The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

by Upton Sinclair

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. This power has formally declared its disapproval of the popular custom of using such words as “Wall Street” and “capitalistic” in a disrespectful manner; so, in combination with the American Institute of Banking, it takes steps to make the new generation more polite. It has prepared a program of lectures, beginning with the seventh grammar grade and continuing through the four years of high school. Its “Committee on Public Education” has prepared a series of ten lectures, and arranged to distribute them in the schools through the eighty-three city chapters of the American Institute of Banking. Bankers from each chapter will give lectures in the public schools at the rate of one a month during the school year, teaching the economic system upon which our banks are founded.

What this economic system is can be stated in one sentence: our government has turned over the most important function of modern life, the creation of credit, to a group of selfish interests, which are thereby enabled to confiscate the greater part of the product of the modern industrial machine. Naturally, the bankers want the schools to teach that this is a divinely inspired arrangement. We have seen their educators at work in city after city, with lectures and “thrift campaigns.” We have seen them in Montana, taking over the whole school curriculum, and in Colorado taking a good part of the school funds as well.

Also the lawyers come forward to do their part. At the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, in Minneapolis, 1923, a “Committee on American Citizenship” brought in an elaborate report, full of words of terror: “inroads,” “threatened changes,” “insidiousness,” “dangerous tendencies,” “dangerous elements,” “long established institutions,” etc., etc. There are four hundred “Red” newspapers, with five million readers, say the lawyers of the United States; and these lawyers propose to protect the people by taking charge of the schools. All local bar associations are to organize committees, and there is to be “unity of policy and action” all over the country; “direct contact will be made with all our schools and colleges.”

And already, it appears, some of the local lawyers have got to work. In the September, 1923, issue of “School Life,” published by the Bureau of Education, I learn that the Indiana State Bar Association is co-operating with the schools, sending speakers on the Constitution; and of course this will be the same thing, the lecturers will say nothing about the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, they will interpret it solely as an instrument for the perpetuation of privilege.

Next, the National Chamber of Commerce, under the guidance of Professor Strayer of Columbia University, Educator-in-Chief of J. P. Morgan & Company. This mighty school magnate has organized a committee for co-operation between chambers of commerce and city school departments. We have seen this “co-operation” working in many cities, resembling the alliance between the lady and tiger—“they came back from the ride with the lady inside!” The co-operating organization is known by the imposing title of “The American City Bureau of the National Committee for Chambers of Commerce Co-operation with Public Schools”; think what a delicious mouthful for a functionary—executive secretary of the A. C. B. N. C. C. C. C. P. S.!

This mammoth institution issued a report based upon a survey of schools in nine hundred cities, from which most optimistic conclusions were drawn by the “Outlook,” house organ of the firm of God, Mammon and Company. Miss Josephine Colby, a “kicked-out” union teacher, wrote to the “Outlook,” pointing out how misleading this editorial was, because it gave the impression that the Chamber of Commerce report represented the entire country, whereas it covered the large city schools, which are the best, and left out the rural schools, which are the worst. Needless to say, the “Outlook” had no space for this letter; and that is why boards of education all over the United States recommend the “Outlook” as proper reading for goose-herds and goslings.

Next, the National Industrial Conference Board, which is the research and propaganda bureau of a long list of Big Business associations—cotton manufacturers, hardware, paper and pulp, electrical, chemical, wool, automobiles, boot and shoe, metal trades, erectors, founders, rubber, silk, railway cars, etc. Here is one of the most powerful “educational” organizations of the country; its active manager is a consulting engineer of the General Electric Company, who got his education in Austria and Germany, and is working to introduce the German system of slave training. This great organization has been active all over the country in censoring text-books and supervising the contents of our children’s minds. At its instance the Chamber of Commerce in St. Louis caused Washington University to cease using the book entitled “Community and National Life,” by Professor Charles H. Judd, head of the department of education of the University of Chicago.

Also, this National Industrial Conference Board discovered that the Bureau of Education of the United States government was circulating a series of pamphlets by Professor Judd, entitled “Lessons in Community and National Life”; which pamphlets were discovered to be full of most terrible Bolshevik material. They quite definitely labored to prejudice the minds of little children against the leading doctrines of our organized American manufacturers. Consider, for example, a sentence such as the following:

Those in favor of the minimum wage for men say that men should receive a wage sufficient to marry and rear a family without the dangers that come from insufficient employment and wages.

Or consider a criminal Bolshevik utterance like the following: