Andrew Carnegie was concerned that college professors were having to work far into their dotage, so his Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created a pension system for them.

How randomly caring!

However, in order to participate in the Carnegie professor pension plan, colleges would be required to standardize both their admissions process and degree offerings.

This surely… uhh… prevents the professors from having to work far into their dotage. Somehow. Presumably.

City superintendents embraced the zeitgeist

I may be a bit rusty on Mainstream Protestant euphemisms. Is Zeitgeist still an alias for Providence? (https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/10/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-3/ ) Which in turn an euphemism for “done by the Almighty via the hands of Righteous” (delusion of godhood behind dissociation)?

of “scientific management” and reorganized schools for throughput.

…and “scientific management” is mostly fashion for evenly-spaced rectangular grids?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/

State lawmakers lengthened the school year and made attendance compulsory to build a common civic culture, assimilate immigrants, and curb child labor.

Well, it certainly did:

https://malcolmthecynic.wordpress.com/2025/03/18/dont-send-your-kids-to-school/

To be sure, having “the common civic culture” with emigrants assimilated straight into it, as well as too many children with underdeveloped parts of brain necessary to do something non-trivial with hands seems to often interfere with building anything else, but these goals were reached. Why were they desirable, again?

Conspicuously absent in the article: mentions of the Catholics or any other sect-on-sect friction anywhere.

There were just teh Christian Values™, man. Infused via submersion. Nothing to see here.

Then St. Carnegie smiled and began the move to state standardized curriculum, and all this presumably have Gone Slightly Wrong only because of those darn space bats.