ORSC 14th Annual Car Show
The Otter river Spotsman's Club will be holding their 14th Annual Car Show on Sunday August 30 from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm at the Otter River Sprotsman's Club 250 lord rd in Templeton.
Free admission.
There will be games, food and prizes. All show cars and motorcycles and spectators will be FREE. Free Dash palque for the first 100 participants.
Awards for best car, truck and motorcycle. For more information, contact ta-berry@comcast.net
For those looking for some conversation fodder at the car show.
ReplyDeleteThe General Education Board And Friends
Reading through the papers of the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board —
an endowment rivaled in school policy influence in the first half of the twentieth century
only by Andrew Carnegie's various philanthropies — seven curious elements force
themselves on the careful reader:
1) There appears a clear intention to mold people through schooling. 2) There is a clear
intention to eliminate tradition and scholarship. 3) The net effect of various projects is to
create a strong class system verging on caste. 4) There is a clear intention to reduce mass
critical intelligence while supporting infinite specialization. 5) There is clear intention to
weaken parental influence. 6) There is clear intention to overthrow accepted custom. 7)
There is striking congruency between the cumulative purposes of GEB projects and the
Utopian precepts of the oddball religious sect, once known as Perfectionism, a secular
religion aimed at making the perfection of human nature, not salvation or happiness, the
purpose of existence. The agenda of philanthropy, which had so much to do with the
schools we got, turns out to contain an intensely political component.
This is not to deny that genuine altruistic interests aren't also a part of philanthropy, but
as Ellen Lagemann correctly reflects in her interesting history of the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, Private Power for the Public Good, "In advancing
some interests, foundations have inevitably not advanced others. Hence their actions must
have political consequences, even when political purposes are not avowed or even
intended. To avoid politics in dealing with foundation history is to miss a crucial part of
the story."
Edward Berman, in Harvard Education Review, 49 (1979), puts it more brusquely.
Focusing on Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford philanthropies, he concludes that the
"public rhetoric of disinterested humanitarianism was little more than a facade" behind
which the interests of the political state (not necessarily those of society) "have been
actively furthered." The rise of foundations to key positions in educational policy
formation amounted to what Clarence Karier called "the development of a fourth branch
of government, one that effectively represented the interests of American corporate
wealth."
The corporate foundation is mainly a twentieth-century phenomenon, growing from
twenty-one specimens of the breed in 1900 to approximately fifty thousand by 1990.
From the beginning, foundations aimed squarely at educational policy formation.
Rockefeller's General Education Board obtained an incorporating act from Congress in
1903 and immediately began to organize schooling in the South, joining the older Slater
cotton/woolen manufacturing interests and Peabody banking interests in a coalition in
which Rockefeller picked up many of the bills.
ReplyDeleteFrom the start, the GEB had a mission. A letter from John D. Rockefeller Sr. specified
that his gifts were to be used "to promote a comprehensive system." You might well ask
what interests the system was designed to promote, but you would be asking the wrong
question. Frederick Gates, the Baptist minister hired to disburse Rockefeller largesse,
gave a terse explanation when he said, "The key word is system." American life was too
unsystematic to suit corporate genius. Rockefeller's foundation was about systematizing
us.
In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these
new foundations of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and of other corporate families. After a year of
testimony it concluded:
The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American
industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control
the education and social services of the nation.
Foundation grants directly enhance the interests of the corporations sponsoring them, it
found. The conclusion of this congressional commission:
The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of
any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation;
this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which
insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.
Foundations automatically make friends among banks which hold their large deposits, in
investment houses which multiply their monies, in law firms which act as their counsels,
and with the many firms, institutions, and individuals with which they deal and whom
they benefit. By careful selection of trustees from the ranks of high editorial personnel
and other media executives and proprietors, they can assure themselves press support,
and by engaging public relations counselors can further create good publicity. As Rene
Wormser, chief counsel for the second congressional inquiry into foundation life (1958),
put it:
All its connections and associations, plus the often sycophantic adulation of the many
institutions and individuals who receive largesse from the foundation, give it an
enormous aggregate of power and influence. This power extends beyond its immediate
circle of associations, to those who hope to benefit from its bounty.
ReplyDeleteIn 1919, using Rockefeller money, John Dewey, by now a professor at Columbia
Teachers College, an institution heavily endowed by Rockefeller, founded the
Progressive Education Association. Through its existence it spread the philosophy which
undergirds welfare capitalism — that the bulk of the population is biologically childlike,
requiring lifelong care.
From the start, Dewey was joined by other Columbia professors who made no secret that
the objective of the PEA project was to use the educational system as a tool to
accomplish political goals. In The Great Technology (1933), Harold Rugg elucidated the
grand vision:
A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions of individual
minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old stereotypes must be broken up and
"new climates of opinion" formed in the neighborhoods of America.
Through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of
government — one that will embrace all the activities of men, one that will postulate the
need of scientific control. ..in the interest of all people.
In similar fashion, the work of the Social Science Research Council culminated in a
statement of Conclusions and Recommendations on its Carnegie Foundation-funded
operations which had enormous and lasting impact upon education in the United States.
Conclusions (1934) heralded the decline of the old order, stating aggressively that "a new
age of collectivism is emerging" which will involve the supplanting of private property
by public property" and will require "experimentation" and "almost certainly... a larger
measure of compulsory cooperation of citizens... a corresponding enlargement of the
functions of government, and an increasing state intervention... Rights will be altered and
abridged." (emphasis added)
Conclusions was a call to the teachers colleges to instruct their students to "condition"
children into an acceptance of the new order in progress. Reading, writing, and arithmetic
were to be marginalized as irrelevant, even counterproductive. "As often repeated, the
first step is to consolidate leadership around the philosophy and purpose of education
herein expounded." (emphasis added) The difficulties in trying to understand what such
an odd locution as "compulsory cooperation" might really mean, or even trying to
determine what historic definition of "education" would fit such a usage, were ignored.
Those who wrote this report, and some of those who read it, were the only ones who held
the Rosetta Stone to decipher it.
ReplyDeleteIn an article in Progressive Education Magazine, Professor Norman Woelfel produced
one of the many children and grandchildren of the Conclusions report when he wrote in
1946: "It might be necessary for us to control our press as the Russian press is controlled
and as the Nazi press is controlled....", a startling conclusion he improved upon in his
book Molders of the American Mind (1933) with this dark beauty: "In the minds of men
who think experimentally, America is conceived as having a destiny which bursts the all
too obvious limitations of Christian religious sanctions."
The Rockefeller-endowed Lincoln Experimental School at Columbia Teachers College
was the testing ground for Harold Rugg's series of textbooks, which moved 5 million
copies by 1940 and millions more after that. In these books Rugg advanced this theory:
"Education must be used to condition the people to accept social change. ...The chief
function of schools is to plan the future of society." Like many of his activities over three
vital decades on the school front, the notions Rugg put forth in The Great Technology
(1933), were eventually translated into practice in urban centers. Rugg advocated that the
major task of schools be seen as "indoctrinating" youth, using social "science" as the
"core of the school curriculum" to bring about the desired climate of public opinion.
Some attitudes Rugg advocated teaching were reconstruction of the national economic
system to provide for central controls and an implantation of the attitude that educators as
a group were "vastly superior to a priesthood":
Our task is to create swiftly a compact body of minority opinion for the scientific
reconstruction of our social order.
Money for Rugg's six textbooks came from Rockefeller Foundation grants to the Lincoln
School. He was paid two salaries by the foundation, one as an educational psychologist
for Lincoln, the other as a professor of education at Teachers College, in addition to
salaries for secretarial and research services. The General Education Board provided
funds (equivalent to $500,000 in year 2000 purchasing power) to produce three books,
which were then distributed by the National Education Association.
In 1954, a second congressional investigation of foundation tampering (with schools and
American social life) was attempted, headed by Carroll Reece of Tennessee. The Reece
Commission quickly ran into a buzzsaw of opposition from influential centers of
American corporate life. Major national newspapers hurled scathing criticisms, which,
together with pressure from other potent political adversaries, forced the committee to
disband prematurely, but not before there were some tentative findings:
ReplyDeleteThe power of the individual large foundation is enormous. Its various forms of patronage
carry with them elements of thought control. It exerts immense influence on educator,
educational processes, and educational institutions. It is capable of invisible coercion. It
can materially predetermine the development of social and political concepts, academic
opinion, thought leadership, public opinion.
The power to influence national policy is amplified tremendously when foundations act
in concert. There is such a concentration of foundation power in the United States,
operating in education and the social sciences, with a gigantic aggregate of capital and
income. This Interlock has some of the characteristics of an intellectual cartel. It operates
in part through certain intermediary organizations supported by the foundations. It has
ramifications in almost every phase of education.
It has come to exercise very extensive practical control over social science and education.
A system has arisen which gives enormous power to a relatively small group of
individuals, having at their virtual command huge sums in public trust funds.
The power of the large foundations and the Interlock has so influenced press, radio,
television, and even government that it has become extremely difficult for objective
criticism of anything the Interlock approves to get into news channels — without having
first been ridiculed, slanted and discredited.
Research in the social sciences plays a key part in the evolution of our society. Such
research is now almost wholly in the control of professional employees of the large
foundations. Even the great sums allotted by federal government to social science
research have come into the virtual control of this professional group.
Foundations have promoted a great excess of empirical research as contrasted with
theoretical research, promoting an irresponsible "fact-finding mania" leading all too
frequently to "scientism" or fake science.
Associated with the excessive support of empirical method, the concentration of
foundation power has tended to promote "moral relativity" to the detriment of our basic
moral, religious, and governmental principles. It has tended to promote the concept of
"social engineering," that foundation-approved "social scientists" alone are capable of
guiding us into better ways of living, substituting synthetic principles for fundamental
principles of action.
ReplyDeleteThese foundations and their intermediaries engage extensively in political activity, not in
the form of direct support of candidates or parties, but in the conscious promotion of
carefully calculated political concepts.
The impact of foundation money upon education has been very heavy, tending to
promote uniformity in approach and method, tending to induce the educator to become an
agent for social change and a propagandist for the development of our society in the
direction of some form of collectivism. In the international field, foundations and the
Interlock, together with certain intermediary organizations, have exercised a strong effect
upon foreign policy and upon public education in things international. This has been
accomplished by vast propaganda, by supplying executives and advisors to government,
and by controlling research through the power of the purse. The net result has been to
promote "internationalism" in a particular sense — a form directed toward "world
government" and a derogation of American nationalism, [emphasis added]
Here we find ourselves confronted with the puzzling duty of interpreting why two
separate congressional committees convened fifty years apart to study the workings of the
new foundation institutions, one under a Democratic Congress, one under a Republican
Congress, both reached essentially the same conclusions. Both adjudged foundations a
clear and present danger to the traditional liberties of American national life. Both
pointed to the use of foundation influence to create the blueprint of American school life.
Both saw that a class system in America had emerged and was being supported by the
class system in schooling. Both called for drastic action. And both were totally ignored.
Actually the word "ignored" doesn't begin to do justice to what really occurred. These
congressional investigations — like Sir Walter Scott's difficult to obtain Life of Napoleon
Bonaparte — have not only vanished from public imagination, they aren't even alluded to
in press discussions of schooling. Exactly as if they had never happened. This would be
more understandable if their specific philanthropies were dull, pedestrian giveaways
designed to distribute largesse and to build up good feeling toward the benevolence of
colossal wealth and power. But the reality is strikingly different — corporate wealth
through the foundations has advanced importantly the dumbing down of America's
schools, the creation of a scientific class system, and important attacks on family
integrity, national identification, religious rights, and national sovereignty.
ReplyDelete"School is the cheapest police," Horace Mann once said. It was a sentiment publicly
spoken by every name — Sears, Pierce, Harris, Stowe, Lancaster, and the rest —
prominently involved in creating universal school systems for the coal powers. One has
only to browse Merle Curti's The Social Ideas of American Educators to discover that the
greatest social idea educators had to sell the rich, and which they lost no opportunity to
sell, was the police function of schooling. Although a pedagogical turn in the Quaker
imagination is the reason schools came to look like penitentiaries, Quakers are not the
principal reason they came to function like maximum security institutions. The reason
they came to exist at all was to stabilize the social order and train the ranks. In a
scientific, industrialized, corporate age, "stability" was much more exquisitely defined
than ordinary people could imagine. To realize the new stability, the best breeding stock
had to be drawn up into reservations, likewise the ordinary. "The Daughters of the Barons
of Runnemede" is only a small piece of the puzzle; many more efficient and subtler
quarantines were essayed.
Perhaps subtlest of all was the welfare state, a welfare program for everybody, including
the lowest, in which the political state bestowed alms the way the corporate Church used
to do. Although the most visible beneficiaries of this gigantic project were those groups
increasingly referred to as "masses," the poor were actually people most poorly served by
this latter-day Hindu creation of Fabian socialism and the corporate brain trust.
Subsidizing the excluded of the new society and economy was, it was believed, a
humanitarian way to calm these troubled waters until the Darwinian storm had run its
inevitable course into a new, genetically arranged Utopia.
In a report issued in 1982 and widely publicized in important journals, the connection
between corporate capitalism and the welfare state becomes manifest in a public
document bearing the name Alan Pifer, then president of the Carnegie Corporation.
Apparently fearing that the Reagan administration would alter the design of the Fabian
project beyond its ability to survive, Pifer warned of:
A mounting possibility of severe social unrest, and the consequent development among
ReplyDeletethe upper classes and the business community of sufficient fear for the survival of our
capitalist economic system to bring about an abrupt change of course. Just as we built the
general welfare state. ..and expanded it in the 1960s as a safety valve for the easing of
social tension, so will we do it again in the 1980s. Any other path is too risky.
In the report quoted from, new conceptions of pedagogy were introduced which we now
see struggling to be born: national certification for schoolteachers, bypassing the last
vestige of local control in states, cities, and villages; a hierarchy of teacher positions; a
project to bring to an end the hierarchy of school administrators — now adjudged largely
an expenditure counter-productive to good social order, a failed experiment. In the new
form, lead teachers manage schools after the British fashion and hire business
administrators. The first expressions of this new initiative included the "mini-school"
movement, now evolved into the charter school movement. Without denying these ideas
a measure of merit, if you understand that their source is the same institutional
consciousness which once sent river ironclads full of armed detectives to break the steel
union at Homestead, machine-gunned strikers at River Rouge, and burned to death over a
dozen women and children in Ludlow, those memories should inspire emotions more
pensive than starry-eyed enthusiasm.
What the hell does this nonsense have to do with a Car Show or Templeton as it is TODAY
ReplyDeleteFunny you should ask DO. In my opinion many car enthusiasts are middle class Americans. The definition that I learned was that the middle class were the job creators, the small businessmen, farmers, ect. those who provide jobs for themselves and others but not the large corporations that count on monopolistic business practices usually political in nature. These car enthusiasts would do well to read up on who is responsible for their dwindling life styles that have effected them and most certainly will effect their children. Schooling has been used to promote International monopolistic tendencies at the expense of the middle class.
ReplyDelete