I was going to start the fourth grade at a new school.
We lived in the little plantation town of Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. The main industry of the town was sugar, and about 80 percent to 90 percent of the population was descended from Asian immigrants brought to Hawaii in the late 1800s. I, myself, am fourth-generation Japanese American.
At my old elementary school, most of my classmates looked like me. At my new school, 50 percent of my classmates were white, the other half Asian. Most of the kids, white or Asian, were rich kids from well-to-do families. For the first time, I felt poor.
My rich friends had nice homes in exclusive neighborhoods. Our family lived in a rented home behind the library. Most of my friends’ families had two cars. My family had one. A number of those families had second homes on the beach. When my friends had birthday parties, they were held at the yacht club. My birthday parties were at a public beach. When my friends began playing golf, they took lessons from the pro at their country club. I didn’t even own golf clubs. I was a caddy at the country club. My rich friends had new bicycles, some even had their own sailboats, and they took vacations to Disneyland. My mom and dad promised we would someday go to Disneyland, but we never did. We had fun taking day trips to the local national parks to watch volcanoes erupt.
It was at my new school that I met my rich dad’s son. At the time, he and I were in the bottom 10 percent of the class economically and, occasionally, academically. We became best friends because we were the poorest kids in the class and stuck together.
The Hope of Education
In the 1880s, my ancestors first began emigrating to Hawaii from Japan. They were sent off to work in the fields of the sugar and pineapple plantations. Initially, their dream was to work the fields, save money, and return to Japan as rich people.
My relatives worked very hard on the plantations, but the pay was low. On top of that, the owners of the plantations took money from the workers’ paychecks to pay the rent for the houses that the plantation provided. The plantation also owned the only store, which meant workers had to purchase their food and supplies at the plantation store. At the end of the month, there was very little money left in their paychecks after rent and store charges were taken out.
My relatives wanted to get off the plantation as soon as possible, and to them a good education was their ticket out. From stories I’ve been told, my ancestors scrimped and saved to send their kids to school for a college education. The lack of a college education meant you were stuck on the plantation. By the second generation, most of my relatives were off the plantation. Today, my family boasts several generations of college graduates—most with at least a bachelor’s degree, many with master’s degrees, and a number with PhDs. I am on the low end of my family’s academic pole: I only have a bachelor’s of science degree—a BS degree.
The School Across the Street
Changing schools at the age of nine was a significant event in my life because of the new school’s location. The following diagram shows the change in my social environment.
Directly across the street from my new school, Riverside School, was Hilo Union School. Hilo Union School was the school for the kids whose parents worked for the plantations, many of whom belonged to the labor unions. Riverside School, on the other hand, was for the kids whose parents owned plantations.
In the fourth grade, I began attending Riverside School with the kids of plantation owners. In the 1950s, while walking to Riverside School, I would look across the street at Hilo Union School and see a school not segregated by race but by money. This is when my suspicion of school and the educational process began. I knew something was wrong, but I did not know what. If our home wasn’t on the same side of the street as Riverside School, I might have gone to Hilo Union School instead.
From grade four through grade six, I went to school with the kids who were the descendants of the plantation owners—the people and system my relatives wanted to escape from. All through elementary school, I grew up with these kids in school, played sports with them, and went to their homes.
Once elementary school was over, many of these friends were sent off to boarding schools. I went on to the public junior high school farther up the street. There, I joined the kids from across the street, the kids from Hilo Union School, and I grew more aware of the differences between kids raised in rich families and those raised in poor and middle-class families.
My dad was highly educated, and the head of the educational system in Hawaii. Not only did he make it off the plantation, but he was also very successful as a government employee. Although my dad went to school, had advanced degrees, and had a good job that paid well, as a family we were still financially poor—at least compared to the families of my rich friends. Every time I went to my rich friends’ homes, I knew something was missing, but I did not know what. At the age of nine, I began to wonder why going to school did not make my mom and dad rich.
The Plantations
My relatives worked and scrimped to save for a good education so that their kids could get off the sugar plantation. I saw the relationship between Riverside School and Hilo Union School, and I experienced having rich friends who were descendants of plantation owners and having friends who were descendants of plantation laborers. In elementary school, the basic education is the same—yet something is missing, even today.
My relatives wanted their kids to get off the plantation. The problem was, and is, that in school we never learned to how to own the plantation.
So many of us go on to work for the new plantations—the big corporations of the world, the military, or the government. We go to school to get a good job. We are taught to work for the rich, shop at the stores of the rich, borrow money from the banks of the rich, invest in the businesses of the rich via mutual funds in our retirement plans—but not how to be rich.
Many people do not like hearing they are taught by our school system to be caught in the web, the web of the conspiracy of the rich. People do not like to hear that the rich have manipulated our system of education.
Hijacking the Education System
One of the greatest sins of our current educational system is that it does not teach you about money. Rather, it teaches you how to be a good employee and to know your station in life. Some would say this is by design. For instance, in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island, Griffin quotes from the first occasional paper of the General Education Board, entitled “The Country School of To-Morrow,” written by Frederick Gates: “In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good upon a grateful and responsive rural folk… For the task we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one: To train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are…”
Keep in mind that the General Education Board was founded in 1903 by the Rockefeller Foundation—one of the most powerful and wealthiest foundations of its time. What we see here is an attitude that dates back over a hundred years, one of the elite rich of the United States, and even the world, seemingly orchestrating an education curriculum to meet their needs and not necessarily the needs of the student. This is important today, because although these attitudes are over a century old, they have not gone away, and they are the driving force behind your education, my education, and the education of your children. And they are the driving force behind the suppression of financial education even today. You do not need to know about money when you are destined to simply be a cog in someone else’s money machine, or a worker on someone else’s plantation.
After reading Dr. Fuller’s Grunch of Giants in 1983, I began to understand why the subject of money is not taught in schools. Up until then, I did not have the courage to criticize the school system; after all, my father was the head of the education system in Hawaii. As the years went by, however, I began to run into others who had similar views