Anthony Sutton believes that reforming education is the first step toward creating a better world. In his 2002 introduction to America’s Secret Establishment, Sutton argues that our initial task should be:
To eliminate the Hegelian system that stifles individual initiative and trains children to become mindless zombies, serving the State. We need a lot less propaganda for “education” and a more individual creative search for learning. Instead of more money for education, we need to allocate a lot less. The existing system of education is little more than a conditioning mechanism. It has little to do with education in the true sense, and a lot to do with control of the individual.
Sutton argues that “this statist system is a reflection of the Hegelian ideas brought to the United States by the Skull and Bones “troika” of Gilman, White and Dwight, and then financed by Rockefeller.” John Dewey was a major figure in developing this American education system imported from Prussia. According to Sutton,
…the Dewey system was initiated and promoted by Skull and Bones members. Dewey was an ardent statist, and a believer in the Hegelian idea that the child exists to be trained to serve the State. This requires suppression of individualist tendencies and a careful spoon-feeding of approved knowledge.
In “Unsentimental Education,” George Monbiot describes the damage done by schooling to children at the other end of the spectrum, the elite:
“But the damage goes far beyond this skimming. British private schools create a class culture of a kind unknown in the rest of Europe. The extreme case is the boarding prep schools, which separate children from their parents at the age of eight in order to shape them into members of a detached elite. In his book The Making of Them the psychotherapist Nick Duffell shows how these artificial orphans survive the loss of their families by dissociating themselves from their feelings of love. Survival involves “an extreme hardening of normal human softness, a severe cutting off from emotions and sensitivity.” Unable to attach themselves to people (intimate relationships with other children are discouraged by a morbid fear of homosexuality), they are encouraged instead to invest their natural loyalties in the institution.”
And this has consequences for the rest of us, as Monbiot explains:
“This made them extremely effective colonial servants: if their commander ordered it, they could organise a massacre without a moment’s hesitation (witness the detachment of the officers who oversaw the suppression of the Mau Mau, quoted in Caroline Elkins’s book, Britain’s Gulag). It also meant that the lower orders at home could be put down without the least concern for the results. For many years, Britain has been governed by damaged people.”
Notes
Anthony Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, 2002
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119639.pdf
Gatto
Iserbyt
George Monbiot, “Unsentimental Education,” Monbiot.com, Posted January 22, 2008,
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/01/22/unsentimental-education/
