Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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With the help of his millionaire trustees Butler has built up an alumni machine, and the alumni paper is the organ of his personal glory. He has built up a faculty machine, of men who understand that they are free so long as they agree with their president, and who go forth to carry out the president’s will wherever the Columbia influence reaches—which is throughout the entire school and college system of our plutocratic empire.

Butler, you understand, was head of the department of education at Columbia; he fixed the policy of this department, making it a machine for the turning out of “educational experts,” trained to see life as a battleground of money-ambition, and to run the schools as efficient factories. Butler edited the “Educational Review,” and the present editor is a Columbia man, and his puppet. I shall take you with me before long for a trip over the United States, and show you the Tammany Hall of education; the league of superintendents, and the politicians of the National Educational Association, financed by the book companies and other big grafters, and combining with the chambers of commerce and professional patriots to drive out liberalism in education as in politics, and resist every new idea in every department of human thought and activity. They are backed by the political machines of special privilege, and protected and glorified by the “Brass Check” press; and everywhere you find Columbia men the leading advocates of routine, red tape, and reaction.