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Lack of Fairness in American Schools

The evidence is fairly strong that American schools are not educating people fairly and that as it is practiced, education is designed to divide the population. It divides rich from poor, and deliberately so. Gatto quotes Woodrow Wilson as President of Princeton University following a New York City School Teachers Association meeting in 1909 as saying that:

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class or persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks (Gatto 37).

This spells out in no uncertain terms that education was designed to divide the population into the workers and the elite. There was a realization that if the entire population received a fair and adequate education, they would be able to think for themselves, and see how they were being manipulated by big business and marketing. The masses were the consumers, and if they could think logically they would not fall for the gimmicks and false promises of the salesmen, and would not buy the products they did not need. They had to be controlled.

By not educating the majority of the population properly, then they could be controlled. It has been shown by many education critics over the years that the American compulsory school system bore a strong resemblance to the Prussian provenance for schools (Gatto 35). Horace Mann's Seventh Annual Report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is seen as an appeal to bring the Prussian school system to America, according to Gatto (36). It was made clear by Alexander Inglis in 1918 in his book Principles of Secondary Education that,

compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the pro...

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Lack of Fairness in American Schools. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:25, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1703128.html