It is the intention of New Earth Institute to create and maintain a Space of Love. Our first priority as an educational institution is to commit to love as best we can at all times. For an environment of loving acceptance that encourages intelligence to function unimpeded by fear, by censure, by ridicule, by rebuke, all participants agree to honor and respect themselves and others.
In this Space of Love natural affection (hugging, touching with permission) is not regarded with suspicion, but deemed appropriate to loving individuals. It’s a sign that love, not fear, rules, that demonstrations of love are natural, not evil.
In a climate of love, life flourishes in the open rather than hides in the shadows. This is a climate. of brotherhood and sisterhood. Love, not fear, protects us like a gentle lioness.
FREEDOM
The Space of Love is also a pledge to freedom of thought, freedom of feeling, and freedom of expression. But freedom is not license to harm; At NEI we forfeit our right to harm others in overt and subtle ways. Here we are accountable for our words and deeds. Here we learn how to communicate non-violently and non-aggressively. We agree to honor others at all times. We learn to communicate our negative emotions --- anger, hate, jealousy, fear, suspicion --- in a way that communicates our truth, but preserves respect for the other.
Free people occasionally make waves. Except on the basics about how we treat each other, there is room for disagreement, for difference of opinion, for eccentricity, for individuality, for originality.
ORIGINALITY
At New Earth Institute the spark of originality is celebrated. Love does not accept mediocrity; conformity is not the norm. We applaud the genius and creativity of everyone. The fires of enthusiasm and passion shine brightly here. Flowers only bloom in the presence of light and love.
TEACHERS
Teachers here are not authority figures. They do not pretend to, and are not expected to know all the answers; they are capable of routinely admitting their ignorance. Questions, not answers, is the name of our game. The dominant question is not “Who knows the answer,” but who is interested in discovering the answer. Inquiry is our modus operandi.
Here there is no hierarchy, breeding fear and retribution. A teaching style that depends on earned authority rather than artificial authority teaches a different lesson to students, a lesson of freedom and respect; arrogance has no legitimacy in relationships among free people. At NEI the title does not possess authority; the individual who merits authority may.
Teachers are not in a class by themselves. Since they have no automatic and instant authority, they can be openly criticized and challenged.
TEACHERS AS STUDENTS
Unless teachers are avid students themselves, they fail to fulfill their role.
To ensure our Space of Love, it is expected that each teacher makes a regular practice of expanding his or her consciousness, discovering and coming to terms with his or her shadow self, so that he or she does not contaminate students with unresolved issues and well-disguised negativity.
Authentic Education as Inspiration
Education without inspiration is like fast foods without nutrition. It desiccates the soul and leeches vitality. Inspiration nourishes the higher self; it is our eagle that soars. Inspiration expands perspective so that the spark in us is set aflame. Our viewpoint becomes exalted; we are awakened to our potential.
Mankind without a vision, degenerates. He lives only on the lower mental plane, cut off from what is life giving. He is vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, servitude, and degradation. He becomes a blind man, having no capacity to distinguish what is invigorating from what is destructive. He works only for pay; he’s enthralled to his paymaster; he lives without hope.
Inspiration come from within although it may be triggered from the outside. It is a sudden recognition of one’s own authenticity as a child of Nature. Inspiration animates, quickens us to move in a new direction, spurs us to do what seemed impossible. It is an encounter with the deepest truth.
The hidden source of this divine arousal is life itself. Life triggers life by provoking a genuine living response.
When a teacher teaches not to the mind alone, but to the sentient being behind the mind, he speaks to the soul. When a student is directly addressed in this way, he responds with his imagination as well as his reason. He awakens!
The materials used is teaching must be those that possess life in the first place. Facts and abstract concepts will not do. Information out of context is dead. Theories without live demonstrations are dead weight to be memorized and carried for life like a mental ball and chain.
What has the power to ignite students is fairy tales, pregnant stories, the great myths of the world, poetry, song, dance, drama, and art.
Not dead scientific dogma and encyclopedic information, but science as careful observation and interaction with living Nature. A trip into the wilderness where life abounds, planting and tending a garden where organic interfaces with inorganic, communicating with animals in a climate of love and respect --- these uplift and stir the imagination.
The wonders of mathematics, especially as it interact with nature, sacred geometry, and architecture.! Seeing the beautiful patterns of numbers, becoming mentally dexterous and playing with numbers -- this inspires.
History --- not as a succession of conquests or a series of dates --- but as absorbing biographies and dramas with endless interconnections and fascinating sidebars --- inspires. Anthropology, the panorama of the cultural experiments of man through time and space --- when other cultures are not viewed with disgust like the study of slimy, alien beings, but empathetically and imaginatively, excites and stirs the imagination.
Mankind without a vision, degenerates. He lives only on the lower mental plane, cut off from what is life giving. He is vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, servitude, and degradation. He becomes a blind man, having no capacity to distinguish what is invigorating from what is destructive. He works only for pay; he’s enthralled to his paymaster; he lives without hope.
Inspiration come from within although it may be triggered from the outside. It is a sudden recognition of one’s own authenticity as a child of Nature. Inspiration animates, quickens us to move in a new direction, spurs us to do what seemed impossible. It is an encounter with the deepest truth.
The hidden source of this divine arousal is life itself. Life triggers life by provoking a genuine living response.
When a teacher teaches not to the mind alone, but to the sentient being behind the mind, he speaks to the soul. When a student is directly addressed in this way, he responds with his imagination as well as his reason. He awakens!
The materials used is teaching must be those that possess life in the first place. Facts and abstract concepts will not do. Information out of context is dead. Theories without live demonstrations are dead weight to be memorized and carried for life like a mental ball and chain.
What has the power to ignite students is fairy tales, pregnant stories, the great myths of the world, poetry, song, dance, drama, and art.
Not dead scientific dogma and encyclopedic information, but science as careful observation and interaction with living Nature. A trip into the wilderness where life abounds, planting and tending a garden where organic interfaces with inorganic, communicating with animals in a climate of love and respect --- these uplift and stir the imagination.
The wonders of mathematics, especially as it interact with nature, sacred geometry, and architecture.! Seeing the beautiful patterns of numbers, becoming mentally dexterous and playing with numbers -- this inspires.
History --- not as a succession of conquests or a series of dates --- but as absorbing biographies and dramas with endless interconnections and fascinating sidebars --- inspires. Anthropology, the panorama of the cultural experiments of man through time and space --- when other cultures are not viewed with disgust like the study of slimy, alien beings, but empathetically and imaginatively, excites and stirs the imagination.
Education Today: America in the Prussian Shadow
Horace Mann, the first Superintendent of Schools in America, loved order above all, and as he had been frustrated in trying to standardize Massachusetts schools, he saw the already completed Prussian model as a shortcut to his goal. His success in adopting Prussian-style schools changed the course not only of American education, but of American history, as well.
For Mann imported a cynical system created by elite Prussian industrialists in order to produce a fascist state with an ideology that promoted:
* Dictatorial government.
* A centralized control of the national economy, political decisions, military life and operations, and education.
* Stiff and violent repression of any opposition or any variance in ideas.
* Censorship of artistic expression.
* Record keeping and regular surveillance of its citizens.
* Unquestioned nationalism.
Prussia’s highest virtue was absolute obedience to authority. For the small group of industrialists, the goal was generating the highest profits possible in a state that sponsored an invincible army. There were, in short, no individual rights or liberties, except for the elite. All power was held by the state, controlled by the industrialists.
Yet even Prussia’s educational system, which Mann investigated, had two faces.. For the elite, the Realschule was to be the place where true education would take place. Here students would freely interact, discuss topics, debate and, in general, learn to think. Here they would gain leadership skills and become identified with the elite class. Here they would dabble in classical education.
Horace Mann, however, rejected this system of education in favor of the one that specialized in creating human robots for factories and the military.
According to John Gatto’s highly documented Underground History of American Education, 92% of Prussia’s children were forced to attend the school that prepared students for one of two occupations: obedient soldiers in the army, or obedient workers in the factories.
This school for commoners was the Volksschule. It was this model school that Horace Mann chose to adopt and transplant to Massachusetts, the model that was to be eventually adopted by every state in the United States, and then by our federal government, and which has become in everything but name our federal system of compulsory, national education. Everything in this school was designed to break the spirit of individuals and train them to become bored, undifferentiated sheep-workers, willing to relinquish personal dreams for the glory of the state.
Prussia, as the first military-industrial-educational complex to inaugurate the Industrial Revolution, appealed to industrialists in America and throughout the world. Because Prussia represented the triumph of fascist planning and practice, it inspired the would-be fascist industrialists everywhere, as did Hitler’s absolutist beliefs and propaganda in a later age. It maximized and guaranteed obscene profits for the already wealthy. It created an army of compliant, submissive workers for industry and created a military force capable of defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, and exacting revenge on France for humiliating Prussia in the battle of Jena in 1806. It proved to the satisfaction of many that “might makes right,” that to the brutal victor come all the spoils.
As Gatto explains:
“The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
“The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the ‘Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time it would be different.
“In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no long be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that ‘work makes free,’ and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte’s challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther’s plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the ‘Old Deluder Satan’ law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century; only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school as late as 1920. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.
“Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference."
John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education, P.131-132
In the 1840s, the totalitarian state of Prussia adopted many strategies reminiscent of first state educational system of the ancient military camp of Sparta. Those strategies, which clearly reveal the mindset of its proponents, included:
1 Compulsory attendance
2. Regimentation and uniformity and standardization in all aspects of the school day
3. Worship of efficiency and mechanization
4. Centralized control of all schools
5. Planned limited intellectual development
6. Socially Engineered Obedience and Subordination (managing the thought life of children through the new Scientific Psychology of Mind Control and Conditioned Learning)
7. Science at the center of the curriculum
8. Universal Standards for all children
9. State controlled Teacher Certification
10. Segregating children in classrooms by Age
11. Universal Child Labor Laws preventing children from working prescribed for all others.
12. Indoctrination with a rigid, planned curriculum for all grades
13. Forbidding the use of phonics in learning to read
14. Use of Controlled Vocabulary to regulate what students could read and could not read
15. Reliance on State Sponsored Textbooks (information was homogenized, altered, made politically correct, passionless anddull)
16. Social studies (with pointed lessons on how to be an ideal citizen) replaced any knowledge of history and the historical process
17. The use of the bogus science of Phrenology (bumps on the head represent developed and undeveloped regions of the brain) to manage student behavior
18. The state assumed legal guardianship of each child
Prussian schools thus foreshadowed the employment of compulsory schooling for national indoctrination in the United States, in Great Britain, in Soviet Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.
Prussia, it is clear, was a state where absolute control could not even be questioned. This repressive regime totally managed the life of its citizens. The surveillance of the state reached into every aspect of life.
In this way, the system would guarantee education of the state, by the state, and for the state. The child became the moldable property of the state, to be used solely for its purposes.
All 18 of these strategies of fascist Prussia were seized on by Horace Mann and made part of the Massachusetts public schools; most were in place within a decade. There were many in Massachusetts, probably the majority, that could not reconcile individual liberty with compulsory, state-sponsored education, and who strongly resented and resisted turning their children over to the state.
But Mann was a powerful individual with a network of strong political connections gained by his years as a Massachusetts representative and senator. He was known for being a persuasive orator, a successful lawyer, for his office as President of the Massachusetts’ Senate, for his aggressive establishment of educational reforms and forceful attempts to standardize and regulate schools as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and for creating a well-regulated Massachusetts lunatic asylum in Worcester. Everyone who owed him a favor was enlisted to vote or persuaded others to vote for his compulsory school bill. The law passed in Massachusetts in 1852. The Prussian model of education had been successfully transplanted to America. From that point on, America was destined to be controlled by the industrial magnates.
Mann was able to introduce an officially non-sectarian education that, in fact, was based on good Protestant principles that would protect the state from the huge influx of Catholics from Ireland.
Over the next 70 years, battles between proponents of a free educational system (mostly parents) and those who advocated the uniformity that could only be accomplished through compulsory education, a la Prussia, would be waged in every other state as well. The combination of political power and the interests of corporations eventually overcame the unorganized opposition of parents, although 16 states resisted and opposed the process until early in the 20th century.
After their capitulation, individual states used their discretion on how strictly to compel their students to accept the formula based on authoritarian absolutism.
For me, as a student in the compulsory education system (grades K–12), as a teacher working for the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs’ government schools in Inuit (Eskimo) communities in Alaska (I had to leave because the politics of the bureau tore my heart out), as a teacher in a typical private school (I rebelled at the lack of individual expression and the extreme control exercised on the student body), and as the founder of The Well School, compulsory education was repulsive. We refuted the fascistic model and the thinking that inevitably supports it and created, instead, an education devoted to the development of individual consciousness, individual expression, and the knowledge that comes from honoring individual experience.
The irony is that the great majority of teachers working in our national, compulsory, education system are well-meaning individuals, many deeply committed to the welfare of their students, as well as to the obligatory requirements of their job. This irony is compounded by another: the vast, American public is almost totally ignorant that our “public schools” are based on the principles developed by Prussian industrialists `with a lust for absolute power and absolute control over the minds of others. The System
the Prussians devised is a system intended only for exploitation in the service of violence towards others. It works to rob us of genius, of independence and self-reliance, of self-respect, and of an awareness of living creatures.
Americans have, like the Germans and the English (who also copied Prussian educational innovations), interwoven into our national psyche an unconscious adoration of power, regardless of whether we, as individuals, play the part of the wolves or the sheep in our economic drama of survival. We are unconsciously addicted to violence, to brutal competition, to cruelty, to torture, and to indifference.
Today, violence is the mindset of kids, who play at killing day after day in video games. It is the mindset of the movie and television industry, which finds that random, indiscriminate violence creates, for them, excessive profits. It is the mindset of educational bureaucrats who, for a little power over parents and children, sell their soul to the system.
There are other ironies that should be noted. The colonists fought a bitter war to free themselves from the bureaucratic control of the English and English corporations operating in America. Yet, ultimately, every state in this “free” nation voted for bureaucratic control of their children. And now, our federal government, through the Department of Education, directs what we call “voluntary” (there is nothing voluntary about it, for federal monies to state educational agencies can be cut off in an instant), national goals and standards (strict conformity always appealed to fascistic thinking), which every child must accept as the law of the land. We have centralized education, and put children not under the control of their parents or the tutor chosen by their parents, but under the control of a federalized, two-tiered bureaucracy, in which states now bend to the will of a national imperative to create dumbed-down, obedient conformists. Often, the parents’ only recourse is to remove their children from government schools and seek the right of home education under the rules and regulations of their state.
We see that children in America are now owned by the state, as they were in Prussia. They do not only live under the laws of a government that protects their independence and freedom, but according to the multitude of exacting prescriptions of educational bureaucrats, politicians, and educational “experts” who care nothing about raising consciousness.
Is it not odd that Americans see a compulsory, national educational system, still based rigidly on the Prussian model of absolute, fascistic control, a necessity for Democracy? What pretense! What hypocrisy! For over 150 years, Americans had lived with total freedom of educational choices and maintained a level of literacy that cannot be approached today, with all ourmandated, up-to-date, scientific research and instruction by a host of fully certified teachers.
Students who attended the hundreds of common schools in early America were already literate before they left the protection of home to enter the variety of schools of their day. They did not require 12 years to learn to read intelligently or to fail to do so. With no accredited teachers (just mom and pop, or a private, uncertified tutor), one or two years was more than enough to read and understand what most college freshmen cannot read today with 12 long years of compulsory schooling: the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Plutarch, etc.
In this country, most of us have been subjected to compulsory schooling; public schooling (12–13 years in length) functions today as an extended right of passage. Despite its failure to create enthusiastic, curious, creative students, its graduates continue to act as apologists and defendants for U.S. forced schooling. For many of us, the public school system has had much to do with the way we were formed
For Mann imported a cynical system created by elite Prussian industrialists in order to produce a fascist state with an ideology that promoted:
* Dictatorial government.
* A centralized control of the national economy, political decisions, military life and operations, and education.
* Stiff and violent repression of any opposition or any variance in ideas.
* Censorship of artistic expression.
* Record keeping and regular surveillance of its citizens.
* Unquestioned nationalism.
Prussia’s highest virtue was absolute obedience to authority. For the small group of industrialists, the goal was generating the highest profits possible in a state that sponsored an invincible army. There were, in short, no individual rights or liberties, except for the elite. All power was held by the state, controlled by the industrialists.
Yet even Prussia’s educational system, which Mann investigated, had two faces.. For the elite, the Realschule was to be the place where true education would take place. Here students would freely interact, discuss topics, debate and, in general, learn to think. Here they would gain leadership skills and become identified with the elite class. Here they would dabble in classical education.
Horace Mann, however, rejected this system of education in favor of the one that specialized in creating human robots for factories and the military.
According to John Gatto’s highly documented Underground History of American Education, 92% of Prussia’s children were forced to attend the school that prepared students for one of two occupations: obedient soldiers in the army, or obedient workers in the factories.
This school for commoners was the Volksschule. It was this model school that Horace Mann chose to adopt and transplant to Massachusetts, the model that was to be eventually adopted by every state in the United States, and then by our federal government, and which has become in everything but name our federal system of compulsory, national education. Everything in this school was designed to break the spirit of individuals and train them to become bored, undifferentiated sheep-workers, willing to relinquish personal dreams for the glory of the state.
Prussia, as the first military-industrial-educational complex to inaugurate the Industrial Revolution, appealed to industrialists in America and throughout the world. Because Prussia represented the triumph of fascist planning and practice, it inspired the would-be fascist industrialists everywhere, as did Hitler’s absolutist beliefs and propaganda in a later age. It maximized and guaranteed obscene profits for the already wealthy. It created an army of compliant, submissive workers for industry and created a military force capable of defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, and exacting revenge on France for humiliating Prussia in the battle of Jena in 1806. It proved to the satisfaction of many that “might makes right,” that to the brutal victor come all the spoils.
As Gatto explains:
“The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
“The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the ‘Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time it would be different.
“In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no long be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that ‘work makes free,’ and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte’s challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther’s plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the ‘Old Deluder Satan’ law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century; only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school as late as 1920. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.
“Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference."
John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education, P.131-132
In the 1840s, the totalitarian state of Prussia adopted many strategies reminiscent of first state educational system of the ancient military camp of Sparta. Those strategies, which clearly reveal the mindset of its proponents, included:
1 Compulsory attendance
2. Regimentation and uniformity and standardization in all aspects of the school day
3. Worship of efficiency and mechanization
4. Centralized control of all schools
5. Planned limited intellectual development
6. Socially Engineered Obedience and Subordination (managing the thought life of children through the new Scientific Psychology of Mind Control and Conditioned Learning)
7. Science at the center of the curriculum
8. Universal Standards for all children
9. State controlled Teacher Certification
10. Segregating children in classrooms by Age
11. Universal Child Labor Laws preventing children from working prescribed for all others.
12. Indoctrination with a rigid, planned curriculum for all grades
13. Forbidding the use of phonics in learning to read
14. Use of Controlled Vocabulary to regulate what students could read and could not read
15. Reliance on State Sponsored Textbooks (information was homogenized, altered, made politically correct, passionless anddull)
16. Social studies (with pointed lessons on how to be an ideal citizen) replaced any knowledge of history and the historical process
17. The use of the bogus science of Phrenology (bumps on the head represent developed and undeveloped regions of the brain) to manage student behavior
18. The state assumed legal guardianship of each child
Prussian schools thus foreshadowed the employment of compulsory schooling for national indoctrination in the United States, in Great Britain, in Soviet Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.
Prussia, it is clear, was a state where absolute control could not even be questioned. This repressive regime totally managed the life of its citizens. The surveillance of the state reached into every aspect of life.
In this way, the system would guarantee education of the state, by the state, and for the state. The child became the moldable property of the state, to be used solely for its purposes.
All 18 of these strategies of fascist Prussia were seized on by Horace Mann and made part of the Massachusetts public schools; most were in place within a decade. There were many in Massachusetts, probably the majority, that could not reconcile individual liberty with compulsory, state-sponsored education, and who strongly resented and resisted turning their children over to the state.
But Mann was a powerful individual with a network of strong political connections gained by his years as a Massachusetts representative and senator. He was known for being a persuasive orator, a successful lawyer, for his office as President of the Massachusetts’ Senate, for his aggressive establishment of educational reforms and forceful attempts to standardize and regulate schools as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and for creating a well-regulated Massachusetts lunatic asylum in Worcester. Everyone who owed him a favor was enlisted to vote or persuaded others to vote for his compulsory school bill. The law passed in Massachusetts in 1852. The Prussian model of education had been successfully transplanted to America. From that point on, America was destined to be controlled by the industrial magnates.
Mann was able to introduce an officially non-sectarian education that, in fact, was based on good Protestant principles that would protect the state from the huge influx of Catholics from Ireland.
Over the next 70 years, battles between proponents of a free educational system (mostly parents) and those who advocated the uniformity that could only be accomplished through compulsory education, a la Prussia, would be waged in every other state as well. The combination of political power and the interests of corporations eventually overcame the unorganized opposition of parents, although 16 states resisted and opposed the process until early in the 20th century.
After their capitulation, individual states used their discretion on how strictly to compel their students to accept the formula based on authoritarian absolutism.
For me, as a student in the compulsory education system (grades K–12), as a teacher working for the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs’ government schools in Inuit (Eskimo) communities in Alaska (I had to leave because the politics of the bureau tore my heart out), as a teacher in a typical private school (I rebelled at the lack of individual expression and the extreme control exercised on the student body), and as the founder of The Well School, compulsory education was repulsive. We refuted the fascistic model and the thinking that inevitably supports it and created, instead, an education devoted to the development of individual consciousness, individual expression, and the knowledge that comes from honoring individual experience.
The irony is that the great majority of teachers working in our national, compulsory, education system are well-meaning individuals, many deeply committed to the welfare of their students, as well as to the obligatory requirements of their job. This irony is compounded by another: the vast, American public is almost totally ignorant that our “public schools” are based on the principles developed by Prussian industrialists `with a lust for absolute power and absolute control over the minds of others. The System
the Prussians devised is a system intended only for exploitation in the service of violence towards others. It works to rob us of genius, of independence and self-reliance, of self-respect, and of an awareness of living creatures.
Americans have, like the Germans and the English (who also copied Prussian educational innovations), interwoven into our national psyche an unconscious adoration of power, regardless of whether we, as individuals, play the part of the wolves or the sheep in our economic drama of survival. We are unconsciously addicted to violence, to brutal competition, to cruelty, to torture, and to indifference.
Today, violence is the mindset of kids, who play at killing day after day in video games. It is the mindset of the movie and television industry, which finds that random, indiscriminate violence creates, for them, excessive profits. It is the mindset of educational bureaucrats who, for a little power over parents and children, sell their soul to the system.
There are other ironies that should be noted. The colonists fought a bitter war to free themselves from the bureaucratic control of the English and English corporations operating in America. Yet, ultimately, every state in this “free” nation voted for bureaucratic control of their children. And now, our federal government, through the Department of Education, directs what we call “voluntary” (there is nothing voluntary about it, for federal monies to state educational agencies can be cut off in an instant), national goals and standards (strict conformity always appealed to fascistic thinking), which every child must accept as the law of the land. We have centralized education, and put children not under the control of their parents or the tutor chosen by their parents, but under the control of a federalized, two-tiered bureaucracy, in which states now bend to the will of a national imperative to create dumbed-down, obedient conformists. Often, the parents’ only recourse is to remove their children from government schools and seek the right of home education under the rules and regulations of their state.
We see that children in America are now owned by the state, as they were in Prussia. They do not only live under the laws of a government that protects their independence and freedom, but according to the multitude of exacting prescriptions of educational bureaucrats, politicians, and educational “experts” who care nothing about raising consciousness.
Is it not odd that Americans see a compulsory, national educational system, still based rigidly on the Prussian model of absolute, fascistic control, a necessity for Democracy? What pretense! What hypocrisy! For over 150 years, Americans had lived with total freedom of educational choices and maintained a level of literacy that cannot be approached today, with all ourmandated, up-to-date, scientific research and instruction by a host of fully certified teachers.
Students who attended the hundreds of common schools in early America were already literate before they left the protection of home to enter the variety of schools of their day. They did not require 12 years to learn to read intelligently or to fail to do so. With no accredited teachers (just mom and pop, or a private, uncertified tutor), one or two years was more than enough to read and understand what most college freshmen cannot read today with 12 long years of compulsory schooling: the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Plutarch, etc.
In this country, most of us have been subjected to compulsory schooling; public schooling (12–13 years in length) functions today as an extended right of passage. Despite its failure to create enthusiastic, curious, creative students, its graduates continue to act as apologists and defendants for U.S. forced schooling. For many of us, the public school system has had much to do with the way we were formed
Meeting the Needs of Teens and Young Adults
New Earth Institute also functions is an innovative high school for teenagers and young adults that recognizes and addresses the deepest needs of teens, including:
1. The need to become self-reliant and independent
When you learn practical skills through activities (building, maintaining the campus, cooking, baking, making cheese, gardening and animal care, (and 100 other projects), you practice basic life skills, and are trusted with greater and greater responsibility.
2. The need to belong and be valued
New Earth Institute is, first and foremost, an inclusive community where you are respected and given great responsibilities.
3. The need to feel intelligent and alive.
The many forms of intelligence (intellectual grasp, artistic genius, elevated consciousness, interpersonal skills, the ability to articulate emotions, etc.) are honored at NEI. We pledge to recognize each student’s genius; we honor that pledge by helping each individual recognize her or his unique brilliance.
4. The need to become organized, responsible, and trustworthy
If you are willing to become more efficient and effective, if you are willing to do your best, if you are willing to learn to keep your word, if you are willing to work, and if you are willing to be more appreciated, we have a school for you.
5. The need to serve others
At NEI you are not just a student; you are expected to work for the good of our community, for the good of the world.
6. The need to discover your unique identity
At NEI you awaken to many sides of your nature, and become aware of your many possibilities and many weaknesses. Over and over, you chose you ideals, and conform to who you wish to become. This cyclical process will reveal to you your unique identity.
7. The need to think for yourself
NEI recognizes that individuals need to think critically and learn to trust their own sense of what makes sense. We’ll help you to learn to discriminate what is healthy, wholesome, and true for you as an individual, and what is not. We empower you to become who you want to be.
8. The need to ask questions, to investigate mysteries, and to seek and tell the truth.The intention of NEI is to encourage careful observation and enthusiastic inquiry into academic study and into life. Students who pose their own questions initiate the process of meaningful learning.
9. The need to for a safe forum for communications
To be fully human we all need to learn to communicate efficiently, effectively, and clearly. But we also need to learn to communicate honestly and nonviolently with others so others can truly hear what we have to say. Therefore, NEI provides a weekly forum in which both conflict and compassion can be addressed and personal privacy respected.
10. The need to be free.
The liberty to follow an inspiration (independently or with others) fathers creative genius. The wisdom gained by exploring what enthralls us (rather than what is just mandated to us), feeds our curiosity and satisfies our soul.
11. The need to explore the contradictory views of life and existence.
Coming to terms with reality involves tolerating irony and paradox. To regularly participate in informal debates about ideas enlivens and refreshes the mind. Respectfully comparing one’s opinions with the opinions of others is pure education.
12. The need to accept your own authority and make decisions for yourself.
As students grow less reliant on the authority and the opinions of others,
and learn to trust their own instincts, their own research, and their own intuitions, they come to realize their own power and authority.
NEI strives for excellence, not only in academics, but also in meeting the deeper needs of its students. We do this through classes, seminars, individual and group projects, adventures, discussions, and the natural activities that arise from living life together. In our community, we value participation, enthusiasm, and honesty, considered opinions, work, creativity, and guts.
1. The need to become self-reliant and independent
When you learn practical skills through activities (building, maintaining the campus, cooking, baking, making cheese, gardening and animal care, (and 100 other projects), you practice basic life skills, and are trusted with greater and greater responsibility.
2. The need to belong and be valued
New Earth Institute is, first and foremost, an inclusive community where you are respected and given great responsibilities.
3. The need to feel intelligent and alive.
The many forms of intelligence (intellectual grasp, artistic genius, elevated consciousness, interpersonal skills, the ability to articulate emotions, etc.) are honored at NEI. We pledge to recognize each student’s genius; we honor that pledge by helping each individual recognize her or his unique brilliance.
4. The need to become organized, responsible, and trustworthy
If you are willing to become more efficient and effective, if you are willing to do your best, if you are willing to learn to keep your word, if you are willing to work, and if you are willing to be more appreciated, we have a school for you.
5. The need to serve others
At NEI you are not just a student; you are expected to work for the good of our community, for the good of the world.
6. The need to discover your unique identity
At NEI you awaken to many sides of your nature, and become aware of your many possibilities and many weaknesses. Over and over, you chose you ideals, and conform to who you wish to become. This cyclical process will reveal to you your unique identity.
7. The need to think for yourself
NEI recognizes that individuals need to think critically and learn to trust their own sense of what makes sense. We’ll help you to learn to discriminate what is healthy, wholesome, and true for you as an individual, and what is not. We empower you to become who you want to be.
8. The need to ask questions, to investigate mysteries, and to seek and tell the truth.The intention of NEI is to encourage careful observation and enthusiastic inquiry into academic study and into life. Students who pose their own questions initiate the process of meaningful learning.
9. The need to for a safe forum for communications
To be fully human we all need to learn to communicate efficiently, effectively, and clearly. But we also need to learn to communicate honestly and nonviolently with others so others can truly hear what we have to say. Therefore, NEI provides a weekly forum in which both conflict and compassion can be addressed and personal privacy respected.
10. The need to be free.
The liberty to follow an inspiration (independently or with others) fathers creative genius. The wisdom gained by exploring what enthralls us (rather than what is just mandated to us), feeds our curiosity and satisfies our soul.
11. The need to explore the contradictory views of life and existence.
Coming to terms with reality involves tolerating irony and paradox. To regularly participate in informal debates about ideas enlivens and refreshes the mind. Respectfully comparing one’s opinions with the opinions of others is pure education.
12. The need to accept your own authority and make decisions for yourself.
As students grow less reliant on the authority and the opinions of others,
and learn to trust their own instincts, their own research, and their own intuitions, they come to realize their own power and authority.
NEI strives for excellence, not only in academics, but also in meeting the deeper needs of its students. We do this through classes, seminars, individual and group projects, adventures, discussions, and the natural activities that arise from living life together. In our community, we value participation, enthusiasm, and honesty, considered opinions, work, creativity, and guts.
3 Eras of U.S. Education
If we look back at the history of education in our country from the time of the founding until the present, what is apparent is that we have had only three clearly differentiated periods of U.S. education.
1. The Era of Voluntary Education. Parents could decide the kind of education they desired for their children. Education was actually dominated by home schooling. Most people learned to read at home, and even those who were extremely well educated had less than three years of formal instruction, mostly at private schools, mostly in terms of three or four hours a day, 30 to 90 days a year.
The common schools in New England taught the Calvinist Puritan doctrines. The Puritans intentionally modeled these schools after those created by Martin Luther.
In addition, there were specialized private schools that prepared students for society life, college, or religious studies.
2. The Era of Transition to Compulsory Education. Over a period of 67 years (from 1852 to 1918), one state after another was persuaded to adopt compulsory education laws and penalties for truancy, along with child labor laws. State by state, over the years, control of the child was effectively transferred from the parents to the state.
3. The Era of Compulsory Education. The first state compulsory education was created by a highly respected Massachusetts lawyer, state representative, and senator, Horace Mann. His own schooling consisted of not more than six weeks per year during his teens, but Horace Mann, a legislator and later the first Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, was destined to fall under the spell of the rigidly ordered Prussian school movement. On his summer honeymoon tour to Germany in 1843 (while schools were on vacation), he briefly visited a Prussian compulsory school, and was persuaded by a few conversations to import the Prussian system to America, despite the fact that he never viewed a Prussian school in operation.
1. The Era of Voluntary Education. Parents could decide the kind of education they desired for their children. Education was actually dominated by home schooling. Most people learned to read at home, and even those who were extremely well educated had less than three years of formal instruction, mostly at private schools, mostly in terms of three or four hours a day, 30 to 90 days a year.
The common schools in New England taught the Calvinist Puritan doctrines. The Puritans intentionally modeled these schools after those created by Martin Luther.
In addition, there were specialized private schools that prepared students for society life, college, or religious studies.
2. The Era of Transition to Compulsory Education. Over a period of 67 years (from 1852 to 1918), one state after another was persuaded to adopt compulsory education laws and penalties for truancy, along with child labor laws. State by state, over the years, control of the child was effectively transferred from the parents to the state.
3. The Era of Compulsory Education. The first state compulsory education was created by a highly respected Massachusetts lawyer, state representative, and senator, Horace Mann. His own schooling consisted of not more than six weeks per year during his teens, but Horace Mann, a legislator and later the first Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, was destined to fall under the spell of the rigidly ordered Prussian school movement. On his summer honeymoon tour to Germany in 1843 (while schools were on vacation), he briefly visited a Prussian compulsory school, and was persuaded by a few conversations to import the Prussian system to America, despite the fact that he never viewed a Prussian school in operation.
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