By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
“When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.” ― Adolf Hitler
“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.” ― Aldous Huxley, Preface to A Brave New World
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
“A society that puts equality…ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.” ― Milton Friedman
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO CALLS FOR “Free education for all children in public schools.” The List of 45 Communist Goals as provided by Skousen in The Naked Communist lists education as goals in a number of places on its list:
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
The statist drive to control education is the drive to control the children. If the children are taught that Marxism is the only viable system of government, and they are taught the lesson through antidotes that proclaim the system is fair and compassionate and for the common good (while saving the planet), any argument to the contrary will be rejected without even a consideration. Liberal left progressivism is a religion, and if the followers are taught early, they will follow the dogma for life.
America became great over the last two centuries educating our children in little red school houses taught by teachers hired by the community. The parents were very involved with their children’s education, and the lessons were much more advanced than we see in today’s public school environment.
As government has taken more interest in the education of our children, the effectiveness of the school system has suffered. The real downward spiral began during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, when his administration created the Department of Education. Since then, we have watched our education system plummet from a position that was very competitive, to an embarrassing level that we are not even sure how to remedy. Each President since Carter, save for Reagan, has initiated their own programs in the hope of saving the American Education System, despite the reality that no constitutional authority exists allowing federal intrusion. Each program has failed, and each new attempt seems more draconian than the one before.
A friend recently quipped, “We used to teach our children how to think. Now the school system teaches them what to think. I don’t even think they know what critical thinking is anymore.”
I am naturally left-handed. When I was in elementary school learning how to draw my letters in the early 1970s whenever I picked up my pencil with my left hand, the teacher yanked it from my left hand, and made me use my right hand. “This is the wrong hand,” she explained, “and this is the right hand.” Though my penmanship was lousy, since I was using the wrong hand, I learned how to write right-handed.
A couple years later when I was preparing to play baseball, I was confused regarding which hand to use to throw the ball. My dad asked, “Well, what hand do you write with?”
“This one,” I replied, holding up my right hand.
He taught me to throw right-handed. I never had much of an arm. Defensively, I was sound, but every other kid could out-throw me. In the beginning I didn’t even use a proper motion to throw the ball. I pushed it from my chest. Throwing right-handed was unnatural for me, but because the teachers had forced me to write right-handed, I was throwing right-handed. To this day, I write right-handed, and anything that uses a throwing motion (swinging a hammer, serving a tennis ball, casting a fishing line) I do it right-handed. Everything else (such as eating) I do left-handed.
In the 1970s the teaching profession in the public schools were engaging in social engineering hoping to homogenize us into a like-minded mass of automatons. The result of government trying to force equity upon any group is always the same; mediocrity, and a homogenization at the lowest common denominator.
The same kind of social engineering is going on today, and the latest assault at the time of the writing of this book, is called “Common Core.”
American students are lagging behind in virtually every category among virtually all developed nations. Our younger generation has been “dumbed down,” and without the ability to think critically, they are doomed to be limited to a life of hard-labor.
The problem may be culminating now, but the early budding of a socialized leftist school environment began beyond one hundred years ago.
In 1899, John Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association. In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. During his lifetime he taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and Columbia University. He also held positions at the University of Chicago.
The progressive education movement began in the 1880s. It differed greatly from the traditional Euro-American curricula of the 19th century. This new curriculum focused on using experiential learning methods, while placing a strong emphasis on group work in the hope of developing social skills in a collective. Through progressive education students were introduced to more collaborative and cooperative learning projects, education on social responsibility, community service and service learning projects, and democracy.
Collectivism became the primary focus of education, rather than individual achievement. The socialists of the time period understood that to alter the United States, it would need to be a gradual change, using creeping incrementalism so as not to alert the parents or the whole of society. The children would teach their children collectivism, and the schools would insert more collectivism with each passing generation, until the concept of individualism would simply become a forgotten concept, and the public school taught children as adults would then, through democracy, vote into power the socialists.
The United States is a republic, not a democracy. The push to alter the system to a democracy began with Andrew Jackson, father of the Democratic Party, during the 1830s. Democracy is a transitional system that uses majority rule to convert political systems into oligarchies. Majority rule in its purist form allows the majority to take away the rights of the minority. Majority rule becomes mob-rule, and mob-rule inevitably becomes mob violence until all opposition is silenced, or eliminated.
Karl Marx called democracy “the road to socialism.”
John Dewey became a principal figure in incorporating the progressive education model into the American public schools from the 1880s to 1904. Dewey’s efforts were instrumental in convincing teachers and administrators to begin to embrace the “new education.”
Dewey placed pragmatism above moral absolutes, using psychological and sociological processes to upset the religious foundation that had been a part of American education for so long. In 1897, Dewey published a summary of his theory on progressive education in School Journal.
He argued that education is not a place as much as it is “the process of living and is not meant to be the preparation of future living.” School, he believed, must represent the present life. Therefore, the teacher should not be an authoritative figure, but a part of the present life. The teacher should be a member of the community there to assist the student.
Dewey also explained that education is a fundamental method of social reconstruction. Through education, society can progress and reform. Students, he taught, must “share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.”
As a socialist, enabling the education system to give way to social reconstruction and for the schools to act as a means to reconstruct society, enabling the collective to become a living community.
In addition to Dewey’s influence upon the education system in the United States, he has also been attributed with playing a primary inspiration for a number of movements, including humanism, naturalism, contextualism and empiricism.
Alfie Kohn wrote in 1999, “Traditional education uses extrinsic motivation, such as grades and prizes. Progressive education is more likely to use intrinsic motivation, basing activities on the interests of the child. Praise may be discouraged as a motivator.” (Alfie Kohn (30 September 1999). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-547-52615-7. Retrieved 8 June 2013.)
As a part of their plan for a worldwide absolute oligarchy, The Carnegie Foundation during the 1930s included in its writings regarding a “planned system of a New World Order” a planned global education system. (http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/)
In 1949 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was publishing pamphlets expounding the importance that children be educated devoid of any national allegiance, patriotism or family loyalties. “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only produce precarious results.”
In today’s American Society, though the United States Constitution provides no authorities to the federal government to be involved in education, the ruling elitists in Washington, D.C., are dictating mandates to nation’s school districts which demand compliance or else non-compliant school districts will lose their flow of federal dollars.
Common Core has been sold under the guise of being the horse that can carry the United States to higher educational standards. While the federal government states that the implantation of Common Core is voluntary, and there are no federal mandates requiring any school district to use the experimental curriculum, failure to sign up for Common Core results in a loss of any and all federal funding to that school district.
The ultimate goal is to eliminate locally run school boards, abandon the letter grade system, and change the curriculum to methods vastly different from traditional methods we call the “Three Rs”.
In lock-step with Dewey’s methods, Common Core is engineered to program children to participate and appreciate the notion of collectivism. Group activities are geared towards creating “group mind” thinking. The community and the collective is being taught as more important than the individual mind. The value of the child is judged by the value the child can bring to the group, and if he or she can work with the group.
The progressive education push has also been coupled with the drugging of our children, and policies removing the parents from the educational process. Textbooks are no longer taken home in most public school settings, likely to hide the details of what the child is being taught from the parents. In some school districts the amount of time a parent is allowed to spend in their child’s classroom has been greatly reduced, and restricted. The attitude by the school system that “your child belongs to us during the school hours” has become more prominent, and more conspicuous.
An educational system which misinforms and indoctrinates young people by design was always the goal. In the United States it has been a concerted effort. The education system is being supported by the mass media and the political class. Confirmation of the lessons taught to the young minds are reinforced constantly through entertainment programming, video games, and even advertising. The news media and the constant flow of collectivist information on the computer through the manipulation of search engines confirm everything the child has been taught. The homogenizing effects are now global, and have become tools of state-sponsored propaganda and mind control that doesn’t even seem to care anymore on whether or not it hides its intentions.
Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski saw it coming, and new that technology would be the final tool to ensure the brainwashing agenda was completed. In 1970 in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technotronic Era, Brzezinski predicted, “The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
A marriage between the mass media, psychology and the education system has enabled the liberal left statists to more easily target and access our children. The statists have invested heavily in research regarding human behavior and the human psyche. As a result, advertisements, movies, music videos and other media have coupled with the education industry to be as influential on the lives of our children, and their education, as possible. Images and symbols are strategically inserted to generate a desired response.
Rational or logical arguments no longer accompany today’s tactics against our children. Now, they directly tap into humanity’s primal needs and instincts, generating emotional and irrational responses.
Common Core uses the same kind of communal and collective methods as progressive education because they are one and the same. The basic foundation of Common Core is collectivism, and big government control over our children through a “fair” educational setting. The Common Core curriculum pushes younger children into the communal fold, deemphasizing parental roles, and promoting that the “morality” of the powers that be are superior to that of the parent’s.
In the schools under Common Core, children are taught to serve the government’s definitions regarding what the community needs are, and to release themselves from the shackles of individualism. Common Core also preaches that the accountability of the education system should not be to the parents, but to the government.
The Business Roundtable (http://businessroundtable.org/) , an organization that states it focuses on facing the major issues of the nation through a team of CEOs who lead U.S. companies with $7 trillion in annual revenues (http://static.politico.com/cc/d0/74a3bc2e4718a5e81e84f7b4df85/brt-letter-on-no-child-left-behind.pdf) , wrote a letter to Congress in support of Common Core, and the Elementary and Johnson’s Secondary Education Act (ESEA) http://www.ed.gov/essa?src=rn (reborn through Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)), declaring, “A prepared workforce is essential for U.S. employers of all sizes. This is how we guarantee a brighter future for our workers and their families. We ask you to encourage the conferees to strengthen ESEA’s accountability provisions. Schools should be required to implement support strategies in cases where students are not meeting state-defined achievement goals…”
Required? Why do corporations want Congress to push ESEA so that schools will be forced to move toward a workforce-based, rather than a personal and individual decision-based, achievement plan? Common Core, and those who support it, desire a system where the decision making for children is based on the judgment of the government machine’s collective dictates, not on what the student, with guidance from the parent, and trusted teachers, desire and choose.
In Common Core, the math is established to drag down those who excel in math down to the level of all other students in an attempt to make it “fair,” history has been re-written, and the instructional materials are geared towards a collective (communist) agenda and narrative, rather than the basic “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.”
To hide the true nature of Common Core, the curriculum is presented as a fair national standard, and the students are not allowed to take their text books home.
Saul Alinsky recognized that teaching the children was an important part of initiating a Marxist revolution. The children, as well as the adults, must be taught to understand that “The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and the wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.”
His argument was a call for an abandonment of morals and ethics. Morality and ethics prevent the world from being what “it should be.” The Alinsky end game is likely a global utopia in which the “people” have power.”
http://www.newenglishreview.org/DL_Adams/Saul_Alinsky_and_the_Rise_of_Amorality_in_American_Politics/
Morality and ethics are something taught very young by a child’s parents, so to enable a society to abandon those morals and ethics, a Marxist government must get to the children early, before those kinds of beliefs can be instilled in the child by the parents.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/DL_Adams/Saul_Alinsky_and_the_Rise_of_Amorality_in_American_Politics/
Morality and ethics are something taught very young by a child’s parents, so to enable a society to abandon those morals and ethics, a Marxist government must get to the children early, before those kinds of beliefs can be instilled in the child by the parents.
The federal government was never granted the authority to be involved in the education system for a reason. Though education was important in the minds of the Founding Fathers, localism had to be at the heart of that education. During the 1800s our nation developed and prospered without federal interference into the education system. The children were taught in little red school houses, often, without any outside influence by teachers who were hired by the local community. Through our education system began to temper under the heavy weight of progressive influences during much of the twentieth century, the United States still managed to maintain a respectable position in the world in regards to education. Then, after the creation of the Department of Education under the Jimmy Carter administration, the downward plummet of the school systems of America were in full swing.
The influence of the federal government has given the statists vast responsibilities over children that have always been traditionally handled by parents and families. In an attempt to nationalize education through Common Core standards, and double down on the ESEA of 1965, the 2015 Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA) not only gave the Obama administration a larger range of powers over education, but the momentum to establish full-service parent-replacement centers, and the authority to send government workers into neighborhoods on “home visitation and parenting education” missions. (http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/21395-obamas-community-schools-aim-to-replace-parents)
The piece of legislation also the opportunity for the federal government to establish “community schools,” which not only establish a system that more resembles the communal theory that it “takes a village,” but even calls for government boarding schools that he said should have children 24 hours per day, seven days a week. http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/21209-education-secretary-s-dangerous-public-boarding-schools-agenda
“Community” schools, as defined by the Obama administration, could become a child’s parents, nanny, educator, doctor, dentist, food source, psychiatrist, and more. These “schools” could expand and accelerate the statist attempt to eliminate the role of families and parents in the lives of children, replacing them with governmental paternity.
The Deputy Education Secretary at the time of the legislation, Arne Duncan, applauded the ECAA, accepting the empowerment to hand out taxpayer funds to schools, and state governments that help “integrate multiple services into a comprehensive, coordinated continuum supported by research-based activities that achieve the performance goals … to meet the holistic needs of children.” Secretary Duncan openly boasted that it was the education system’s desire to turn the children of America into “green” and “global” citizens with his “global partner” UNESCO via the “weapon” of education.
By August of 2015, an estimated 5,000 “community schools” were in operation nationwide. http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/21395-obamas-community-schools-aim-to-replace-parents Opponents of Common Core and federal intrusion of the American education system have estimated that if the legislation continues to move forward, there could be thousands more “community schools” in the coming years. In late 2015, Arne Duncan become the U.S. Secretary of Education, and he congratulated his department for spending millions of tax dollars promoting the “community schools” scheme. He said of the “Brave New Schools” that, “Across the nation, we've seen schools come together to partner with key organizations to support comprehensive services for students and their families in some of our toughest communities. Great schools require the entire community to work together, and these grants will help leverage our resources to create a range of wraparound services that help all students grow in the classroom, and graduate ready for college and their careers.” Duncan's "cradle-to-career" education-reform agenda, as he calls it, is essentially a blueprint for total indoctrination and ultimately, tyranny. http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/21395-obamas-community-schools-aim-to-replace-parents
“This is modeled after the Soviet system,” said Charlotte Iserbyt, author of the book Deliberate Dumbing Down of America and a former senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Education. “It is part of a long-range plan outlined by the Carnegie Corporation to abolish local elected boards and use education to transform America from a capitalist system to a planned economy. The charter schools are a huge part of this agenda too because they already do not have elected boards, and the plan is to have unelected commissions and boards, at the same time as we move away from local tax funding of schools. We are watching it all happen right now. The simplest solution is to cut the international/federal/state umbilical cord!”
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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