Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
[CLICK HERE to continue watching the report on Boiling Frogs Post.]
by James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
17 April, 2012
The hysterical refrain “won’t someone think of the children” has been so overused as a knee-jerk populist appeal for overarching, tyrannical legislation–from proposals for internet censorship to calls for illegal government spying–that it has become a self-parodying cliche. Still, the essential argument appeals to such a basic part of the human experience that it is trotted out time and again by politicians, sometimes subtly and effectively, sometimes clumsily and heavy-handedly, and sometimes like George W. Bush.
However the argument is framed, it is always essentially the same: For the sake of the children upon whose shoulders the future of civilization rests, this or that particular program needs to be enforced. Thus it should not come as a surprise that the Council on Foreign Relations, that group of globalist insiders founded by Colonel Edward house in 1921 as a tool for shaping American foreign policy and undermining American sovereignty, took up the question of education in a recent report looking specifically at how U.S. education reform is tied to the question of national security.
The idea that a sense of national identity is fostered through the education system must be particularly horrifying to an American public that is now subjected to daily reports of elementary school children being handcuffed and arrested for schoolyard fights or an autistic teens being tasered a sickening 31 times for the heinous crime of not removing his jacket in class.
While the oppressive environment of today’s schools do provide a window onto the increasingly militarized police state that America is becoming, the idea that the school system could be used as a tool for inculcating a national identity and taming a traditionally independent population is by no means a new one. In fact, as any careful study of the books and quotations of the western school systems progenitors will show, the modern idea of schooling was formulated specifically to create a nation of intellectually crippled, docile workers, who would be more dependent on authoritarian systems of control and more easily manipulatable by the ruling class.
In his article “The Purpose of Education: Social Uplift or Social Control?” Andrew Gavin Marshall carefully documents the process by which the school system came to be seen as a tool of nation-building and then as a mechanism of social control. Writing in the American Journal of Sociology in the 1970s, researchers noted:
“The spread of schooling in the rural North and West can best be understood as a social movement implementing a commonly held ideology of nation-building. It combined the outlook and interests of small entrepreneurs in a world market, evangelical Protestantism, and an individualistic conception of the polity.”
In contrast to this, reformers wanted to implement a system of social control, one capable, in the words of Robert Wiebe, of “serving all citizens, stamping them American and unifying the nation.”
Whereas the educational impulse in the early days of the schooling movement was to foster and encourage the curiosity and independence of the largely agrarian population for whom these qualities would have evident utility, this morphed into a system for forcing obedience to authority, mechanical repetition of tasks, and rote memorization of facts as the economy itself became increasingly dependent on industrialized processes of production. In this paradigm, the task of the education system itself was to prepare the vast majority of the population for the repetitious, highly regimented labor of the factories.
One of the intellectual precursors for this idea was a German philosopher named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. According to British philosopher Bertrand Russell:
“Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.”
As John Taylor Gatto, former New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year, has exhaustively documented in his books on the subject, the philosophical roots of this tradition trace back to Prussia, where the modern system of universal compulsory education was first formulated.
More than just the control of primary and secondary education, however, the institution of the academy itself had to be tamed in order to make this system of control complete. With a history that could theoretically trace its ancestry back to Plato’s Academy and at the very least to the universities of the middle ages, academia’s rich history of fostering independent thought had long made it an uneasy ally of the establishment hierarchy. In the late 19th century, however, a generation of robber barons arose from the American industrial revolution to amass fortunes never before dreamt of by non-aristocrats. Fortunes which they were soon to put to the task of moulding society in their image.
In the 1950s, the Congressional commission known as the Reece committee explored historical documents of the major foundations established by the robber barons, including the Carnegie Corporation, and lead researcher Norman Dodd discovered how they took control of the levers of American state power by grooming a class of academics that would be amenable to their interests.
Earlier today I had the chance to talk to Andrew Gavin Marshall, contributing writer to BoilingFrogsPost and founder of ThePeoplesBookProject.com, about the ways that this system of control via the education system has been consciously revised, updated and reformulated by well-connected insiders under the guise of “The Crisis of Democracy.”
If it is the insiders at organizations like the CFR who have been self-consciously steering society in this self-defeating direction, then, it should be relatively easy to determine what not to do. We merely have to examine what it is they are suggesting, and then pursue a different course of action.
The framing that the would-be directors of society put on the issue is as transparent as it is effective on a populace who have had their powers of critical thinking greatly reduced by an education system that no longer teaches it: if the school system is broken, then what we need is more schooling. More hours in government indoctrination camps, more taxpayer dollars thrown at the problem in a cynical attempt not to ameliorate the problem, but exacerbate it, more power consolidated in the hands of the education department that has been organizing this dumbing down of society the whole time. And like any other false flag event, it is a feedback loop: the worse the problem gets, the more power the perpetrators of that problem can obtain.
No, the problem will never be solved by allowing the same self-proclaimed elites and would-be social engineers even more time, money and power to wreak havoc in our children’s lives. This problem, like so many others, will only ever be solved when parents stop waiting for government agencies and globalist think tanks to descend from the heavens with the perfect solution and take matters into their own hands.
Thanks for this James! 🙂
Man I wish I could listen to the whole Boilingfrogs post but the site is gone. I did manage to find an archived version of the post but it just has the same audio as here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120422191937/http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2012/04/17/the-eyeopener-education-national-security/
Well the preview and text with shownotes here was very, dare I say, “educational”? No informative and intriguing, yes lets go with that 🙂
Thanks for endeavoring to inform people about how the modern system of universal compulsory education was first formulated by the Prussian State.
Their formula seems to be very compatible with video games, social media and able to be amplified 10X by “A.I.” on modern times.
“Why Public Schools and the Mainstream Media Dumb Us Down” by Academy of Ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CDaflxJJ0g
I could not get the John Taylor Gatto link above to work either, but I found certain aspects of his website available in archive dot org (though, as with the Boiling Frogs post, not all the content is available via that method).
I also found this:
“The Prussian Connection – UNDERGROUND HISTORY – John Taylor Gatto”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho7PPR93XJk
Also found this:
“Our Prussian Education System” by John Taylor Gatto
https://ia600502.us.archive.org/25/items/john-taylor-gatto-archive-library-collection/gatto-prussian-2018_text.pdf
For anyone else stumbling across this gem in the archives, I’ll share the following.
I am reading this book called “Sand Talk” (by Tyson Yunkaporta) and he offered a story from the perspective of an Aboriginal “Australian” man about the origins of the public government education system (and the Prussian connection mentioned above).
Tyson describes how the Prussian State modelled their government “education” system after techniques used for domesticating (taming/’breaking’) wild animals.
He describes it as the institutionalized invention of the concept of “adolescence” which served to slow the process of a child becoming an adult (as the indigenous rights of passage that signified the transition from childhood to adulthood typically only lasted months up until that point) and how via stretching it out, children could be lobotomized in slow motion and turned into infantilized permanently childlike, obedient, passive, compliant tax chattel, soldiers and workers for industry as adults.
I particularly found his insights into the “weaponization of boredom” and separation from parents combined with endless repetitive pointless tasks to be very illuminating.
Here are pics of the pages leading up to the text excerpt below for additional context: https://substack.com/@gavinmounsey/note/c-100510151
———————
Excerpt from “Sand Talk” (by Tyson Yunkaporta) :
“There is a reason ideological battles and culture wars filled with rhetoric about patriotism and nation-building are fought around schools and schooling. Schools are sites of political struggle in this civilisation because they are the main vehicles for establishing the grand narratives needed to make progress possible. The entire history of globalisation hinges on the story of modern public education, how it began and why. I often wonder what would change if people were able to see this story retold from the perspective of an Aboriginal person reading back through old federation documents and the earliest syllabuses from Prussia.
The answer is: it would be an outlandish conspiracy theory that has no place in a glass cabinet full of skulls. That’s why I’m going to tell it here.
While most of the facts are verifiable, I have been very selective in which facts I used to build the narrative. I created the story to illuminate the way history can be twisted to suit the interests and narratives of the people who write it. But mostly I wrote it for a laugh—it is fun to imagine what history would look like if it were written not by the winners but by losers like me.
The story of modern public education, then, is a story of transition between an age of imperialism and an age of modern globalisation. It begins, like all stories about civilisations, with the theft of land from indigenous people. The people were the Prūsai, natives of an area between modern day Germany and Russia, who lived there from at least 9000 BCE.
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
..They traded amber and hemp across Europe and into Asia, but mostly lived by hunting and fishing. They maintained this society right up until the thirteenth century.
In the south, trouble had been brewing for centuries. Germanic and other Nordic refugees (from previous Roman invasions and rising sea levels, and from starvation as a result of degraded soil caused by recent incursions of agriculture) went viking across Europe. Viking was a verb meaning raiding in those days, and these boat people really were a problem. They had overrun Britain and changed that island forever, although Roman and Celtic invaders had already been there before them, so the poor old British copped a triple dose of colonial abuse. The Prūsai, however, were lucky enough to escape the worst of this colonisation process for many centuries, and continued their traditional lifestyle, along with many other indigenous nations to the north. For a while, at least.
There weren’t single big nations like today, but pluri-national groups of regions—lots of regions all with different laws, languages and customs: very much like Australia was before colonial occupation. Big countries with one law, one language and one people are a very recent invention designed to facilitate more effective control of populations and resources for economic purposes. This is why, after Rome had left the Germanic regions, the rich landowners struggling for dominance there worked hard to restore the Roman system of social control. They fought to reinstate this power system for a thousand years, with many small states battling each other for supremacy, the Roman eagle standard emblazoned on their coats of arms. This obsession with Rome would cause some problems down the track, particularly for the indigenous Prūsai to the north.
In the thirteenth century, an organisation called the Order of Teutonic Knights broke away from the other German regional groups and decided to create their own new state. The site they chose was Prūsailand, so they invaded and exterminated or assimilated the Prūsai people, making the entire population Teutonic. In classical and fantasy art, however, you won’t find any images of knights wiping out indigenous people. What you will find instead are armoured heroes bravely slaughtering beasts, dragons and mythical monsters. These creatures came to represent the tribal cultures of the world: the romantic European image of the knight slaying the dragon is actually a hidden reference to the systematic genocide of what were called pagan peoples. This European tradition of propaganda in which victims of genocide are portrayed as dangerous animals was later used to great effect against (the Gael, the indigenous people of Turtle Island) Jews (and then later by the Jews against Palestinians), and Aboriginees in Australia, who up until half a century ago were often considered animals rather than human citizens…
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
..By 1281, the Order of Teutonic Knights had all but wiped out the native Prūsai and created the new state of Prussia. The interesting thing is that these ‘white knights’ had been heavily involved with the Crusades, in which the Roman Church had been fighting a Christian war for centuries to take over Jerusalem and other holy places. They failed so badly that instead of bringing Europe to the Middle East, they brought the Middle East back to Europe, in the form of a system of government that they had seen there and liked. This system was in its final stages of decline during the Crusades, with most of the Middle Eastern forests and farming land stripped bare and turned into desert by the ravages of the world’s first civilisations. The survivors had begun returning to more sustainable ways of life—tribalism, subsistence agriculture and pastoralism in the following centuries (a way of life that would later be turned upside down again by twentieth-century Anglo oil interests).
The failed model borrowed by the Teutonic Knights wasn’t invented in the Middle East. It had its origins in an unsuccessful Asian experiment of large states with total government authority and rampant expansion and production. This was completely alien in Europe, which was used to a system of petty warlords and oligarchs struggling chaotically over dwindling natural resources, while local peasants in villages persisted much as they had since the beginning of the iron age, periodically disrupted by the activities of the powerful. The exotic new system introduced by the Teutonic Knights was all about absolute power concentrated into one highly organised central government that would control the daily lives of all.
Remember too that these new Prussians had just spent a thousand years trying to replicate the system of control that they had experienced under the Romans who had originally conquered Germania. (Britain and the US later mastered Rome’s imperial method—a system of establishing indigenous elites to keep conquered peoples in check, promoting lateral violence and competition to make subjugated peoples self-policing vassals.) Prussia even adopted the Roman symbol of the eagle as a logo, which was later picked up by the Nazis and the United States. Rome introduced mesmerising dreams of power and control that have not been easy to shake even in modern history.
By the eighteenth century Prussia, under Frederick the Great, had become one of the greatest powers in Europe, despite its small size and lack of natural resources. This was due to the fact that it had a larger permanent military force than anyone else. No other country could force so many of its citizens into the army on a full-time basis. The Prussian system was one of total control, which successfully managed to coerce the population into complete submission to the will of the government…
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
..Creating a massive standing army was not a problem for them. (Over a century later, the US military would adopt their formula for maintaining permanent standing armies on the advice of a Prussian military consultant named von Steuben.)
Prussia didn’t stop there. The more rights it stripped from Prussian citizens, the more powerful it became. Frederick the Great’s nephew continued this process, depriving every adult of all rights and privileges.
Then in 1806 the Prussians suffered a shattering military defeat at the hands of Napoleon. After their beaten soldiers fled from certain death, they decided to turn their attention to the children, realising they had to start young if they wanted to instil the kind of obedience that would override the fear of death itself.
The government decided that if it could force people to remain children for a few extra years, then it could retard social, emotional and intellectual development and control them more easily. This was the point in history that ‘adolescence’ was invented—a method of slowing the transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage.
This delayed transition, intended to create a permanent state of child-like compliance in adults, was developed from farming techniques used to break horses and to domesticate animals. Bear in mind that the original domestication of animals involved the mutation of wild species into an infantilised form with a smaller brain and an inability to adapt or solve problems. To domesticate an animal in this way you must:
1. Separate the young from their parents in the daylight hours.
2. Confine them in an enclosed space with limited stimulation or access to natural habitat.
3. Use rewards and punishments to force them to comply with purposeless tasks.
Effectively, the Prussians created a system using the same techniques to manufacture adolescence and thus domesticate their people.
The system they invented in the early nineteenth century to administer this change was public education: the radical innovation of universal primary schooling, followed by streaming into trade, professional and leadership education. It was all arbitrated by a rigorous examination system (on top of the usual considerations of money and class). The vast majority of Prussian students (over ninety per cent) attended the Volksschule, where they learned a simple version of history, religion, manners and obedience and were drilled endlessly in basic literacy and numeracy. Discipline was paramount; boredom was weaponised and deployed to lobotomise the population..
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
..This system worked so well that Prussia became one of the most powerful countries in the world, at a time when the idea of ‘nations’ (rather than regions, kingdoms, tribes or city-states) was first being promoted as the dominant form of social organisation on the planet. The Prussians began to make plans to spread the institution of schooling as a tool for social control throughout the world, as it facilitated the kind of uniformity and compliance that was needed to make the model of nationhood work. The US could testify to the effectiveness of Prussian education as a tool for domination and power, as American educators had been making pilgrimages to Germany for more than half a century. Excitingly, test schools across America proved that the artificially induced phenomenon of adolescence was achievable outside of Prussia, too.
In 1870, Prussia got its revenge on France by annihilating the French military in the Franco-Prussian War, and immediately established Germany as a unified nation state—the dream of the Teutonic Knights finally realised. After that, the Prussian education system (and the new institution of extended childhood) became all the rage around the western world. It was modified to some extent, probably because the Prussian model seemed a bit weird, even to the power-hungry ultra-rich of Europe—it was so all-encompassing that women were required to register each month with the police when their menstruation started. Prussia was described jokingly as an ‘army with a country’ or a ‘gigantic penal institution’. Towns and cities were built like prison blocks, grey grids of rigid cubes and plain surfaces. The government worked hard to ‘cleanse’ the society of homeless people, gypsies, Jews and homosexuals as they expanded and enforced their embryonic doctrine of eugenics. (Their motto for education was Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free, a slogan that the Nazis adopted and later placed above the gates of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, used for Jewish slave labour and extermination. There are many schools in Australia today with a similar motto in Latin: Labor Omnia Vincit, work conquers all. Now, as ever, the creation of a workforce to serve the national economy is the openly stated main goal of public education. And, as ever, the inmates of this system are told that their enthusiastic compliance with forced labour will be in their best interests at some future point.)
Germany’s compulsory education system expressed six outcomes in its original syllabus documents:
1. Obedient soldiers to the army.
2. Obedient workers for mines, factories and farms.
3. Well-subordinated civil servants.
4. Well-subordinated clerks for industry.
5. Citizens who thought alike on most issues.
6. National uniformity in thought, word and deed..
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
..And it spread like wildfire: to Hungary in 1868, Austria in 1869, Switzerland in 1874, Italy in 1877, Holland in 1878, Belgium in 1879, Britain in 1880, and France in 1882. From there it quickly expanded further to European colonies, including Australia.
As we’ve seen, the US had been involved much earlier, with even Benjamin Franklin advocating the Prussian system. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson established the Federal Reserve, copying Germany in its centralised banking system too: this way, the state would control both learning and money, just like Germany did.
As the twentieth century wore on, more interesting links emerged between Germany and the US, both drawing on the symbols and dreamings of ancient Rome—because Germany’s old obsession with ancient Rome hadn’t gone away. They called their leader Kaiser, German for Caesar; they adopted the symbol of Roman fasces, bundles of rods with an axe that once represented Roman state power. The US followed suit. American education documents emerged with those same symbols printed on the covers, and today the fasces are still a prominent symbol of American power, proudly on display in many official ceremonies.
The Roman fasces came to represent a whole modern belief system around social control and national domination—that’s where fascism got its name—and a version of the Roman salute was famously adopted by the Nazis.
In that period, when Hitler was Time’s man of the year in America, the pseudo-science of eugenics that the Nazis so enthusiatically adopted was popular throughout the western world. It purported to legitimate a decades-old tradition of white supremacy that had earlier informed the nationalist values established during Australian federation and exemplified by the White Australia Policy.
Not just in Australia, but all around the world, new systems of education, nationalism, finance, corporatism and social control were informed by fascist ideas and theories from Germany and the United States, encouraging the extermination of indigenous people and minorities, just like the white knights of yore. Cataclysms followed as new nations that had missed out on the empire-building activities of the age of discovery tried to catch up with their land-rich neighbours. When the smoke cleared, lands and power and blame were redistributed unevenly among the survivors and a new world emerged with new stories providing a sanitised history of good triumphing over evil..
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
..But the structural racism installed through Prussian-style schooling and the eugenics movement would not be discarded, merely rebranded. Later, following long civil-rights struggles and campaigns for social justice, racial inferiority was renamed ‘cultural difference’. Racial integration was called ‘reconciliation’. In the colonies, assimilation was relaunched as ‘Closing the Gap’. The language became more politically correct, but the globalising goals of cultural uniformity, economic compliance and homogenised identities remained the same.
In my crackpot version of this history, public schooling plays a principal role in the story of transition from one age to the next. It is by no means a complete account, but I hope this marginal perspective is far enough ‘out of the box’ to provoke some questions regarding the sustainability of the global systems that shape our minds and lives. Where is our current turbulent period of transition taking us? Do we want to go there? What form will knowledge transmission (aka education) need to take during this transition? Us-two may also tentatively wonder whether our minds are now too domesticated and shrivelled even to contemplate these questions effectively.
(above excerpt from “Sand Talk” by Tyson Yunkaporta, you can get a copy here: https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/sand-talk )
Whew! That was a long one, well at least that will be preserved here incase his book gets censored and deleted elsewhere.
Like I said above, imagine all these imported Prussian brainwashing techniques being weaponized via AI! In schools, in video games, on facebook, on google etc.
Interesting times indeed!
That was a pretty accurate story but I will quibble over a couple of details
“…. Remember too that these new Prussians had just spent a thousand years trying to replicate the system of control that they had experienced under the Romans who had originally conquered Germania….”
The Germans drove the Romans out of Germany under the leadership of “Herman the German” 😉 with the destruction of three legions under the command of Varus. Augustus is said to have had a habit of randomly wailing “Give me back my three legions Varus!” .
The point I am making is the “wine line” between Germanic and Romanized civilization is pretty important- Germanic cultures in the north of Europe and Romance ones on the other side of the Rhine…the Germans certainly copied much of value from the Romans but their cultural history is much more their own then south Europe’s.
On the idea of “systemic racism” being introduced via schooling I would point out that everyone in the pre modern world was “racist” because racism against out groups…. The fact that they did not call it racism (a term allegedly made up by Trotsky, a commie Jew) does not alter the fact that no one imagined it was a good thing to have a bunch of foreigners showing up and living in your peoples land. It certainly did not work out well for the folks Europeans colonized, lol.
Ben Franklin was “racist” against Germans coming to America iirc… “race” being much narrower an idea of ethnicity back then.
@Duck
Thanks for offering your two cents on this.
Hopefully some others will stumble across this old diamond in the rough post and weigh in to share their thoughts as well.