In 1906, the richest man in America funded a document that decided what your grandson would be allowed to become.Frederick T. Gates wrote it. John D. Rockefeller paid for it. The General Education Board built nine hundred and twelve American public high schools on its philosophy.The sentence read: "We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science."It was published in 1913. It has been sitting in the Library of Congress ever since.Almost nobody has read it.This is the story of the trap that document built — and the one boy who escaped it. Not because the system failed to catch him. Because his immigrant father was too busy selling uniforms to read the memo.Richard Feynman's IQ was rated 125 — "merely respectable." Columbia rejected him. Three Nobel laureates came out of his Queens high school, and the system noticed none of them.The document is still on the shelf. The system it built is still running. And the meeting you sat in last week — where the credential beat the engineer who actually understood the problem — was designed in 1906.
This is the Rockefeller Education Trap Feynman Escaped.Sources cited in this video:
Frederick T. Gates, The Country School of To-Morrow (Occasional Papers No. 1, General Education Board, 1913)
Alexander Inglis, Principles of Secondary Education (Houghton Mifflin, 1918)
National Education Association resolution, 1915
Senator Chamberlain, US Senate Floor, 1917
Reece Committee findings, US House of Representatives, 1953
James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?