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Social Control

A Survey of the Foundations of Order

by Edward A. Ross1901book
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Reference
False Premises

The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control. Your librarian should be able to locate a copy for you without much trouble. In it Ed Ross wrote these words for his prominent following: "Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media....the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School.... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough."1 Social Control revolutionized the discipline of sociology and had powerful effects on the other human sciences: in social science it guided the direction of political science, economics, and psychology; in biology it influenced genetics, eugenics, and psychobiology. It played a critical role in the conception and design of molecular biology.

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Reference
False Premises

The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control. Your librarian should be able to locate a copy for you without much trouble. In it Ed Ross wrote these words for his prominent following: "Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media....the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School.... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough."1 Social Control revolutionized the discipline of sociology and had powerful effects on the other human sciences: in social science it guided the direction of political science, economics, and psychology; in biology it influenced genetics, eugenics, and psychobiology. It played a critical role in the conception and design of molecular biology.

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Quote
Used in: False Premises
The ebb of religion is only half a fact, the other half is the high tide of education. While the priest is leaving the civil service, the schoolmaster is coming in. As the state shakes itself loose from the church, it reaches out for the school. Step by step with dis-establishment of religion proceeds the establishment of education; so that today the moneys, public or private, set apart for schools and universities far surpass the medieval endowments of abbeys and sees. (p. 194)
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Quote
Used in: False Premises
Finally, it is possible to fix in the plastic child-mind principles upon which, later, may be built a huge structure of practical consequence. For thus out of sight in the impressions of childhood lie the foundations of many a man's theory of conduct and philosophy of life. Undoubtedly, when reason is fully active the man revises his beliefs, tearing down the hastily-run-up structures of youth, and building anew. But, while dislodging stone after stone that has been laid in the mortar of bad logic, he rarely disturbs the deep concrete foundation that, clinging to the bedrock of his mind with the grip of early suggestion, seems to be a part of his very self. Building on some early moral or intellectual prejudice such as the divine government, the harmony of public and private interests, the coincidence of virtue and happiness, the sacredness of law, the dignity of magistrates, society is able to get the individual on its side almost for nothing. (p. 185)
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Used in: False Premises
The schooling of the young is a long-headed device to promote order, and does not get adopted till the group wakes up. At first it is the rare thinker who sees anything in it, and his arguments do not always prevail. Down to the Reformation, only the Greek philosophers and the Jewish rabbis had set forth the possibilities of education in respect to social order. Men trust the policeman and the priest sooner than the pedagogue. To collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board, exhibits a faith in the power of suggestion which few peoples ever attain to. And so it happens that the role of the schoolmaster in the social economy is just beginning. (p. 187)
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