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Nov 25, 2023Liked by Vincent Kelley

Re: “Home Schooling’s Rise from Fringe to Fastest-Growing Form of Education” and the linked article on John Taylor Gatto.

At some point slavish copying of Prussian methods gave way to the more radical methods informed by the Frankfurt school. Funded by the large East Coast philanthropies, the radicals focused their attention on Teacher's Colleges nationwide, with Columbia University Teachers College serving as ground zero to refine their methods and build a cadre.

To see how well they succeeded go to the homepage of nearly any Teacher's College and you will see echoes of the Frankfurt school used as scripture. Ironically the "abolition of whiteness" and focus on racial oppression found in the article are the fruits of this long lost radicalism in Education.

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Anything you would recommend on this history? Gatto does discuss the Teachers College in one of his books and, if memory serves, the emphasis was on Skinnerian behaviorism, which seems like a very different lineage from the Frankfurt School (perhaps some overlap in postwar Adorno). I think there's often a myopic focus on the Frankfurt School as the root of today's identitarian evils, which in fact are more wide-ranging in origin.

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Nov 27, 2023Liked by Vincent Kelley

I haven't found a work dedicated solely to the topic. "Foundations: Their Power and Influence" has a chapter that touches on it. Also "Antifacism: The course of a crusade"

To piece it together: Gyorgy Lukacs influenced the early Frankfurters and their focus on pedagogy.

The school relocated to Columbia University in the 1930s which was home to the most influential teachers college in the country. After the war Frankfurt alumni created the intellectual underpinnings for the "denazification" of America. Thanks to foundation funding Columbia University began producing teachers trained in critical theory and "Authortarian personality" themed demonization of Americans. That's why teachers college curricula appear to be llifted from an Adorno lecture.

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Thanks for that recommendation - looks interesting.

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