Obedience School Ain’t Just for Pets?

The US Education System Was Not Built for Your Freedom

There’s this theory that gets tossed around that the Rockefeller Foundation and other industrialists hijacked the American education system to churn out obedient workers instead of independent thinkers.

Spoiler: it's not "tin foil" if it’s printed in their own documents.

The real answer is a lot more interesting, and a hell of a lot more uncomfortable.

Yes, Rockefeller and Friends Absolutely Shaped the System

John D. Rockefeller didn't just revolutionize oil. He helped redesign American education through the General Education Board (GEB) he founded in 1903. His mission? Not to create a nation of poets, philosophers, or inventors, but something a little more manageable, and most importantly way more profitable.

Here’s an actual quote from the GEB's internal communications:

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands."
(General Education Board, 1913)

Translation: “We have money. You will have obedience. Let’s get to work making ME money.”

Not exactly the spirit of independent thinking and rugged self-reliance America loves to romanticize and touts as the “American Dream” now is it?.

And Rockefeller wasn't alone. Industrial titans like Carnegie, Ford, and even J.P. Morgan funded education initiatives built around the same basic idea: Create good docile citizens who can follow instructions, not independent thinkers who might realize they're being screwed.

Before the Machine: A Different Kind of Learning

Before the industrial revolution, education in America looked very different.

- Learning was mostly local, based on family businesses, apprenticeships, mentorships, and small community schools.
- A teenager might learn farming, blacksmithing, tailoring, or tradecraft directly from skilled adults.
- Literacy was valued, but so were practical skills, creating things, farming, actual critical thinking and problem solving, not standardized test scores.

It wasn’t perfect and access to education was very uneven, but it was more human and more individualized, serving the person to be a valuable contributor to his family and community.

The industrialists couldn’t and certainly didn’t want to scale that model.
They needed something predictable, scalable, and standardized. Because heaven forbid a kid learn how to think independently when they could be learning how to pull the same lever repeatedly for 12 hours a day instead.

So they built one.

Schools Were Built to Feed the Machine

At the dawn of the 20th century, America was in hypergrowth. Factories needed millions of workers. Workers needed to show up on time, take orders, repeat tasks, and never, ever question the chain of command.

Schools were deliberately designed to simulate factory life:

- Bells signaling shift changes.
- Age-based grouping to keep kids moving along like parts on an assembly line.
- Standardized testing to reward compliance over creativity.
- Memorization over critical thinking.

As New York Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto put it:

"Schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders."
(Dumbing Us Down, 1992)

And it wasn’t just theory. Carnegie literally funded university programs to train "scientific managers" people who could apply assembly-line thinking to human beings.

Education became social engineering with a friendly face.

Cuz, nothing says "freedom" like learning to ask for permission to use the bathroom

It Wasn't All Evil - But It Was Controlling

Now, to be fair, Rockefeller and his peers didn’t see themselves twirling mustaches and plotting world domination. They genuinely believed order and predictability would lift society out of chaos.

And in some ways, they were right:

- Mass literacy skyrocketed.
- Public health education reduced deadly diseases.
- A shared sense of national identity was forged.

But creative independence?
Financial sovereignty?
Questioning unjust systems?
That just wasn’t allowed on the syllabus.

Because an educated, independent population might do something crazy like, I don't know, refuse to work 80 hours a week for $15 an hour.

They didn’t want revolutionaries.
They wanted reliable parts.

The Legacy We’re Still Living In

Fast-forward to today, and the DNA of that system still runs through almost every public school in America:

- Kids trained to memorize and repeat, not to think and challenge.
- Bells, rigid schedules, authority figures, conditioning obedience.
- A total absence of crucial life skills: negotiation, personal finance, emotional regulation, entrepreneurship, critical thinking under uncertainty.

And the results are everywhere:

- Crushing student debt loads for degrees many people don't even use.
- Millions stuck in jobs they hate, feeling trapped but unsure how to break out.
- A culture that tells young people to follow a path that hasn’t worked for decades, get good grades, go to college, get a "safe" job at a company that takes care of its people, funds your retirement, and somehow you will be fulfilled, achieve “The American Dream”.

So how come so few people that followed that recipe and graduated with an expensive college degree feel like they got the dream they were sold?

And just in case you thought an MBA track "higher entrepreneur education" is different, guess again.

Even in the world of "teaching entrepreneurship," the factory model holds strong.
Instead of teaching people how to bootstrap, how to build with what they have, how to own their companies outright and not give the majority to the bankers and investors.

We teach them how to polish a PowerPoint deck, beg for venture capital and Private Equity, and sell pieces of their company off like cattle at auction.

Because what better way to preserve control than making sure even the rebels start by asking permission?

The system teaches that to be an entrepreneur, you must go hat-in-hand to the bankers and money changers, the same old gatekeepers, instead of figuring out how to create value for yourself from Day One.
The factory farm schooling model doesn't stop with employees.
It now extends to the very people who should have broken free.

If you’ve ever felt like school didn’t prepare you to actually win at life, you’re not crazy. It was never designed to.

Receipts: In Their Own Words

Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s top education advisor, wrote this in 1913:

"We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning... We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters."
(The Country School of Tomorrow, 1913)

And the GEB’s stated mission?

"...to adjust the people to the social and industrial order."

That’s not a conspiracy theory.
That’s official history.

But sure, keep telling yourself it’s all fine if that helps you sleep.

Ready for Something Different?

If you've ever felt that pull…
The one that says you were meant to build something of your own instead of just fitting into someone else's system…

You're not alone, and after a lifetime of entrepreneurship, building things from scratch, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing forward, always somehow letting the money changers win at my own game. Leaving my very family, my customers, my partners, my employees, left holding awful bags full of their manure, I'd be happy to help however I can.

If this resonated with you, feel free to reach out.

They'll teach you how to scale a company.
They'll never teach you how to escape their system.
That's not a curriculum.
That's survival, freedom, self-reliance, and you're going to have to learn it somewhere else.

And here's the truth they don't put in any textbook:

That to win at the real game, the one they never teach, is figuring out how to build your life around 2 groups of three things:
Passion, Purpose, and Ownership. With all of your Heart, Head, and Soul.

- Find the work that sets you on fire.
- Aim it toward something that actually matters, makes the world better.
- And figure out how to bootstrap it and own the whole damn thing yourself.

That's not just how you make a living.
That's how you build a life worth living.

Sometimes all it takes is a different kind of education, the kind you don’t get from a factory school system.

If you're serious about building your own world instead of living in someone else's, I'm here to help, it’s my true Passion, Purpose, and Ownership. And helping you find yours and executing on it feeds my Heart, Head, and Soul…

"Schools weren't built to set you free. They were built to fit you in."