|
Company Kids
The Cluenessness Crisis. Part 2
BY Melinda Selmys February 3-9, 2008 Issue |
Posted 1/29/08 at 11:00 AM
Pope John Paul II spoke against an epidemic trend in modern
education — and particularly education in North America: to treat children not
as growing persons, but as potential employees.
“Financial needs
often induce people to give priority to academic learning, to the detriment of
the integral education of the young,” he said in his 2004 Address to the
Participants in the Symposium on Catholic Education. “Wherever students live,
education must help them each day to grow into more and more mature men and
women, and ‘to be’ better rather than ‘to have’ more.”
The mainstream media regularly raise a hue and cry against
corporate sponsorships in public schools. The logic of the complaint is that if
Pepsi Cola is paying for the gymnasium and IBM is paying for the computer lab,
then the agendas of those corporations will obviously be pushed on unwary
children.
This is absolutely correct. The Learning Company — a
corporation that boasts of being able to reach the minds of 63 million American
schoolchildren — offers learning materials to public schools at little to no
costs. A quick read through their publicity materials leaves little doubt as to
what is lurking in the mouth of the gift-horse: “School,” they tell their
corporate customers, “is the ideal time to influence attitudes, build long-term
loyalties, introduce new products, test-market, promote sampling and trial
usage — and above all — to generate immediate sales.”
The problem in public education is not that it has sold out
to corporate sponsorship, but that it was bought and paid for by big-business
philanthropy from the beginning.
Prior to large-scale public schooling in America, there were
community schools.
These were funded and built by the communities that they
served; the teachers had to meet the approval of the parents whose children
were placed in their care, and parents were free to remove their children from
school at any time. There were also the parochial schools, governed by churches
and under the authority of the local bishops. Fortunate parents are still able
to send their children to such institutions today.
The shift from the community school to the government school
board involved a massive campaign — one that received most of its funding and
impetus from wealthy men, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. This
took place at the beginning of the 20th century, during a time when rampant
scientific optimism promised an earthly utopia based on scientific reasoning
and social engineering.
Utopian thinkers from Plato onward have seen schooling as a
necessary foundation for their dreams of social reconstruction. They have,
nearly without exception, also agreed on several dubious premises: that most
people cannot be trained to be good unless they are lied to and deliberately
misinformed, that the breakdown of children into intellectual or social classes
is necessary to a smoothly functioning society, and that the good of the
individual ought to be subordinated to the good of the state. People are seen
as fulfilling a social function rather than as complete persons.
In the early part of the last century, a small group of
wealthy financiers saw the opportunity to realize such a vision through the
application of grants and foundations that would be the engine for creating a
new kind of society.
Modern public schooling was one of the first of a series of
“rational” social innovations that included forcible eugenic sterilizations in
the ’20s, Alfred Kinsey’s “landmark studies” in human sexuality in the ’40s and
legalized abortion in the ’70s. It is arguable that without the public schools,
the rest would have been impossible.
This connection is, in some cases, quite direct: Public
schools allowed eugenicists to subject children to the intelligence testing and
medical examinations necessary to identify the “unfit”; they provided many of
the youngest subjects for Kinsey’s interviews; and they continue to teach
children about contraception, abortion, and sexuality without respect for the concerns
of parents or the primacy of the family in forming sexual consciences.
Ultimately, there is no such a thing as corporate charity.
There is corporate “philanthropy,” but as commentators since Oscar Wilde and
G.K. Chesterton have noted, “philanthropy” is often a euphemism applied to
self-serving, inhuman ideologies.
In the next installment, we’ll take a look at some typical
modern curricula to find out.
Melinda Selmys is a staff writer
at VulgataMagazine.org.
Make a Donation now!
Insightful. Informative. Uncompromisingly faithful. The National Catholic Register is more than a newspaper. It’s a cause. Your support for the Register funds important journalism that helps to build a Culture of Life in our nation, and throughout the world. Help us promote the Church’s New Evangelization by donating to the National Catholic Register right now.
Click here to donate
| 
.
