Recipe

Set down clearly over 200 years ago here is the recipe for the schools we commonly experience. [William] Playfair argued that public instruction would ruin national prosperity, not enhance it. And who is to say he is wrong as long as prosperity is reckoned in dollars and cents."The education of the middling and lower ranks" has to be put aside, to be replaced with psychological conditioning in habits and attitudes of deference, envy, appetite, and mistrust of self, if the system of capitalism is to survive with all the benefits it provides.

"A smattering of learning is a very dangerous thing;' he said, not because ordinary people are too dumb to learn; just the opposite, they are too smart to be allowed to learn. People become dangerous when too many see through the illusions which hold society together.

--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 10