"It took hundreds of millions of dollars to turn American education around in that short a period of time. Where did the money that inflamed this epidemic come from? How was it spent? How did the mainstream of experimental psychology meet up with a mainstream of millions of dollars?
The answer, it must be admitted, is enough to make one feel distinctly uneasy. The new psychology tapped the richest existing vein of American wealth and philanthropy and, in short order, won for itself the backing of almost unlimited funds. Here were its new buildings, its endowments, its publications, its research facilities, transportation, salaries - the wherewithal to spread like wildfire throughout the entire fabric of American education.
The checks were to emanate not from the uptown headquarters of Columbia Teachers College in New York City's Morningside Heights, but from No. 26 Broadway, around the corner from the financial capitol of the world on Wall Street.
No. 26 Broadway was the most famous business address in the country, perhaps in the world. It was the corporate home of the Standard Oil Company, owned and operated by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The story of how the resources of the great oil monopoly came to be used in the spread of a new psychology covers a period of some 40 years, and begins with Mr. Rockefeller himself."
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Educational results far exceeded those of modern schools. One has only to read old debates in the Congressional Record or scan the books published in the 1800's to realize that our ancestors of a century ago commanded a use of the language far superior to our own. Students learned how to read not comic books, but the essays of Burke, Webster, Lincoln, Horace, Cicero. Their difficulties with grammar were overcome long before they graduated from school, and any review of a typical elementary school arithmetic textbook printed before 1910 shows dramatically that students were learning mathematical skills that few of our current high school graduates know anything about. The high school graduate of 1900 was an educated person, fluent in his language, history, and culture, possessing the skills he needed in order to succeed.
In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding bands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply.
The task we set 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 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. Fredrick Gates
A similar view of the power of philanthropy was expressed by Board trustee Walter Hines Page (later to become editor of the Atlantic Monthly, ambassador to Great Britain, and early advocate of America's entry into World War I) to the first executive secretary of the Board, Wallace Buttrick:
... the world lies before us. It'll not be the same world when we get done with it that it was before: bet your last penny on that will you!
SOURCE
In case you forgot, the Simpson clan's names are Homer (owner of that exclamation of ignorance, "D'oh"), Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie.
