Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowWas Public School Created To Make Factory Workers?
Every day, across the United States, millions of children wake up to attend school. In this country, all children are guaranteed a right to education -- and, while while everyone agrees kids should be able to learn, millions of parents have serious problems with the modern education regime. Why? In today's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore how the modern system came to be... and whether it was created by historical elites to further their thirst for docile employees in the future.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They called me Ben. We're joined with our guest super producer, Max freight Train Williams. Most importantly, you are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know, live and direct with the audience of four.
Sure, you guys maybe don't even know this. We don't talk about it that often. But for the last handful of years, I guess since a certain weirdo event happened in the news, you might have noticed we've been recording in our separate domiciles, and today we're not. For I think the first time in a long.
Time, we got one or two in person episodes done at hotel rooms.
That's true, that's right, That's its own weird kind of situation though. Right we are now today though, coming to you from our state of the art new facilities, yeah, our radio podcast studios.
Yeah.
To paint the picture for you conspiracy realists. Uh, there is what I consider an egregious amount of sunshine coming through the windows. Were so we've got some work to do, and it was just like preparing to launch a spaceship. Max and Matt and Nol and I and our pal Tyler. We're coming through and like fixing, double checking different technical aspects. We figured it out. We're here for you. We have also, I would argue, over the years we have been in so many crazy situations we have had kind of an education via experience and education via fire, you know what I mean, Like you said, Matt, recording in hotel rooms, you know, knunkers, Yeah, bunkers, Noel, you were getting under the table and we're trying to figure out power and amp age and dreaming.
I was under that table and dreaming.
Did mention? Yeah, And this is like our education that we have received here is not institutionalized, right, It's stuff you're doing. Yeah, it's stuff where we have we have had education by mistakes. Like it's it's weird to say it now, but at this point in the life of this show, when people are starting their own shows and they're asking us questions, we can actually answer a lot of them because if there's a wrong answer, we did it already.
Yeah. Yeah, but there was a path in a weird way for us right right like in this studio, right outside the door, there's a huge picture of our podcast logo and it's right next to the face of Ron Burgundy. Yeah, and that's weird.
It's very weird.
That's not even his real name.
Did you guys know what I've found out the other day?
But I guess what I'm saying is we've we've learned a ton as we've made all these mistakes, but there has been a pathway for us to get to where we are right now. And it was I don't know if it was visible or I don't know what do you guys think?
It's kind of ad hoc.
Honestly, I used to maybe ex sell myself short and say, like, oh, you just sort of stumbled your way into every opportunity that presented itself to you. But then I realized, like, as I've gotten older, it's like, no, whether I knew it or not, I was subconsciously forging a path with the decisions that I made that kind of led me from one thing to the next, you know, whether it be through mistakes, screwing something up and moving on to something else or whatever there was, you could mark a trajectory, but it's the kind of thing you don't see until you zoom out, you know what I mean.
Sure, yeah, you could always see the trees better in retrospect, right, And we all came to this through different ways. I of course made an infernal covenant that will have consequences down the road. We are fans of school. I think it's I think it's fair to say, like, are you guys fans of school? Do you look back on your school days fondly? No?
Okay, I'm a fan of There was a period of school that I liked more than other periods, But overall I would say, was it was it the free period?
No?
It was study hall?
No.
I mean there was a time I went to a fine arts magnet school and so I was surrounded by like, like minded, kind of nerdy, you know, arty music kids. And then my family went through a transition. My father lost his job and we ended up having to move to Birmingham, Alabama, where I was plunged into the public school system of Hoover, Alabama, which is like the movie Varsity Blues or one of those football reality shows.
And I did not do. I did not take well to it. Let's just say, so, what about you met I loved school? Yeah, that's it.
I love it. I love it. I love things like con Academy. There's so many resources to learn online now, NOL, I think you make very good distinction between learning versus school right, an education system of a methodology and institution. A lot most people love learning. It's very like we have different modes of learning. But it's extremely rare to go to a human being and say do you like learning and for them to go, nah, I'm good with what I know. Now you know, and I like seventy four that's the highest number. But school can sometimes not. This one size fits all approach to teaching leaves some people out in the cold. And everybody, no matter what you think personally or what your school experience is like, everyone on the planet agrees education of some sort is vital for a society to continue. That's why education is always an ideological battleground. You know, what we're taught, how we're taught, who is allowed to teach us? These are the subjects of numerous conspiracies across decades, centuries, millennia probably, and tonight we're diving deep into a strange claim about public school what if they were created with an ulterior motive? Here are the facts.
Yeah, I mean, this is a very interesting question, and it goes into things I think that we've all experienced, like the idea of tech prep versus like vocational prep or whatever it might be. They call them tracts, right, which I think is an interesting term given what we just talked about about our trajectories throughout life.
Or magnet schools like I was. This is a true story. I don't talk about it often. I had off the books deal with the high school that I had attended for a time where they said, as long as I was making them look good and communicative arts, I didn't have to do any math nice So I got like a nerd version of a football deal.
That's awesome. I was also, I mean, I'm not saying you're necessarily terrible in math. Math was just not my strong suit. I was much more of a verbal guy. But it's interesting the history of public education in the US actually dates back to Boston, and the history of modern public education in the world begins in Prussia, which is weird. Yeah, I think, Yeah, Prussia with a p we'll get to all that. In The very first public school in the US was the Boston Latin School.
Yeah.
I wonder, I wonder if you break down the Prussia thing a little bit, because it almost feels like it speaks to this episode a little bit in my mind. But maybe that's my preconceived notions, right, Yeah, the idea of making everybody's education the same, right, right, versus the town school or the neighborhood school or the church. Yeah.
Yeah, the if you live in the kind of world that we live in, on stuff they don't want you to know. Well, then when you hear the name Prussia, your ears just perk up. You know, we're not instantly saying it's bad, but no, you are. It is strange. It's a fact a lot of folks don't know Prussia. We'll get to the Prussia model and why it's so important in our exploration today. We should establish I think that the Boston Latin School was not Prussian at all. The Boston Latin School was pay to play. It's older than the US. It dates back to sixteen thirty five, and a few years later the first taxpayer supported school, the Mather School get in Lincotton mother sixteen thirty nine. This is also in Massachusetts. And this is a big deal because before before school was a commonplace thing. If you were growing up in the US colonies, you would learn about life or socialization from your family, your church, other people in your community, and then you would get an apprenticeship and usually people would tell you what that apprenticeship was going to be. This was not the time of like, dream big, what do you want to do, young gas Merelda, I want to be a witch? Not really, that'd be cool.
Yeah, there's no surprise trade crafts there. You go in knowing, oh, I'm going to apprentice as this position is a job, this important thing.
But literally I think I like making barrel because they didn't have the luxury of being able to pursue the academic arts, you know, or study music that was all very like kind of superfluous, you know, or or literally left to a very select group of folks that were probably like monks or something, you know.
Either yeah, either either members of the clergy or what we would consider the upper crusts. The elites would have the leisure time to pursue those things.
Well, I mean it sounds really focused in the beginning that sixteen thirty five Latin school. It's a Latin school, right when people were literally speaking Latin. You're learning how to read Latin, write Latin. I mean, I'm maybe it's more widely focused than that, but it sounds like that's pretty much what that the nature of that school was. And is the Mather School really named after Cotton Mather, because like, if it is, then it's almost like going to a religious school or something, right, I mean, I don't know.
Maybe it's named after Richard Mather, oh okay, but still kind of the same. It's it's the oldest public education school. Richard Mather was the grandfather of Cotton Mather, okay, and he was a Puritan minister. So that's that's how old this place has been. And I love that word pointing out literacy. So you'd get the basics of literacy and arithmetic from your parents, assuming they a knew that themselves and b felt it was worth their time to teach you, because otherwise they would just say, you know, get back in the field, right, yeah, and don't come back until you've killed three rabbits And they're like, well what is three? Like, ah, I knew there would be consequences.
Well, okay, so we're talking about two Boston schools, right, the earliest forms of this. Let's talk about why the eastern seaboard of the United States, where those original colonies were, why were they more forward with this.
I think it has to do with the Reformation, right, Yeah. So New England, as we know, was a hotbed of kind of a seat of the Protestant Reformation. So therefore they kind of were a little bit of ahead of the curve in terms of literacy, right.
Yeah, they were kind of radicals of their time, and.
Because they had to be able to spread words said Reformation with like treatism what.
Yeah, the idea is that we don't need we don't need the Catholic hierarchy to intercede on our behalf. We can communicate and learn from the divine directly because we have the power to read scripture. So they they're much more literate than the more southern colonies, but they're also very much focused on scripture, you know what I mean, They're not reading Harper's or whatever.
Yeah. Well, but they also didn't have a bunch of schools early on, They had like private help, right.
Yes, yeah, yeah, in the South, so in the South, which was always a more brutal, hierarchical arrangement, you would have a ton of sixteen hundreds. You have a ton of indentured servants. First, they can't read, and the people at the top are stoked about that. They don't want people to be able to read. What they do do never not hilarious. What they do do is they take their kids, the children the scion of the wealthy agricultural class, and they get them private tutors like you were talking about at or if they're really flexing, they send those kids back to England.
Wow, okay, and indentured servant. I mean that's just like one click away from slaves. And slave owners obviously also did not want their slaves to be able to read, because that was a way a catalyst for revolution or for revolts.
Right yeah, I mean, if you can keep people docile and you can restrict their ability to teach themselves, then you are you know, you're the only game in town, right and anyway, there are so many things to say about this. We know over time, schools did eventually become the norm in the United States and have a lot of problems. It goes state by state. Not all schools are equally good, and not all of them have the same problems, but overall it's a good thing they exist. Right, even for the anti authoritarians in the crowd this evening, it's good that people want to teach people to read, right, we can. Yeah, that's not a hot take.
No, no, it's not in the country at large.
Right.
As the idea of a publicly supported educational system as it started to spread, people are on board, right, and they're like, yeah, we don't mind chipping in a little bit of our taxes so that everybody around these parts can read and know how things work.
Oh, like the like the Hope Scholarship here in Georgia. You know, it's a vice tax I'm playing the lottery, or it was, and it would help send children to college. When the argument against things like the Department of Education, which is also imperfect, or the argument against taxpayer supported schools, it kind of falls apart when you realize that every time a kid gets a successful education leading to employment opportunities, that's one less person who is going to be out stealing cars, radios, you know what I mean. There are long term benefits also.
Who could potentially be a drain on the system in terms of welfare or whatever. And true, yeah, that's its own other discussion, and that's rife and very rocky in and of itself. Obviously.
Well, let's talk about curriculum, because what what are as the first public schools are starting to originate? What are kids learning?
Latin?
Oh?
Okay, got it, super useful.
Right, those are the two Latin incursive and then counting to seventy four. No, you raise a good point. There was a much more blatant emphasis on what was considered moral intelligence morality teaching. And if you were a teacher, then this is before the era of like the cool edgy professor all Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park style. You are a paragon of what puritanical society considers good and they're pretty strict about.
So it might be what we would see today in Catholic schools or in any kind of religious schools where you know, the curriculum includes just as much scripture and sort of philosophical conversation and learning as it does mathematics and science and.
History study of the classics the time of the classical education, right, this person, this, this person may not know everything that we consider important in the world of arithmetic. But they can quote the Anea to you. They can, and they can tell you who they got whom in the Bible.
I got to tell you, guys, just a little tick I have Sometimes when a phrase comes out of somebody's mouth, a song plays in my head, and it happens way too often, and I don't like it because I don't I often don't want to just spurt it out all the time. You said the phrase Catholic school. Do you know which song like jumped into my head?
Oh? H cathlic School as bitter as Roman rule.
No that song at all.
I'm just not really singing it.
No, But what is the song?
Uh? I will follow you into the dark.
That's it. Okay, Sorry, it just happened, you know.
I don't think is it like it's mouth follow you immediately? Picture hit me baby one more time anytime someone says Catholic school. So that's because I'm a filthy old man.
I had to do some programs at some Catholic schools, and I'll tell you know, it's nowadays there it's a really solid education because it emphasizes whip, because it emphasizes whip. It's basically fight club. It's fight club and their weapons allowed. Uh no, not to disparage the Catholic the Catholic school, but like there is that moral that moral aspect to it. Of course the religion aspect, but they do emphasize what you would call secular skill sets, so it is it is good idea.
They're also private schools typically, so they're being funded by tuition rather than government tax or whatever.
And with the coside of one of the most powerful organizations in the world not even okay, I'm not doing papist conspiracies, but like the very powerful people.
Almost as powerful as the Mormon Church with one hundred billion dollars.
Gosh, yeah, check out check out our strange news. So all right, the cool thing is by the mid eighteen hundreds and we are getting too conspiracies here. Most states had three assumptions that everyone accepted schools are a good thing, and they should be free, We're going to pay for them with taxes. Teachers should have some sort of education themselves, which is you know, baller, and that children should be required to attend school for some time now it's typically from about six to sixteen. You fast forward to today. Like you said, no, there are plenty of alternative schooling paths available. You can be homeschooled, for example, you can go to private schools. But the US, at least on paper, wants to give everybody the opportunity to study whatever they wish if they are able to do so. So not everybody is going to have the chops to be a nuclear engineer, but if you are capable of that kind of that kind of cognitive work and you want to do it, you should be able to do it no matter who your parents are.
Sort of a bootstrap philosophy.
But it is important to note while we are these United States, schooling in public education is often a state based thing, so you're not going to get the same thing wherever you travel around here.
Right, not even to mentioned state by state, school district by school, county by county. That's what I mean. By county by county, I mean people you know, go way in over their heads when it comes to buying a house so their kids can be in quote unquote the good school districts.
I was very lucky.
I was able to buy a house in a neighborhood that I could afford, But the school is bad My kid also lives with her mom, who lives and the good school district because she rents currently, So we kind of made an agreement that I would buy this house and that she would continue renting until our kid's done with school, which isn't much longer.
FBI.
This guy right here, yep, Hey, no, I'm not doing anything.
It's messed up.
Though, dude.
I mean, it's wild that a place geographically, you know, separated by miles could have such a vast difference in quality of education schools are ranked, you know what I mean, And like, well, we will get into standards, testing and stuff later, but anyway.
It's it's a huge it's a huge challenge, you know. And this what this inherently means is that entirely due to the lottery of location, the country is losing potential doctors, potential professors, nuclear engineers because of these various intercene wars of ideology. And the story is full of ups and you know, I just think it's full of ups and downs. But if you look at the history of public education in the US, what you see is a miniature version of the history of the country's conflicts writ large.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, not to mention things like political line drawing, gerrymandering, and all of that stuff that is a product of things like the Civil War, you know, the civil rights and movements, ideological and political conflicts of various stripes, you know, separation of church and state, all of these kinds of things. You know, we are seeing the aftermath of that, or at least there is an indelible mark left on our public eduacation system because of these events. And most of those marks, those indelible ones aren't like good, like it's inherently kind of created a flawed system.
Well, there are scars too from it. You know, a scar is a powerful analogy because it shows that something bad happened, but it also showed that you survived. And the that's waxing a little poetic, I think. But we see, you know, we see the heroic efforts of the civil rights movement right which gave was a strong step in the continuing struggle for equality. And we see other weird things like the Pledge of Allegiance comes in not at the beginning of public education. Yeah, the Pledge of Allegiance didn't have under God in it until nineteen fifty four. And it wasn't what was it before it? It just didn't have under God is one nation. Yeah I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, it was just there was a big flag warship kind of movement. I make it selling a pagan cult. But uh but yeah, I as our pal Max super producer Max Free Trade. Williams pointed out Eisenhower the Eisdower administration added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War, which I think means it's time for a crossover that I hope doesn't embarrass you too much. Matt. It's Max with the facts.
And he's fallen.
It's just for you right now.
Are we actually going to do the thing we have we lost?
Yea.
Also, so it makes no I don't know about you, but I think it makes both of our days whatever we get to play it.
I mean, people behind the garten, we don't actually get to hear in real time, but y'all are lucky out there. You get to hear this beautiful sound cue courtesy of of of of Matt Matty, two hands, Who is.
That coming in your phone?
It's Max, It's live. Yes, so uh so, yeah, this this stuff changes, right, you know, And you see the concerns over religion in schools. Right, should prayer be allowed? Should should a specific religion be forced on children who don't practice it? Uh? And overall, despite all these problems, the idea of public education is better than nothing. It's way better than being born into a family and having someone say, well, uh, we make doorknobs here. So I hope you like doorknobs, because that, Josiah is the rest of your life. Like it's it's better than that. You can you can be something different. You have power, unless that is, there's a conspiracy afoot. What if the goal of public education isn't to make new doctors and power engineers, teachers, astronauts and so on? What if it was primarily built to ensure a steady stream of docile, hopeless factory drones.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, there's this quote. Have you guys seen this quote before from It's often attributed to legendary pill John D. Rockefeller Old JD R.
Notorious Pill. Yeah you're talking about I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.
Yeah. Yeah, I can also see.
It like inscribed and in some sort of creepy statue of Rockefeller, like in like the disto being you know, socialist version of our world.
You know, like what I could see it too if you if you've ever been in kind of a very posh environment, you get those clues that you're hanging out with the one percenters. I could a you totally like you're in the Skull and Bones hangout, or you go to a soiree and then they've got they've got a big picture of Rockefeller, right, and then maybe there's a bunch of like he's standing on a bunch of poor people.
Right, or at the very least there's just like a throng of like faceless you know, multitudes assembled. I mean, listen, this is all a product of capitalism. I mean everyone can't be John D. Rockefeller. There can only be a handful. You know. It's like highlander rules and.
That guy's monomaniacal issues.
Yeah, oh, well for sure.
But the big question is did he actually say it, and why did he say it? And and what did he mean right, and what consequences were therefore that sentiment.
Frankly, whether he said it or not, the sentiment clearly holds true.
It feels like and we're gonna get into it, right, We're gonna we're gonna go through that. But I want to posit here, guys, what is better, literally seriously on the level, a nation of thinkers or a nation of doers.
I think that's a valid argument. I had some I had some changes of heart well working on this too.
They're also not mutually exclusive, I agree, I agree.
Just think about what you're doing once.
You once you get to think, ye, sometimes you don't want a dewey you know what I mean. You're like, oh, but I'm thinking too, Hi, I'm just I'm interested in this. I think it's more nuanced than this is bad.
Right.
It's like the like I knew a guy who could speak seven languages but couldn't figure out how to write an ass as a donkey as it a dog, dirty dirty boys.
I'm sorry people don't call it that anymore, but that's the quote. It's a quote. You said it as though you were just saying that.
Let me get.
I love it.
I love it, boy.
No, but this is very very important, important, and I think what we'll get to this as well. It is nuanced because you know, There are plenty of dewey thinkers, you know, yes, and of course plenty of thinky doers. The question is like, what do we need in a society that thrives on capitalism and year over year growth that corporations depend on. We we really need there to be a separation in a hierarchy and it behooves us and by us. I'm I'm hypothetically being part of the Rockefeller this Rockefeller class to you know, create this worker pool, you know in other wise who's going to make our stuff?
This is okay, these are excellent points. This is the root of the conspiracy. Back in nineteen oh three. This is true. Rockefeller and his goons or is Co, whatever you want to call them, they created something called the General Education Board. What do we say about innocuous names?
They're perfect.
There's nothing to see here.
The call was perfect.
It was a perfect call, right, It was a perfect call. GEB is an organization that's dedicated to quote, improving education throughout the United States. And at first blush, this is actually pretty progressive for the time. They say, look, we're going to promote education within the USA without distinction of race, sex, or creed.
Like the sound of that.
Yeah, that sounds like sci fi future talk to the average person in nineteen oh three, almost as though it's too good to be true.
Yeah, well it's weird because if it really is that without distinction of race, sex, or creed. What happened during the Civil Rights movement where stuff was all messed up?
Right, exactly what happened, what happened during the reconstruction period post Civil War? You know the age of Jim Crow and so on. Old Rocky put a lot who was a notorious cheapskape. By the way, he put a lot of money into this, and the statistics are nuts. In nineteen oh three, he kicked off the General Education Board with one million dollars.
In nineteen oh three. Do we have the calculator for that? We do?
One gazillion dollars.
I mean pretty close. He just he just made it rain with a thirty four point six million dollars in today's money in twenty twenty three. Wow, that's nothing. That's tiny beans.
That's tiny beans.
That's tiny beans for that's tiny beans rolled Rocky Old Rockefeller.
Again, we're talking about the kind of wealth that you can only accumulate when you're like the first one that starts an entire industry, you know, like legacy money like that. You can't even do that anymore. No, it's not even possible.
And again, pardon my friends. Here he was in crazy. He we were talking about this off air. He had a personal holiday that was more important than his birthday. It was job day, he called it. It's the first that it was hit the day of his first job. Wow, he was like, he was like the main Oh, the patriarch of secession was that Logan.
Yeah, yeah, Logan Roy and even then being a cheap skate, very very monomaniacal.
In just a few more years, by nineteen oh seven, he had donated somewhere north of forty three million dollars all to this organization. This is the mind blowing thing. We do have inflation calculation for this.
Oh let's here we go, about forty three three million in nineteen oh seven dollars is one point three nine six billion dollars insane. That's crazy to public education.
Well, shit education, specifically to this one pet project. That's crazy. Imagine you don't even really see that anymore. Right to the point about like this guy has wealth that can break the system. It's like at the he is like the uh person at the end of an RPG that doesn't doesn't ever really stop, you know, like when you're done with Skyrim and you've got everything and you've just sort of broken the game and you walk around. He has broken the game. He's walking around god mode. He's on cod mode. Yes, just so. And at the time, this forty three million dollars was the largest gift to any philanthropic organization in the entire history of the US. You can go to the official Rockefeller site and they will they will tout and trumpet his activities there. But the GB was pro education and they were also they were also pretty.
I spy Jonathan Strickland walking by. Oh no, he can't go that way.
That's blocked.
Okay, sorry, there is, let's keep that part in the windows. Is interesting. So this okay, So the GB is pro education, but they also have very specific ideas about who should learn what.
Yeah. Yeah, because there's no distinction between race, sex, or creed. Right, so.
There might be let's call it discrimination based on location. Ah, they work in the South, right, and they work in the South. They work all over the US, but extensively in the South until nineteen sixty four, and they got a reputation for consistently pushing poor and minority students away from college and saying, Okay, who wants who wants to be a philosopher? Your town already has a doctor, you know what I mean? What we need is somebody to take care of all these peaches or all this cotton.
And I could see that maintenance, like vocational stuff is pushed really hard.
Right, we need a car, we need a mechanic.
Yeah, geez.
So that's what they would do, even if kids are like, hey, I'm very good at math, or hey, I have such a knack for languages, like, well, you know, plumbing is kind of like a language.
I bet you could build signs real good.
Yeah. Yeah. And so we got to go to a great paper by these two authors, Luise Fleming and Rita Saslaw. They have They wrote a pretty extensive examination of the history of the GEB and well, let's just give people a quote.
I guess the problem is not with opening doors to poor children, as the philanthropists viewed their donations, but with closing doors to any other area a student might choose to pursue. It is with the belief that a student's lot was known and that they're the future.
Lay wow, Wow, it's mmm. We've seen that in depictions of kind of post apocalyptic slash post utopian stories, right where everybody's future is laid out for them the moment they're born, or even before they're born. Oh sure, all of that kind of thing.
Logan's run.
Yeah.
Oh, it's weird to imagine that it was an it was attempted even back then. Oh from nineteen was it nineteen oh four or nineteen oh three to nineteen sixty four?
Wow, Which means there are people listening today who are alive when the GEB was still active, and the consequences of this thing carry on the Okay, the quote itself, so sometimes people are worried about the wrong thing. The quote itself doesn't really show up until much later. There's a great Snops article you can read that dives into this, the idea that I don't want a nation of thinkers and want a nation of workers. It appears earliest in a documentary in two thousand and six what Yeah called One Nation under Siege, which is sort of a mixtape of different conspiracy theories. You can't find John Rockefeller actually saying this. You can find people saying that he said it, which is not the same thing. But we did find something a little bit more creepy. Regardless of what John said. He had a lot of advisors, and one of them said something not just similar, but way more detailed and way more disturbing. In a book called The Country School of Tomorrow, a Rockefeller advisor named Frederick Taylor Gates, who is a grand Pooba in the gb He in this book from nineteen sixteen says, the following is hard on the paint and the class system stuff. Here the conspiratorial aspect is readily apparent. It's a long quote, but I think we should do the whole thing.
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 among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for. This is an ellipses within the quote great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, states men of whom we may have an ample supply.
The task we said before ourselves is very simple, as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal.
Life just where they are. So we will organize our children into little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way in the homes, in the shops, and on the farm.
We're gonna make better slaves, guys, that's what he say. He's like, Johnny, I got a hot pitch for you. All I need is like forty four million dollars, and we're gonna have the best prolls ever, you know, And is before the use of the word prole like that.
Why is it that I picture a delightful pastry when you say prolls, I'm thinking of perfiderals.
Sorry, that's different. That's different. Yeah, perfiderals, they're the proletariative pastries.
From Pfizer.
Is silent. So it does sound like it though, right. It sounds like he's saying, we want more perfect workers in the bottom of society, in our class system, and there's not room at the top for everyone. Yeah.
We He literally says, we don't need to make any of these things out of anybody that we're going to be working.
With you because those politicians, doctors, engineers, and so on, their jobs are going to go to their kids.
Of course, we're going to make them at Hoffin.
Right, exactly, legacy students. What could go wrong?
Uh?
And if if there are any legacy students in the crowd today hearing this no offense to you as a person, but as a piece of the system, that is intensely problematic. Oh so, anyway, but so this guy is one of the dudes who makes the geb Rockefeller may not have said a specific quote, but he certainly was ten toes down with the idea of more perfect slaves.
It feels that way.
A more perfect union for more perfect slaves.
You know, maybe we should change the title slave by any other name.
You know, it's still still a slave. I mean again, all this goes into the idea of prison labor, you know what I mean, Or it doesn't go into it, but it's.
A similar it does.
It's a similar philosophical loophole. Right on paper, these aren't slaves or in gentured servants or the bad things from history's past. But functionally, yeah, pretty much the same.
Yeah, and the GB in specific, focusing on what we can prove it was created to propagate what they thought of as lower class workers. And as you know on this show, folks, we are huge fans of the trades. More people in the US should be pursuing the trades. College has often in recent decades been sold as a kind of bait and switch, and it put a lot of people in debt, right, And I think that was a feature for the villains in charge of it, not a bug. So there there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, hey, I'm going to become an expert in this technical field. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But the GEB folks were incredibly condescending about this, and they did think that folks who went to public school were beneath them. It is painfully obvious.
What does GEB stand for? Again, generalized educational board board? Is it in any way related to the idea of a GED like how you can kind of get your high school equivalent general equivalency? Is it that these stands for? Okay, yes, I know they're not related, but it does occur to me that that being a thing, a lot of people will do that so they can go ahead and start working on the factories quicker, right, or you can get it like in prison.
That's all. Or your family is under dire circumstances. They need to get at your problem. Yes, I think we all know folks like that. But regardless, the geb accomplish their mission with great effect, and there are intergenerational consequences of this that echo into the modern day. You might be saying, wait, what about Prussia. That's not all. As Billy Mays was wont to say, there's much more to the story. We're going to take a break and hope the Rockefellers let us finish the episode we returned, all right. There are other education conspiracies and they build towards this same argument. There's an economist, a professor out of the Northwestern University named Joel Mochier I believe I'm pronounced correctly, who says these things are real. They're called factory schools, and the idea is not American. It's not from the Geb. It is from Prussia. In the early nineteenth century, the eighteen hundreds of Prussia, education was for the first time provided by the state, and learning was kind of regimented, kind of militarized, so you be grouped by age.
I mean that makes sense, that sounds like what I know of education.
Right, because we were all taught with this kind of Prussian method. It was impersonal, it's efficient, it's standardized. It's the fast food approach to education.
Yeah, every child, when you are this age, you will learn these things. And once you have graduated in revolutions around the sun, you can now read and learn these things. Makes sense to.
Me, Yeah, exactly, and now we have Now we have what leaders of a society always want, consistency and predictability. Right, the following you know, citizen A nine five will matriculate at this age. They will leave school at this age, and when they leave school, they will know the following things, which makes them suitable for the following professions.
Yay.
Now, what does the child want to do doesn't matter, does not matter, because if they're smart and if they're educated correctly, what they'll want to do is what we want them to do. Weird, it's a syop.
It's so strange to me because I, well, we know this, We've talked about this in the past. The United States went through this kind of strange transformation in the times of Cable, where the wants the wants, not the needs of children became paramount for advertising agencies for much of you know, the money that this country made by corporations existing within it selling services and goods to children, And I, I don't know, the there's something, there's something speaking to me from that. It's like it doesn't really oh god, I don't know. I want to say it, like doesn't even really matter what the child wants necessarily when you're thinking about it from this institutional thing, it's more like what is the child excelling at? What is the child good at? Like? What what are the strengths? I don't know, does that make sense or I don't know.
You know, they're within public schools. There are things like gifted programs stuff like that, and program medial programs, and sometimes you are forced to be in remedial programs if you are not excelling in certain things. And obviously grades in and of themselves are a test of your aptitude as to whether you're any good at something or not. But you also, I mean I say this from experience, you have to get your kid tested to see if they qualify for a gifted program, and you have to make an effort to even care enough to put them into it. No one's just gonna like come and take you under their wing, you know, and put you in the gifted program. It's something that the parents have to be cognizant of and be aware of and then also make some outside efforts to get their kid in that track. So yeah, it's a thing.
It definitely is. It definitely is a thing. And again it's an imperfect system. But to your point mat about the advertising reaching through children, I I gotta send you this compilation of all those creepy at very blatant advertisements from the beginning of that era, where it's stuff like don't wait kids, ron didn't tell your parents and buy Kellogg's as best as flakes.
Yeah, no, I know, and I'm sorry to make that weird point. I don't know. Often I feel like some of my thinking is just silly and old school. But I want versus need, I think is an important thing when it comes to building. Sure, again, a country, an industry, a nation, or whatever you want to call it.
Like building a child is building the country. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. They're the foundation of a continuing civilization. So that is why the powerful will always focus on the children, sometimes with sincerity, often with ulterior motives, like in this case the economists that we mentioned there. Doctor Moykure says, much of the education kids were receiving in these Prussian schools, it wasn't technical in nature, it was social and moral and it's because of the Industrial Revolution. This is what happened. Said. Workers had always spent their days in a domestic setting. You know, you're an artisan, you're a farmer, you work out of your cottage. They had to be taught to follow orders to get into this kind of regimented hierarchy because unless you were in a military or the clergy, you would have never had that experience. And says then they had to be punctual, they had to be sober, they had to be docile, and the early industrial capitalist spent a huge amount of time socially conditioning their labor forces. Sunday schools. They were reaching people through Sunday school They were reaching children, right, and they wanted to make the workers more knowligeable, you could say, more receptive to incentives.
And that really checks out Ben, it does. I'm thinking about my son going through public school system. I'm thinking about my public school like early early right when when we're really focused on learning the pledge, learning to sit down, the hand gesture or some vocalization that means every kid has to sit down and be quiet, or I think it's still used those kinds of things. And it's also that there's a task master, a teacher, you know, a foreman, whatever it is going to be, can say advocate any position that any of us find ourselves in.
We're going to have to be beholden to somebody. So I mean.
School is just.
That means anything I say after this you don't have to take me serious. No, I mean school is intended to socialize us in a way where we do realize. I always tell my kid, like school, you just have to get through it, even though it sucks, because it's teaching you. It's a it's a model situation where you have to learn that everything isn't about you, and then you do have to think about what is the bigger picture, you know, and you have to also learn how to play the damn game.
You have to learn to collaborate with people like one of the This is something they don't talk about a lot. But if you want to indoctrinate people, the biggest thing you do is get them to perform series of ritualized vocalizations and physical movements in sync.
It's so singing the alphabet s T d wyd s g d w I T k oh god, not a lot.
So, I mean that's true, that's that's how you create these behaviors. And this is the thing. Okay, this is insidious, it's not great, but it's kind of necessary in the Industrial Revolution. I mean a lot of folks like if to the point about authorities, if you took orders from someone in your typical job before the Industrial Revolution and you weren't in the military or the clergy, the person giving you the orders was like, your dad, you're your dominatrix. Yes, very common in agrarian society, the dad or the domb right, which is a famous Chaucer book. So the so for a lot of folks, the idea of going to this factory and working and taking orders from somebody who isn't even related to them is emasculating and humiliating. They're like, you're not my dad, you're not even a priest.
Or the king.
Yeah, you're not the king. What are you like the king of the lace makers? Get out of here.
Jeez, that's weird. To think about. It's true.
As problematic as some of this stuff is, I do think it is interesting how we've moved so far away from like the apprentice kind of program, and which I would argue is actually really good. Like if you want to become an expert at something, you need to work under someone who has actual experience, and nowadays it's like everything's so free wheeling you kind of you want to figure out how to do something, you just look it up on YouTube and you can kind of figure it out yourself. I think, honestly, college is going to become less and less relevant as history goes on.
You know, well, I think the things that make college or university relevant may shift. That's right, because the I mean, the one of the big points of going to an IVY League school is not so much the education you receive and as the as the tribalism of it. Right, And you can look at numerous studies that show matriculation in those in those societies does not equate to higher performance unfortunately. And that might be an episode for another day, but to this point, you know, there are still like anybody listening is in the trades now, there are still these really robust apprenticeship systems that work really well. They just take a long time. You become a journeyman electrician or whatever.
So that's okay, maybe I see I retract my previous statement. I guess I just it doesn't seem like it's as out in the open or as like part of the general its system.
You're absolutely right, it's not as publicized or prioritized or normalized. So okay. The question is, though they had to do this, like this is kind of hacking or bootstrapping, as we said earlier, a huge social shift from agrarian, rural agricultural economies to having people work in industry in factories. The factory suck, by the way. The conditions are just terrible.
And what we haven't even gotten to reform of those types yet, right, People are still losing fingers and limbs.
Yeah, yeah, and they're getting the crap beat out of them and stuff.
And kids are working.
Children are working there, you know, because they can get in smaller spaces. Everybody's got black long slight diversion.
But my dear friend, I think you guys both know Peyton friend of the show, he pointed out to me, sort of a modern he's concerned about a modern kind of callback to this or he said he saw some shockingly young kids in New York City doing uber eats deliveries on bicycles.
I mean child labor. You know, there was a meat eat packing interests that got just got caught with child labor. Child labor is coming back. That's what's happened, right, and like how education may be returning to some more to some darker days. There was this thing in Quzi, an author named Alison Schrager who said that the fat cats of the industrial Revolution in Europe, they made the John Rockefeller decision. It sounds weird for big time investors and capitalists to do this, but those factory owners were the biggest champions for the Elementary Education Act of eighteen seventy and that's what made education universally free and available in England. So for some reason, people who ordinarily are very not philanthropic doubled down on a way to get to your kids and a way to frame how your children see the world. We don't know, You're right, yeah, and it is thought control. And this Prussian style approach made its way to the US thanks to a guy named horus Man out in Massachusetts. The rest is history. Let it's also the present day, it's also the future. I think conspiracy is real. It's very much real, even if it was necessary. And a lot of those quiet state by state decisions here in the United States about what can and cannot be taught, they hinge on ulterior motives, They hinge on stuff they don't want you to know.
It really does just make me think about what of my base, my baseline reactions to things have been honed by me going through that educational system.
Right the idea of what constant it's a full workday is one.
Yeah, it's just little things that I can't it's not possible for me to even recognize in a day to day life. You'd have to live in a different culture or yeh see it, or literally have a sidewy side observe, like, oh, your reaction to that is very similar to when you were in kindergarten, and this.
You know exactly, and it's it's very tiny things. It's also much larger things. And I you know, obviously this is not to denigrate teachers. We're no fans of education. This is not to take it to take pot shots at anybody, but uh, well, John Rockefeller, he deserves it. And we know it went a little bit long with this one, but it is a real conspiracy and we'd love to hear your thoughts, folks. I mean also, i'd love to hear how things are changing. I remember, I can't remember who I was talking to. The friend of mine who has a couple of kids, was telling me the number one thing that kids want to be that she sees our kids wanting to be influencers in like middle school. They'll say, what do you want to be when you grow up? Astronauts have taken a back seat now it's now it's influencers.
Gotta blow up the main frames, guys.
Yeah, how can we stop this?
Right?
Somebody listening knows how to blow up the mainframes.
So yeah, So we thank you as always for tuning in. Fellow conspiracy realists. We cannot wait to hear your thoughts, your approaches to education, what you think about these conspiracies. While that John Rockefeller quote may not be exactly what he said, it is very close to what he thought. It was.
Frederick's quote, not me right.
Right different Frederick, and they were very much think ye doers. So let us know your thoughts. Promise, it's just gonna be between you and us and the NSSAY unless you give us permission to use your voice and or message on air.
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