Your
research into the origins of our
school system reveals something most
people never confront: the system
wasn't designed to help children
flourish. It was designed to serve
industrialists who needed a certain
kind of worker—obedient, punctual,
compliant, and unlikely to question
authority.
John D.
Rockefeller's involvement in shaping
American education is
well-documented. Through the General
Education Board (GEB), which he
founded in 1903, Rockefeller and
other industrialists poured millions
into reshaping schools according to
their vision. The GEB didn't aim to
create independent thinkers. Its
mission, as reflected in their own
documents, was far simpler: "We
shall not try to make these
people... into philosophers or men
of learning... The task we set
before ourselves is very simple...
to train these people as we find
them".
Think about what that
means. They weren't interested in
cultivating human potential. They
were interested in training. They
wanted workers who would show up on
time, follow instructions, and not
cause trouble. The factory model of
education—bells, rigid schedules,
rows of desks, standardized
curriculum—wasn't an accident. It
was a deliberate design.
If
you judge the current system by
Rockefeller's stated goal—creating
obedient workers—you'd have to call
it a resounding success. Schools
produce graduates who are accustomed
to bells and schedules, who expect
to be told what to do, who wait for
permission before acting. They
produce people who are comfortable
with hierarchy and authority. They
produce workers, not thinkers.
But I doubt most people today
would agree that this is the right
goal. I hope we want something
different. I hope we want
independent thinkers who can live
independent lives. I hope we want
citizens who can question authority
when authority is wrong, who can
spot manipulation, who can think for
themselves rather than just
following the crowd.
Yet the
system we've kept for over a century
works against that. It rewards
compliance and punishes questioning.
It teaches that there's one right
answer and the teacher has it. It
trains people to accept authority
rather than think critically about
it.
Look at what's happening
in society today. Groupthink is
everywhere. Ideas that would have
been dismissed as conspiracy
theories a decade ago are now
mainstream. Why? Because we've
created a population that doesn't
know how to think independently.
They follow the loudest voices, the
most confident authorities, the
crowd. They never learned to
question, to doubt, to reason things
through for themselves.
This
isn't an accident. It's the
predictable outcome of a system
designed to produce obedience, not
independence. When you spend 13
years being told what to think, when
to think it, and how to prove you've
thought it, you don't emerge as a
critical thinker. You emerge as
someone who waits to be told.
The recent backlash against
higher education illustrates this
problem from another angle.
Progressive academics, despite their
self-perception as crusaders against
oppression, have created their own
form of groupthink—rewarding
conformity to ideological norms,
treating disagreement as moral
failure, and insulating themselves
from alternative viewpoints. This
intellectual tribalism fuels the
very populist resentment that
threatens academic freedom. Whether
on the left or the right, the
pattern is the same: when
institutions stop encouraging
genuine independent thought and
start demanding conformity, they
betray their purpose.
The
solution isn't to tweak the system.
It's to replace it with something
that actually encourages independent
thought. School should be the place
where we not only tolerate
questioning but actively cultivate
it. Where we teach people to think,
not just to comply. Where we help
them become adults who can run their
own lives, not workers who need to
be told what to do.
Rockefeller built a system for his
time. It's time to build one for
ours.
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