here is another great read.
http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm
John Taylor Gatto
Speech to the
Vermont Homeschooling Conference
(Note: John Gatto is the former New York State Teacher of the Year who renounced the government school system in his landmark book DUMBING US DOWN. He is constantly in demand as a public speaker.
As a bit of background, the industrial titans of the 1890's began to think that not only could the production line be engineered, but people's lives could be engineered as well, in order to work like homogeneous robots with the machines. People like Rockefeller and Carnegie gave huge sums to prominent academics to see if this could be realized through the educational system. They found that to a considerable extent it could, and it is still being done today as evidenced in the Congressional Record during the Clinton administration. This is the story that John Gatto has to tell.-DB)