Education and the Social Crisis

The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling as well as for the stock market. In 1928, a well-regarded volume called A Sociological Philosophy of Education claimed it is the business of teachers to run not merely schools, but the world.⁴ A year later, the famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced, "Academic subjects are of little value." William Kirkpatrick, his colleague at Teachers College, boasted in Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.⁵

This is a key point Gatto gets wrong, I believe, because he took the historical discourse at face value. It was a loud and frequant cry from the business world that "ruinous competition" was getting everyone into prices wars that were destroying the profits required to make an industrial economy viable. Origins of the Federal Reserve System as some good pointers into the business discourse of that time period. Likewise, it was part of the worldview of many Progressive politicians, activists, and educators, that the recessions and economic panics that had been happening more frequently of late (1893, 1907, 1929) were caused by the corrosive spirit of "competitive rivalry", a notion that blended a generic idea of selfish-greed with actual business competition. Education and the Social Crisis articulates this common view quite clearly. So Gatto is basically reporting the explanations he's seeing people give for why they're trying to push the U.S to a more planned economy. It's just that these people were wrong and/or lying about these changes being remotely necessitated by the nature of mass industrialization.