The Leipzig Connection:  Sabotage of the US Educational System -- Chapter 10
 

The Leipzig Connection: Sabotage of the US Educational System by Paolo Lionni

Chapter 10. A New Social Order

The Lincoln School, despite its inability to teach its students how to read and write, created broad effects on American education. Discarding the traditional course of study, it developed the core curriculum and merged the study of history, geography, and civics into what it called the "social studies." To a generation of teachers and administrators educated at Teachers College, the Lincoln School was a model for the type of school they were to create back home. To thousands of visitors, it was a showplace for the new psychology and Progressive Education. For the Rockefeller forces, it was a demonstration of the humanitarian intentions behind the Rockefeller fortune. Yet it was not, however large, the sum of all the Progressive Education activities at Teachers College. Nor did it represent the thousands of ways in which a now affluent Teachers College was forwarding the steady overhaul of American education. There is little in the way of change in our educational system and
our society to which the professors at Teachers College didn't apply themselves. Dewey's disciples Harold Rugg, George S. Counts, and William H. Kilpatrick provide good examples of where Wundtian psychology was taking the teachers of our teachers.'

In the words of Rugg:

... through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people.

Rugg proposed that this could be accomplished in three ways:

First and foremost, the development of a new philosophy of life and education which will be fully appropriate to the new social order;

Second, the building of an adequate plan for the production of a new race of educational workers; Third, the making of new activities and materials for the curriculum.

Counts went further, proposing that the schools themselves build that new social order:

Historic capitalism, with its deification of the principle of selfishness, its reliance upon the forces of competition, its placing of property above human rights, and its exaltation of the profit motive, will either have to be displaced altogether, or so radically changed in form and spirit that its identity will be completely lost ... That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my firm conviction. To the extent that they are permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school they will definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation.

Although Kilpatrick's views were similar, he is mentioned here not so much because of his advocacy of Marxism or the new psychology in education but because, in 1914, he published a vitriolic attack on the teaching methods of Maria Montessori. He argued, that Dr. Montessori's "emphasis on individuality precluded the social interaction stressed in American progressive theories":

He complained further that the teaching materials were not stimulating; that children learned to read, write and figure too early; and that any good elements in the method were already contained in Dr. Dewey's theories, which went beyond those of Dr. Montessori. Dr. Kilpatrick's book had such impact that by 1918 the Montessori method was seldom mentioned in the United States, although it flourished elsewhere.

The result of Kilpatrick's diatribe was the suppression of the Montessori method in American education for the next 50 years.

Thorndike, meanwhile, was arranging for the publication of new spellers, arithmetic books, dictionaries (in collaboration with Barnhart), and textbooks on education and educational testing. And the General Education Board continued to fund Teachers College, as well as the Progressive Education Association, the National Education Association, and others to the tune of 324 million dollars.

By 1953, Wundtian psychology had reached out from Teachers College into virtually every public school in the land:

The single most powerful educational force in the world is at 120th Street and Broadway in New York City. Your children's teachers go there for advanced training .. With 100,000 alumni, TC has managed to seat about one third of the presidents and deans now [1953] in office at accredited U.S. teacher training schools. Its graduates make up about 20 percent of all our public school teachers. Over a fourth of the superintendents of schools in the 168 U.S. cities with at least 50,000 population are TC-trained.

Today, Wundt is remembered only by psychologists. Gates, Flexner, Cattell, Russell, even Thorndike, are found only in texts written by their disciples. They may seem irrelevant to today's critical educational problems: drug abuse, illiteracy, criminality, lowered standards, lack of motivation and self-discipline, and all the rest. Pick up a freshman college psychology text and you may well find no mention of Wundt, or even Cattell. Try to find a dictionary published after 1920 which has an unadulterated definition of "psychology." Question those who went to school before 1917, and find out what it was like. Check out the early works and histories of psychology; verify the facts, the names, dates, locations and events.

Looking further you will find that despite the increasing billions that the large foundations and, now, the federal government, pour into American education, the situation just keeps getting worse. Despite the millions spent every year on the apparent development of psychology, this field has yet to come up with one workable solution to the problems of education many, if not most of which, it now appears to have created.

Psychology currently constitutes the principal philosophical underpinning of our educational and, consequently, of our cultural outlook. From its largely bestial precepts major decisions in all walks of life are now made, and anyone attempting to determine the causes of a deep and lengthy national malaise must take into account psychology's covert hegemony over the thought processes of the body politic, the body economic, and the body social. Institutionalized as "education," it has be come our largest single public expenditure at local state, and federal levels.

The idea that Man is an exclusively physiological entity conflicts daily with the promise of a way of life conceived for, and attainable only by, men of free will. This idea (that Man is a stimulus-response animal) and the methods it implies, has played a critical role in transforming The American Dream into a national nightmare. It has turned our homes, schools, offices, stores, and factories into the battle grounds of World War III; the draftees drift from encounter to encounter, increasing numbers succumbing as neurotic mental and spiritual casualties. The greatest number of victims, however, is in thin 5-16 year-old range, as roughly one-quarter of the population is recruited into the compulsory federal behavior clinics cosmetically known as (public) schools.

Those willing to decide on the basis of their own experience and observations whether they (and their children) are animals or not, and who choose, not to be, must begin now to openly repudiate psychology's stranglehold on our children's future and awaken their neighbors from the nightmare.

(end of chapter 10)

Continue with Chapter 11. Research Notes

Back to Chapter 1. The New Domain

Get The Book!

The Leipzig Connection by Paolo Lionni - the complete book with more details & facts about the scam known as modern education and psychology.

Suggested Reading List - the Demise of the Educational System - OBE (Outcome-Based Education), NEA (National Education Association), educational psychology, German psychology & influences, demise of public education, educational sabotage, Wundt, Pavlov, Dewey, Skinner, Watson.