- The early founder
figures were sophisticated
and gifted pedagogs.
And they used methods that were valid
and are still valid,
of course, to this day,
even though they are often eschewed today.
But this period lasted just a few decades,
a little bit beyond the Civil War,
and then a combination of things happened.
One is the advent of
Darwinism, with particularly,
specifically, Social Darwinism,
and then a little bit
after that, eugenics.
And the other phenomenon
about which we hear much less
is a very, very natural and
mathematically predictable one,
namely, that you accept these young people
for educational purposes,
you are successful
with some of them, and
some of them return back
into their homes and communities and so on.
But there's always a percentage
where the family withdraws
or disappears or dies out
or where there is no big improvement,
and then as they become adults,
what do you do with them?
And so, no place could be made and found
in the community for them,
so they began to eat up the spaces.
And so, after your first five or 10 years,
maybe you can place 70% of
the people in the community
but 30% remain behind,
and in another five years,
to that 30% has been added
another 10% and it's 40.
And that creeps up every year to the point
where you have hardly any
space left to admit people
for the educational program.
Some people have called it the
silting up of institutions.
That was not anticipated, and to this day,
has not been appreciated that it was not,
as the textbooks largely say, a failure
of the pedagogic aspirations
of the early founder figures,
but that it was an inevitable
result of the silting up
process that institutions drifted
into a custodial mode,
from a pedagogic, educational one.
