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The Goslings

Author	Upton Sinclair
Language	English
Subject	Sociology
Publisher	Self (Pasadena, California)
Publication date	1924
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print. Reprinted 2005 by Kessinger Publishing in paperback.
Pages	454 first edition, 464 reprint
Preceded by	The Goose-step (book)
Followed by	Mammonart

The Goslings is a nonfiction book, published in 1924, by the American novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair. It is an investigation into the consequences of plutocratic capitalist control of American elementary and high schools.

The book is one of the “Dead Hand” series: six books Sinclair wrote on American institutions. The series also includes The Profits of Religion, The Brass Check (journalism), The Goose-step (higher education), Mammonart (classics of literature, art and music) and Money Writes! (literature). The term "Dead Hand" criticizes Adam Smith’s concept that allowing an "invisible hand" of capitalist greed to shape economic relations provides the best result for society as a whole.

Title

The title of Sinclair’s previous book, The Goose-step referred to the authoritarian Prussian culture of Germany, which the United States had recently defeated in World War I. Sinclair implied that students in American universities and colleges were being trained to think in unison like German students and support reactionary politics. A gosling is a baby goose; the implication is that younger students were being trained in a similar fashion.

Synopsis

At the time, Sinclair was living in Pasadena, California. He sets the stage with several chapters on the Better America Federation, a Los Angeles-based organization of wealthy local businessmen, and its suppression of a dockworkers’ strike. He then shows how the BAF controlled public education in Los Angeles. He covers education in New York, Chicago, and other cities. He describes how the National Education Association was stolen BY WHOM from the teachers of America. Then follows a description of Big Business organizations which have assumed to take control of our schools, a discussion of Catholic schools, and the reaction to his publication of The Goose-step.

Critical reactions

As in The Goose-step, Sinclair here provides the historian with an enormous amount of contemporary and difficult-to-find source material.

The cynical journalist H. L. Mencken praised Sinclair for his extensive research, accurate reporting, and entertaining writing style. However, he criticized Sinclair for naively assuming that public schools had ever been designed to produce alert and curious youths. Rather, the earliest American schools were religious (Puritan) and intended to prevent youth from committing religious heresy—a tradition carried on by parochial schools. The public schools, originating in Prussia and a mid-19th century import to the United States, are intended to prevent students from challenging the moneyed elite; that is, committing political and economic heresy.

External links

• Sinclair’s papers for The Goslings’’ are at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.