere 90% statewide, and 79% nationwide.
Fast forward to the early 1900’s when federal education really took off, thanks to the primary influence of wealthy industrialists (such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford), private educational foundations, and government agencies.
In 1902 the first Board of Education was founded by Rockefeller, which provided funding for schools across the country, and was one of the primary influences in shaping our modern educational programming. This was when a greater commitment to industry and government began to take precedence within the educational system. The following excerpt is directly from the Board of Education’s very first mission statement. It’s alarming to say the least:
“In our dream we have limitless resources and people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own 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 of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, or statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”
In 1906, the federal National Education Association (the NEA) was established. Years later, at the beginning of the second world war, their executive director would go on record stating that their goal was to “accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.”
That same year, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, published his Philosophy of Education, which included the following: “Ninety-nine students out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”
In 1910, President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech in which he made this disclosure: “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
In 1913, Henry Ford invented the assembly line, revolutionizing factory efficiency and changing the future of production forever. Over time, this helped to mold a new educational paradigm… one in which the contents of children’s minds could be manufactured through a standardized system, much like an assembly line, and similarly measured by units completed. Thus efficiency, productivity, and adherence to the system began to take precedence in schools over growth, creativity and democracy.
By 1917, almost all jobs within American schools were under the control of “The Education Trust” – a new group run by none other than Rockefeller, Carnegie, their private foundations, universities, and the NEA. Their primary goal, as Benjamin Kidd disclosed, was to “impose on the young the ideal of subordination.”
In 1919, historian Arthur Calhoun wrote that children were passing from their families “into the custody of community experts.” He was right. By 1918, primary school was mandated for all children, and in the 1920’s the government began prohibiting private schools and mandating public education.
In 1933, Max Mason, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced that a comprehensive national program was underway to “allow the control of human behavior,” and that schooling figured prominently in the design.
30 odd years later, between 1967-1974, a small group of these private foundations, universities, corporations, and government agencies got together to covertly revamp teacher training in the United States. “Covert” meaning there was absolutely zero knowledge or participation by citizens, teachers, or school districts in this decision-making process.
The first was Designing Education for the Future, in which the Education Department redefined the meaning of the word ‘education’ to: “A means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character.” Each state education department was advised to “lose its independent identity as well as its authority in order to form a partnership with the federal government.”
The second was The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, which outlined new teaching reforms that would be forced on the country. The intention? A future educational system of “impersonal manipulation… [where] few will be able to maintain control over their opinions.”
And the third was The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which served as “a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some unit of instruction.”
They began to achieve this goal in the 1980’s, when the federal government first started implementing and mandating behavioral testing and data collection within public schools. These assessments were unique in that they weren’t testing for academic aptitude, but rather, they tested the attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics of schoolchildren. They were designed to detect things like whether a child is internally motivated, or externally motivated -- whether they are more likely to stand up against the crowd or conform to it. And not only were the states testing these things, they were scoring them -- they were criteria-based tests, meaning there was a right answer and a wrong answer, based on the state-desired response.
Here’s an example of one such question:
“There is a secret club at the school called the midnight artists. They go out late at night and they paint and write funny things on buildings. I would join this club when I knew:
a) my best friend asked me to join
b) most popular students were in the club
c) my parents would ground me if they found out I joined.”
It’s important to note here that all possible answers demonstrate a breaking of the rules, so it isn’t testing for morality, but rather compliance. A and B were correct answers and C was incorrect. In other words, the two answers that demonstrated conformity were acceptable, while the one answer that demonstrated individuality was not. The goal appears to be collectivism.
The most concerning part of this testing isn’t the questions themselves, or even the approved answers, but what is done with the data once the test is complete. Not only was there no conversation happening at the time about data collection, sharing, and privacy… The government started using this private information that students were willingly disclosing to implement remediation programs, where the schools brought in technical assistants to implement federally validated “programs” that were proven to successfully change the attitudes and behaviors of children. All of this was done to achieve the state goal of a “minimum positive attitude.”
The program they implemented was targeted based on which subgroup the child fell in… for instance, they had programs specifically for white males with parents who made a certain amount of money per year, or black females whose parents had a certain level of education. The goal appears to have been molding our children into compliant, group-thinkers who will willingly do what everyone else wants them to do.
This is the vision the American educational system seems to have for our children. It’s hard to imagine a bleaker or more disheartening picture, yet schools have somehow managed to get even more depressing since the late 20th century. With the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, and the Common Core Standards Initiative of 2010, kids now face more rigorous testing, extreme pressure, and toxic competition than ever before. All while test scores continue their steady decline.
There has been a 10% overall decrease in SAT and achievement test scores since the 1970’s… but most interesting is the dramatic drop in the number of above average scores. Since 1972, there has been a 36% decline in students who scored above 600, and a 50% decline in those who scored above 750. These initiatives set out with the intention to “level the playing field” for all students, but they appear to be succeeding in all the wrong ways. Instead of elevating all children to the status of high achievement, we’ve simply lowered the number of high achievers.
These new educational standards, despite their alleged best intentions to hold schools accountable for academic achievement, have effectively encouraged schools to prioritize scores above all else. The children these schools are supposed to be serving have been reduced to mere datapoints.
Our schools have successfully fashioned themselves as factories, and our children have become the products to be mass-produced. And the poor teachers are under just as much pressure to surrender their humanity in favor of the machine… they have less control over what they teach and more urgency than ever to uniformly mold their students, not into brilliant thinkers, but into effective regurgitators and efficient test takers.
They now spend the majority of their time preparing students to take tests. Despite the fact that tests are repeatedly shown to be ineffective measures when determining a child’s holistic understanding of and ability to apply concepts. True learning simply can’t be measured as neatly and easily as our educational system would like us to believe. We’re ignoring mountains of data that tell us how children learn best, and covering it over with greater levels of bureaucracy, limitations, and control.
As Peter Gray so perfectly states, “Children [have become] pawns in a competitive game in which the adults around them are trying to squeeze the highest possible scores out of them on standardized tests. Anything that increases performance short of outright cheating is considered ‘education’ in this high-stakes game.”
Pat and I truly believe that the vast majority of teachers and administrators are amazing people who are giving their very best to serve our children and make the world a better a place. Our daughter’s brief experience in school was filled with nothing but incredible people – the teachers, the staff, even the principle were all so good to us. But the bottom line is, despite their most benevolent intentions, teachers are obligated to teach the prescribed doctrine and play their part in the assembly line.
One of the most common turns of phrase that we’ve heard from teachers is, “My hands are tied.” They can’t stray far from regulation without risking their livelihoods. By far and away the most influential teachers throughout our own educational journey were the ones who were breaking the rules.
The last stop on our timeline of educational history is March 2020 -- the onset of the worldwide Coronavirus Pandemic, which radically altered our view of life as we know it. Nearly every system that upholds human civilization came to a screeching halt. Fear and uncertainty became palpable energies in the collective. And schooling in particular was one of the biggest sources of angst and overwhelm for families… and it was now inescapable. It was in your living room!
As the school systems were scrambling to create a band-aid solution for this unprecedented situation, parents were able for the first time ever to get a good look into the gaping flaws of their kids’ schooling. More and more parents didn’t like what they saw and for the first time ever, they realized that they actually had a choice. So they started looking for alternatives. Thus, in just a couple short years, the homeschool revolution grew by millions.
Now, years later, we’re back to business as usual as a society. Schools have reopened, and very little has changed within them. What has changed is the growing number of families that have decided not to return to the school system. Instead, they’re reclaiming their child’s educational birthright and setting them free to learn the way they learn best -- enthusiastically, joyfully, freely, naturally.
These families have chosen not to blindly accept the vision laid out for them by society, but rather to create their own powerful new vision. They understand the critical importance of consciously creating a new reality -- one in which their family culture shapes and informs society, not the other way around -- and they believe in their power to create that reality.
If you are one of these parents, we commend you for doing the work to get here. We know it isn’t easy. It takes so much consciousness and courage to show up to this party, and we’re so glad you’re here. If you haven’t yet considered these things, we strongly encourage you to do so. Homeschool is by no means the only solution to this problem, but simply ignoring the problem is no longer an option.
Most people go their whole lives without ever thinking deeply about these things. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t want to know. Most people are content to remain in blissful ignorance. But in doing so, they are unknowingly casting a vote to maintain the status quo. If we want to create real positive change in this world, we need to wake up and take a stand for what we believe in. We need to guide our family to become the change we want to see…
As Bill Plotkin said, “One of the most potent ways to contribute to cultural transformation is for you and your family to become role models -- you make a radical change in lifestyle, if you can, if you dare. The soulcentric lifestyle choices that you make really do have a significant impact on your community. Culture shifts one individual and family at a time. The transition to a soulcentric society might take several generations to complete, and we must begin now.”
What does it mean to be “soulcentric?” To us, it means living in alignment with your soul truth -- with your essential nature. We believe every human is born with a unique soul blueprint -- an innate curriculum for discovering their unique purpose on this planet, and becoming the most conscious, empowered, evolved humans they can be. Not merely a cog in someone else’s machine. As Howard Thurman said, it means “knowing what makes you come alive and doing that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
What else is life for but experiencing existence as deeply and meaningfully as we’re able, and contributing the absolute best that’s within us? And what else should education be for but preparing our children to do exactly that?
It’s time to reimagine what’s possible. It’s time to claim our own empowered vision for the future of education. Not the government’s vision, or the media’s, or the corporations’, or the local school board’s… ours – as the families that are quite literally raising the future. Because the only real way to revolutionize education is to put it back in the hands of the individual.
As John Taylor Gatto said, “I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
Resources to Learn More
The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto
Weapons of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto
Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto
Free to Learn, Peter Gray
How Children Learn, John Holt