The Goslings A Study of American Schools (ePub)

Excerpt: 'Life has given you one of its precious treasures, a child; a body to nurture, a character to train, a mind with endless possibilities of growth, a soul with hidden stores of tenderness and beauty-all these are Nature's gifts. Modern science has shown that within the child's soul lies magically locked up all the past of our race; also, it is evident that within it lies all the future of our race. What our children are now being made is what America will be. You send these little ones to school. Twenty-three millions of them troop off every week-day morning, with their shining faces newly washed, their clothing cleaned and mended. You bear them, you rear them, with infinite pains and devotion you prepare them, and feed them into the gigantic educational machine. You do not know much about this machine. You have turned it over to others to run. Every year you pay to maintain it a billion dollars of wealth which you have produced by real and earnest toil. You take it for granted that this billion dollars is competently used; that those who run the machine are giving your twenty-three million children the best education that forty-three dollars and forty-seven cents per child will buy. The purpose of this book is to show you how the "invisible government" of Big Business which controls the rest of America has taken over the charge of your children. In the course of a public debate with the writer, in the Civic Club in New York City, May, 1922, Dr. Tildsley, district superintendent of the public school system of that city, made the statement: "I do not know any school system in the United States which is run for the benefit of the children. They are all run for the benefit of the gang." This statement, made upon high authority, is the thesis of "The Goslings." Come with me and let me show you what is this "gang" which runs the school system of the United States; how they got their power, what use they make of it, and what this means to the bodies and minds of your twenty-three million little ones.'