8 March 2017

In 1917 the following principles were written down by Alexander James Inglis.
From the book, The Progressive Pioneer by William G. Wraga, we find the quote :

Alexander James Inglis’s (1879-1924) transformation from an academic traditionalist devoted to Latin pedagogy to an influential progressive-experimentalist and advocate of the comprehensive high school has received insufficient attention from educational and curriculum historians. Inglis’s career manifests important characteristics of the progressive era in American history. As an attempt to generate organising principles upon which to construct a new, responsive social institution, his book, Principles of Secondary Education, stands as a quintessential manifestation of progressive values. This fine-grained profile of Inglis’s work reveals nuances in the historic record that are otherwise obscured by high-level historical interpretations. An assessment of the utility of these interpretations for explaining Inglis’s career leads to a discussion of the implications of the record of Inglis’s work for understanding the progressive period and it’s prevailing interpretations, as well as to a consideration of the role of biography in historical research.
Source

The Reality
The principles Inglisl laid out were adopted as the best means of destroying all ideas of the autonomous individual in children, achieved by programming the subconscious of the recipient procuring an immediate response to what the same masters would instil in the child.

The Six Important Functions of Secondary Education

1. The Adjustive or Adaption Function : Establishment of fixed habits of reaction to authority.
The role of the schools is to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make children learn, and do, foolish and unnatural things.

2. The Integrating or Conformity Function : Develop like mindedness, unity in thought and habit.
This should well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible, the hive mind. People who conform are predictable and follow the herd, this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labour force.

3. The Diagnostic and Directive Function : Label children to mark them in the class structure.
School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, we all have one.

4. The Differentiating Function : Divide and conquer strategy to immobilise in social structure.
Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – teach them not one step further. 

5. The Selective Function : Preservation of the favoured races.(Darwin)
This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favoured races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from year seven onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6. The Propaedeutic Function : Grooming of those in higher classes to manage the lower classes.
The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the children will be taught how to manage and to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down, unable to critically think or reason, in order that government authority is unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labour.

Reference : The Principles of Secondary Education, Alexander James Inglis 1918, Chapter X;”The Six Important Functions of Secondary Eduction” pages 367, 375 – 384.

Quotes
“Habit is thus, the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”
‘The Principles of Psychology’ by William James 1890 page 121.

In I934 Executive Director of The National Education Association announced that his organisation  :
“Expected to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.”

First Public Mission Statement of the Rockefeller General Education Board in the first report to well-wishers, first paragraph, 1906 : 

“In our dreams people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them, authors, educators, poets, men of letters, we shall not search for artists, painters, musicians, lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of which we have an ample supply.”

The task is simple, we will organise children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”

Further Study
GEMS Global Education Management Systems and its links to the RSA Royal Society of Arts
Psychiatry and its views on education
In Profile : The Froebel Education Method and the Third Reich
In Profile : György Lukács and the Frankfurt School
In Profile : Wilhelm Wundt, psychological programming of children
EIM Group European Investment Managers, Absolute Return for Kids, and the Dutroux child sex abuse scandal