In 1865 the American poet, William Ross Wallace, wrote a poem in praise of motherhood. The refrain of the poem was the sentence, “For the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” In the first half of the twentieth century, “He who controls the teachers’ college controls the future,” was an adage bandied about in graduate school classrooms in universities and in boardrooms on Wall Street. I believe it was Jonathan Kozol, the ex-officio grandfather in the U.S. of home- schooling education, who insisted that government control of the content and methodology of education in public schools was a way of channeling students into a future that primarily served the interests of the elites. As insightful as these thoughts were in their time, their roots go back as far as Plato, who taught, “The direction in which education starts a person will determine his future life.” Today, childhood education in the so-called “First World” takes place in large part via mass media communication platforms, e.g. films, television, the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok, etc. Just thirty- seven years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Today, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom. This means that approximately 232 media executives are calling the shots for the vast majority of the information adults are presented and for what is placed before children and embedded in their brains.
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