By Antony C. Sutton, former economics professor at
California State University (LA); former Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University:
...The link between German experimental psychology and the American educational system is through American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, in his time probably the foremost educational critic in the U.S....Hall spent six years in Germany...Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Professor of Philosophy at University of Leipzig, was undoubtedly the major
influence on G. Stanley Hall. Modern education practice stems from Hegelian social theory combined with the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. Whereas Karl Marx and von Bismarck applied Hegelian theory to the political field, it was Wilhelm Wundt, influenced by Johann Herbart, who applied Hegel to education, which in turn, was picked up by Hall and John Dewey and modern educational theorists in
the United States...John Dewey's psychology was taken from G. Stanley Hall, the first American to receive a doctorate from Wilhelm Wundt at University of Leipzig...Looking back at John Dewey after 80 years of influence, he can be recognized as the pre-eminent factor in the collectivisation, or Hegelianization, of American Schools. Dewey was consistently a philosopher of social change. That's why his impact has been so deep and pervasive...Already a Hegelian in philosophy, he acquired and adapted the experimental psychology of Wundt and Hall to his concept of social change...What we learn from this is
that Dewey's education is not child centered, but State centered, because for the Hegelian "social ends" are always State ends.
...Parents believe a child goes to school to learn skills to use in the adult world, but Dewey states specifically that education is "not a preparation for future living." The Dewey educational system does not accept the role of developing a child's talents but, contrarily, only to prepare the child to function as a unit in an organic whole - in blunt terms, a cog in the wheel of organic society. Whereas most Americans have moral values rooted in the individual, the values of the school system are rooted in the Hegelian concept of the State as the absolute...for
Dewey man has not individual rights. Man exists only to serve the state...
What then is the purpose of education, if the individual has no rights and exists only for the State?...For Hegel every quality of an individual exists only at the mercy and will of the State. This approach is reflected in political systems based on Hegel whether it be Soviet Communism or Hitlerian national socialism. John Dewey follows Hegel's
organic view of society. For example: "Education consists either in the ability to use one's
powers in a social direction or else in ability to share in the experience of others and thus widen the
individual consciousnesses to that of race" (LECTURES
FOR THE FIRST COURSE IN PEDAGOGY).
This last sentence is reminiscent of the Hitlerian
philosophy of race (i.e, Hegelianism)."... end quote

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff, c1982:
...America, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, lasted about a century...The turning point was the massive importation of German philosophy in the period after the Civil War...The philosophical pragmatists in the 1880s and '90s were pioneering the method of eroding the nation's founding ideas...For the most part, the leading spirits of the Progressive era were men who had been students here or abroad in the 1880s or '90s. They were the voices of the
First American generation to be reared in college on the new collectivist theories; they were men trained to the conviction that an increase in the power of the state is the solution to most of mankinds problems...The Progressives did not hesitate to name the model of their action. The model was the mother country of the leading Progressive state, Wisconsin. Wisconsin was described at the time as being "fundamentally a German State," which was "doing for America what Germany is doing for the world."...
...In Europe, the rise of statism had been accompanied by the rise of an aggressive nationalism. The same combination of policies was evident in the American reformist movement..
...As a result of the statist foundation and the economic catastrophe they inherited, the New Dealers could afford to be more explicit then their predecessors on the reformist movement. " hether we like it or not," sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild wrote, "modern life has become so highly integrated, so inextricable socialized, so definitely organic, that the very concept of the individual is becoming
obsolete."...The New Dealers did not lavish praise on
Germany, They were warmer to Mussolini's Italy.
...From Emerson to Dewey [John Dewey, father of the modern American public education system, rf] and even later, they sought to accept the conclusions of Kant...They began to drop the made-in-America masks. What showed up was the made-in-Germany essence. It was a recapitulation in the New World of the history of nineteenth-century European philosophy.
The standard textbook progression was reenacted, in mini-terms. "From Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche" became "from Dewey to Norman O. Brown to Herbert Marcuse." The men and women growing up in the 1920s and '30s, the first large scale group of Americans to be reared in Progressive schools, had been rendered incapable of offering their future children any intellectual guidance. As it happened,
their children, growing up in the postwar years, were the first generation to be exposed to the new irrationalist trend. These children became the rebels of the sixties...
end quote


"The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat." John Dewey, The School and Society, The
University of Chicago Press, 1956.

"...today's comprachicos do not use narcotic powers: they take a child before he is fully aware of reality and never let him develop that awareness. Where nature had put a normal brain, they put mental retardation. To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing can be more ingenious. This is the ingenuity practiced by most
of todays educators. They are the comprachicos of the
mind.....the perception of reality, the learning of facts, the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, are exclusively individual capacities; the mind is an exclusively individual `affair'; there is no such thing as a collective brain. And intellectual integrity - the refusal to sacrifice one's mind and one's knowledge of the truth to any social pressure - is a profoundly and properly selfish attitude. The goal of modern education is to stunt, stifle
and destroy the students' capacity to develop such an
attitude, as well as conceptual and psycho-epistemological preconditions." - Ayn Rand, 1970, from her book The New
Left, c1971, 1993

Wow that's long Rick, I'll read your link tomorrow if time permits. Thanks for posting.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

By Antony C. Sutton, former economics professor at
California State University (LA); former Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University:
...The link between German experimental psychology and the American educational system is through American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, in his time probably the foremost educational critic in the U.S....Hall spent six years in Germany...Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Professor of Philosophy at University of Leipzig, was undoubtedly the major
influence on G. Stanley Hall. Modern education practice stems from Hegelian social theory combined with the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. Whereas Karl Marx and von Bismarck applied Hegelian theory to the political field, it was Wilhelm Wundt, influenced by Johann Herbart, who applied Hegel to education, which in turn, was picked up by Hall and John Dewey and modern educational theorists in
the United States...John Dewey's psychology was taken from G. Stanley Hall, the first American to receive a doctorate from Wilhelm Wundt at University of Leipzig...Looking back at John Dewey after 80 years of influence, he can be recognized as the pre-eminent factor in the collectivisation, or Hegelianization, of American Schools. Dewey was consistently a philosopher of social change. That's why his impact has been so deep and pervasive...Already a Hegelian in philosophy, he acquired and adapted the experimental psychology of Wundt and Hall to his concept of social change...What we learn from this is
that Dewey's education is not child centered, but State centered, because for the Hegelian "social ends" are always State ends.
...Parents believe a child goes to school to learn skills to use in the adult world, but Dewey states specifically that education is "not a preparation for future living." The Dewey educational system does not accept the role of developing a child's talents but, contrarily, only to prepare the child to function as a unit in an organic whole - in blunt terms, a cog in the wheel of organic society. Whereas most Americans have moral values rooted in the individual, the values of the school system are rooted in the Hegelian concept of the State as the absolute...for
Dewey man has not individual rights. Man exists only to serve the state...
What then is the purpose of education, if the individual has no rights and exists only for the State?...For Hegel every quality of an individual exists only at the mercy and will of the State. This approach is reflected in political systems based on Hegel whether it be Soviet Communism or Hitlerian national socialism. John Dewey follows Hegel's
organic view of society. For example: "Education consists either in the ability to use one's
powers in a social direction or else in ability to share in the experience of others and thus widen the
individual consciousnesses to that of race" (LECTURES
FOR THE FIRST COURSE IN PEDAGOGY).
This last sentence is reminiscent of the Hitlerian
philosophy of race (i.e, Hegelianism)."... end quote

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff, c1982:
...America, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, lasted about a century...The turning point was the massive importation of German philosophy in the period after the Civil War...The philosophical pragmatists in the 1880s and '90s were pioneering the method of eroding the nation's founding ideas...For the most part, the leading spirits of the Progressive era were men who had been students here or abroad in the 1880s or '90s. They were the voices of the
First American generation to be reared in college on the new collectivist theories; they were men trained to the conviction that an increase in the power of the state is the solution to most of mankinds problems...The Progressives did not hesitate to name the model of their action. The model was the mother country of the leading Progressive state, Wisconsin. Wisconsin was described at the time as being "fundamentally a German State," which was "doing for America what Germany is doing for the world."...
...In Europe, the rise of statism had been accompanied by the rise of an aggressive nationalism. The same combination of policies was evident in the American reformist movement..
...As a result of the statist foundation and the economic catastrophe they inherited, the New Dealers could afford to be more explicit then their predecessors on the reformist movement. " hether we like it or not," sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild wrote, "modern life has become so highly integrated, so inextricable socialized, so definitely organic, that the very concept of the individual is becoming
obsolete."...The New Dealers did not lavish praise on
Germany, They were warmer to Mussolini's Italy.
...From Emerson to Dewey [John Dewey, father of the modern American public education system, rf] and even later, they sought to accept the conclusions of Kant...They began to drop the made-in-America masks. What showed up was the made-in-Germany essence. It was a recapitulation in the New World of the history of nineteenth-century European philosophy.
The standard textbook progression was reenacted, in mini-terms. "From Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche" became "from Dewey to Norman O. Brown to Herbert Marcuse." The men and women growing up in the 1920s and '30s, the first large scale group of Americans to be reared in Progressive schools, had been rendered incapable of offering their future children any intellectual guidance. As it happened,
their children, growing up in the postwar years, were the first generation to be exposed to the new irrationalist trend. These children became the rebels of the sixties...
end quote


"The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat." John Dewey, The School and Society, The
University of Chicago Press, 1956.

"...today's comprachicos do not use narcotic powers: they take a child before he is fully aware of reality and never let him develop that awareness. Where nature had put a normal brain, they put mental retardation. To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing can be more ingenious. This is the ingenuity practiced by most
of todays educators. They are the comprachicos of the
mind.....the perception of reality, the learning of facts, the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, are exclusively individual capacities; the mind is an exclusively individual `affair'; there is no such thing as a collective brain. And intellectual integrity - the refusal to sacrifice one's mind and one's knowledge of the truth to any social pressure - is a profoundly and properly selfish attitude. The goal of modern education is to stunt, stifle
and destroy the students' capacity to develop such an
attitude, as well as conceptual and psycho-epistemological preconditions." - Ayn Rand, 1970, from her book The New
Left, c1971, 1993