From a man who calls himself "Prospector":


It started a couple thousand years ago. The Greeks and Romans kept slaves. Slaves have to be taught how to act, so they sent them to schools. The slaves trained each other to act like slaves. Did you ever wonder why a teacher is called a pedagogue? After all, "ped" means a foot and "gogue" is a god. What is a "foot god"? The pedagogue was the slave who led the other slaves to school, providing instruction and answering questions along the way.

The slave schools worked very well. So well that the entire method was adopted by the brahmins in India to educate the lower classes. It worked so well there that it was adopted in Prussia to train soldiers. Now you need to know there are two kinds of soldiers, enlisted and commissioned. Commissioned officers were drawn from upper classes where the children were trained at home by tutors or by their parents following the ancient pattern of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. See The Lost Tools of Learning for an explanation of that method. Upper class education produced generals, emporers, and philosophers, people with broad knowledge and ability to plan. Lower class education produced engineers, soldiers, and managers, people with narrow but deep knowledge and habits of doing things well. This method of slave training was then adopted into American education. See The Underground History Of Education for an explanation of the process of adoption.

One thing you need to know about slave training, if you will excuse my repetition, is that it works very well. It really does make better technicians, managers, soldiers, any class of people that follow orders and perform limited duties very well. The big drawback is that it does not produce philosophers, generals, or great leaders of any kind. Slave training only produces slaves.

Nowadays we call our slave schools "public education" and we are very proud of the results. We brag that 100% of our children learn to read. Except that a lot of them don't understand what they read and don't know of anything they want to read and don't know any reason why they should care. When politicians started demanding control over everything after WWII, nobody knew enough to call a halt to their power grab because nobody had read enough history to understand what was happening. When politicians lied to people nobody realized they were being lied to because nobody studied civics any more. It took forty years for the country to produce one man who bothered to read the Internal Revenue Code and figure out that it didn't apply to anybody in the country. Twenty five years later people are still arguing about whether he was right or wrong. And every one of those people is a product of the public education system. We whine because we have corrupt leaders, and no good leaders to replace them. It's because all our leaders came out of public schools, and so did nearly everybody else. We have no leaders because we closed our leadership training system and forced all the students into slave schools.

It reaches a point where you have to assume the existence of a devil to coordinate such things over such a long time span.