The Scientific Management of Children: John Taylor Gatto

 "There was a purpose behind schooling, and it had nothing to do with what parents and children wanted but what a highly centralised economy and strong political state needed."
"Woodrow Wilson talking to businessmen said: 

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. "

"Forgoing the privilege of education was not to be a matter of choice, which probably explains why Wilson`s remarks were not broadcast to the common public but were made behind closed doors."

"By 1917 all major school administrative jobs nationwide were under control of a group referred to in the press of the day as "the education trust." A record of the first meeting of the trust in Cleveland, Ohio exists, and an attendance roll showing that the interests of Rockefeller and Carnegie were represented, together with those of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd wrote in 1918 that the chief end of the project was "to impose on the young the ideal of subordination."

" One famous insider of modern schooling back in the post-WWI days (when the model was hardening) called government schooling `the perfect organisation of the  hive.` That was H. H. Goddard, chairman of psychology at Princeton.  Goddard believed standardised test scores used as a signal for privileged treatment would cause the lower classes to come face-to-face with their own biological inferiority. It would be like wearing a public dunce cap. Exactly the function `special education` delivers today. The pain of endless daily humilation would discourage reproduction among the inferior, Goddard thought. Galton had virtually demanded it of responsible politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in his own writings. "