Bureaucratizing the Child: The Manufacture of Adults in the Modern World

Abstract

This book is about two things. First, it is about the fact that modern schools everywhere take dependent, impulsive, illiterate, and stubborn five-year-old children, and create predictable, compliant, literate, and docile adults. Every modern society routinely and efficiently does this in a process lasting about 12 years. Every modern society does this even though it intrudes upon one of the most emotionally charged relationships known, that between a parent and child.