The underground history of American education

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1. overgardSep 2026
   One thing that tends to get lost when we talk about the education system we have is how it was invented and what it was designed for. I mention this, because if you want to educate kids better, it's useful to consider what they system was designed for so we can design a better one. Unfortunately, the history here is somewhat more cynical and bleak than you might expect. There's an excellent book called "The Underground History Of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling"

   Anyway, modern schooling was essentially designed to create excellent workers -- it was never about creating excellent individuals. At the time, the robber barons who helped invent this system along with a series of pseudo religious ideologues essentially wanted: standardized, predictable, obedient individuals without a lot of creativity. Credentials became important. Basically they wanted good consumers who don't question their station in life. (It shouldn't shock anyone that this is essentially what our current robber barons also want, although to a more extreme degree. It also shouldn't shock anyone that this is largely what we get out of the system.)

   The current system was still helpful, despite it's design, I would argue mostly because of the excellent teachers that really do have kids best interests in heart. However, I really think technology has just completely broken this. I'm not sure it's a system that can be repaired, I think it's going to end up being a new system. My guess (I think it's basically already happening) is the rich will send their children to more experimental schools because they have the money, and the poor... well who cares about the poor anyway? (Sarcasm, but, I think that more or less describes the unspoken attitudes of the elites)

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2. teslaboxJun 2026
   John Gatto's books and talks are all very insightful. His old website had the full text of The Underground History of American Education for free.

   Archive.org crawled the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/johntaylorgatto.... (check the versions from maybe 10 years ago...)

   IIRC he had a stroke, and finally passed away. Now https://JohnTaylorGatto.com redirects to his youtube channel.

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3. pdfernhoutMay 2025
   We already have that "defeated underclass" courtesy of a century of mainstream schooling (according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto): "The Underground History of American Education -- A conspiracy against ourselves" https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/10/john-taylor-gatto/the-cu... "As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates — these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched. I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises — no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system...."

   In 2010, I put together a list of alternatives here to address the rise of AI and Robotics and its effect on jobs: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

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4. snowfarthingNov 2024
   > I've never seen this evidence, but to speculate: probably since the colonist were, well, colonists, and literally building every industry from the ground up, they had to be.

   I would strongly recommend looking into John Taylor Gatto's "An Underground History of American Education", at least as a starting point. Indeed, that is where I learned that a literacy drop between WWI and WWII raised eyebrows, but when it came to the Vietnam era, the Army had to investigate "How can so many people fake illiteracy?" and found that the answer was "They aren't faking it."

   > After this though, in the 19th century, we knew most people could not read or write.

   Now it's your turn: I'd like to see your evidence for this.

   > True, but worker widgets who can read.

   That's assuming that everyone (including educators and politicians) think reading is important.

   >> There is a strong tendency to recognize "market failure" as a problem -- but it is rather rare to see people discuss "regulatory failure"

   > I experience the opposite, but granted I live in Texas. The default mode is regulations are bad, and the less the better.

   Have you considered the possibility that what is happening in Texas is an attempt to recognize harmful regulations, and weed them out so that people can have more freedom to function?

   >> The assumption that all regulations exist because the alternative is worse is deeply flawed

   > It's not an assumption, it's an observation. When it comes to education and others.

   I cannot help but worry that your observations are cherry-picked. There's plenty of regulatory fail to observe for the few who look to observe it.

   > The thing is the free market relies on there being a free market. Not every market can be a free market. That's a problem. I've already explained how education can never be a free market above, [ed: I can't find that explanation] but another example is healthcare. I can't compete in healthcare because of the HUGE time investment in schooling. I also have zero choice as a consumer - I just go to the nearest hospital. There's also no visibility in price because you have to diagnose me first, and that can be wrong or things can pop up later.

   > Healthcare is not, and will never be, a free market. Even now the US has a largely socialized healthcare system, it just so happens to be the worst socialized healthcare system. Primarily because we've handed it off to the private sector, who have incentives to actually make it worse. Meaning, insurance thrives when you receive less care. The inefficiency is built into the profit motive, and you can't get around it.

   I have both experienced and seen what health care in Great Britain is like, and based on the statistics I hav come across over time, to this day, to suggest Great Britain's health care is better than America's is a big stretch. Something similar can be said of Canadian health care (Pittsburg, PA, has more MRI machines than all of Canada!), and certainly, Cuba's awful health care system should be considered "socialized". To the degree that American health care is better than these systems, it's largely because of the private aspects of it -- and what's worse, to the degree that it's harmful, it is because of government regulations that kill competition. How is it that the law requires that I have the freedom to choose where I want my car repaired, but that I must find an "in-network" doctor? Why can I purchase auto insurance from any company in any State, but I must have insurance sold in my home State? How the heck are these specific kinds of restrictions supposed to make health care better?!?

   Many of the concerns you gave about health care apply to the car repair market too -- both in terms of insurance and in terms of car repairs and maintenance. Why is it that mostly-privatized car repair is market-friendly, but health care is not?

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5. SirensOfTitanMay 2024
   I really enjoyed Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education," it's a refreshing and entertaining rebuke of the authoritarian/scientific management consensus on schooling, which has not changed much over the past century and is not equipped to educate children for the modern era.
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6. hoshDec 2022
   Before ChatGPT, there has been criticism education as we know it today. The notion of “education” has not always been about training, and putting someone in a hypothetical situation and grading progress — indeed, the measurement of progress itself — is not present in all notions of education, or all methods of learning, or even all systems of determination of truth (epistemology). Behavioral conditioning with reward incentives are also not the only method in education.

   One of the interesting voices about this John Taylor Gatto. Mainstream methods of “training” as you described them, may indeed be the most common method today, but it is by no means the most effective, and Gatto goes into detail about it in his book, _The Underground History of American Education_.

   For example, an older notion of education is not so much to train people to mechanically repeat results (like you would train people in a factory), but rather, to develop informed and educated citizens that are able to reason, think critically, and participate meaningfully in a republic. There’s little point in having a voting body of citizens unable to think for themselves, and are merely regurgitating ideas they hear.

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