The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

I begin this study of the American school system with Southern California, because that is the part of the country in which I live, and which therefore I know best. It is a repr...

The first step in this narrative is to explain how it happened that the writer of this book, a muck-raker and enemy of society, was in the office of Mr. Irwin Hays Rice, preside...

The purpose of the previous chapter was to explain to you the series of events whereby it came about that Upton Sinclair, muckraker and enemy of society, was in the office of th...

Let us now survey the situation in Southern California as I settle down to the writing of this book. The storm has blown over for the moment. Twenty-eight of the strikers—the be...

Naturally, we have to begin with the “Times”; and at the very outset, to show you what the “Times” wants from our schools, I narrate the experience of Mr. M. C. Bettinger, until...

It is the thesis of the business men who run our educational system that the schools are factories, and the children raw material, to be turned out thoroughly standardized, of t...

There is an election of the school board in Los Angeles every two years. The Black Hand laid their plans to elect a complete board in the spring of 1923; they went at the job in...

There has existed for the past twenty years inside the school system a secret oath-bound society of the school men known as the “Owls,” whose members pledged themselves to consi...

We now have the Black Hand in undisputed control of the school system of Los Angeles; their seven dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries meet, frequently in secret session, and carry ou...

It goes without saying that in such a school system promotion goes by favoritism. The system of examining and grading teachers at the present time is a farce. These examinations...

Needless to say, those who run this school machine for the Black Hand are vigilant to keep modern ideas from the children. They excluded the “Nation” and the “New Republic” from...

What becomes of the children under this regime of the Black Hand? I have talked with scores of teachers, and their testimony is unanimous, that the children’s minds are on anyth...

You shake your head and say: “I had no idea of such things; yes, Southern California must be very bad indeed!” But I beg you not to fool yourself in that way. Southern Californi...

The education of a million children, and the control of twenty-five thousand teachers in the metropolis, is entrusted to a school board of seven people. The president of this bo...

On the top of my desk as I work is a five-foot shelf of big envelopes, containing data on the school systems of various cities. I take one envelope, and sort out its contents, m...

Needless to say, the first duty of this Tammany school board is to enforce loyalty to the plutocracy; and, needless to say, this constitutes “patriotism” and “religion.” Mr. Aar...

The expulsion of these three teachers was, of course, a personal triumph for Mr. Aaron Dotey, Chief Spy of the DeWitt Clinton High School. The activities of the “Dotey Squad,” a...

This campaign to make the schools safe for the plutocracy culminated in the passage of the so-called “Lusk laws” at Albany. Senator Lusk was a Republican machine politician, who...

In city after city I found school conditions like these, and in every case I found a little group of men and women opposing them, facing every handicap and humiliation. In two c...

Let us take next the school system of Chicago. Here is a city of three million people, with representatives of most of the races and nations and tribes of the world; a great por...

I went away from Chicago in May; and coming back in June, on my way home, I discovered that this Chicago melodrama is a continuous performance. A new act was on, and the busines...

It is important to note that a great part of the opposition to graft and propaganda and repression in the Chicago schools has come from classroom teachers. That is the real sign...

We have now examined the public schools of three of our largest cities. We are going to visit a number of other cities, and it will be convenient to begin with San Francisco and...

Once more I am sorry to seem to play the game of the Grand Imperial Kleagles; nevertheless, it must be stated that two forces have had control of the San Francisco public school...

We cross San Francisco Bay to Berkeley, and here is a city of sixty thousand people, cut in half by a broad avenue; on the one side live well-to-do commuters, retired army and n...

The trolley cars take us a few miles south to the city of Oakland, where we find a still larger population of shipyard workers, longshoremen and factory hands, having ideas of t...

We move north to Portland, which is the harbor of the lumber country, a relatively old city with an aristocracy of merchant princes, like Baltimore or Boston. Ten years ago Oreg...

The school situation in Portland assumes to some extent the aspect of a sex-war; the women teachers do the work and the men bosses get the salaries. After a long campaign the ta...

We continue north to Seattle, another metropolis of fir and cedar. Here organized labor has been active; the city came near having a Socialist mayor, and the struggle of Big Bus...

We continue our journey, and enter the domain of the copper kings. In “The Goose-step” I have portrayed the state of Montana as entirely swallowed by a monstrous reptile known a...

While we are in this mountain country, let us see what is going on throughout the state. The financial agents of the Anaconda, known as the Montana Bankers’ Association, passed...

We move on to Colorado, where we have not only copper kings, but coal and iron and oil and gold and silver kings—half a dozen dynasties dividing an empire. It would take a large...

Back in the days of President Buchanan the American Congress set aside large tracts of federal land, to be devoted forever after to the support of schools; and these lands have...

Now in this homestead of the free the organizers of the Nonpartisan League are beaten, tarred and feathered, jailed or deported, for trying to address the farmers. Alexander How...

We continue East to St. Louis, another city where God and Mammon have combined for the exploitation of the children. There is no city in which the Catholics are stronger, nor an...

We move north to Minneapolis, headquarters of the milling industry, and financial center of a rich iron and lumber territory. Here we find the beginnings of hope for America; or...

In order to make a consecutive story, I have shown what Big Business has done in the way of Graft in Minneapolis. Let us now complete our view by taking up Propaganda and Repres...

Next we visit Detroit, headquarters of our automobile industry, where we find the usual struggle to hold down union labor, and the usual school board of business men and politic...

We go from city to city, and I wonder, will you grow tired of reading the same things over and over? Perhaps we shall be wise to agree on a few formulas, so that you may get a s...

Let us now move to the Atlantic seaboard, beginning with Boston, hub of the universe and fountain-head of our culture. Boston once prided itself upon the civic virtues and stern...

While we are in Massachusetts, let us have a look at its second city, Worcester, the manufacturing center of the metal trades, and “open shop” headquarters of New England. We ha...

We move south to Philadelphia, the third largest city of the country, controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad and its allied banks, through an old-established and smoothly runni...

Let us move farther south to Baltimore, another old and slow-moving city, with a dynasty of long-established merchant princes. For forty years, to my knowledge, their political...

I have referred to the Francis Scott Key School in Baltimore, and you will be interested to hear more about this rare phenomenon—a beautiful building, animated by a beautiful sp...

Next comes our national capital; and here we have a unique situation, owing to the fact that the people of the District of Columbia have no votes, but are governed by an autocra...

Dr. Van Schaick’s successor as president of the board of education was a Catholic gentleman by the name of Edwards, prominent in the Chamber of Commerce, and therefore an undoub...

We have now examined school conditions in nineteen of the largest American cities; the total population of these cities amounts to eighteen million, which means four million chi...

I again select California, because it is the nearest, and the easiest for me to study. We can best know the California machine by following the adventures of a rebel teacher; so...

We now ascend to the top of our great school pyramid, the National Education Association. This is the professional organization of the educators of the United States, and as suc...

The National Education Association is a very old institution, predating the Civil War. It has always been controlled entirely by the supervising force; in other words, it has be...

First you will ask to know the people who did the job; which means that you will be introduced to the bosses of our educational Tammany Hall. Some of them you know already; but...

Come now to Salt Lake City, and see why the N. E. A. machine selected it for their next convention. Externally there are reasons, in the form of beautiful temples and educationa...

The business meeting of the National Education Association was called for 8:30 on Friday morning, and the program stated that there would be a paper read and singing before the...

The next convention was held at Des Moines in 1921, and here were the first fruits of the sowing. I have before me a tabulation of the delegates to the Des Moines convention, cl...

The National Education Association now stands complete, according to the design of its architects. It is a political machine, maintained by Big Business to do a certain job in t...

We have followed closely the business and politics of the N. E. A. conventions; let us now consider them in their educational and social aspects. They are imposing assemblages,...

We have seen the National Education Association assembling in Boston, and welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce. We have seen them assembling in Oakland, and welcomed by the same...

Next comes the question of the open shop, the most important in the world to our National Manufacturers, who have been active in putting anti-union propaganda into the schools,...

Space is limited, so let us drop the merchants and manufacturers, and consider another great power, the American Bankers’ Association, which has gone aggressively into education...

Among the great capitalists who have been making over our schools, the most active has been Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller established the General Education Board, an...

Next, our military men present themselves as educators; nothing would please them more than to take over our schools entirely, and make a hundred thousand little West Points. Th...

Needless to say, it is not only the military men who are revising our school text-books; all the business interests are wielding their blue pencils, and likewise the religious g...

The situation confronting a would-be writer of school text-books in the United States is as follows: If he writes on astronomy, engineering, or Spanish grammar, he may write the...

There are other forms of propaganda now being turned out wholesale for our children. There are various papers and magazines, to which in many cases the pupils are required to su...

In addition to the patriots, who are interested in the contents of our school books, there are large groups of business gentlemen interested in these books as merchandise. Every...

The solution of the problem of our school-book supply waits upon our training a generation of social servants who believe in public welfare and in knowledge, as our forefathers...

Wherever you travel in the school world of the United States, you find these same activities. You recall the almost universal graft in the school affairs of Chicago; it should h...

We have seen the activities of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in many American cities; but because this is a national system, competing with the public schools in every part of th...

Just what is the attitude of the Catholic Church to the American public schools? This is an important question, because there are fourteen million Catholics in our country, and...

Let us now break through the tangle of ecclesiastical sophistry, and try to get in a few paragraphs the common sense of the situation. Why are Catholic authorities reduced to qu...

One more important question we have to consider: What is Catholic education? Here again we find two aspects of the problem—first, the doctrines of the church, and second, their...

We are now familiar with the principal agencies which have taken over our education upon a national scale. In addition to these, each community has its local interests, which ma...

So much for what steel does to schools; let us now see what oil does. Our journey of inspection will be under the escort of a rare high school teacher—one who is willing to tell...

We have had glimpses of rural school conditions in the far West. Let us glance at the wheat country. From the point of view of politics and education the Dakotas are a back-yard...

So far our attention has been given to the public schools. There is another large field of education, at which we can only stop for a glance—the private schools. There are over...

To just what extent does the plutocracy control our schools? In “The Goose-step,” pages 28-29, I quoted from a study by Scott Nearing, reported in “School and Society” for Septe...

The “little red school-house” may of course be anything, depending on the individual teacher. In our two hundred thousand “one-teacher” schools, there are many which are jolly a...

The person who can tell us about the morals of our school children is Ben B. Lindsey, judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver. Lindsey knows, not merely because he has been on the...

We have seen what becomes of the child in the great educational mill. Let us now see what becomes of the teacher. Let us inquire, to begin with, how the teacher gets in; put you...

I have given in “The Goose-step” a list of some of the offenses for which college professors have lost their jobs. I might do the same thing for school teachers, and include eve...

We have asked the question: is a teacher a citizen? I can name a few places in the United States in which a teacher may be a citizen, provided he or she is willing to give up pr...

The effect of official tyranny such as we have been observing is to reinforce and intensify the occupational diseases of the teaching profession, which are timidity and aloofnes...

The first objection always brought against teachers’ unions is that they might lead to strikes. The American Federation of Teachers has met this proposition by expressly repudia...

Some teacher who is not in touch with the labor world will read the story I have told about labor government in San Francisco and in Butte, Montana, and will ask, is that what I...

As this manuscript goes to the printer, “The Goose-step” has been before the public nine months. Approximately twenty-two thousand copies have been sold, and many of them have b...

There are some universities which were not satisfied with the amount of attention they received in “The Goose-step,” and came forward to demand more. Most prominent among these...

I have in my collection a number of clippings, which demonstrate how fast the goose-steppers are stepping their short journey to hell. At the extremely pious Northwestern, which...

“The Goose-step” would have been a failure if it had not excited bitter antagonism. Many collegians rushed to defend their alma mater; and the purpose of this final chapter is t...

I have now said my say, concerning both colleges and schools. I have given two years to the subject, have written nearly four hundred thousand words on it—and these words are th...