Upton Sinclair

“ Modern science has shown that within the child’s soul lies magically locked up all the past of our race; also, it is evident that within it lies all the future of our race. What our children are now being made is what America will be.
You send these little ones to school. Twenty-three millions of them troop off every week-day morning, with their shining faces newly washed, their clothing cleaned and mended. You bear them, you rear them, with infinite pains and devotion you prepare them, and feed them into the gigantic educational machine. ”

“ I wish that there existed in modern society a beautiful and altruistic labor movement, instead of what does exist, a part of the capitalist system, partaking of the weaknesses and corruptions which are automatically produced in human societies by the continuous operation of mass rivalries and greeds. The American Federation of Labor is a machine, precisely like the Republican party, or the National Education Association; it is a vested interest of high-salaried leaders, whose function is to dicker with Big Business for the best terms obtainable in the labor market. ”

“ It is something understood by all teachers that anyone who opposes the principal will find herself “transferred,” or lowered in ratings, or will have hard classes, or longer hours with no more pay. Said one to me: “Any teacher who brings charges against a principal is ruined. It matters nothing what the charges are: stealing school funds, or beating the pupils, or offensive advances of a sexual nature. All that happens is the principal denies the charges, and the matter is dropped; a teacher’s testimony counts for no more than the testimony of a Negro in the South.” ”

“ I want to show you the invisible government which runs your schools, for its own profit, and your loss. This power is the same power which runs your politics and industry; here in Los Angeles, the very men who smashed the union of the shipyard workers also smashed the councils of the school teachers. Indeed, as chance willed it, the two jobs came together and became one job; so that every lie told against the strikers was a lie against the teachers, and every dollar wrested from the shipyard workers was balanced by a dollar stolen from the schools. ”

“ To become a Socialist school board member is like stepping into a lion’s den; save that there is no wall against which you can back up—the lions are on every side of you! There is nothing you do or attempt to do for the schools in which you do not encounter some business interest trying to make profit out of them. ”

“ THE SCHOOLS OF MAMMON 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 anything in the world but study. I choose the great “L. A. High,” because that is where the children of the rich attend. One parent, a woman of refinement and sense, has tried to keep the tastes of her daughter simple and wholesome, but she tells me it is impossible, because home influence counts for nothing against the overwhelming collective power of the mass. ”

“ I happen to know a lady who is head of the department of English in a high school of a great city. This lady is a lover of literature, and a teacher of the highest gifts; she knows how to inspire the young, not merely to read and think about books, but in all their school activities, their magazines and debates and dramatic performances. It happens that she is a Socialist, and makes no bones about teaching the children to think for themselves about our social system. ”

“ We were sitting on the little roof-garden of the Civic Club one spring evening, and there were six or eight teachers in the group. I could not see their faces in the darkness, but I could hear their eager voices, their murmurs of assent to Henrietta’s statements. With a pencil and pad I noted down in the dark one after another of her sentences: “Tight mindedness and fear are the occupational diseases of teaching.... In the business world there is no such thing as unquestioned obedience; that belongs only in teaching.... There is more kowtowing in our schools than anywhere else in the world.” ”

“ Twenty years ago, when I first came into the Socialist movement, I had the beautiful fond idea that the intellectuals would furnish that new psychology. Twenty years of watching the brain-workers climb out upon the faces of the poor, and take their comfortable stations as retainers of privilege, have brought me to realize that the workers must save themselves; they must supply not merely the numbers, the industrial power, but also the idealism, the moral power. ”

“ The present status of the American school teacher is that of a wage-slave, an employe of the school board and the superintendent; it is not the status of a free citizen, nor of a professional expert. It can only be made that, first, by the education of the teachers themselves—a process of organization and self-discipline, guided by the more active and intelligent and courageous of the profession. ”

“ Still others are cynical corruptionists, who sell out their deluded followers, and permit labor unions to be used as weapons in the partisan wars of Big Business. Any teacher who goes to the labor movement without realizing these things, will suffer bitter disillusionment.
Underneath this machine is the great mass of the workers, groping their way toward freedom and self-government; betrayed a million times by leaders throughout the ages, they continue to grope, and to learn. ”

“ Whenever in the name of democracy the serpent of Communism or Bolshevism or Anarchy, feared alike in the countries from which you come, shall rear its head to strike its poisoned fangs into the charter of our liberties, it will be crushed under the heel of a true democracy, just as we kill without fear or hesitation, the common, ordinary garden variety which plays at our feet and then go on about our business. ”

“ A new order of things is born. The powers of evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see fulfilled the great socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers will be the peace of the world.” ”

“ HONEST GRAFT 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, marking the material with the letters, G, F, P, and R. That is to say, Graft, Favoritism, Propaganda and Repression—the four products of education by Big Business. Under the letter F in New York City I find the grievances of scores of teachers with whom I talked. Their story was all the same: the system is brutal, the system is rigid, the system is honeycombed with politics and dishonesty. ”

“ In every city, town and village of the United States there is room for a woman of wealth who will turn out and fight for the schools—not merely to get more money from the tax-payers, and to keep the grafters from stealing it, but to make the schools places of freedom, with windows open to the new doctrines which are blowing over the world. ”

“ But it is now my duty to declare that those principles are flagrantly and continually violated by administrative officers who have come into power since President James retired. These officers have forfeited the respect of the faculty and of the student body, and are already making our university a byword in the educational world. No growth in size or in wealth can compensate for our loss in morale and in reputation. Nor can noisy self-congratulation and the suppression of criticism alter the facts. Those of us who know the situation, and are unbiased, and are free to speak, should do so. ”

“ How completely these men are divorced from the intellectual life, it will be difficult for a European to imagine. They are bursting with energy; but lacking contact with ideas, they are like engines whirling in a vacuum, unconnected with driving shaft or gears. They assemble and partake of luncheons and dinners in sumptuous hotels, and summon to them preachers and teachers of all degrees, to tell them that they are the ultimate product of evolution. ”

“ But there isn’t one word about labor, there isn’t one word about Socialism, there isn’t one hint to any school child of the colossal struggle for economic self-government now going on all over the world, with its roll of heroes and martyrs as magnificent as any ever sung in the days of political revolutions. ”

“ Suffice it to say, that the organized workers have grown tired of seeing their best brains stolen from them, they have set out to educate their own youth, and train their own leaders. There are now workers’ colleges or schools in all the leading cities of America, and to know them and to help them should be one of the joys of progressive teachers. In places where there is not yet a labor school, it only waits for some group of teachers who will go to the labor men, and advise with them, and help them to break into this new field. ”

“ But I want them, while giving their money, to give also their time; to study the schools and school problems, and see that their money is honestly spent for the children, and that educational policies are in the hands of men and women who love the children, and believe in freedom and enlightenment—not, as so often at present, in the hands of intriguing politicians, and the sycophants and hirelings of vested greed. The aim of my two books is to set our educators free from this control of selfish private interest ”

“ I am here discussing only what is found in the great metropolis of automobiles, the headquarters of all standardization. I remind you of its deputy superintendent, in charge of this Fordization of infancy, who tells us how “society” is certain to require more and more propaganda from the schools, and this is the system which makes it possible. Ask yourself, before it is too late, whether you are satisfied with your destiny, to breed human units to be turned into factory operatives and cannon fodder for the masters of the new American Empire. ”

“ There is no control from the grown-ups except the written suggestions of Mr. Monroe, together with the advice of two adults whom the youngsters have themselves chosen to fill that rôle when requested. This is real training for democracy; it is education in the strict sense of the word—drawing out the child’s own impulses and abilities, instead of repressing them and crushing them into a predetermined mould. Through such voluntary and self-governing associations our schools will be made over—and I fear it will have to be done from the outside, not from the inside. ”

“ Is a teacher a citizen? What I ask the teachers of the United States to do is to write for themselves a Magna Charta; to adopt a collective program, and put upon the statute books of every state the explicit provision that teachers are citizens, and that wherever their rights as citizens come into conflict with the rights of school boards and superintendents as hirers and firers of labor, the teachers’ rights as citizens are superior. Teachers have, and should maintain through their organizations, every right which other citizens have. ”