A Scientifically Humane Future

In the founding decades of American forced schooling, Rockefeller’s General Education Board and Carnegie’s foundation spent more money on schools than the national government did.¹ What can a fact like that mean? Because they possessed a coherent perspective, had funds to apply to command the energies of the ambitious, possessed a national network of practical men of affairs, and at the same time could tap a pool of academic knowledge about the management of populations held in the universities they endowed, these and a small handful of men like them commanded decisive influence on forced schooling. Other influences had importance, too, but none more than this commitment of a scientifically benevolent American ruling class whose oversight of the economy and other aspects of living was deemed proper because of its evolutionary merit by the findings of modern science. The burden of this chapter is to show how a national upper class came about, what was on its mind, and how schools were the natural vehicle it mounted to ride into a scientifically humane, thoroughly utopian future.