posted September 26, 2006 01:24 PM         

"The chief end is to impose upon the young the ideal of subordination."
- Benjamin Kidd, British evolutionist (of the "Education Trust" circa 1917)

"It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking...[is] opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor." - Ellwood P. Cubberly in Public Education in the United States (c)1934

The statement occurs in a section of his book called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory system" has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering march of machinery"), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.

Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress.

Arthur Calhoun writes in his 1919 book Social History of the Family that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He offered a significant forecast, that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit."

"The rugged individualism of Americanism must go, because it is contrary to the purpose of the New Deal and the NRA, which is remaking America.

Russia and Germany are attempting to compel a new order by means typical of their nationalism — compulsion. The United States will do it by moral suasion. Of course we expect some opposition, but the principles of the New Deal must be carried to the youth of the nation. We expect to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force." - Louis Alber of President Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration (1933)

In response..in the same paper:

"So, according to what Mr Alber says, NRA—sweeping and revolutionary as it is—is only a 'fragment' of the greater program of which the public knows nothing, and this unknown program is to be inculcated in the minds of pupils in the schools everywhere, by official efforts and at government expense. Hitherto the purpose of the schools has been merely to educate the youth of the land--to impart knowledge, in an unbiased and nonpolitical manner. Now, according to Mr Alber, our schools — like those of Italy, Germany and Russia — are to become an agency for the promotion of whatever political, social and economic policies the administration may desire to carry out. And the taxpayers, whether they like those policies or not, are to pay for having their children converted to them." - Editor Monroe Evening News

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