13: Where Are The Government Schools Taking Us?

Personal note: My sincere thanks to George Mason for his posts at this site explaining why I had to be away from the computer for so long, and to visitors for their patience. I'm not as lively as before, but I have recovered well enough to continue blogging (although it will be slower than before all this happened, at least for a while). This post, in particular, will be informative about the current agenda of policy-makers in our educational system.

This is Number Thirteen in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

"... regionalism has considerable appeal as a world order half-way house. It seems more feasible in the near term as a step beyond state sovereignty than can be used to dilute nationalist sentiments during a period when glogal loyalties need to grow stronger." - Richard A. Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University, with connections to the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Federalist Association, in a comment in the 1970's about the World Order Model's Project.

The history of the American educational system shows us that collectivists and statists were successful at seizing control of the minds of generation after generation of our children. The process was slow, but that served them even better, because it's slowness made it almost imperceptible. Our Enlightement heritage was gnawed away, bit by bit; eventually, as the counter-Enlightenment forces substituted their ideas for our own, our children began to view ours as immoral and evil.

The goals were to villify the individual and to picture the group, the collective, as superior, pre-eminent, in importance. This process of socialization picked up speed with John Dewey's Hegelian influence in the schools, including the earliest years, and soon the Communists of the Soviet Union became both fashionable and highly influential.

The collectivists' goals didn't stop with the installation of a socialist system in this country. As interaction - trade, communication, etc. - among peoples of the world grew easier, their ambitions expanded to keep pace.

The quote by Dr. Falk illustrates the expansion; it doesn't make much sense until we become acquainted with the collectivists' ever wider goals.   

What Dr. Falk meant when he spoke of "regionalism" is the unification of nation-states into various geographically/culturally related populations and nations into governing "regions" (such as we currently have with the European Union, the first of such "regions"). It is the hope of many collectivist-statists around the world that eventually, first through locally  unified economic/political/military "regions," the entire globe will eventually fall under the control of a single world-wide government.

Many people who read or hear about such an idea think it sounds like the fantasy of some lunatic-fringie who is undergoing mental decompensation of the "conspiracy" sort. Unfortunately, Dr. Falk was serious, and he was not - and is not - alone. Such a global unification has been the goal of many highly influential collectivist-statists in America (and the rest of the world) from early in the history of the government takeover of our education system to the present.   

The weakening of the sovereignty of the various nation-states of the world in favor of a single global collective state began as the perceived answer to armed conflict during the aftermath of WWI. The League of Nations was established to promote the idea; that institution failed, and was soon replaced by the United Nations, which has seen more success. In the meantime, power-lusting politicians all around the world saw the "peace plan" as their step to greater power than had ever been seen on the planet in all of human history. 

Dr. Dennis Cuddy, former Senior Associate in the U.S. Department of Education, compiled an extensive and very revealing list of quotations in his Chronology of Education of Education with Quotable Quotes; Charlotte Iserbyt, another "whistleblower" from the government, compiled a collection of documents she "liberated" before leaving her position at the Department of Education as Senior Policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.  Copies of Iserbyt's documents are published in The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, and many of Cuddy's quotes are also published in the book Brave New Schools, by Berit Kjos.

Although all three authors are devoutly religious Christians, a philosophy which, like that of any faith, I do not share, the warning they post in the following selection from Cuddy's list should not be lost on any American at any point along the philosophical spectrum, and I am grateful for their exposure of what they saw going on in the Department of Education.

As we see so often in the thinking and behavior of the graduates of our government schools (and even the private school graduates, whose schools are often accredited by the government, and whose teachers are mostly trained and certified by the government), the collectivist-statists from the time of Horace Mann to the present have been generously rewarded for their persistance and hard work.

First, they made sure that the kids aren't taught "facts" such as history, mathematics, science, economics, geography, and philosophy. The intellectual void they create is filled by instilling in our children's emptied heads their own ideas. For example, they tell them that one opinion is just as good as another, that one moral code is just as good as another, that one must never be critical of a different "culture," that private property is "selfish" and "evil," etc. You've heard them all, I know, usually under the label of "Political Correctness."

Most of today's parents and teachers do not fully understand the nature of what is going on and the danger we face (up to and including the dissolution of our borders and Islamic aggression). That is because they are, for the most part, products of the same educational system that has produced so many of the journalists, entertainment figures, lawyers/judges, politicians, teachers, professors, artists and even - believe it or not - even some scientists and mathematicians, not just the humanities and liberal arts - that have become so anti-American (read: anti-Enlightenment). The irrational kind of thinking taught in our schools has affected EVERY discipline. Without awareness of this among our parents and our teachers, we are nothing but sheep being herded by the hard-working collectivist-statists.

As you already know by this time if you have read the preceding posts, the period from the mid-1800s to the early-mid 20th century were very active in setting the educational compass of the young United States. The schools were hijacked by the government under pressure from educationists, all of whom had dreams of what society should "look like," and formed unions to act as "pressure groups" to ensure that their collectivist goals would be accomplished.  None of their visions promoted the importance of the individual, his freedom to think, his intelligence, and his creativity. The agenda set by those in positions of political power at the time was first, to create an ignorant and compliant population, and second, to teach them the "virtues" of collectivism and statism.

As an important bit of background information, here's a little about Andrew Carnegie and his relationship to all this.

You probably know of Andrew Carnegie as a wealthy American industrialist and philanthropist, and he was both of these things, but that's not the whole story. On the one hand, his own business created thousands of jobs, and he funded and supported libraries, universities, and institutions that vastly expanded the teaching of the sciences and medicine in the U.S, which at that time were generally substantially behind their European counterparts. Carnegie was a hero in many ways, but philosophically, he was a mixed bag.

Very briefly, Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835, just as Horace Mann's plans for a government school system were picking up speed in this country. The family emigrated to America in 1848. As a child, Carnegie was indoctrinated with his father's democratic pacifist tenets, as well as with issues that we would call "social justice" today. These views were born of the elder Carnegie's own financial status (poor), and the difficulties that many like him experienced as the Industrial Revolution advanced.

The Industrial Revolution opened unprecedented opportunities for productive work to the populations of Europe and America, especially to members of the lower classes who would have died of wretched poverty in previous times, unable to afford the necessities of life. Initially, the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent spread of the social system that promoted its growth (capitalism) produced not only opportunities, but some difficulties as well - for example, many jobs required educational levels and the kinds of experience not required earlier in a more primitive system.

Carnegie's father was poor, but he was also a very bright man, and gave himself a basic education. He not only began to lead a more comfortable life, but unfortunately, failed to recognize it's source - capitalism.

He became very active in social issues, and these had a great influence on the young Andrew, who grew up as pacifist with grave reservations about the legitimacy of the military. Later in life, his favorite philanthropies dealt with various "peace projects" such as the Carnegie Hero Fund, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Church Peace Union, and the building of what were called three "Temples of Peace" (the International Court at the Hague, the Pan American Union Building in Washington, D.C. and the Central American Court of Justice in Costa Rica). He was a supporter of the League of Nations, founded ostensibly to promote peaceful means of solving conflicts instead of war. In addition, he authorized the trustees of his foundations to use them to eradicate other "social ills" after his money had been used to secure world peace.

Fortunately, we don't have to deduce the ideals held by Carnegie, because his life story is well known. Similarly, we don't have to deduce the motives and goals of the policy-makers of the American education system because, while far less well known, the collectivist-statists have left a long, if scattered, paper trail.

Let's begin with the identification of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), founded in 1905. The Carnegie Foundation is a well-known promoter and funder of global socialist projects, including education, under the guise of promoting "world peace" (I would like to point out that it wasn't just Carnegie who took this path; other "mixed-bag industrialists" such as Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan etc. have also had similiar concerns).

Here is some of the information collected and published by Cuddy:

1) In 1919, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace gave a grant to establish the Institute of International Education. John Dewey, famous for his role in both the development of the intensely anti-reason philosophy of Pragmatism (the first American philosophy and unfortunately, the philosophical child of Hegel) and Progressive Education, was on the IIE's National Advisory Council.

(Given that Dewey had learned so much of his thinking from Hegel, he saw teaching submission to the group, the "collective," the "state," rather than the importance of reason and the development of the individual mind, as the primary function of education. Even the sciences were taught in order to support the pre-eminance of the state.

Dewey wielded a great deal of influence on the entire American government school system. It should therefore come as no surprise that he was so important in setting the course of American education on the road to collectivism-statism.)

2) In 1933, Dewey, who became the honorary president of the National Education Association, co-authored the Humanist Manifesto I.

(Although the term "humanist" had an honorable origin when Europe was emerging from the Dark Age [it meant that if you wanted to learn about the nature of human beings, you should study human beings, and not the references to human nature as seen in religious documents]. The notion of studying the object of interest directly instead of religious sources quickly spread to other areas as well, and thus threatened the power of religious authorities, who took up the cudgel against it.

(An example of the result of this destruction is the "Humanist Manifesto II," Article 12, which is favored by the United Nations. It states, in part:

("We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds... the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community. We look toward the development of a system of world law, world order, based upon transnational government... The age of nations must end... The governments of the nations have decided to order their separate sovereignties into one government to which they surrender their arms."

(Not surprisingly, it was resolved by the Fiftieth Annual Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, as seen in the Congressional Record of the 81st Congress, 1st Session, 10/12-13/1949, to oppose the growth of the anti-sovereignty idea that is so prominant today.

(Another exercpt from Article 12 is: "We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcent the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community.)

Meanwhile, back in 1934, government interference in the economy, combined with the absence of education of students in the government schools in economics and/or philosophy, had turned what would have been a brief and minor blip in the economy into a major depression, and people became vulnerable to promises of "rescue" from the government. It is small wonder that collectivism and statism, gained such a great appeal.)

4) 1934 was a banner year for the collectivists; former NEA (National Education Association) Executive Secretary Willard Givens said:

"All us us... must be subjected to a large degree of social control... An equitable distribution of income will be sought... the major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order."

5) Still in 1934, the Carnegie Corporation funded the American Historical Association's Report of the Commission on Social Studies ("social studies" was a watered-down version of history, geography and civics combined into a single course). Here's some of what it said:

"...The age of individualism and laissez faire in economy and government is closing... a new age of collectivism is emerging... It may inviolve the limiting or supplanting of private property by public property... Almost certainly it will involve a larger measure of compulsory as well as voluntary cooperation of citizens... a corresponding enlargement of the functins of government, and an increasing state intervention in fundamental branches of economy previously left to individual discretion and initiative..."

6) In 1942, J. Elmer Morgan, editor of the NEA Journal, wrote the following editorial entitled The United Peoples of the World, in which he touted a world government's need for an educational branch, a world system of money and credit, a world police force, and a world bill of rights and duties.

(This latter, in particular, is a serious violation of the meaning of "rights," the foundation of which was developed primarily during the Enlightenment). Without going into further detail at this time, it enslaves, rather than guarantees the rights of, individuals.)

7) In 1946, in another editorial, Morgan wrote The Teacher and World Government:

"In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher... can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children... At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession."

(This statement can leave no doubt as to the collectivists' agenda for our educational system and our children.)

8) 1946 was a productive year for the collectivists, too. That year, Canadian WWII General Brock Chisholm, who was also an M.D. (psychiatry), was head of the young World Health Organization. He told us,

"We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents... The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training... these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy... Psychology and sociology... the sciences of living, should be taught to all children in primary and secondary schools... Only so... can we help our children carry their responsibilities as world citizens... We must be prepared to sacrifice much... Whatever the cost, we must learn to live in friendliness and peace... putting aside the mistaken old ways of our elders if that is possible. If it cannot be done gently, it may have to be done roughly or even violently..."

(1946 was in the middle of the era of some of Sigmund Freud's greatest influence. Although Freud was born much earlier in the 19th century, he had enormous influence on our educational system, and Brock's views were typical of those who fell under the influence of Freud's work.  Freud's influence on our kids will be discussed in another post.)

8) Again in 1948, and again funded by the Carnegie Corporation, a set of guidelines called Education for International Understanding in American Schools - Suggestions and Recommendations was published:

"The idea has become established that the preservation of international peace and order may require that force be used to compel a nation to conduct its affairs within the framework of an established world system. The most modern expression of this doctrine of collective security is in the United Nations Charter... Many persons believe that enduring peace cannot be achieved so long as the nation-state system continues as a present constituted. It is a system of international anarchy."

9) In an expression of alarm at these ideas, the Chicago Sun-Times published an editorial in 1962 saying:

"... control -- real control over the nation's children -- is being shifted rapidly to the NEA. That organization has about completed the job of cartelizing public school education... It is extending that control over colleges and universities. In the NEA scheme of things, it will be a simple matter to extend control over whatever Washington agency handles the funds."

10) The collectivist locomotive kept rolling along; in 1965, Congress passed the ESEA (the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act). Several months later, it funded a book by UCLA professor John Goodlad, called Citizens for the 21st Century. In it, Goodlad wrote:

"... the school is perceived as... a partitioned box where boys and girls come to sit still for six hours a day and be told about some fragmentary pieces of "knowledge" thought to reflect the rudiments of their "culture." This image must be shattered, violently if necessary -- and forever."

11) In 1970, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), which is the "curriculum department" of the NEA, published To Nurture Humaneness: Commitment for the '70s; here are a few statements from contributing authors

"The old order is passing... Social controls cannot be left to blind chance... Here education must play a stellar role." (Dan W. Dodson, Professor of Educational Sociology, New York University)

"Many daily decisions and value judgments now made by the individual will soon be made for him... How to plan for one's children's education will be partially taken out of his hands." (John Loughary, Professor of Education at the University of Oregon)

"Vital questions of values, beliefs, feelings, emotions and human interrelationships in all forms must be integral parts of the curriculum." (Arthur Combs, Professor of Education at the University of Florida)

12) In 1973, the Global Education Associates (GEA) was founded. It's founders, Gerald and Patricia Mische, wrote a book called Toward a Human World Order, where they said:

"It examines the strait-jacket of the present nation-state system and... explores world order alternatives... "

13) In 1976, The Phi Delta Kappan printed an article by Harold Shane, NEA Project Director for the NEA Bicentennial Committee. It was entitled America's Next 25 Years: Some Implications for Education.

He said, "Rather than adding my voice to those who urge us to go "back to basics," I would argue that we need to move ahead to the new basics... the arts of compromise and reconciliation, of consensus building, and of planning for interdependence... As young people mature, we must help them develop... the global servant concept, in which we will educate our young for planetary service and eventually for some form of world citizenship."

14) Moving right along to 1983, the Institute for 21st Century Studies was founded by Gerald O. Barney and funded by the Rockefellers, the World Bank, and UNESCO. It was "to provide support for the growing international network of 21st Century Study teams ... in exploring alternative national futures... examining education and other key areas... adopting a global perspective."

15) In 1985, the U.S. Department of State gave the Carnegie Corporation the "authority to negotiate with the Soviet Academy of Sciences (which functioned, among other things, as an intelligence-gathering arm of the KGB) about 'curriculum development and the restructuring of American education.'"

16) In 1987, some well known members of the Study Commission on Global Education were (then governor) Bill Clinton, professor John Goodlad, and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching president Ernest Boyer, among others. They prepared a report called The United States Prepares for Its Future: Global Perspectives in Education. The Foreword said:

"A dozen years ago... teaching and learning 'in global perspective' was still exotic doctrine, threatening the orthodoxies of those who still thought of American citizenship as an amalgam of American hiustory, American geography, American lifestyles and American ideas... it now seems almost conventional to speak of American citizenship in the same breath with international interdependence..."

17) In 1989, Shirley McCune (Senior Director with the Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory, which develops curriculum) said:

"What's happening in America today... is a total transformation of our society. We have moved into a new era... What the revolution has been in curriculum is that we are no longer teaching facts to children..."

18) In 1990 in The Keys of This Blood: The Struggle for World Dominion, author Malachi Martin said that the transnationalists' goal was "Ideally the same textbooks should be used all over the world in both the hard sciences and the soft curricula... [an] initiative in this direction has been under way for some years now, undertaken by Informatick, a Moscow-based educational organization and the Carnegie Endowment Fund..."

These, said Martin, would be the values they would promote:

"'Good' will no longer be burdened with a moral... coloring. 'Good' will simply be synonymous with 'global.' Else, what's an education for?... The emphasis is on homogeneity of minds, on the creation and nourishing of a truly global mentality... We must all become little Transnationalists."

20) 1990 saw the foundation of the "Project Global 2000" by Global Education Associates (see number 12 at 1973 above), and it's goals were linked to those of the international Global 2000.

"... its Education Council works with educators to integrate World Order Perspectives into [the American curriculum] and teacher education."

21)  In 1993, the National Association for Multicultural Education had a meeting for "multicultural educators" from each state, where it was said that the curriculum reform they proposed would clash with "the practices, beliefs and attitudes that are taught in many homes..."

22) Also in 1993, at the annual NEA convention in San Francisco, resolutions in support of multicultural/global education were approved.

23) In 1994, South Dakota passed a bill that required home schoolers to be certified by the state by the year 2000.

(I don't know if that bill is still in effect, but the purpose of it was to discourage the greatest threat to the collectivist-statist agenda of the government schools today - children not under education unions' control.)

24) Still in 1994, at the Baltimore USCEF (United States Coalition for Education for All) conference, discussion centered around global and community partnerships, and the theme was "It takes a village to raise a child..."

(I know that most of us have some pleasant memories of our childhood education experience in the hands of kindly and effective teachers, and that it's often hard to believe that the motives of those running our schools is anything but the well-being of our children's future. Some did, and still do, and examples of great teachers' stories will be told later.

(However, as shown by their history, their own words down to the present, and the way our children "think," it is apparent that the policy-makers who set the goals of our schools are far less interested in teaching our children how to become independent thinkers who will become successful, happy adults, than they are in promoting a world federation of states governing a compliant population submissive to their views and totally ignorant of what it was that brought us out of the Dark Age. Because of this, we are in danger of slipping into another one.)

The power and influence of these policy-makers picked up speed during the first half of the 20th century, including through Freud and the famous Dr. Spock, both of whom were favorites of the collectivist-statists.

Charlotte Iserbyt closed the end of Kjos' Brave New Schools "Section C" in part with these words:

"The soil has been tilled and the seeds have been planted. We now await the blossoming of what John Dewey and his followers have worked for since the early 1900s: universal socialist/internationalist education for world government's planned economy."

I agree.

Addendum: The collections of material from which I took the information above did not extend beyond '94, so I would like to add a very recent comment here to demonstrate that the collectivist-statists are still working hard, and it isn't just at their "professional" meetings to plan for future intrusions into our schools, but it is, as you have probably already seen, already been successful at invading the classroom.

This very year - 2007 - Mike Brooks, a Bidwell Junior Highschool teacher in Chico, California, dictated the following for his students (13-14 years old) to write in a letter:

"...After careful consideration of the facts of our current situation, I have decided to announce to everyone that I am no longer a citizen of the United States, but a free and independent member of the global community."

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Comments

[freelance writing jobs]

government school is the still the best than the private school.
yes! sometimes, the private is advance but the you will see, in every contest for school between private and public you will see the advantage of public school. :)