The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education

by Upton Sinclair

Excerpt from The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education
Six hundred thousand young people are attending col leges and universities in America. They are the pick Of our coming generation; they are the future of our coun try. If they are Wisely and soundly taught, America will be great and happy; if they are misguided and mistaught, no power can save us.
What is the so-called higher education of these United States? You have taken it, for the most part, on faith. It is Something which has come to be; it is big and impressive, and you are impressed. Every year you pay a hundred million dollars Of public funds to help maintain it, and half that amount in tuition fees for your sons and daughters. You take it for granted that this money is honestly and wisely used; that the students are getting the best, the highest education the money can buy.
Suppose I were to tell you that this educational machine has been stolen? That a bandit crew have got hold Of it and have set it to work, not for your benefit, nor the benefit of your sons and daughters, but for ends very far from these? That our six hundred thousand young people are being taught, deliberately and Of set pur pose, not wisdom but folly, not justice but greed, not free dom but slavery, not love but hate?
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Genres: History, Politics, Journalism

508 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2004

About the author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book mentions Columbia University and Reed College, two schools that Ivan attended, as places where I one cam get a solid education; it also mentions Vassar College and St Stephens College as forward-looking and free-thinking institutions, and I noted with pleasure that I and Sara attended these schools as well. While Sinclair's The Goose-step could be an important book to be read again, particularly in our present-day realities of a shifting political climate. It seems to me that the regime of President Donald J. Trump has caused the terms 'liberal' and 'progressive' to take on a hue that not only runs counter to America's capitalist ideology, but it seems to me that an appreciation of the history of the labor movement has been discarded in a world where the educational institutions Sinclair writes about once prepared the young for democratic service in a society of free-born men and women. Perhaps the fact that I was overly enamoured with the idea of literature as art in my early days of post-graduate living, including my early desire to write about all of Shakespeare's plays, kept me from wandering into the socialist fray of unauthorized political movements like my friend Jeremy once did but, nevertheless, I find my penchant for nascent socialist texts like this one to be a marker of my journey for the security of my faith; in the sense I am kind of like Charlie Kirk, but in a less public fashion. Three stars.

[Mike Zickar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upton Sinclair's non-fiction investigations into the state of higher education, circa 1920. This is a powerful book, at times funny, at other times exhaustive. Sinclair takes us through a tour of universities throughout the country, starting with his Columbia and then focusing on other Ivy Leagues, making it out West to Cal-Berkeley and Stanford, up to Washington and Oregon, North Dakota, and nearly everywhere else in the US. He outlines how universities were poorly run, run by petty leaders and boards of trustees, nearly all who were afraid of professors talking about anything controversial especially if it dealt with critiques of capitalism.

It's eerie reading this book, 100 years later when my state, Ohio, seems to be having some of the same discussions about academic freedom and the vulnerability of students to ideas that the powerful feel are disruptive.

Sinclair has a passionate path forward, some which still seems relevant. There is a real joy in this book and a lot of great history.

[Corbin Routier · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America Capitalist. To establish this thesis is the purpose of 'The Goose Step'"
-Upton Sinclair

This is the first book of his that I really disliked his thesis. I believe it much more accurate to say that access to education, as an obstacle towards achieving wealth and power, is a structure of a class system and has its intention of maintaining that system. That the current system favors Capitalism is only a detail. Communists favor communism, fascists favor fascism, and capitalists favor capitalism. It's not a surprise.

I almost gave this book three stars. If instead you look at his writing from a different perspective (such as the one I supplied) it is a little more bearable.

[Apostate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly a tad bit over-stated, but this work seems to me a pretty accurate (& bitingly funny) picture of American society & higher education. It was written in one gilded age, but Sinclair's arguments apply to conditions in this current gilded age, as well.