The repudiation of the Committee of Ten was reinforced by a companion report proposing that history, economics, and geography be dropped at once. What Cardinal Principles gave proof of was that stage one of a silent revolution in American society was complete.

 

Children could now be taught anything, or even taught nothing in the part-time prisons of schooling, and there was little any individual could do about it.

 

Cardinal Principles assured mass production technocrats they would not have to deal with intolerable numbers of independent thinkers—thinkers stuffed with dangerous historical comparisons, who understood economics, who had insight into human nature through literary studies, who were made stoical or consensus-resistant by philosophy and religion, and given confidence and competence through liberal doses of duty, responsibility, and experience.

— John Taylor Gatto,The Underground History of American Education