The Hidden Architects of Compulsory Schooling

Why We Got Workers, Not Thinkers — and How to Change That

Jun 18, 2025

Why We Got Workers, Not Thinkers — and How to Change That

“I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”

This quote — often attributed to John D. Rockefeller, though more accurately reflecting the ethos of his education advisor Frederick T. Gates — continues to haunt the foundation of modern public education.

The Real Quote That Set the Tone

In 1913, Gates — head of the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (GEB) — penned this vision for rural schooling in The Country School of Tomorrow:

“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand.
The present educational conventions fade from our 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 of science.
We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters.
We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians.
Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.
The task we set before ourselves is very simple… 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.”

Let that sink in.

This wasn’t fringe. This was foundational policy — funded with millions in oil money, influencing everything from teacher training to curriculum design.

The Long Shadow of Rockefeller’s GEB

Founded in 1903, the GEB effectively standardized American schooling into a top-down, compliance-based model.
It prioritized order, efficiency, and obedience — not imagination, inquiry, or self-determination.
By the time the U.S. Department of Education was formally created in 1979, the system was already built on GEB values.

And it worked. Not to awaken minds — but to discipline the population into clock-punching productivity.

John Taylor Gatto: The Insider Who Spoke Out

Award-winning teacher and education whistleblower John Taylor Gatto laid this bare in his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992). A few core takeaways:

School trains children to be dependent, not free.
The structure of schooling — bells, fragmentation, testing — kills natural curiosity.
Genius is common; schooling suppresses it.
True education begins when we leave institutional schooling behind.

“We don’t need more reform. We need a revolution in consciousness about what learning actually is.”
– J.T. Gatto

More amazing quotes to think deeper:

“The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.”
— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)

“We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults.”
— The Underground History of American Education (2000)

“The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to. Schools were designed by Horace Mann and others to be instruments of social control.”
— Weapons of Mass Instruction (2008)

“Genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius because we haven’t figured out how to manage a population of awakened individuals.”
— The Underground History of American Education (2000)

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.”
— Dumbing Us Down (1992)

“What we have come to consider 'normal' education is a twisted product of 19th-century industrial ambition, not human necessity.”

“I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom.”

“The job of a good teacher is not to train kids for tests or obedience but to open the doors of the soul.”

What Can We Do?

Here are 5 Gatto-inspired starting points:

Reclaim Time – Ditch the factory bells. Let children immerse in ideas for hours, not periods.
Learn in Public – Museums, forests, farms, community spaces. The real world is the best classroom.
Read Primary Sources – Teach history through original documents, not textbooks.
Mentorship over Grades – Connect kids with elders, craftsmen, philosophers, builders.
Honor Soul, Not Scores – Encourage purpose, not performance. Ask what lights them up.

Final Thought

Maybe it is time to start home schooling once again…

Or perhaps some hybrid formula to allow for some socialization, mornings at school afternoons with parents, that may not have to work so hard if we broke free from this control system once and for all!

The system is not broken.
It was built this way.
But we’re not stuck with it.

Every awakened parent, writer, or rebel educator who sees through the illusion becomes part of the counter-spell.

Let’s continue to REMEMBER…

🔍 References:

Frederick T. Gates, The Country School of Tomorrow (1913)
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down (1992), Weapons of Mass Instruction (2008)
John D. Rockefeller, General Education Board archives (Rockefeller Archive Center)
Charlotte Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America (2000)

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🔎 Addendum: Are Frederick T. Gates and Bill Gates Related?

This question surfaces often — and with good reason.

Frederick T. Gates, a Baptist minister turned Rockefeller advisor, was the architect of America’s early 20th-century education and medical models, serving as chief strategist behind the General Education Board (1903) and the standardization of schooling across the U.S. He also helped shape the Flexner Report (1910) — a foundational document that restructured modern medicine around chemical and pharmaceutical control, while eliminating holistic schools and indigenous healing.

Bill Gates, born over half a century later, emerged as the 21st-century’s most influential private funder of global education and health policy — championing digitized classrooms, biometric ID systems, mass vaccination campaigns, and AI-assisted learning models. He continues to push for centralized solutions under the banner of philanthropy, through the Gates Foundation and numerous global NGOs.

🧬 So... blood relatives?

Officially? No confirmed genealogical link between Frederick T. Gates and Bill Gates has ever been established in public records.

But…

🔗 The ideological and institutional overlap is undeniable:

Frederick T. GatesBill GatesAdvisor to RockefellerAdvisor to WHO, WEF, and multiple global bodiesFounded the General Education BoardFunds Common Core, online ed, digital credentialsHelped standardize medicine via Flexner ReportFunds global vaccine infrastructure, mRNA techPushed for obedience-based schoolingFunds AI tutors, standardized testing, behaviorist learning

Even more curiously, Bill Gates’ father, William H. Gates Sr., was involved in population control advocacy and served on the board of Planned Parenthood — a Rockefeller-linked institution going back to its eugenicist roots.

🧠 Final Thought

Maybe they’re not family by blood.
But they’re definitely kin by blueprint.

I had to add a little more… found the article lacked a bit of substance:

Voices of the Unschoolers:

🔍 On the Nature of True Education

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
— William Butler Yeats
“Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”
— C.S. Lewis
“You cannot make people learn. You can only provide the right conditions for learning to happen.”
— Vince Gowmon

🛠️ On Compulsory Schooling

“Mandatory schooling laws were designed not to educate, but to train children in obedience, conformity, and predictable productivity.”
— Charlotte Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
“We are students of words: not of things.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
— Abraham Lincoln

🏡 On Homeschooling & Self-Directed Learning

“What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn’t a school at all.”
— John Holt, Teach Your Own
“Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.”
— John Holt
“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”
— John Holt
“When you teach a child something, you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.”
— Jean Piaget

🧠 On Awakening from the Illusion

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.”
— Often attributed to Mark Twain