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ОглавлениеTHE CONSPIRACY AGAINST OUR EDUCATION
Why Money Is Not Taught in School
The purpose of the foundation [the General Education Board] was to use the power of money, not to raise the level of education in America, as was widely believed at the time, but to influence the direction of that education… The object was to use the classroom to teach attitudes that encourage people to be passive and submissive to their rulers. The goal was—and is—to create citizens who were educated enough for productive work under supervision but not enough to question authority or seek to rise above their class. True education was to be restricted to the sons and daughters of the elite. For the rest, it would be better to produce skilled workers with no particular aspirations other than to enjoy life.
—G. Edward Griffin in The Creature from Jekyll Island, on Rockefeller’s General Education Board, founded in 1903
The New School
I was nine years old when my suspicions about school began. At the time, my family had just moved across town to a new home in order for my dad to be nearer to his place of work. I was going to start the fourth grade at a new school.
We lived in the little plantation town of Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. The main industry of the town was sugar, and about 80 percent to 90 percent of the population was descended from Asian immigrants brought to Hawaii in the late 1800s. I, myself, am fourth-generation Japanese American.
At my old elementary school, most of my classmates looked like me. At my new school, 50 percent of my classmates were white, the other half Asian. Most of the kids, white or Asian, were rich kids from well-to-do families. For the first time, I felt poor.
My rich friends had nice homes in exclusive neighborhoods. Our family lived in a rented home behind the library. Most of my friends’ families had two cars. My family had one. A number of those families had second homes on the beach. When my friends had birthday parties, they were held at the yacht club. My birthday parties were at a public beach. When my friends began playing golf, they took lessons from the pro at their country club. I didn’t even own golf clubs. I was a caddy at the country club. My rich friends had new bicycles, some even had their own sailboats, and they took vacations to Disneyland. My mom and dad promised we would someday go to Disneyland, but we never did. We had fun taking day trips to the local national parks to watch volcanoes erupt.
It was at my new school that I met my rich dad’s son. At the time, he and I were in the bottom 10 percent of the class economically and, occasionally, academically. We became best friends because we were the poorest kids in the class and stuck together.
The Hope of Education
In the 1880s, my ancestors first began emigrating to Hawaii from Japan. They were sent off to work in the fields of the sugar and pineapple plantations. Initially, their dream was to work the fields, save money, and return to Japan as rich people.
My relatives worked very hard on the plantations, but the pay was low. On top of that, the owners of the plantations took money from the workers’ paychecks to pay the rent for the houses that the plantation provided. The plantation also owned the only store, which meant workers had to purchase their food and supplies at the plantation store. At the end of the month, there was very little money left in their paychecks after rent and store charges were taken out.
My relatives wanted to get off the plantation as soon as possible, and to them a good education was their ticket out. From stories I’ve been told, my ancestors scrimped and saved to send their kids to school for a college education. The lack of a college education meant you were stuck on the plantation. By the second generation, most of my relatives were off the plantation. Today, my family boasts several generations of college graduates—most with at least a bachelor’s degree, many with master’s degrees, and a number with PhDs. I am on the low end of my family’s academic pole: I only have a bachelor’s of science degree—a BS degree.
The School Across the Street
Changing schools at the age of nine was a significant event in my life because of the new school’s location. The following diagram shows the change in my social environment.
Directly across the street from my new school, Riverside School, was Hilo Union School. Hilo Union School was the school for the kids whose parents worked for the plantations, many of whom belonged to the labor unions. Riverside School, on the other hand, was for the kids whose parents owned plantations.
In the fourth grade, I began attending Riverside School with the kids of plantation owners. In the 1950s, while walking to Riverside School, I would look across the street at Hilo Union School and see a school not segregated by race but by money. This is when my suspicion of school and the educational process began. I knew something was wrong, but I did not know what. If our home wasn’t on the same side of the street as Riverside School, I might have gone to Hilo Union School instead.
From grade four through grade six, I went to school with the kids who were the descendants of the plantation owners—the people and system my relatives wanted to escape from. All through elementary school, I grew up with these kids in school, played sports with them, and went to their homes.
Once elementary school was over, many of these friends were sent off to boarding schools. I went on to the public junior high school farther up the street. There, I joined the kids from across the street, the kids from Hilo Union School, and I grew more aware of the differences between kids raised in rich families and those raised in poor and middle-class families.
My dad was highly educated, and the head of the educational system in Hawaii. Not only did he make it off the plantation, but he was also very successful as a government employee. Although my dad went to school, had advanced degrees, and had a good job that paid well, as a family we were still financially poor—at least compared to the families of my rich friends. Every time I went to my rich friends’ homes, I knew something was missing, but I did not know what. At the age of nine, I began to wonder why going to school did not make my mom and dad rich.
The Plantations
My relatives worked and scrimped to save for a good education so that their kids could get off the sugar plantation. I saw the relationship between Riverside School and Hilo Union School, and I experienced having rich friends who were descendants of plantation owners and having friends who were descendants of plantation laborers. In elementary school, the basic education is the same—yet something is missing, even today.
My relatives wanted their kids to get off the plantation. The problem was, and is, that in school we never learned to how to own the plantation.
So many of us go on to work for the new plantations—the big corporations of the world, the military, or the government. We go to school to get a good job. We are taught to work for the rich, shop at the stores of the rich, borrow money from the banks of the rich, invest in the businesses of the rich via mutual funds in our retirement plans—but not how to be rich.
Many people do not like hearing they are taught by our school system to be caught in the web, the web of the conspiracy of the rich. People do not like to hear that the rich have manipulated our system of education.
Hijacking the Education System
One of the greatest sins of our current educational system is that it does not teach you about money. Rather, it teaches you how to be a good employee and to know your station in life. Some would say this is by design. For instance, in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island, Griffin quotes from the first occasional paper of the General Education Board, entitled “The Country School of To-Morrow,” written by Frederick Gates: “In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good upon a grateful and responsive rural folk… For the task we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one: To train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are…”
Keep in mind that the General Education Board was founded in 1903 by the Rockefeller Foundation—one of the most powerful and wealthiest foundations of its time. What we see here is an attitude that dates back over a hundred years, one of the elite rich of the United States, and even the world, seemingly orchestrating an education curriculum to meet their needs and not necessarily the needs of the student. This is important today, because although these attitudes are over a century old, they have not gone away, and they are the driving force behind your education, my education, and the education of your children. And they are the driving force behind the suppression of financial education even today. You do not need to know about money when you are destined to simply be a cog in someone else’s money machine, or a worker on someone else’s plantation.
After reading Dr. Fuller’s Grunch of Giants in 1983, I began to understand why the subject of money is not taught in schools. Up until then, I did not have the courage to criticize the school system; after all, my father was the head of the education system in Hawaii. As the years went by, however, I began to run into others who had similar views on education and why schools do not teach us much about money.
One of the first people I came across who shared my suspicions about education is John Taylor Gatto, author of, among other books, Weapons of Mass Instruction and Dumbing Us Down. Mr. Gatto was named New York City Teacher of the Year three times and also New York State Teacher of the Year. In 1991, he quit the teaching profession in an oped piece in the Wall Street Journal, saying, “I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work.” He brought to my attention that our current system of education comes from the Prussian system, a system designed to create good employees and soldiers, people who blindly follow orders, waiting to be told what to do, including what to do with their money.
As Mr. Gatto said to me recently, “The school system was not designed to teach children to think for themselves. Nor was it developed to just support the present-day notion that we can all be free. In actuality, our current school system is based on a Prussian model that was developed to do just the opposite—to teach children to obey orders and do as they’re told. Compliant and obedient students become employees who are content to work for the rich or become soldiers who sacrifice their lives to protect the wealth of the rich.”
Now, you may or may not believe that there was an intentional conspiracy against teaching about money in the school system. But what you cannot deny is that our schools should receive a failing grade when it comes to financial education. Whether purposefully or not, our system’s lack of teaching and instruction on money is a driving force behind the financial oppression many people in our country face today. It is the lack of financial education that has so many highly educated people worried about today’s global financial crisis. There are millions of people who have lost their retirement savings following the advice of financial salespeople. Too many people’s eyes glaze over when they’re forced to talk about their finances.
Reader Comment
I agree with what you are saying, Robert. I taught primary school children for 30 years before I resigned. I was frustrated by the education system. I felt that we set up our youngsters to fail because we were educating them mainly in things that do not equip them for life. The ancient Greeks believed in teaching people to think. We train our young to do as they are told.
—henri54
Exchanging Freedom for Money
If people do not learn about money, they can end up exchanging their freedom for a paycheck—for a steady job and enough money to pay their bills. Some people spend their lives in constant fear of being fired. That is why, for millions of well-educated workers, job security is more important than financial freedom. For instance, when I was in the Marine Corps, I had the sense that some of my fellow pilots wanted to stay in the service for 20 years, not to fight for our country, but to receive a government paycheck for life. In the world of academia, many teachers dream of the security of tenure more than the pride of teaching.
The lack of financial education in our schools has resulted in millions of free people who are willing to let the government take more control over their lives. Because we do not have enough financial intelligence to solve our own financial problems, we expect the government to do it for us. In the process, we surrender our freedom and give the government more and more control over our lives and our money. Every time the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury bail out a bank we are not helping the people; we are protecting the rich. A bailout is welfare for the rich. With each bailout, we surrender more of our financial freedom and our share of public debt grows and grows. Big government taking over our banks and solving our personal financial problems through government programs such as Social Security and Medicare is a form of socialism. I believe socialism makes people weaker and keeps them weak. In Sunday school, I was taught to teach people how to fish—not to give people fish. To me, welfare and bailouts are the purest form of giving people fish instead of teaching them how to provide for themselves.
Taxes, Debt, Inflation, and Retirement
As stated in Chapter 1, the four main forces that keep people struggling financially are taxes, debt, inflation, and retirement. I also stated that these four forces are directly connected to the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury. Again, once the Federal Reserve was allowed to print money and increase the national debt, taxes, inflation, and retirement had to rise. Saying it another way, weakening people financially via taxes, debt, inflation, and retirement allows for a government’s greater consolidation of power. When people are struggling financially, they are more willing to have the government save them, unwittingly exchanging their personal freedom for financial salvation.
In 2009, the percentage of Americans who own their homes is dropping. Mortgage foreclosures are at all-time highs. The number of middle-class families is dropping. Savings accounts are smaller, if they exist at all. Family debt is greater. The number of people officially below the poverty line is rising. The number of people who are working beyond the age of 65 is increasing. Bankruptcy is going through the roof. And many Americans do not have enough money to retire.
But this is not just a U.S. phenomenon. This is a worldwide personal financial crisis. The conspiracy of the rich affects every nation and all people of the world.
Regardless of whether you subscribe to a conspiracy theory, the facts remain that today the world is in the biggest financial crisis in history and people are looking for the government to save them. And regardless of whether you subscribe to a conspiracy theory, the fact remains that most people leave school without much knowledge about money, taxes, debt, inflation, and retirement and how these financial forces affect their lives.
Who Took My Money?
Take a moment to look at the financial realities many of us live with.
Realities and how they apply to rich and poor:
School
Most people learn nothing about money at school.
The rich learn about money at home.
Job
Most people get a job working for the rich.
Taxes
Taxes go to the companies that are owned by the rich and friends of political leaders in the form of bailouts. It is estimated that for every $1,000 in taxes you and I pay, less than $200 comes back as a benefit to us. The rich know how to play the system. They own the businesses, make more money, and pay a lower percentage in taxes than employees do.
National debt
When the government talks about trillion-dollar bailouts, it means that for generations to come our kids will be paying for these financial rescues of the rich. Our kids will pay for these bailouts in higher taxes and higher inflation.
House
Mortgage payments go to the banks of the rich. If you take out a $100,000 mortgage at 5 percent for 30 years, you will pay $93,000 in interest alone. This does not include fees, commissions, and service charges.
Retirement
Most people invest in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds for their retirement. Most of this money is invested in businesses of the rich. If the investment loses money, you lose money—and the financial planner, stockbroker, or real estate broker keeps the commission.
Cost of living
Who gets the money we spend for insurance, gasoline, telephone service, electricity, and other necessities of life? The rich. Who benefits if these necessities go up in price? The rich.
Reader Comment
I have noticed a real difference in the medical treatment between the social classes. You either have to be rich (self-insured or insurance provided) or very poor (free government care) to get treatment. I would be curious as to how many small business owners and entrepreneurs are actually affording “good” insurance. Not just some catastrophic plan. I believe the majority of people stay in a job they hate and never take the risks required to start their own business because of fear of losing health insurance for their family.
—Bryan P
The Biggest Lies About Money
My poor dad was a great man, an educated, hardworking, honest-to-a-fault teacher and public servant. Yet when it came to money, he was a liar. When he talked about work, teaching, and life, he often said statements like, “I’m not interested in money.” Or, “I’m not doing it for the money.” Or, “Money is not that important.” Every time I heard him make such statements, I would shake my head. To me these were lies. One day I asked him, “If you’re not interested in money, why do you accept a paycheck? Why do you often say, ‘I’m not paid what I’m worth’? Why do you look forward to a pay raise?” He had no reply.
Like my dad, many people are uncomfortable with the subject of money. Many people lie or live in denial about the importance of money in their life. It is often said, “Never discuss sex, money, religion, or politics.” These subjects are too volatile and primal in nature. That is why most people talk about the weather, sports, what is on TV, or the latest diet fad. These things are superficial—we can live with or without them. We cannot live without money.
Many people subscribe to the saying we discussed in the Introduction of this book, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” What they fail to recognize is that, in the context of that saying, money itself is not the root of all evil. Many people believe that money has the power to corrupt, and it can. Many people believe that if kids knew how to make money, they might not want to get a good education, and that, too, is possible. Yet living life takes money, and earning money is one of the facts of life. Most people spend most of their waking hours, and hence their lives, working for money. Many divorces and family breakups are caused by arguments about money.
Keeping people ignorant about money is evil because many people do evil things for money, such as work at a job they do not like, work for people they do not respect, marry people they do not love, take what is not theirs, and expect someone else—like their family or the government—to take care of them when they are capable of taking care of themselves.
Obsolete Ideas
The idea that money is not important is an obsolete idea.
Reader Comment
King Solomon, circa 850-900 BC, the wisest and wealthiest man of his age, wrote in Ecclesiastes 10:19, “A feast is made for laughter, wine will make you merry, but money answers all things!”
—drmlnichols
In very simplistic terms, humans have evolved through four basic societal ages. They are:
1. The Hunter-Gatherer Age: In prehistoric times, money was not important. As long as you had a spear, nuts, berries, a cave, and a fire, your needs were met. Land was not important because humans were nomads and followed the food. People lived in tribes with very little hierarchy. The chief did not live that much better than anyone else. During this age, there was only one class of people, and money was not important.
2. The Agrarian Age: Once humans learned how to grow crops and domesticate animals, land became important. Barter was the medium of exchange. Money was not important because even if you didn’t have it, you could still survive. During this era, kings and queens ruled the land. The peasants who used the land paid taxes in the form of crops and animals to the family that controlled the land. The words real estate literally grew from the term royal estate. That is why we still use the word landlord in reference to the person to whom we pay our rent. During this age there were two classes of people: the royals and the peasants.
3. The Industrial Age: I believe the Industrial Age began in the 1500s. Christopher Columbus, seeking an ocean passage to Asia, defied the idea that the world was flat. Columbus was not looking for the New World, as many schools teach. He was looking for trade routes for resources like gold, copper, rubber, oil, lumber, furs, spices, industrial metals, and textiles, which were essential to the Industrial Age.
People moved off the farms and moved into the cities, causing a whole new world of problems and opportunities. In the Industrial Age, rather than the peasants paying the king, the new capitalists paid the employee. Instead of land, the new capitalists owned corporations.
Corporations were formed primarily to protect the rich, their investors, and their money. For example, before a ship sailed for the New World, the rich formed a corporation. If the ship was lost and sailors died, the rich were not responsible for the loss of life. All the rich lost was their money.
Today, it is more of the same. If a CEO runs the company onto the rocks, loads the company with excessive debt, pays the executives millions in salaries and bonuses, or steals the employees’ retirement funds, the employees lose everything, but the rich are often protected from the losses and liabilities—even the crimes.
Even during the Industrial Age money was not important. That’s because the rule of thumb between employee and employer was a job and paycheck for life—job security and financial security. For people of my parents’ generation, money was not important because they had company and government pensions, a house that was paid for, and savings in the bank. They did not need to invest their money.
All that changed in 1974, when the U.S. Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. This act led to what we know as 401(k), IRA, Keogh, and other retirement plans. In 1974, money became important, and people had to learn to manage their own money or die poor, living on Social Security, as my dad did after he lost his government job.
4. The Information Age: We live in the Information Age. In the Information Age, money is important. More specifically, knowledge about money is essential in the Information Age. The problem is that our educational system is still in the Industrial Age, and in the minds of most intellectuals and academics, money is not important. Most of these people are operating on old, outdated, and obsolete ideas of money. But money is important. Today money is a key aspect of life. Today financial security is more important than job security.
Reader Comment
Up until very recently, I have always equated job security with financial security; I never thought about it any other way than that. Now I know better.
—jamesbzc
Financial Education
Today, it is essential to have three different types of education. They are:
1. Academic education: This includes the ability to read, write, and solve basic math problems. In the Information Age, one’s ability to keep up with changing information is more important than what one learned yesterday.
2. Professional education: This is knowledge of a trade in which to earn money. For example, one goes to medical school to become a doctor or to a police academy to join the police force. Today, it takes much more professional education to be financially successful. In the Information Age, professional education is essential to job security.
3. Financial education: Financial education is essential to financial intelligence. Financial intelligence is not so much about how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard your money works for you, and how many generations you pass your money on to. In the Information Age, financial education is essential to financial security.
Most school systems do a pretty good job with academic and professional education. They fail when it comes to financial education.
Why Financial Education Is Important in the Information Age
We also live in a world of information overload. Information is everywhere, on the Internet, TV, radio, in magazines, newsletters, computers, cell phones, schools, businesses, churches, billboards, and on and on. Education is essential to processing all of this information. That is why financial education is important.
Today, financial information is coming at us from all directions. Without financial education, a person is less able to process financial information into personal meaning. For example, when someone says a stock has a P/E of 6, or that a piece of real estate has a cap rate of 7 percent, what does that mean to you? Or when a financial planner says the stock market goes up an average of 8 percent a year, what does that make you think? Maybe you ask, “Is that information true, and is 8 percent a year a good or bad return?” Again, without education a person cannot translate information into personal meaning. Information without education is limited in value. This book is dedicated to adding to your financial education by teaching you the new rules of money, and how the new rules affect your life whether your realize it or not.
New Rule of Money #1: Money Is Knowledge
The first new rule of money is: Money is knowledge.
Today, you do not need money to make money. You simply need knowledge. For example, if a stock is priced at $100, on some stock exchanges you can short that stock, which means sell shares that you do not own. For instance, let’s say I borrow 1,000 shares valued at $100 from the exchange, sell them, and put $100,000 in my account. Then the stock falls to $65, and I go back to the exchange, purchase 1,000 shares for $65,000, return for a full refund the 1,000 shares I borrowed at $100 a share, and keep the $35,000 difference, less fees, commissions, and transaction costs. That is in essence what it means to short a stock. To make this money all I needed was knowledge. First I needed to know that the concept of short selling existed, and second I needed to know how to use the method. I can do similar transactions in business and in real estate.
As this book progresses, I will use similar examples of money being made out of nothing—nothing but knowledge. Many of these examples will be real-life transactions that I’ve personally completed, and on top of these transactions creating money out of nothing but knowledge, my returns were also higher, gained with much less risk than investing in mutual funds, and resulted in little to nothing in taxes.
Today, in the Information Age, fortunes are won and lost in the blink of an eye as a result of good or bad information. As most of you know, many people recently lost trillions of dollars due to bad advice, bad information, and a lack of financial education. The frightening thing is that most of those people who dished out the bad financial advice are still handing out that same bad information. A famous biblical quote is “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” Today, many people are perishing financially because they follow the old rules such as save money and get out of debt. Or they believe investing is risky, when it is the lack of financial education, experience, and bad financial advisors that is much more risky. Today, you can make money without money. You can also lose your life savings in a blink of an eye. That is what I mean when I say money is knowledge.
Reader Comment
I would say that this notion is correct, but I would also state emphatically that ACTION on knowledge is actually more important. That one knows how to short a stock, or build a website, or whatever, does not necessarily translate into that person taking the actions necessary to create wealth.
—ramasart
Reader Comment
I would state the maxim in reverse, but the essence of this rule is that having the correct information is much better than simply having money. A rich man may not need to fear being broke, for he knows the tactics that may be exercised in order to regain his wealth. Conversely, the man who holds a significant amount of money today may live in great uncertainty because he does not know how to increase his holdings through new skills—new information that he has not been able to apply.
—dlsmith29
In Conclusion
It is bad enough that our schools do not teach students much, if anything, about money. But today, in 2009, many of the rich are fighting President Obama’s economic stimulus plans to spend more on improving education. Only time will tell whether Obama’s stimulus plan will work, but regardless, I do think spending more on education is vital to developing a strong economy, country, and free world.
I am an advocate for education. In Asian culture, the most respected professional is the teacher. Yet in Western culture, teachers are the lowest paid of educated professionals. I believe that if we valued education like we say we do, we would pay our teachers more money and build better, safer schools in bad neighborhoods. To me, it is a crime that in America our real estate taxes determine the quality of education a child receives. In other words, schools in poor neighborhoods receive less tax money than schools in rich neighborhoods. Talk about a conspiracy of the rich!
I also believe that if we truly valued education, we would teach people financial literacy because we would recognize that money is a central and important aspect of our existence. So while many so-called “advocates of education” deride my ideas, I simply ask: Why continue advocating a system that is designed to create cogs instead of freethinkers, and a system designed to suppress financial knowledge rather than create financially literate people who can prosper in a capitalist system?
Whether you believe as I do that there is a conspiracy in education, the fact remains that a sound education, one that includes financial education, is more important today than ever before. When I was a kid, if one of my classmates did not do well in school, he or she still could get a high-paying job working for the sugar plantation or a factory. Today, as factories close and jobs move overseas, a child who does poorly in school will probably do poorly in life. This is why the world needs better schools, safer schools, better-paid teachers, and more financial education.
In the Information Age, we are overloaded with data. Education gives us the power to translate that information into meaning, meaning we can use to make our lives better. Give us the power to solve our own financial problems rather than expect the government to solve our problems for us. Stop the bailouts and all the handouts. It is time to put an end to the conspiracy of the rich. It is time to teach us how to fish.
