an article I wrote for a website...
I read an article online at http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=35990 about schools skimming the cream of the crop, the top 5%, off and into select schools and this article reminded me of a book I’d read recently about the history of our education system. I began to find connections to socialism, eugenics, the Fabian Society, and a whole lot more. Big brother is controlling your every action from birth, and it is a complex situation I hope to help unravel it for you, so please bear with me as I approach it from an educational perspective, since that is my discipline.
In the beginning of the 19th century, a new method of schooling was popping up in America’s larger cities, one in which children of the lower-class were conditioned to obedience under pretext that they were learning. These were the Lancaster schools, which were also a Hindu invention, designed with the purpose of “dumbing us down.”
Educationalist Andrew Bell found an opportunity when he studied the structure Hindus arranged for training the lower castes, about 95 percent of the Indian population. He observed that the five-category ranking of the caste system was similar to those in schools. Prestige and authority are only for the top three castes which only comprise 5 percent of the total. And remember, in the caste system, you can fall but you cannot rise. His system influenced the Lancaster schools, however his exact system did not survive past his death, as it needed close and enthusiastic supervision and small classes and was only really useful when funds were sparse and teachers in very short supply. (However, such a situation seems eerily familiar, especially in California with billions of dollars cut, teachers fired, and class size increasing. Maybe this is NCLB’s utopian situation?)
So there is some of my “5%”. But wait, there’s more!
Our IQ tests are part of this grand 5% conspiracy. Prior to WWI, eugenicists evaluated racial and national groups by comparing numbers of one group or another on "lists of distinction”. Psychology, wishing to attain higher status in science, claimed to be able to go deep into the hidden regions of the brain, through an invention of an "intelligence test," an "IQ" score which would aid in what eugenicists desired- a genetically and scientifically proven method of categorizing and marginalizing people. Psychologist Carl Brigham concluded in 1923 that "the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over Alpine, Mediterranean and Negro groups has been demonstrated." To emphasize the evil of eugenics, renowned Teachers College Professor Thorndike, and his fellow psychologist H.H. Goddard at Princeton, claimed 83 percent of all Jews and 79 percent of all Italians were in the mental defective class based upon the IQ test. These very such tests infiltrated the schools, and thus every child would now be given a number based on their score. And remember, IQ scores were unvarying, unchangeable, a true mark of ability. Mental ages were dutifully entered on permanent record cards with as much assurance as Barnas Sears, William Torrey Harris, Horace Mann, G. Stanley Hall, and John Dewey had accepted skull maps drawn by their favorite phrenologists, whom believed the shape of your skull indicated your intelligence. Oh, and these men all had stakes in our educational system.
This all plays into eugenics, the Prussian Education system, and the Fabian Society, so stay with me.
To quote Gatto as he said it best, “The eugenics movement begun by [Sir Francis] Galton [Darwin’s first cousin] in England was energetically spread to the United States by his followers. Besides destroying lesser breeds (as they were routinely called) by abortion, sterilization, adoption, celibacy, two-job family separations, low-wage rates to zest for life, and, above all, schooling to dull the mind and debase the character, other methods were clinically discussed in journals, including a childlessness which could be induced through easy access to pornography. Galtonians advocated the notion of breeding a super race.” This is Eugenics in a nutshell, and milder versions are still alive and well in our nation, the aforementioned IQ tests are part of it as you can easily infer. How else do you prove the top 5% as being justified, and how else can you scientifically categorize and prove the remaining 95% as being inferior? Through eugenic science, my dear. In fact, the Progressive Era, through eugenic influence, has practiced exclusionary labor force practices, ridding of unfit workers labeled parasites, industrial residuum, and the unemployable. This eerily echoes the statistics of the “type” of people generally incarcerated, uneducated, and on welfare. One must ask if it is coincidence or not.
The late business professor and progressive Simon Patten stated that we were training the unfit, and “every improvement increases the inefficiencies which the laboring class may possess without their being thereby overcome in the struggle for subsistence that the survival of the ignorant brings upon the society.” This, to me, sounds like a call for socialized health care, welfare, etc. It is a way to appease the 95% masses and simultaneously enslave and subordinate them. This idea will tie in later, but back to education.
You have likely begun to gain a perspective that public schools are generally not for the top 5% and you would be correct. To further emphasize, The NEA (National Education Association) reports of 1911 and 1918 attacked "the bookish curricula" which are "responsible for leading tens of thousands of boys and girls away from pursuits for which they are adapted," books gave children "false ideals of culture." An interim report of 1917 asked for emphasis to shift away from history to something called "social studies"; the thrust was away from the past so that attention might be focused on the future. Their 1917 report, "Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education," asked for schools to teach health, vocational training, and specified behaviors; the goals of education were no longer character or mental development.
Prussia, in present-day Germany, was a German military state, which consciously modeled itself after Sparta. The Prussians had a remarkable education system envied world wide; it was free and compulsory (that’s good, right?) and comprised of national testing for all students in order to classify them for specific job training. Students in the system learn their rank and learn to follow orders. Prussia’s aim was social obedience of the lower class. Horace Mann was the leader in having brought the Prussian education system to America which changed the face of education forever. Under his and the Prussian influence, many American dignitaries went to Prussia to study their education system first hand; they brought the methods back with them and were subsequently placed in the major teacher preparation colleges and other universities across the nation. The Prussian system was initially only adopted in Massachusetts, then in New York by Mann’s sister in law, a Peabody of The Peabody Foundation, which then spread it to the South. With the culmination of their work and that of the Prussian trained professors, the system spread like wildfire across the nation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a man with great influence upon the Prussian system as well as a man interested in Kant and Hegel ( as well as was paraphrased and written about by Socialist Bertrand Russell) said, "Although this science [of manipulation] will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.” Fichte, Hegel, and Kant’s ideas are part of the Fabian Societies beliefs.
I’d love to keep going, but really, this is where all the pieces come together. The Fabians supported many things including health services in order for "the breeding of even a moderately Imperial race" which would be more productive and better militarily than the "stunted, anemic, demoralized denizens...of our great cities"; and a national education system because "it is in the class-rooms that the future battles of the Empire for commercial prosperity are already being lost". Google or wikipedia Fabian society or Elitism and certain key terms are abound: universal health care, liberalism, liberal reform, socialism, labor unions, tax increase…the list goes on. Fabians believe that control must rest with the “experts” and thus oppose ideas of working class control and a mass participatory democracy. The working class mass does not understand the complexities of modern society economically, politically, socially, or in any other way. Suddenly, this all seems to be a big, complex, master plan of sorts to control us all. The 95% working class, controlled mass, could never take over the top 5% elitists because we wouldn’t even being to think such a thing. We’ve been trained to not question authority and not to rise up, all under the guise of social reform and governmental aid.
However, I’m sorry to the Fabian Elitists that seem to surround me. Your plan is flawed. We wore gold sashes at our high school graduations, forever more labeling us at the top5%. We attended the same private universities. We read the same liberal philosophy and sociology texts. We acted as if we subscribed to your nonsense. But you know what? Sorry, there are some of us that believe all men are created equal. We’ve I will rise up, using the ladder your system provided to me, to free them from your servitude. I will work to my death to become one of your “status quo” in the education system and I will use my mind, my passions, my constitutionally and God-given right, to take your carefully controlled system crashing down for the good of the people. 
Sources:
Gatto, J.T. “The Underground History of American Education.”
Wikipedia.com (Andrew Bell, Horace Mann, Barnas Sears, WilliamTorrey Harris, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall, Prussia)
Neisser, Ulric. “The School Achievement of Minority Children.” at
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=jCnRG-jS_rAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA19&dq=american+education+caste+5%25&ots=Wu0gepGGNr&sig=DDnsOvBPeXZT6A38Kax1QeUwfew#v=onepage&q=american%20education%20caste%205%25&f=false
http://www.justicematters.org/jmi_sec/jmi_dwnlds/forgotten_history.pdf
http://www.quantumshift.tv/v/1198046178
On a related tangent, EDS, which develops California’s school exams, sub-contracts out to Metritech Inc, which has a CEO and founder, Dr. Samuel E Krug, who studied psychometrics, which relates to eugenics. He has written books on personality and ability testing, computer based behavioral assessments for education, anxiety and depression, and school leadership. He also wrote about the “16 PFs”, based on the 16PF Personality Questionnaire, which remains in use by universities and businesses for research personnel selection and the like. Research has indicated that the test is useful in predicting a wide variety of behaviors, such as creativity, academic success, cognitive style, empathy and interpersonal skills, leadership potential, conscientiousness, self-esteem, frustration tolerance, coping patterns, marital compatibility, and job performance. There is an adolescent version.
