"Myth of the Robber Barons" and Selective Instruction

I'm just finishing the book Myth of the Robber Barons by Burton Fulsom. He describes a business lives of Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, the Scrantons, Charles Schwab, Rockefeller and Andrew Mellon. He describes these men as "market entrepreneurs" who each took initiatives to lower costs of production and passed those savings on to the customer, in an attempt to increase profit through volume with much less emphasis on profit margin. He contrasts these men with what he calls "political entrepreneurs," who clamored for subsidies (and abused their stipulations), pools, restrictive tariffs, price-fixing, and shoddy workmanship to increase their profit. At the end of the book Dr. Fulsom analyzes how historians have described both the market entrepreneurs and political ones. In general, historians lump all these guys in together and emphasizes the need for big government to regulate business to "level the playing field" but deemphasizes government's role in corrupting the playing field in the first place.

It is with these ideas in mind that's something crystallized for me. I began thinking about the present state of human knowledge, especially the accelerating rate at which the pool of human knowledge grows. There was a time only a few centuries ago in which a person with above average intelligence and above average curiosity could essentially know a large percentage of everything that anybody knew at that time in the entire world. But now with estimates of the body of human knowledge doubling about every five years, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to know everything that humankind knows today.

This is where the insidious nature of progressive education comes into play. Like most things, education time for both children and adults is a scarce commodity with many alternative uses, and therefore must be used economically. With the veritable certainty that we can't possibly teach kids (or even doctoral candidates) everything, teachers become not only the delivery system of knowledge but also the arbiters of what knowledge is delivered and what is ignored. When done carefully and deliberately "educators" can go a long way towards shaping the whole world-view of their students. In short, since the basket of human knowledge is so full and so big it is easy to cherry pick lessons to mold the "young skulls full of mush" (in Rush Limbaugh's words) in the educators' own Progressive image. As a matter of fact, there are universities and even whole cities where the Progressive world-view goes unchallenged. And since the students have been conditioned to identify "smart, educated and cosmopolitan" with Progressive, then anything that conflicts with the Progressive world-view must then be "dumb, uneducated and unsophisticated." That's how Progressives replicate themselves, not by winning the argument, but by smothering dissent.

And that's the revelation that I had this morning, sitting on a coil of stainless steel band at the window factory. It's not so much a solution as an act of clarifying of the problem. And it doesn't answer the "why" as much as some of the mechanics of "how" this indoctrination is done. I do think that keeping this clarification in mind will help me going forward, especially at the school board meeting at New Oxford in a few weeks.