Examining Education in the United States -- a series by Alex Newman, Epoch Times
- The Progressive Agenda to Dumb Down America's Children
- The Genesis of Public Schools: Collectivism and Failure
- How Horace Mann Worked to Destroy Traditional Education -- and America
- How John Dewey Used Public 'Education' to Subvert Liberty
- John Dewey's Public Schools Replaced Christianity With Collectivist Humanism
- Socialists Used Public Schools to Destroy Literacy in America
- Frankfurt School Weaponized US Education Against Civilization
- Big Foundations Unleashed Collectivist 'Revolution' via US Schools
- How Socialists Used Teachers Unions Such as the NEA to Destroy Education
- UNESCO: Indoctrinating Humanity With Collectivist 'Education'
- Rise of 'Fed Ed' Accelerated Demise of Real Education
- Common Core, Still in Place, Nationalized Educational Quackery
- Big Brother Schools Using Big Data to Manipulate and Spy on Kids
- The Sordid History and Deadly Consequences of 'Sex Ed' at School
- Homeschooling Revolution Gets Coronavirus Boost
- Historic Crossroads for Private Education: Boom or Bust?
- Trading Academics for Far-Left 'Social-Emotional Learning'
- Schools Using Fake 'History' to Kill America
- CCP Virus Ushers In Brave New World of Techno-Utopian 'Education'
- Echoes of Mao: Weaponizing Schools With 'Critical Race Theory'
- The Totalitarian Agenda Behind LGBT Sex-Ed Revolution at School
- Pushing Parents Out, Biden Administration Further Weaponizes 'Education'
- The Schools Are on Fire; Time to Get the Children Out
Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children. He is the executive director of Public School Exit, serves as CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, and writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad.
1. The Progressive Agenda to Dumb Down America's Children -- by Alex Newman, 09/25/2019
During the 48th Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Council, Epoch Times' senior editor Jan Jekielek sat down with Alex Newman, co-author of "Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children." Newman broke down what he sees as the progressive agenda taking over the American school system to promote a collectivist, socialist, atheist worldview.
Jan Jekielek: Alex Newman, great to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Alex Newman: Great to be here with you. Thank you Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: You're the author of "Crimes of the Educators," and you had a very provocative talk last night. And I wanted you to tell me more. What is going on in the US educational system that we should be worried about?
Mr. Newman: Well, I think we should be worried about the entire educational system, not just what's going on there. If you look at the people who created it, they all told us what their agenda was. It was to turn the children into little socialists, little communists, little humanists, and away from traditional American values, biblical morality, and those cornerstones of what America was founded on. And so I think the entire edifice is a threat to our freedom, to our nation, to our children, to our families.
Well, I think we should be worried about the entire educational system, not just what's going on there. If you look at the people who created it, they all told us what their agenda was. It was to turn the children into little socialists, little communists, little humanists, and away from traditional American values, biblical morality, and those cornerstones of what America was founded on. And so I think the entire edifice is a threat to our freedom, to our nation, to our children, to our families.
Mr. Jekielek: What percent of American adults are illiterate?
Mr. Newman: 50 percent. In 1993, the federal government did a literacy study, and they categorized Americans into five categories. One being completely and totally illiterate, couldn't read a stop sign to save [their] life; two being basically functionally illiterate, and five being a good reader. Half of Americans were in the bottom two categories.
They did another survey 10 years later--same results: about half of Americans can't read. And in some places, it's even worse. In Washington DC, the government's own data shows that more than two-thirds of the adult population is functionally illiterate. This is mind-blowing.
Mr. Jekielek: It is mind-blowing.
Mr. Newman: They spend 12 years in a government school. We spend $150,000, $200,000, and these kids are graduating, and they can't even read their high school diploma. Now anybody who tells you that's an accident doesn't know what they're talking about. This is absolutely deliberate. It can be proven. We reprinted one of the essays in this book by John Dewey, the founding father of America's government school system explaining that basically they want to dumb down the children. We don't need to teach the little kids how to read, write and do math. We really just need to socialize them. But we need to do it without people noticing because otherwise there's gonna be a violent reaction. So we reprinted that essay just because it's so hard to believe until you've seen the evidence.
Mr. Jekielek: It's extremely hard to believe. It sounds like you're kind of handicapping the society and the nation severely. Why would you do that?
Mr. Newman: That's a very good question.
Mr. Jekielek: First of all, this statistic, to me it's a jaw-dropping thing. It's been around since 1993. I don't even know what to say. And secondly that it's deliberate, just strains credulity.
Mr. Newman: The story of how it all happened is [in the book]; I can give you the condensed version.
There was a Reverend Gallaudet who was running a school for deaf children with the absolute best of intentions. He set out trying a new strategy for teaching reading because the way normal people learn how to read our alphabet is through phonics. Each letter represents one or more sounds. To teach a child to read, you need to teach them what sounds each letter makes, how you blend those together, and then how you decode the word. Deaf children can't hear sounds. So this Reverend who was taking care of deaf children figured out [that he could] just teach them to memorize whole words as if the words themselves were assembled, kind of like the Chinese writing system. It's completely different from our writing system, which is based on phonetic characters. For deaf children, this was a really big improvement.
A very smart person can memorize hundreds, maybe even over a thousand words. That opens up reading to them in a way that wasn't possible before. Horace Mann, who was the pioneer of setting up government schools in America, started off as the education commissioner in Massachusetts. He got this idea from the Prussian dictatorship, that government ought to educate all the children, equalize all men, and get the Bible out, etc. And he thought, why don't we try out this reading method in the new government schools that we've created in Boston? Well, they did, and within a few years, all the headmasters of all the schools in Boston said, we're not going to do this anymore. It doesn't work. The kids were developing what today we would call dyslexia. They couldn't read properly because that's not how you teach reading.
Even a really smart kid cannot memorize 8,000 words, [which] would be necessary to be able to properly understand the written language that we have. So that [idea] was completely discredited. I mean, you can read the essay today. My colleague who I wrote "Crimes of the Educators" with, Dr. Sam Blumenfeld, put together a book in 1973 called "The New Illiterates." And he actually reprinted the essay that the Boston schoolmasters wrote about this teaching method. They had said, this change proposed by Mr. Mann is not called for. It's not sustained by sound reasoning. It doesn't work. We're not going to do it anymore. It was completely discredited. Throw it on the ash heap of history; it doesn't work. Let's not do it again.
Now, John Dewey, who I mentioned before, was inspired by the Soviet Union. He went to the Soviet Union. He loved what Lenin was doing, instilling a collectivist mentality into the children. He wanted to replicate that in the United States. He resurrected this quackery that Horace Mann had tried out, knowing full well that it wasn't going to work. They set up an experimental school with Rockefeller money, and the kids graduated unable to read and write. Incredibly, they said, that's perfect. Let's do it all across the nation.
They put together readers like "Dick and Jane," which handicapped millions of Americans. It became a big scandal back in 1955, because Rudolf Flesch wrote the book, "Why Johnny Can't Read." He blew the lid off all this. He said, this is ridiculous. This way of teaching reading flies in the face of all logic, all common sense. And yet it's being taught in every public school in America. Something's wrong. So this caused a national uproar. They were exposed. They had to retreat slightly. They said, we'll introduce phonics again; at least a little bit. Then in 1973, Dr. Blumenfeld put out "The New Illiterates" statistics and another scandal ensued. And yet, to this day, under common core, they have children in kindergarten memorizing sight words.
[The idea that] it's an accident or that somehow, after thousands of years of teaching people to read, we forgot how to do it, is preposterous. It's ludicrous.
Mr. Jekielek: The title of your book is provocative. It's suggesting there's kind of a utopian vision behind what's happening to our schools. We're just talking about literacy here. Are you saying that this is somehow well-intentioned? Someone's trying to create a better society by making sure people can't read properly? I don't get it.
Mr. Newman: I don't think that it's well-intentioned.
Robert Owen was one of the earliest socialists. In fact, he was a socialist before Karl Marx came along. He had come over from Scotland and set up a colony in Indiana called the New Harmony colony, and it was an absolute failure. They said, we're going to try communism here before the term communism existed. They called it a social system where you wouldn't have private property. Everything would be kind of communal and collective. It was a miserable failure.
So Robert Owen went back to the drawing board. He said, the problem is not with the idea of communism. The problem is that people are raised in a selfish environment. They're given an education that turns them into little individualists when really they need to be collectivist. So his organization actually branched out and instead of focusing on founding a communist colony, they said we need to set up a national system of government schools where we can prepare these children for a future of collectivism.
So, Horace Mann got his inspiration, and actually the King of Prussia got his inspiration, from Robert Owen. He actually wrote him a thank you letter. You could say Robert Owen was well-intentioned. He rejected Christianity, he rejected God, he rejected private property. He rejected all the things that I would consider good, but I think, from his writings, he clearly believed what he was doing was good. He thought human nature was actually good, whereas the traditional American ethos has always been kind of Calvinistic: humans are innately depraved, and our heart is desperately wicked. Well Robert Owen didn't believe that.
He thought that was a product of our environment, and that if you could get the children [while they're still] young, you could train them to create what the Soviets later called "the New Soviet man": someone who wouldn't think of themselves but only the collective.
In that sense, maybe you could say they were well-intentioned. I think the current crop of people who insist on teaching our children with this quackery masquerading as reading instruction, I think they know full well the damage that they're doing. And I think it's very deliberate. As a Christian, I think the agenda is almost self-evident. The very first education law we ever had in the United States was actually passed in the 1640s by the very, very religious people of what was then the Massachusetts Bay colony. It was called the "Old Deluder Satan Act."
Mr. Jekielek: Tell me what this is.
Mr. Newman: It was the first education-related act that was ever passed in what became the United States. It was passed back in the Massachusetts Bay colony, [which was] settled by very, very religious people who had come across from Europe. The premise of the legislation -- it's actually written in the law that was passed by their legislature -- was that one of the chief projects of "old deluder Satan" was to keep men from knowledge of the scriptures. They had in mind [policies of] burning people at the stake for trying to translate the Bible into the languages of the common people. They said, one of the chief projects of Satan was to keep men from knowledge of the scriptures. So what we need in this colony is to make sure everybody can read so that they can read the scriptures, so that Satan can not deceive them.
Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating.
Mr. Newman: So what happens if most of your population is illiterate? They're not going to be reading their bibles. They're not going to be reading their Constitution or their Declaration of Independence. They're not going to be reading genuine history books or even primary source documents. They'll be turning to fake news like CNN, or they'll be relying on government teachers in government schools to teach them. This creates an enormous problem from the perspective of handing on our traditions, passing on our religious values, maintaining our political institutions and our freedoms. And I think almost self-evidently, that's the goal, to quote a more recent figure, Barack Obama: "to fundamentally transform the United States." They would never have been able to advance the socialist agenda, the size and the scope of government in the way that we've seen without having dumbed down the American population.
Mr. Jekielek: This is really fascinating. Now that you frame it this way, it does make sense that it would make people much more susceptible to indoctrination, because it's harder for them to find the alternate perspective that they may have to consider.
Mr. Newman: Absolutely. Now you have YouTube, which is one positive development. People who are illiterate can still go watch videos and learn something, but there's a lot of garbage on YouTube as well. I think there's no substitute for going back and reading the Constitution or reading the Bible or reading the Declaration of Independence. It's a totally different thing to read it for yourself than it is to hear it from some Marxist political science professor.
Mr. Jekielek: The democratization of the written word through the Gutenberg Bible and everything that followed is a transformative event, a civilization-changing event, right?
Mr. Newman: It was, and if you look at America, it came out of a society that was overwhelmingly Christian and that was overwhelmingly literate. Far more Americans were literate at the time of our War for Independence than are today, based on the government's data. There's a lot of literacy data, and I've tracked it from all different sources. There were people who did studies at the time, and there're people who've gone back and tried to do studies.
Just read the Federalist Papers, and you get a sense of just how advanced the education these people were receiving was -- long before we had $1 trillion per year government education system. One of the defining characteristics was, of course, high literacy. Children learned how to read long before they ever set foot in a school. They learned from their parents on a farm using very, very simple tools that anybody could use, like The Blue Back Speller and The New England Primer -- very, very simple tools that they could get at the general store for almost no money.
They were overwhelmingly Christian. They had this belief that they were created by God, that God had given them certain rights and responsibilities, including private property and things like that. That's what America emerged from. And very clearly -- there's no debate about it whatsoever -- the people who set up our government school system vehemently disagreed with that. They wanted to move us toward a more Soviet-style system.
And in fairness to John Dewey, he was operating in the very late 1800's, early 1900's. He had not seen yet the horrors that would be unleashed by these kinds of ideas -- in the Soviet Union and communist China and Cambodia and Vietnam and Cuba. Take your pick. In fairness to him, maybe he didn't know that hundreds of millions of people would end up slaughtered or killed as a result of shortages through these kinds of ideas. So you might say he was well-intentioned. I think his premises were all wrong. But you might say he was well-intentioned. I wouldn't.
Mr. Jekielek: Alex, then this is just one of the crimes of the educators that you document in your book. For me, it's almost like full stop -- this is an emergency! And this is just one thing. How many issues [do you document] in your book?
Mr. Newman: A whole range of crimes. Everything from the drugging of children to the abuse of children to exposing them to obscene and pornographic materials, to encouraging them to fornicate and get abortions. It's just endless. Among the most serious, I would say is child abuse. We consider deliberately handicapping a child for life with illiteracy to be abusive in an extreme way. You handicap that child literally for the rest of their life. You make the written word inaccessible to them, you make their career prospects much dimmer. That's unconscionable.
And even beyond that, [they're] trying to -- subtly through deception and fraud -- overthrow our political institutions, overthrow our freedom, not openly, not by saying we should all give up our freedom and live in a collectivist society, but surreptitiously, by indoctrinating young people.
You know, back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan put together a commission, the National Commission on Excellence in Education. And they came out with a report: A Nation at Risk. And they said -- not me -- that if a foreign power had done this to us through the educational system, we would have viewed it as an act of war. What Dr. Blumenfeld and I argued is that we should view it as an act of war. It was a calculated and strategic effort to overthrow our system of government. I consider collectivism to be slavery. So these people were trying to enslave us.
Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating body of work. Alex, such a pleasure to have you.
Mr. Newman: Thank you so much, Jan.
2. The Genesis of Public Schools: Collectivism and Failure -- by Alex Newman, 10/03/2019
Standardized tests show Americans are getting dumber and dumber with each passing year. And polls now consistently show that more than half of young Americans today prefer socialism over freedom. This is obviously not sustainable -- at least if the United States is going to survive as a free society.
It's also not an accident.
To solve this crisis, it's essential to have an understanding of where public schools came from and what existed prior to their establishment. After all, before the proliferation of government schools, Americans were the best-educated people on the planet -- just consider the Founding Fathers, and the "Federalist Papers," to get a sense of the level of education that once prevailed in America.
The history of how the government was able to take over -- and the characters behind that effort -- is almost incredible. Much of that shadowy story, though, is barely known today, even among educational experts. That's a problem, and potentially an existential threat.
When examined honestly, the history of public education -- and a study of the key men who laid the foundations for the system that now exists -- reveals a long-term plan by Utopians to totally re-shape humanity and civilization along collectivist lines. This agenda has been remarkably successful thus far, as the polling data show.
Everybody involved in education knows about John Dewey and Horace Mann, of course. These two socialist luminaries are almost universally credited with having created the modern public education system in the United States. Their backgrounds and views will be addressed in upcoming articles in this series on education.
But the true story of government schools has its origins long before Mann became the first education commissioner of Massachusetts, with his radical plan to have the government take over education, using the Prussian model.
Much of the earlier history of public schools -- before Mann picked up the baton -- remains not just obscure, but practically unknown. Were it not for the meticulous research of the late Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld, a passionate educator who devoted six decades of his life to studying education and the science of reading, it might still be awaiting discovery in dusty old libraries and university archives in the United States and Europe.
The real story of government education can be traced to a long-forgotten communist commune in Indiana called "New Harmony," and its eccentric founder. Established in the 1820s by Robert Owen, a Welsh Utopian who rejected Christianity and private property, the idea behind the settlement was to show the world that collectivism was actually superior to individualism.
Like the communist experiments of the 20th century -- Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and so on -- New Harmony was a disaster, albeit not as bloody as the socialist experiments of later years. Within two years of its establishment, though, everybody knew New Harmony was a total failure.
The utter implosion of this experiment in collectivism, which preceded Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto" by some two decades, is the reason those early advocates of collectivism made the adoption of mandatory government schools for all children their top priority. The thinking was that the commune failed not because of anything wrong with communism or collectivism, but because the people living there had not been properly socialized and "educated" to be collectivists from childhood.
Just like Marx and Engels would claim decades later, the Owenites believed that what was needed were government schools that would take over child rearing from the earliest possible ages. And so that became their sole focus.
Among other ideas, Owen rejected the prevailing Calvinist views of America in that era. These held that man is innately depraved and that his heart is desperately wicked. Owen believed the reason men were evil, selfish, individualistic, and violent was the result of their upbringing, not their nature. He believed human nature was essentially good, and that a collectivist education would help create what would later come to be known as the "New Soviet man."
Even before he set up New Harmony, Owen had well-developed ideas on the sort of education that would be needed to build his imagined Utopia. He published some of his views on this subject in 1813 in a collection dubbed "A New View of Society or Essays on the Formation of the Human Character."
"It follows that every state, to be well governed, ought to direct its chief attention to the formation of character, and that the best-governed state will be that which shall possess the best national system of education," Owen declared.
"Under the guidance of minds competent to its direction, a national system of training and education may be formed, to become the most safe, easy, effectual, and economical instrument of government that can be devised. And it may be made to possess a power equal to the accomplishment of the most grand and beneficial purposes."
Years later, Owen explained in his own autobiography that his essays on education had been given to the king of Prussia by the Prussian ambassador. According to Owen's account, the Prussian ruler had "so much approved" of these ideas that he ordered his own government to create a national education system based upon them. And thus, the Prussian system of education -- schooling of the state, by the state, and for the state -- was officially born.
This Owen-inspired totalitarian model of schooling, which segregated children by age and coerced parents to surrender their children to the state for "education," would eventually become the model for Massachusetts -- and then the nation as a whole. And the history would gradually be forgotten as the rotten fruit of this system began to undermine traditional American values and ideas.
Long before the horrific communist slaughters and genocides of the 20th century, Owen and his ideas found enthusiastic supporters among certain segments of the American elite. One of Owen's early disciples was Orestes Brownson, a prominent New England writer and editor who became totally dedicated to the cause.
Unlike Owen, who went to his grave passionately believing that simply getting control of the children through government schools would produce Utopia, Brownson eventually rejected collectivism, converted to Catholicism, and blew the whistle on the schemes of his former associates.
"The great object was to get rid of Christianity,” Brownson explained in "An Oration on Liberal Studies" after seeing the light. "The plan was not to make open attacks on religion although we might belabor the clergy and bring them into contempt where we could; but to establish a system of state, we said, national schools, from which all religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children."
Today, that is the norm. But back in the early- to mid-1800s, it would have been inconceivable to average people.
The first element of the plan, Brownson revealed, was to establish a system of government-controlled schools. "For this purpose, a secret society was formed," Brownson continued, saying the plan was to model it on the Carbonari in Europe.
"The members of this secret society were to avail themselves of all the means in their power, each in his own locality, to form public opinion in favor of education by the state at the public expense, and to get such men elected to the legislatures as would be likely to favor our purposes."
While Brownson didn't know how far the secret society's tentacles extended, he did know that a "considerable portion of the State of New York was organized." He knew that, he said, because "I was myself one of the agents for organizing it."
By the very nature of "secret" societies, much of the history of this network remains concealed. But it is obvious that they found great success in advancing government schools. In less than a century, government education proliferated all across the United States.
Stay tuned to this space for more of that incredible history in the weeks and months to come.
3. How Horace Mann Worked to Destroy Traditional Education -- and America -- by Alex Newman, 10/10/2019
Before government took over education in Massachusetts and eventually the rest of the United States, the state and the nation had a thriving education system that produced the best-educated population on the planet up until that time. But then, Horace Mann came along, and everything changed.
Early American schooling was dominated by homeschooling, along with a vibrant free-market education ecosystem. Outside of education at home, which is where most children learned to read, the landscape featured mostly schools run by churches and entrepreneurs, as well as private tutors.
Many of America's Founding Fathers, like the broader population, received the bulk of their basic education at home. Even poor children could receive a formal education, though, provided largely by churches and philanthropists. The Quakers, for example, ran schools that welcomed anyone, whether they could pay or not.
Tax-funded K-12 government schools -- especially as they exist today -- would have been inconceivable to Americans from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. Education without the Bible and God would have been not just inconceivable to those people, but outrageous, if not an oxymoron.
And yet, long before government seized control over education, Americans were incredibly well educated. Literacy data and vast amounts of anecdotal evidence from that era show that literacy levels were significantly higher in the mid-to-late 1700s than they are today. Modern studies on the subject confirm that.
Most children learned to read at home before ever stepping foot in a formal school. And they did it using simple, cheap primers that were vastly superior to almost everything in use today when it comes to reading instruction.
Then, everything changed. An ambitious lawyer-turned-politician-turned-educational-reformer with almost no experience as an educator came on the scene. He had grandiose ideas and messianic delusions that would eventually see the complete restructuring of the entire educational system in the United States. His name: Horace Mann.
In the first article in this education series, The Genesis of Public Schools: Collectivism and Failure, the almost unknown origins of the government-school movement in America were exposed. It all began with with a now-obscure communist named Robert Owen and his failed collectivist colony in Indiana known as "New Harmony."
Owen's early 19th-century writings on education inspired the king of Prussia to establish a national government education system based on statist ideals -- education of the state, by the state, for the state. Prussia's totalitarian system included mandatory schooling for all children, powerful police forces to deal with non-compliance, segregation of children by age, instilling of a statist mindset in all children, and more. It was the first system of its kind anywhere on the planet.
But it would not be the last.
The Owen-inspired Prussian system captured the imagination of Mann and his wealthy associates. These mostly Harvard-educated elites were increasingly abandoning the Orthodox Christianity that defined early America in favor of liberal Unitarian and secular ideas about man and nature. They had an obsession with reforming man and society in their own image.
As a politician in the state legislature, Mann worked hard to expand the size and scope of government across all fields. But by the mid-1830s, the educational reformer was ready to advance Big Government in the United States in an unprecedented manner: the total takeover of education by the state.
With a governor friendly to their ideas in place, Mann and his wealthy backers launched their transformative education plan in 1837. This included setting up a state "Board of Education" -- the first in America -- that would oversee education throughout the commonwealth. Mann was chosen to serve as the board's first secretary.
It was all supposed to be based on the Prussian model launched two decades earlier. According to Mann himself, one of the primary goals of the new education regime he was constructing in Massachusetts would be to "equalize the conditions of men" and eradicate poverty -- in essence, the same collectivist ideology espoused by Owen and his disciples decades earlier.
The keystone of the system envisioned by Mann was a network of government-run "seminaries," or "normal schools," that would train all Massachusetts teachers to teach what the state wanted taught. It didn't take long for the state-sponsored normal schools to begin indoctrinating future teachers with Mann's naturalistic views on religion, including the introduction of the quack phrenology book "The Constitution of Man."
Even though Christianity and the Reformation had fueled the spread of education, Mann, like Owen before him, only more quietly, rejected the Bible and Orthodox Christianity, putting him far outside of the mainstream in 1800s America. Under the guise of removing "sectarian" ideas, he worked hard to destroy the Christian roots of education across Massachusetts and beyond.
Mann shared Owen's views on the nature of man, too. The prevailing Calvinist worldview in early America held that man was innately and totally depraved, and so government must be strictly limited in its powers. Men like Owen and Mann, however, believed people were basically good, and that the right set of policies and education would perfect mankind to create Utopia.
Mann and his cohorts believed fervently in the power of big government to wisely guide mankind toward an idyllic future. He regularly used lofty rhetoric about the benevolent, paternalistic role of government that would become the all-too-familiar siren song of the 20th century's most ruthless totalitarians.
The views of Mann and Owen ultimately prevailed over the traditional understanding of education that had been refined and perfected over the centuries. But while Mann predicted that government schools would ultimately render obsolete "nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code," in reality, their proliferation coincided with a downward spiral that would see crime and immorality explode to unprecedented heights.
Mann's attitude toward other people's children was bizarre, too, even by today's standards. In his 1867 "Lectures and Annual Reports on Education," Mann claimed that those engaged in the "sacred cause of education" were "entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause." Shortly before his appointment as education secretary, he gushed at the mere thought of having "the future minds of such multitudes" dependent in some way on him.
While Mann is often described correctly as one of the founders of public education in the United States, the full story is slightly more complex. Prior to Mann, Massachusetts did have some government intervention in education, including some "common schools" with roots in the early 17th century Puritan Bible colony. That history is well documented.
But regardless of what Mann might have told the conservative public at the time, what existed prior was completely different from what Mann introduced.
The commonwealth's first education laws -- in fact the first education laws in all of North America -- included the "Old Deluder Satan Act" of the 1640s. The text of the legislation reveals a great deal about the mindset of that era.
The premise was this: One "chief project of that old deluder, Satan" is to "keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures." With that in mind, lawmakers decided that towns needed to ensure everyone was capable of reading. So towns with more than a certain number of inhabitants were ordered to make sure children could read -- the alternative being satanic deception rooted in ignorance of the Bible.
The modern conception of "separation of church and state" was completely alien to the Puritan founders, who laid the foundations for what would eventually become the United States of America. For them, the state was a divine institution ordained by God charged with carrying out God's commands -- primarily punishing evil, as defined by God. And that is why they felt it proper to use both church and state -- inseparable institutions, in their mind -- to educate children.
But even in Massachusetts, one of just a handful of jurisdictions that had any government involvement in education at all, the free market and Christianity still dominated the educational scene by the early to mid-1800s. Common schools were in steep decline, as the overwhelming majority of parents chose to educate their children at home and in vastly superior private schools.
At least, that was the case until Mann came along and created America's first ever state-controlled, bureaucratic, property-tax-funded government school system. At the same time that was occurring, along with a militant secularization of education, Mann and his cohorts waged a campaign to demonize the phenomenal private academies across the state, as well as the parents who sent their children there.
Until Mann, across America and the broader Western world, education was regarded as a process of giving children intellectual tools and moral instruction. The primary end was to know God, with developing the intellectual abilities of children a secondary purpose.
After Mann, though, there was a radical transformation. So-called progressive education, as it came to be known, was the new norm. Under his vision, schools were to serve as tools for re-shaping human nature and society to achieve a heaven-on-earth ideal.
One of the most far-reaching innovations to enter the schools under Mann was the "whole word" method of teaching reading, as opposed to the phonics that had been used for thousands of years. It ended in total disaster. That story, which is crucial to understanding the modern illiteracy crisis, will be recounted in an upcoming article in this education series.
After unleashing government education on the people of Massachusetts, Mann went to Prussia to gain a deeper understanding of that regime's centralized indoctrination system. Upon his return to the United States, he beat back conservative attackers upset about his schemes. Then he traveled the country like an evangelist shilling for government schools, successfully promoting the Prussian system in state after state.
The Utopians believed government schools would make Prussia and other jurisdictions that implemented them into paradises of enlightenment and progress. The reality, unfortunately, has not been nearly so nice. In Prussia, the statist educational system culminated in the total transformation of Germany into one of the most despotic horror shows in human history.
It's not working out well for Americans today, either. Stay tuned to this space for more.
4. How John Dewey Used Public 'Education' to Subvert Liberty -- by Alex Newman, 10/17/2019
When humanist John Dewey and his disciples took over the emerging government-education system created decades earlier to advance collectivism, the fledgling system was still in its infancy.
By the time he died in 1952, though, it was a well-oiled collectivist machine that would obliterate America's religious, intellectual, and political heritage more effectively than any force previously imaginable.
Dewey is often lauded as the founding father of the "progressive" education that now has more than 85 percent of American children in its grip. Although he wasn't alone -- he stood on the shoulders of fellow collectivists Robert Owen and Horace Mann, as documented earlier in this series -- Dewey certainly deserves much of the credit, or blame, for unleashing it on the United States and humanity.
Like Mann and Owen before him, Dewey had ulterior motives when he dedicated himself with missionary zeal to the cause of "education reform." Fortunately for future generations and historians, he was a prolific writer who cranked out a seemingly never-ending stream of essays, papers, manifestos, and articles. His views and objectives, then, are hardly a mystery.
Dewey wanted to fundamentally transform the United States. He wanted it to look more like the Soviet Union, in fact. To do that, he believed a total transformation of education and society was required -- literally "changing the conception of what constitutes education," as he wrote in "The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education" in 1904.
Education must bring about a "new social order," he argued.
As was the case with virtually all of the key figures involved in the government takeover of education, Dewey rejected Christianity and even the very existence of God. More on his religion later. He also rejected the individualism and liberty that defined America up to that point, with its strong protections for God-given rights, private property, and free markets.
Instead, Dewey worked fiendishly to continue the severing of American and Western education's Christian roots. The process was launched by Owen, the Welsh communist whose commune in Indiana failed. It formally took root under Mann in Massachusetts, when he imported the Owen-inspired Prussian model of education. But that was all to be just the beginning.
By the time Dewey and his disciples worked their magic, the scheme would culminate in a nation in which the overwhelming majority of high-school seniors violently reject the biblical worldview, and in which most young people describe themselves as socialist.
On top of that, the system would produce a nation in which less than a third of those same seniors would even be considered "proficient" in reading and math, according to federal data gathered from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Interestingly, Dewey was from Burlington, Vermont -- socialist Bernie Sanders's stomping grounds. And like Sanders, Dewey styled himself a "democratic" socialist. But many decades before Sanders visited the Soviet Union on his honeymoon while it was slaughtering and torturing dissidents, Dewey made a pilgrimage to Moscow under Bolshevik rule.
Of course, Karl Marx called for government control of education in "The Communist Manifesto," and so the Soviets complied. Decades earlier, Owen, another communist, did the same. Dewey picked up where they left off, fervently advocating total control of all education by the state with even more passion than Sanders does today.
Writing in the far-left magazine New Republic, Dewey provided glowing reports about the communist system being imposed upon the people of the Soviet Union. He was especially pleased with its so-called education system, celebrating the way it was instilling a "collectivistic mentality" in Soviet children in his "Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World" published in 1929.
Despite his fondness for Soviet totalitarianism and the communist "ideology" behind it, Dewey would publicly criticize Stalin and Stalinism later in life. His model for a communist United States, by contrast, was outlined in Edward Bellamy's 1888 book "Looking Backward," a fantasy about a wonderful collectivist America in the year 2000 where all private property would be nationalized by government.
Dewey's socialist views were hardly a secret. In "Liberalism and Social Action," he wrote that the "only form of enduring social organization that is now possible is one in which the new forces of productivity are cooperatively controlled." "Organized social planning," he continued in his well-known 1935 work, "is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims."
In common with virtually all the totalitarians of the 20th century, Dewey understood that the education of children would be fundamental to achieving his Utopian vision of collectivism. "Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness," he claimed. "The adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction."
In his important 1898 essay "The Primary Education Fetich [sic]," Dewey argued strongly against the then-heavy emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic in the younger years. It produced highly literate, independent-minded individualists with faith in God and freedom. That was not conducive to a collectivist Utopia, obviously.
Instead, Dewey thought the main focus of education during those precious early years should be socialization and emphasizing collectivism. In particular, the reformer wanted to ditch reading and writing in the primary grades to concentrate on giving children "the habits of thought and action" that he believed were "required for effective participation in community life."
An astute operator, Dewey recognized that the liberty-minded and overwhelmingly Christian teachers, taxpayers, and parents of America of that era would never knowingly support his radical educational and political ambitions if they understood them. "Change must come gradually," he explained in that same essay. "To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction."
So instead of going to the American people, Dewey went to the Rockefeller oil dynasty, which was giving away unfathomable amounts of money for "educational reform" through the "General Education Board." The "philanthropic" outfit gave Dewey millions of dollars to create an experimental school to try out his ideas -- a school that successfully cranked out reading-disabled collectivists.
In his crucial 1916 work "Democracy and Education," Dewey argued that the education regime he envisioned would be "the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished." And so, he set about taking control of the education system.
Having failed as a primary- and secondary-school educator, Dewey's effort to seize control of the school system began with a leadership position in education at the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago. Later, he went to Columbia University's Teachers College.
From his ivory-tower perch, Dewey would train up legions of teachers and disciples to unleash on an unsuspecting United States and carry forward his vision. It worked. Dewey became the founding father of America's "progressive" public education system, and his ideology went mainstream.
Another Dewey "achievement" while in academia was resurrecting quack methods for teaching reading that had been discredited in the 1840s under Mann in Boston. That incredible saga -- the root cause of America's current illiteracy crisis -- will be the subject of a future piece in this series.
Perhaps even more important and far-reaching than being able to advance his views on education and politics was Dewey's influence on the religious views of Americans. Dewey was a self-proclaimed humanist, with his public declarations on religion fusing atheism with socialism and communism. His success on this front is unquestionable and will be the subject of an upcoming piece in this series as well.
In fairness to Dewey, Owen, Mann, and the lesser-known characters behind the government takeover of education, they didn't have the 20th century in the rearview mirror. It might be said, in their defense, that they did not know the ideology of collectivism, when implemented, would lead to the untimely deaths and mass slaughter of hundreds of millions of people. Now, we should know better.
5. John Dewey's Public Schools Replaced Christianity With Collectivist Humanism -- by Alex Newman, 10/23/2019
Widely recognized as the founding father of America's "progressive" public education system, John Dewey was a man on an unprecedented religious mission. With more fervor and devotion than many Christian missionaries or Islamic jihadists, he set out to win America over to his religious worldview.
Like the collectivists whose shoulders he stood upon, government-controlled education was Dewey's weapon of choice. And now, more than a century after he began, it's clear that Dewey and his disciples are winning -- big time.
When Dewey launched his crusade to erode the faith and individualism of Americans, the United States of America was among the most devoutly Christian nations that the world had ever known. Church and the Bible were an inseparable part of life and education for virtually everyone.
In 1643, in the Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies, the earliest settlers in America declared, "We all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace." (Emphasis added)
Centuries later, that was still the prevailing sentiment. In 1856, for example, the U.S. House of Representatives, which represents the people more directly than any other federal body, put it this way: "The great vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ." Numerous similar declarations came from Congress before and after that.
In 1892, meanwhile, even the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Holy Trinity Church v. the United States that America "is a Christian nation."
As recently as the 1970s, nine out of 10 Americans still identified as Christians. Today, however, just two-thirds of Americans identify as Christians, with those numbers plummeting further every year.
Even in the Bible Belt today, significantly less than half of Americans attend church weekly, with church attendance dropping to less than 20 percent in some states.
And even among those self-proclaimed Christians, studies and surveys by the Nehemiah Institute and other organizations reveal that the vast majority reject the Biblical worldview that defined Americans for centuries.
With the decline of Christianity and the biblical worldview among Americans, the free political institutions they gave rise to have eroded, too.
Probably the most important single figure responsible for the rapid implosion of Christianity in America and across the West more broadly was Dewey.
In a previous article in this series, Dewey's well-known collectivist views were documented, including his fascination with the Soviet Union and his desire to radically transform the United States into a socialist nation.
The foundation for this transformation was laid in the early 1800s by communist Robert Owen, whose writings on education inspired the Prussian government to take over education. Decades later, Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann, a collectivist and utopian, would import that statist system to America.
Finally, Dewey would seize control of that architecture, mix it with Soviet ideas and psychology, and provide an enormous boost to its effectiveness in fundamentally transforming America.
Part 3 in this series focused primarily on Dewey's views on politics, the economy, and education. But Dewey's religion -- often described as "atheism" but, in reality, going beyond that -- is a crucial part of the puzzle as well. It's also inseparable from his views on everything else.
The high-profile reformer didn't seek to conceal his religious views from the public, and in fact, he was a key player and one of the first signatories behind the first "Humanist Manifesto." This important religious document essentially fused faith in the non-existence of God with a fanatical devotion to socialism and communism, creating potentially one of the most dangerous religions of all times.
The very first tenet of this "new" religion was a direct and open attack on the Bible and the prevailing religious orthodoxy of the time -- in particular the notion that an omnipotent and omniscient God had created the universe and the Earth as described in Genesis 1:1, the Bible's very first verse.
"Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created," reads the first tenet of Dewey's religious manifesto. Note the honesty: Dewey and company recognized that their belief system was, in fact, a religion.
Beyond the giant implications for religion, the political and economic significance of this statement is profound, too.
America's Founding Fathers argued that is was a "self-evident" truth that God had created people and endowed them with certain inalienable rights, as explained clearly in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, the very purpose of government, they said, was to protect these God-given rights -- life, liberty, and so on.
But under Dewey's religion, there is no God. And if there is no God, then there can be no God-given rights. In fact, Dewey was openly hostile to the view that anyone had an inalienable right to private property or anything else. After all, if there is no God to prohibit stealing private property, or even murder, there is no transcendent reason why anybody should have inalienable rights to anything. This is a recipe for totalitarian rule.
The socialist and collectivist mentality behind this was all spelled out clearly in the Humanist Manifesto itself.
"The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted," they wrote. "A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible."
This is the exact same rhetoric used by every communist tyrant of the 20th century: The profit motive is bad, so radical change, including collective ownership of the means of production, must be instituted. This has been the guiding vision of such luminaries as Castro, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Chavez, Maduro, the Kim dynasty, and many more. Countless millions have died as a direct result of these ideas being imposed.
But individualist American Christians with a devotion to God and God-given liberty were hardly going to just give up their ingrained beliefs, their hard-won freedom or their property rights without a fight. So Dewey and his disciples -- often funded with capitalist Rockefeller money, ironically -- understood that "education" would be crucial to changing people's attitudes.
It had to be done quietly, though. "Change must come gradually," Dewey explained in an 1898 essay calling for schools to place much less emphasis on reading and writing, and much more emphasis on collectivism. "To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction."
Charles F. Potter, a fellow signer of the "Humanist Manifesto" and a Dewey associate, spelled out explicitly what few Americans were willing to see or understand at the time. "Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism," he wrote in his 1930 book "Humanism, a New Religion."
"What can theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?" Potter asked rhetorically. Of course, the answer is practically nothing, as the humanists well understood.
A few decades after Potter's bombshell, the U.S. Supreme Court would formalize it all. After centuries of being at the center of American education, the Bible and prayer in schools, as mandated by state and local authorities from the time public education came into being, were suddenly found to be "unconstitutional."
Supposedly, Bible and prayer in local schools represented a violation of the First Amendment's prohibition on Congress passing laws respecting an establishment of religion. The legal "logic," or lack thereof, required the court to twist itself into pretzels.
A well-educated public would have seen right through the deception. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, and long afterward, most of the states actually had established churches.
But after decades of declining educational standards and humanist propaganda in schools, the monumental decision that would transform America was meekly accepted by much of the populace.
At least one justice, Potter Stewart, understood what was really happening.
“Refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism," he wrote in his dissent, using the term "secularism" to describe what Dewey and his cohorts would have referred to as humanism. (Emphasis added)
In short, under the guise of upholding the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court did the very thing the Constitution was supposed to prevent Congress from doing: It established a national religion and compelled Americans to support it with their taxes, and more significantly, with their children.
The reason for the First Amendment was clear -- the Founders were worried that some denomination of Protestant Christians might try to establish itself as the official national religion. They never would or could have imagined less than two centuries after creating the new Christian nation, that the institutions they established would force anti-Christian humanism on the American people via public education and judicial fiat. But that's exactly what happened.
Government schools across the United States to this day pretend to be "neutral" on matters of religion, even while they indoctrinate children into believing in humanism, as if humanism were not a religious belief system. Dewey and his fellow humanists recognized it as a religion, though. And federal courts have, too.
As recently as 2014, a federal court in Oregon declared as much. "The court finds that Secular Humanism is a religion for Establishment Clause purposes," wrote Judge Ancer Haggerty in the ruling, which didn't concern schools in this case but was nonetheless highly relevant to education.
Today, Dewey's totalitarian religion of humanism is being inculcated into the mind of every child attending public school, often by unwitting teachers who don't even realize it. Polls now consistently show over half of young Americans identify as socialists.
Dewey would be proud. But Americans should be outraged.
6. Socialists Used Public Schools to Destroy Literacy in America -- by Alex Newman, 10/30/2019
Widespread illiteracy and the ignorance it produces represent an existential threat to the United States today. But it wasn't always this way.
And it can be fixed.
Fortunately, neither the cause of this crisis nor the solution to it is a mystery -- at least to anyone who has studied the issue.
To blame for this dangerous phenomenon are socialist "educators" going back to the mid-1800s. In particular, it was their quack methodologies ostensibly aimed at “teaching reading” to children.
The answer to the illiteracy crisis is simple, though: America must go back to what worked for thousands of years and continues to work today: systematic phonics instruction.
Americans were almost certainly the most literate people on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s.
In fact, the earliest settlers in Massachusetts, the Puritans, were so passionate about reading that in the 1640s, they passed the "Old Deluder Satan Act" mandating that everyone learn to read. The thinking was that, without knowledge of the Bible, the devil would be more easily able to deceive their communities. And so, it was understood that every town must strive for universal literacy.
This passion for literacy translated into what would become the most literate society that mankind had ever produced up to that time.
According to University of Montana scholar Kenneth Lockridge's study, "Literacy in Colonial New England," 90 percent were literate by 1800, with numbers approaching 100 percent in cities such as Boston.
Even among women, that was true. According to estimates by Joel Perlmann of Bard College and Dennis Shirley of Boston College, virtually all women born in the early 1800s were literate.
At the time, Americans realized that as well. In his groundbreaking 1812 study "National Education in the United States of America," Du Pont de Nemours estimated that even among young people, not more than "four in a thousand are unable to write legibly -- even neatly."
And in 1800, the Boston Review reported that no other nation in the world had a larger percentage of its population with at least basic literacy skills and an understanding of the "rudiments of science."
Considering documents such as the Federalist Papers, which were addressed to the common American man, it's also clear that the level of literacy by the late 1700s was extraordinary -- especially by today's standards.
Remarkably, this was all accomplished with virtually no government involvement in education at all. In fact, most children learned to read from their families using simple but highly effective resources such as Noah Webster's "Blue Back Speller" and the "New England Primer." These two tools taught reading using phonics while providing valuable moral lessons.
By the middle of the 20th century, everything changed.
A crisis in literacy was brewing that's without precedent in the history of the world. Literacy rates began plummeting, particularly after World War II. And today, the government's own data shows evidence of a catastrophic decline in reading.
In 1993, the U.S. government conducted the most comprehensive literacy study ever performed up to that time. And the results were shocking.
On Sept. 9 of that year, citing the study, the Boston Globe reported that "nearly half of Americans read and write so poorly that it is difficult for them to hold a decent job."
Many other analysts concluded, based on the findings, that almost half of the nation was either illiterate or at least very close to functional illiteracy. In short, the United States had been handicapped.
Another federal study performed a decade later found similar results.
The numbers are even worse in certain areas, and among America's youth.
According to the federal government's most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about one-third of high school seniors are proficient in reading.
And in Washington, D.C., a recent State Education Agency report revealed that two-thirds of the adult population is functionally literate, falling to 50 percent in some wards. In response, top D.C. officials took a trip to communist Cuba to see how that murderous regime "educates" children.
Of course, there had been a sneak preview of what is now being observed in Boston under then-Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann -- a collectivist Utopian who led the government takeover of schooling in his state and beyond—in the mid-1800s.
But the quackery there had been quickly and ably exposed by experienced and professional educators, limiting the damage.
The root of the problem stems from the method used to teach reading. The writing system in English is based upon phonetic characters, with each letter representing one or more audible sounds. For instance, the letter "b" makes a "buh" sound, while a "p" makes a "puh" sound.
So, from the time this writing system was developed thousands of years ago by the Phoenicians, teaching an individual how to read has involved giving the student the knowledge to sound out letters, blend them together, and then decode words.
A great Christian minister and educator, Rev. Thomas Gallaudet of Connecticut, after learning from a French minister in Paris, pioneered a new system. It would come to be known variously as the "whole-word" method, the "look-say" method, or the "sight-word" method. It seems clear that Gallaudet had nothing but the best of intentions, even if his ideas ended up producing so many problems.
In his capacity as director of the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb from 1817 to 1830, Gallaudet worked to refine methods to teach reading to children who were deaf and mute. Because deaf children are incapable of hearing sounds, obviously, teaching them to associate certain sounds with certain symbols—letters in this case -- wasn't feasible.
So instead, he taught the children to look at whole words as ideographs or pictographs, similar to the Chinese writing system, as if the words themselves were the symbol, rather than a group of symbols each one representing a sound. Instead of teaching a child that the word "hat" includes three symbols, each one representing a specific sound, Gallaudet would show them the entire word, along with a drawing of a hat, encouraging children to memorize the whole word and its meaning.
For deaf children, this was an enormous leap forward. But Gallaudet and others theorized, incorrectly, that this same method might help non-deaf children. Gallaudet even created a reading primer based on these ideas, and began promoting his methods in educational circles and publications.
Just a few short months after being selected to serve as the commonwealth's first Secretary of Education in 1837, Mann, a collectivist who seemed always ready to embrace quackery, would oversee the introduction of this new system into the government primary schools of Boston.
It was a disaster.
Basically, children suddenly struggled to learn how to read, with many of them displaying symptoms that today would be diagnosed as "dyslexia."
Within a few years, the schoolmasters of Boston joined forces to expose and repudiate the quackery before it did more damage. In a stinging paper, more than 30 school chiefs wrote that "such a change, as that proposed by Mr. Mann and others, is neither called for, nor sustained by sound reasoning."
The critical comments, made in the "Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the Hon. Horace Mann," pointed out that many of the arguments made in support of the whole-word method were "fallacious" and "based upon false premises." Others were irrelevant.
And the results were clear, too: "There has been a great deterioration during the trial of the new system."
That was the end of that—at least for a while.
Incredibly, some 50 years after being exposed as harmful, the whole-word method would be resurrected by "education reformer" John Dewey, a hardcore socialist who is almost universally recognized as the founding father of America's "progressive" public education system.
While Mann may have genuinely believed that the whole-word method would work, it appears very likely that Dewey suffered under no such delusions. For one, the method had been conclusively debunked in the 1840s under Mann. In addition, Dewey used the method on children in his "experimental" school in Chicago, with results similar to those obtained in Boston generations earlier: children unable to read properly.
Dewey also left smoking-gun evidence of his desire to intentionally destroy the high literacy rates among children that existed throughout America at that time. In his controversial 1898 essay "The Primacy Education Fetich [sic]," he openly argued that schools should de-emphasize the teaching of reading, which he believed led to individualism.
In fact, he said children in the early grades were better off not receiving much instruction at all in the so-called "3 Rs"; reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, Dewey, an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, thought young children mostly needed to be properly socialized to become functional members of the collective.
He knew his ideas would not go over well with parents, teachers, or taxpayers of the era.
"Change must come gradually," Dewey wrote in that essay. "To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction."
So instead, he went to the Rockefeller dynasty and the elites.
Years later, Dewey disciples -- a motley collection of socialists and racist eugenicists -- would create "reading" primers based on the whole-word quackery. William Gray at the University of Chicago, where Dewey led the education faculty for years, would produce the "Dick and Jane" series. Meanwhile, Arthur Gates at Columbia University's Teachers College, where Dewey went after Chicago, would produce the Macmillan Readers.
It took a while for them to catch on in America. But after World War II, with plenty of taxpayer cash to burn, school districts across the United States, many being influenced by Dewey and his minions, started buying up the books and imposing the whole-word method on millions of innocent students.
Literacy rates promptly collapsed.
By the 1950s, the crisis was so serious that the public was starting to ask questions. And in 1955, Rudolf Flesch published the explosive book, "Why Johnny Can't Read," blowing the lid off the quackery.
"The teaching of reading -- all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks -- is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense," he explained, lambasting the whole-word method and the literacy crisis it produced.
The ensuing scandal caused many schools to restore traditional phonics instruction. But the Utopian advocates of reading quackery did not go away.
Less than 20 years after Flesch exposed them, legendary educator and reading expert Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld would expose them again in "The New Illiterates." In the book, he systematically analyzed the most common reading primers then in use across the United States, highlighting the problems and showing the enormous damage being done to children.
Again, scandal ensued. And again, quackery advocates rebranded their schemes as "whole language" and offered minor alterations, then went right on handicapping American children by the millions.
Incredibly, some especially unhinged "educators" argued that teaching children to read properly was all part of a vast "right-wing" conspiracy.
Now, brain scans performed with new technology have actually shown the damage being done to the physical brains of children victimized by the quackery. Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuro-Imaging Unit at Saclay in France, demonstrated the harm and explained that reading must be taught by systematically teaching children the correspondence between sounds and letters.
The education establishment pretended not to notice. And the absurdity continues.
Today, key elements of the "whole-word" method still haunt public schools across the United States, often under new terminology such as "balanced literacy" and "guided reading." Under the national "Common Core" education standards imposed on the United States by former President Barack Obama, kindergarten children are even required to memorize "sight words." This causes a whole-word reflex to develop that can produce lifelong reading disabilities, despite having a bit of phonics mixed in.
Perhaps more incredibly, even though the methods have been totally discredited since the 1840s, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) claims children all over the world should still learn a "sight vocabulary."
Consider: People who can't read can't readily educate themselves. They are much easier to control and manipulate, too. And perhaps that is the point.
With Mann, it's entirely possible that this was all an innocent mistake. Certainly, that's true of most teachers in the United States today as well who haven't been trained to teach reading properly.
But the fact that this giant "mistake" continues to be supported by the education establishment to this day—and that it always seems to be socialists, communists, and collectivists pushing it -- suggests that there is a much more nefarious agenda at work.
7. Frankfurt School Weaponized US Education Against Civilization -- by Alex Newman, 11/05/2019
Understanding that future generations are the key to building political power and lasting change, socialists and totalitarians of all varieties have gravitated toward government-controlled education since before the system was even founded.
The communist "Frankfurt School" was no exception in its affinity for "educating" the youth.
Almost 100 years ago, a group of socialist and communist "thinkers" led by Marxist law professor Carl Grünberg established the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. From there, they would move to the United States. And from their new home in New York City, the subversive ideas they espoused would eventually infect the entire planet like a deadly cancer—mostly through the education system.
The group actually had its genesis in Moscow before officially being founded in 1923. By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks -- as Antonio Gramsci would later conclude from his Italian prison cell -- realized a change in tactics was needed. The much-anticipated violent revolution of the proletariat predicted by Karl Marx to bring about communism, it turned out, would be much more difficult in Western Europe and the United States than previously anticipated. In fact, it wouldn't be possible at all without first breaking down the cultural barriers to collectivism, they reasoned.
As such, the Communist Internationale and mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin's minion Karl Radek arranged a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Among the participants, according to historical records, were Soviet secret police boss Felix Djerzhinski, Hungarian Bolshevik "cultural commissar" Gyorgy Lukacs, and Communist Internationale (Comintern) bigwig Willi Muenzenberg.
At the Moscow meeting, the conspirators decided that what was needed was a more gradual "cultural revolution," or what eventually came to be known as "cultural Marxism," in the West and beyond. To advance that program, the subversives agreed on a sinister but brilliant plan. This would involve the destruction of traditional religion and the Christian culture it produced, the collapse of sexual morality and the deliberate undermining of the family, and a wrecking ball to infiltrate and demolish the existing institutions.
Some of these men had experience. For instance, Lukacs, who served as "minister of education and culture" in the Bolshevik Hungarian regime of Bela Kun, had introduced all manner of perversion and grotesque "sex education" in public schools, starting in elementary school. It was part of a campaign to destroy "bourgeois" Christian morality and sexual ethics among the youth. The objective was to eventually de-Christianize Hungary, thereby facilitating a total communist restructuring of the human mind and all of society.
A key tool of these conspirators in Moscow would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. From the Institute in Frankfurt, and later in New York, these cultural revolutionaries would promote feminism, communism, atheism, mass migration, globalism, humanism, multiculturalism, nihilism, hedonism, environmentalism, and all sorts of other "isms" that tended to undermine individual liberty, traditional culture, and morality. Rampant morality-free sexuality and Freudian pseudo-psychology were central to the agenda.
To anyone who has studied America's public education system today, which spends far more time peddling these "isms" to captive children than providing actual education, the stench of the Frankfurt School's machinations is unmistakable. In fact, the whole system reeks.
Despite some differences, the group maintained close ties with the Soviet Union. Ironically, though, analysts have long argued that the work of the institute peddling Nietzsche and others helped lay the foundation for the National Socialist takeover of Germany. As the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler gradually parted ways with the more internationally minded socialist tyranny of the butchers in Moscow, the civilization destroyers at the ISR fled to the United States.
There, with crucial assistance from socialist and humanist "education reformer" John Dewey and his disciples, these characters attached themselves to Columbia University's important Teachers College in 1934. Dewey had been a leading "philosopher" and "educator" at Columbia, retiring just a few years before the Frankfurt School influx was in full swing. Others settled at Berkeley, Princeton, and Brandeis.
With Rockefeller money, Dewey would play a key role in helping the Frankfurt School's operatives put down roots in America. More on the role of the major foundations in subverting American education will be detailed in an upcoming piece of this series.
The importation of Frankfurt School luminaries was a match made in totalitarian heaven, as Dewey and his disciples had much in common with the cultural Marxist social revolutionaries.
As previously recounted in this series on education, for instance, Dewey was a devoted fan of the Soviet model. In fact, he wrote glowing reports about the supposed successes of Soviet communism in the "New Republic" magazine. Dewey was especially infatuated with the indoctrination centers masquerading as schools—and particularly how they were instilling a "collectivistic mentality" in the children. Dewey's collectivist, anti-Christian "religious humanism" also appealed to the Frankfurt operatives.
Once the institute's minions set up shop at Columbia and other prestigious U.S. academic institutions, the Frankfurt School's rhetoric had to change, at least superficially, as Americans were still ardently devoted to God, country, family, and individual liberty. And so, instead of speaking openly of Marxism and communism, Frankfurt School subversives spoke of "dialectical materialism." Instead of attacking the family, they attacked "patriarchy." But the agenda remained the same.
Almost as soon as they arrived, they began plotting the destruction of America's traditional values, religion, and form of government under the guise of fighting "fascism."
Indeed, the luminaries of the Frankfurt School, who represented a wide variety of disciplines, used "education" as a crucial tool for advancing their totalitarian, civilization-destroying philosophies. But they infected much more than just the education system, with their sick ideas spreading out like a poison throughout the intellectual veins of America: the social sciences, entertainment, politics, and beyond.
One of the ways in which Frankfurt School operatives and academics advanced their desired social changes via education was through so-called critical theory. In his 1937 work "Traditional and Critical Theory," ISR Director Max Horkheimer argued that critical theory -- a neo-Marxist tool used to demonize the market system, Christianity, and Western civilization -- was aimed at bringing about social change and exposing the alleged oppression of people by capitalism.
Another useful tool for undermining freedom and traditional society was the 1950 work by key Frankfurt School theorists known as "The Authoritarian Personality." These social “researchers” claimed to discover that the traditional American male and father was actually "authoritarian" because, among other reasons, he held traditional values. Thus, the "patriarchy" and the traditional family -- among the most important barriers to tyranny -- came under relentless attack as a precursor to "fascism." Public schools were viewed as tools to combat this alleged problem, and they did so vigorously.
To understand just how central Teachers College (infected by Frankfurt School and Dewey ideas) would become to the public education in the United States, consider that, by 1950, estimates suggest that a third of principals and superintendents of large school districts were being trained there. Many of these left the college with radical ideas about reality, government, society, family, and economy that came straight from Dewey and the Frankfurt School.
Of course, the damage to America from anti-God, anti-freedom German "intellectuals" began even before the Frankfurt School migrated to Columbia. In fact, Dewey was trained by G. Stanley Hall, who was among the many Americans to study under professor Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig University.
Among other notable highlights, Wundt pioneered the idea of the human being as a soulless animal. Essentially, he viewed people as biological stimulus-response mechanisms that could, and should, be trained in a manner similar to circus animals. This Darwinian, materialist view of the human being reigns supreme today in the education system but has been catastrophic.
Fringe left-wing extremists who support the Frankfurt School's anti-American agenda have dishonestly attempted to paint criticism of the relevant institutions, academics, and their ideas as "anti-Semitic." But in reality, the dangerous ideas pose a major threat to Judaism, too, and so countless patriotic and liberty-minded Jews have also joined the fight against the Frankfurt School's poison.
The threat of these subversives and their cultural Marxism has been recognized at the highest levels of the U.S. government, even recently. Former National Security Council Director of Policy and Planning Richard Higgins, for instance, blasted it in his now-notorious 2017 "Higgins Memo" to President Donald Trump about the ongoing war against the administration and the United States.
The wars against Trump and America "cannot be separated from the cultural Marxist narratives that drive them," warned Higgins, saying cultural Marxism was most directly tied to the Frankfurt School. "The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory," he warned. Higgins then quotes Herbert Marcuse, a leading Frankfurt thinker, on how to crush the political and cultural right through persecution and phony "tolerance."
To this day, reflecting the ISR influx of the early 1930s, Teachers College remains a leading purveyor of socialist poison masquerading as "education." Its recently released book list includes titles by Bill Ayers, the communist terrorist whose terror group Weather Underground, working with communist Cuban intelligence, bombed the State Department, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, police stations, and more. The Teachers College Press fall selection also includes endless nonsense on "social justice," racialism, multiculturalism, and other "isms" with roots in Marxism and Frankfurt School strategies.
With society and civilization becoming increasingly unstable as the final vestiges of traditional education are destroyed, the Frankfurt School and its American allies such as Dewey would be pleased with their handiwork. After all, cultural Marxists including Gramsci and ISR thinkers believed that once the old order was destroyed via a "long march" through society's institutions, Marxism could eventually triumph. On the education front, they now appear largely victorious.
But their overall victory is hardly assured. What comes next depends on whether Americans can be roused from their slumber in time to restore civilization. As the socialists and totalitarians understood well, education will be the key either way.
8. Big Foundations Unleashed Collectivist 'Revolution' via US Schools -- by Alex Newman, 11/12/2019
It may seem counterintuitive, but massive tax-exempt foundations funded by some of America's most prominent capitalists and industrialists helped foment what congressional investigators described as a collectivist "revolution" in the United States.
The goal was to "so alter life in the United States that it could be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union." Many tools were used, but the public education system was the most important and effective.
In the early 1950s, with growing concerns of subversion and communist penetration surrounding the enormous foundations, the U.S. Congress launched investigations. Investigators for Congress's Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the "Reece Committee," after the chairman, found that there was good reason to be concerned.
According to the committee's chief investigator, some of the foundations were weaponizing the American education system to enable what was described as "oligarchical collectivism,” or collectivist rule by an oligarchy. This was done by financing the promotion of "internationalism and moral relativism," among other dangerous "isms," investigators found.
The chief culprits included some of the largest and most important foundations in the United States. These included the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller foundations, and the Carnegie Endowment. According to congressional investigators, they were showering money on Columbia University, Harvard, Chicago University, and the University of California to advance their objectives through education. And it worked.
Norman Dodd, the director of research for Congress's select committee, reported that the foundations had even orchestrated a "revolution" in the United States. The revolution "could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it," Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony.
The committee's final report, released in late 1954, found that "some of the larger foundations have directly supported subversion in the true meaning of that term—namely, the process of undermining some of our vitally protective concepts and principles." Those same entities have also "actively supported attacks upon our social and governmental system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas," investigators concluded.
Globalism and distorting history were also major priorities. In the final report, the committee noted that the foundations had "supported a conscious distortion of history." As part of that, they also "propagandized blindly for the United Nations as the hope for the world," undermining American constitutional principles and liberty.
One of the experts who testified during the hearings was attorney Aaron Sargent, whose background included special investigations, especially into education and subversion. He told lawmakers that many of the big foundations were actively promoting socialism in the United States, in violation of the law and their charters, and that education was among their key tools.
“First of all, in approaching this problem of foundation influence, the subversive-teaching problem is a foundation problem,” he said, noting that the problem began in the 1890s. "This movement is closely related to Fabian socialism." These subversives tried to infect America, but found it more difficult than in Britain due to Americanism, a written Constitution, and federal courts capable of protecting constitutional rights.
And so, the radicals "relied upon propaganda and brainwashing," using the school system to attack patriotism, natural law, and even real history, said Sargent, who was asked to serve as counsel to the select committee but had to decline. "They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts," he testified. "They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy -- one based on the teachings of John Dewey."
On the educational front, he said, the story actually begins with the Rockefeller-funded Dewey Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, a topic that has already been explored in this series. From there, Dewey "expounded a principle which has become destructive of traditions and has created the difficulties and the confusion ... that we find today." As part of that, "Professor Dewey denied that there was any such thing as absolute truth," a concept that was "revolutionary in practice."
In previous articles in this series on the history of public education, the Rockefeller dynasty's role in funding collectivist "education reformer John Dewey, widely considered to be the "father" of America's public school system, was documented extensively. The Rockefeller philanthropies -- especially the "General Education Board" -- provided millions of dollars to advance Dewey's quackery around the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th.
But that would be just the beginning. Rockefeller money also helped resettle the communists of the Frankfurt School at prestigious U.S. academic institutions, primarily Dewey's Columbia University. From there, their subversive poison infected all of U.S. society, mostly through the public education system.
The Rockefeller dynasty was key in shaping education policy. In 1902, facing an avalanche of bad publicity over his ruthless business practices, oil baron John D. Rockefeller created the "General Education Board." This ostensibly "philanthropic" venture was used to help fund and eventually control education in the United States.
Rockefeller put Frederick Gates in charge of his "charitable" schemes. And Gates was honest about the agenda. "In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand," Gates wrote in "The Country School of Tomorrow, Occasional Papers Number 1."
"The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk."
He was clear that the goal was not to raise up philosophers, scientists, authors, poets, musicians, artists, lawyers, doctors, preachers, or statesmen. There was already an "ample supply" of those, he said. Instead, the goal was to create docile and largely unthinking workers who could be used and controlled by the elites.
The ultimate goal of all this subversion from the mega-foundations, though, was even more horrifying.
In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1982, chief investigator Dodd dropped a bombshell that should have, and would have, shocked America to the core -- at least if it had been more widely known. The goal of the foundations' scheming in education and beyond was to crush individualism, promote collectivism, and prepare the way for the United States to be merged with the totalitarian Soviet Union.
While investigating, Dodd was contacted by Ford Foundation President Alan Gaither and asked to come to the foundation's offices in New York. "On arrival, after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said, 'Mr. Dodd, we have asked you to come up here today because we thought that, possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of foundations such as ourselves,'" Dodd recalled in the interview.
Dodd continued: "Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on voluntarily and stated: 'Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience ... operating under directives ... the substance of which is, that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.'"
In short, the head of the Ford Foundation, one of the most influential in the world, told the chief congressional investigator of a committee investigating foundations that the foundations were helping to pave the way to a merger of the free world with the slave world. And Americans remained blissfully unaware, as the cancer crept in quietly through the school system over a period of generations.
According to Dodd and the congressional investigation, the Carnegie foundations decided after World War I that gaining control of education would be crucial. The leadership's goal at that time, Dodd said, was to prevent "a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914." But the task was so enormous that it would require help. And so, while the Carnegie Endowment would focus on international education matters, the Rockefeller foundations were put in charge of domestic initiatives, according to documents uncovered by investigators in the Carnegie Endowment's archives.
"The effect was to orient our educational system away from support of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and implemented in the Constitution, and educate them over to the idea that the task now was, as a result of the orientation of education, away from these briefly stated principles and self-evident truths," Dodd said in the interview.
"What we had uncovered was the determination of these large endowed foundations, through their trustees, to actually get control over the content of American education."
Investigations also found that since at least the 1930s, Moscow decided to infiltrate educational and large foundations in the United States. Following their orders from the Soviet Union, American communists even created a commission focused on infiltrating and taking over foundations.
One of the major successes identified by the congressional investigators was Soviet agent Alger Hiss, who became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace after playing a starring role in creating the United Nations. He was later exposed as a spy for Joseph Stalin's mass-murdering regime.
This work of the major foundations continues to this day. Consider, for example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates pouring billions of dollars into "education reform" and into supporting the collectivist agenda of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In fact, Gates's foundation was, aside from U.S. taxpayers, the single largest financier of Common Core, the universally reviled national (and internationally aligned) "standards" imposed on the United States by the Obama administration. More on that in a future piece of this education series.
The Rockefeller foundations also continue to be deeply involved in "education." And key Rockefeller bigwigs have become increasingly open about their real agenda. In his autobiography, for instance, the late dynasty patriarch David Rockefeller dropped a bombshell.
"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure -- one world, if you will," he wrote on page 405. "If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
When examining these facts, it seems perplexing that the wealth of some of America's most important super-capitalists would be put to use advancing collectivism, subversion, and even socialism. And yet, it was hardly a new phenomenon. In his important book "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution," Stanford historian Anthony Sutton meticulously documented the role of major bankers and financiers from New York City in financing the communist enslavement of the Russian people.
It is time for Americans to completely rethink education or be destroyed. That rethink must involve discarding all of the quackery and subversive influences brought about by collectivists such as Dewey, and the out-of-control foundations that funded and helped them. The future of United States and liberty literally depend on sorting out this mess.
9. How Socialists Used Teachers Unions Such as the NEA to Destroy Education -- by Alex Newman, 11/19/2019
When examining the hydra that is the collectivist "education" establishment that dominates public schools in the United States, among the most important tentacles have been the teachers' unions -- especially the National Education Association (NEA).
Along with other leading unions, the NEA and its affiliates at the state and local level played a leading role in transforming American education into the dangerous disaster that it has become. The extremism has been getting progressively more extreme for more than a century now. But it's not new by any means.
The destructive role played by the NEA is so serious, and so widely understood, that in 2004, even then-U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige described the union as a "terrorist organization." But in reality, the NEA has done far more damage to the United States than a simple terrorist organization ever could.
Consider that terrorists merely kill individuals, even if sometimes in large numbers. But the NEA and its allied unions have helped to practically kill a nation -- the greatest, freest nation that ever existed. While terrorists destroy human bodies, the NEA has worked to destroy human minds and human freedoms.
For at least a century, the NEA, founded in 1857 as a professional association, has barely bothered to conceal its leadership's affinity for communism, collectivism, socialism, humanism, globalism, and other dangerous "isms" that threaten individual liberty. Nor has the union shied away from vitriolic attacks on the United States, the free-market system, Christianity, the family, or educational freedom.
Perhaps the most important exposé ever written on the NEA was the 1984 book "NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education" by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld. Packed with examples and references, Blumenfeld's book proved that, contrary to popular mythology, which holds that the NEA's extremism is a more recent phenomenon, the union's leaders have been radicalizing teachers against America for a century or more.
Since being overtly taken over by progressives early in the 20th century, "the NEA has subjected its members to an unrelenting hatred of capitalism and an unceasing, uncritical benevolence toward socialism," wrote Blumenfeld.
But even before that, it was bad. "From 1857 to the present, the NEA has worshiped two gods: Horace Mann, a statist, and John Dewey, a socialist," Blumenfeld continued, referring to the two most important figures in the hostile takeover of "education" by government. This series on education has dealt with both of these subversives extensively.
By 1900, the NEA, which was lobbying for federal involvement in education, was largely insignificant. Even though there were an estimated half a million public school teachers in the United States at that time, the NEA had well under 2,500 members. Once the "progressives" took firm control, though, it became a sort of "ministry of education" seeking to dictate and control education policy nationwide.
Once progressives were totally in control of the NEA leadership, a story detailed in Blumenfeld's book, there was no longer any inhibitions in openly promoting the triumph of collectivism over liberty using the school system.
At the annual NEA meeting in 1934, Willard Givens, who would soon be appointed executive secretary over the union, laid out the agenda.
"Many drastic changes must be made," Givens declared. "A dying 'laissez-faire' must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the 'owners', must be subjected to a large degree of social control. ... 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."
He also called for nationalization of all sorts of industries, to be operated for the benefit of "the people."
Of course, socialist and humanist "education reformer" John Dewey had been advocating the emergence of a "new social order," socialist in orientation, since at least the early years of the 20th century. And in 1932, Dewey, almost universally regarded as the founding father of America's public education system, became the "honorary life president" of the NEA.
The very next year, Dewey and some of his cohorts would draft and sign the first Humanist Manifesto, a bizarre religious document brazenly rejecting God while shamelessly embracing collectivism and socialism. This totalitarian religion would eventually be advanced throughout America in de-Christianized public schools.
Dewey, who visited the Soviet Union and wrote articles extolling the brutal tyranny's supposed virtues, was interested in education primarily to promote his totalitarian "ideology" and his pseudo-theology. And even though he was adamant that Christianity must not be taught in schools, he was totally fine with religion -- his religion -- in the classroom. In fact, he believed it was essential to creating the "new social order."
"Our schools ... are performing an infinitely significant religious work," he wrote in his 1907 essay "Religion and Our Schools." "They are promoting the social unity out of which in the end genuine religious unity must grow. ... [D]ogmatic beliefs ... we see ... disappearing. ... It is the part of men to ... work for the transformation of all practical instrumentalities of education till they are in harmony with these ideas."
From the 1920s onward, this sort of quack religious, political, and educational nonsense and propaganda from Dewey filled the pages of the "NEA Journal." Among other ideas, Dewey's writing in the NEA's flagship publication, which reached more teachers than any other, constantly extolled the virtues of collectivism and the mass-murdering Soviet system while demonizing the United States and traditional American education.
Dewey was especially warm to the Soviet indoctrination program masquerading as an "education" system, his essays in the NEA Journal and other publications such as the New Republic revealed. And yet, because of clever word games, many Americans remained oblivious to the danger. One of the ways Dewey's propaganda on behalf of tyranny was so effective was that he deceived readers by using the words "democracy" and "socialism" interchangeably.
Dewey was so wrapped up in Soviet intrigue that, before becoming honorary president of the NEA, he served as vice president and one of the original directors of the American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia. This Soviet dictatorship-created organization in the United States founded in 1927 was primarily involved in sending students, professors, and teachers to the Soviet Union for communist indoctrination, and bringing Soviet "experts" to the United States to train American educators.
Unsurprisingly, the NEA was always willing and eager to work with "unions" in slave states of Eastern Europe and Latin America, including the phony unions created by the Soviet regime. That was despite harsh criticism from Soviet dissidents and even the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), another major teachers' union that differed in important ways from the NEA.
The most frequent writer in the NEA Journal throughout the 1930s and 1940s was socialist Stuart Chase. "It is no longer a question of collectivism versus individualism, but of what kind of collectivism," Chase wrote in the NEA's official propaganda organ after calling for the U.S. government to take over agriculture, banking, credit, and more.
In a 1956 interview with the Los Angeles Tidings, former teacher and Communist Party defector Bella Dodd dropped a bombshell. "The Communist party whenever possible wanted to use the Teacher's Union for political purposes," she said, adding that the communists in the union were all in favor of Dewey-inspired "progressive" education. "Most of the programs we advocated, the NEA followed the next year or so."
In addition to spreading its collectivist poison in the minds of children across the United States through public schools, the NEA also waged an effective campaign to spread the indoctrination system worldwide. Indeed, the union was among the first organizations to openly promote the idea of a global "board of education" to control every school on the planet.
As far back as 1920, the NEA created its so-called International Relations Committee. The ostensible purpose was to help build "world understanding." But the real agenda soon become crystal clear to anyone who was paying attention.
Responding to the formation of a formal U.S. government alliance with the ruthless Communist Party dictatorship enslaving the Soviet Union, NEA Journal chief J. Elmer Morgan wrote an editorial for the publication called "The United Peoples of the World."
Among other demands, supposedly to "keep the peace and insure justice and opportunity," Morgan said "we need certain world agencies of administration." Those planetary governing agencies should include a global "police force" and a world "board of education," Morgan opined.
To bring about that global "board of education," the NEA set up the "War and Peace Fund" to collect donations in 1943. Similar schemes took place in Europe among the education establishment. Eventually, these efforts culminated in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1946, an organization that will be addressed in an upcoming article in this series.
In a 1946 editorial in the NEA Journal headlined "The Teacher and World Government," Morgan was again shilling for global government, and again advocating that these subversive ideologies be forced on captive school children through indoctrination.
"In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher has many parts to play," Morgan wrote, calling on teachers to "prepare the hearts and minds of children" for the looming global collectivist regime. "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."
Later that same year, Morgan boasted of the "achievements" toward world government that the "organized teaching profession" had already made. And to this day, the NEA continues to play a key role in the ongoing globalization and internationalization of progressive indoctrination posing as an educational system.
Even before it was peddling the idea of a global education system to bring about global government, the NEA led the battle to get the federal government involved in education -- and then to constantly expand that power under whatever pretext might be effective. Indeed, from the very beginning, the NEA worked to empower Washington over the nation's schools, in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution and its 10th Amendment.
More than a century ago, the NEA also began lobbying Congress for federal funding of education. NEA bosses knew that with federal aid comes federal control. They finally succeeded in 1965 with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. From there, the next stop was the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Education, an NEA wish that President Jimmy Carter granted the union in exchange for its critical support.
NEA bosses often get their way in government, even if it takes a while. That is because the NEA has been a well-oiled lobbying machine for decades. For one, by collecting dues from millions of members, the NEA and its state affiliates are able to pour endless resources into the campaign coffers of politicians. And by prodding its members to vote a certain way, write letters, and even protest, it can keep the politicians it gets elected in line indefinitely.
With almost 3 million members today, the NEA is the largest labor union in the United States. It has pumped well over $100 million into federal political campaigns since the early 1990s alone. And data from the Center for Responsive Politics show that more than 97 percent of that money went to Democrats. The tiny donations to Republicans virtually all went to the most liberal among them. Similar trends exist at the state and local level among NEA affiliates.
Today, the NEA is still trying to quash competition, seeking onerous restrictions on private schools and even waging a war on homeschooling families. In 1988 and the years following (amended in 2006 to the current version), the NEA adopted a resolution that formalized its hatred of families operating outside the government system.
"The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience," the union declared.
Of course, not all of the millions of NEA members agree with the totalitarian ideologies and ideas peddled by the union's leadership. But until recently, at least, in many states, they were required to be members, forced to fund political campaigns and extremist views that they may have vehemently disagreed with. Thankfully, Illinois child support specialist Mark Janus sued and won, ending compulsory union dues. But many teachers still don't realize they don't have to fund the extremism of the NEA and its affiliates.
There may be more bad news yet to come for the NEA, which is becoming increasingly radical with every year that passes. This writer has it on good authority that some significant scandals involving NEA leadership may be revealed in the months ahead.
Either way, an objective look at the history of these tentacles on the education-establishment hydra reveals a monster that is interested in gaining power and smashing freedom -- not educating children. It's time for teachers, parents, and the taxpayers who fund it to speak out loudly.
10. UNESCO: Indoctrinating Humanity With Collectivist 'Education' -- by Alex Newman, 11/26/2019
With the possible exception of Adolf Hitler's National Socialists (Nazis), socialists and communists throughout the past century have all insisted that planetary socialism is needed.
They all agreed, too, on the chief weapon in their arsenal: government indoctrination posing as "education." From the tyrants in Moscow and Beijing to the infamous Socialist International, the goal of planetary slavery in the form of a global socialist government has long been at the forefront of collectivist thinking. And schools have long been the means.
As the tyrants of the world have discovered by experience over more than a century, subduing people under collectivist rule for any length of time can be difficult -- especially if the people can read and think, and if they know their history. But if the children can be brainwashed into collectivism early on in government schools, the process becomes much easier.
And so, socialists and communists from around the world joined forces after World War II to create the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to advance that agenda.
The primary goal of this new body was simple: control education around the world, weaponizing it to advance socialism, globalism, collectivism, and other dangerous "-isms" that threaten individual freedom and self-government.
It was obvious from the beginning, and remains obvious still today, that the views of UNESCO's leaders are entirely incompatible with a free society. Unfortunately, UNESCO now plays a dominant role in public education worldwide.
Formed in 1945 under the guise of ending war by building "defenses of peace" in "the minds of men" through education, UNESCO worked to hijack control over public schools from the very start. Where no government schools existed yet, UNESCO used American and European taxpayer money to establish them, or to bribe governments to do it. And at every step in the process, these emerging indoctrination centers marketed as "educational" institutions worked fiendishly to brainwash children into collectivism and globalism.
The historical record on this global "education" organization is clear. In fact, it was so obviously dominated by communists, socialists, crackpots, totalitarians, and subversives that President Ronald Reagan ordered a U.S. government withdrawal from UNESCO in 1983. Britain left, too, for the same reason. After some alleged "reforms," the U.S. government rejoined in 2002. But the Trump administration once again pulled out, along with Israel, in 2018.
When announcing the U.S. exit, the Reagan administration was blunt about the problems. Speaking at a press conference, State Department spokesman Alan Romberg said UNESCO exhibited "hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press."
Indeed, it was promoting communism, humanism, and even a global "licensing" regime for journalists. Romberg also noted that the outfit "politicized virtually every subject it deals with." But that was no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention.
The very first director-general of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, who also served as executive secretary of its Preparatory Commission, was a collectivist in every sense of the term. Like John Dewey, previously exposed in detail in this series and almost universally regarded as the architect of America's public-education system, Huxley was also a "humanist." So devoted was he, that he even served as the first president of the British Humanist Association, working to advance these ideas with Dewey, whose Humanist Manifesto was basically socialism and communism masquerading as a religion.
Huxley was also quick to fill the ranks of UNESCO with communists and socialists, as documented extensively in the book "Freedom On the Altar: The UN's Crusade Against God & Family" by William Norman Grigg. For instance, the chief of the Soviet "Education Ministry" served as director of UNESCO's department of secondary education. That trend continues to the present day, with myriad card-carrying members of the Communist Party and Socialist Party literally running the powerful global agency.
Even many of the Americans who worked under Huxley at UNESCO were communists. According to testimony by Chairman Pierce Gerety of the U.S. International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board, charged with preventing communist infiltration of U.S. delegations, UNESCO had a "clique" of Americans working in it "who placed the interests of the Communists and Communist ideology ... above their own country."
The Senate Judiciary Committee concluded in 1956 that UNESCO was "by far the worst," from the standpoint of "disloyal" and "subversive" (communist) Americans in global organizations. That's because communists recognized the importance of weaponizing education.
Like Hitler and his National Socialist barbarians, Huxley was also a fervent advocate of eugenics, the idea of improving humanity by removing "undesirables" from the racial gene pool. So passionate was Huxley about breeding genetically "superior" human beings and removing "degenerates" -- something he compared on numerous occasions to improving the quality of livestock -- that he actually led the British Eugenics Society. Prior to founding UNESCO, he served as vice president of the eugenics group. After his term at UNESCO, he became president of the eugenics organization.
UNESCO was one of the ways in which he hoped to promote eugenics. In his infamous 1946 policy document "UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy," written during preparatory negotiations, Huxley said one of the key tasks for the organization would actually be to promote "radical" eugenics.
"Even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable," he said, explaining why UNESCO's leadership has been so obsessed with breaking down children's moral values.
Huxley was also open about the fact that UNESCO was working to brainwash children into accepting a socialistic world government. A fervent believer in Darwin's theory of evolution, Huxley declared in "UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy" that "political unification in some sort of world government" would even be "required" for humanity to "evolve" to the next level. "The world is in the process of becoming one," Huxley said in the document. "A major aim of UNESCO must be to help in the speedy and satisfactory realization of this process."
Just a few years after its founding, UNESCO was already pumping out propaganda aimed at undermining individual liberty, the family, and the nation-state in the minds of children. In a 10-part series of pamphlets headlined "Toward World Understanding," for instance, the UN "education" agency called for using schools to promote the concept of "world citizenship." As part of that, schools would have to "combat family attitudes" on everything from "nationalism" (patriotism) to religious beliefs on the nature of sin and reality.
When reading through UNESCO documents and the writings of its leading operatives, it becomes clear that the goals went beyond even just brainwashing children into dangerous ideologies. In fact, Huxley and his cohorts envisioned creating an entirely new system of secular morality divorced from all the major religions of the world.
Then the plan was to use government schools, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, behavior modification and conditioning, values clarification, indoctrination, and propaganda to replace the old values and systems of morality with the new. It was audacious and extreme. But it's working.
By the early 1960s, UNESCO had decided that traditional values on sexuality needed to be replaced too. And UNESCO-guided government schools around the world were to be the primary tool to bring about the sought-after change. This would help break down the nuclear family -- crucial to any free and civilized society -- by promoting promiscuity and the breakdown of sexual morality.
And so, in 1964, UNESCO sponsored a conference in Germany claiming that "sex education should begin at an early age." Since then, UNESCO has been relentless in sexualizing children, a topic that will be addressed in an upcoming piece of this series.
The trends toward socialism and communism within UNESCO only got more and more extreme. In 1970, for instance, UNESCO hosted a symposium on mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin in Finland.
"Lenin was a man with a mind of great clarity and incisiveness," declared then-UN boss U Thant at the event. "His ideals of peace and peaceful coexistence among states are in line with the aims of the U.N. Charter." Apparently nobody at the summit objected to the idea that Lenin, one of the cruelest mass murderers to ever walk the planet, shared the same values as the UN and its "education" arm.
UNESCO's affinity for socialist and communist leaders continues to this day. Right now, French Socialist Party member Audrey Azoulay, who boasted that she "grew up in a radical left-wing family," is leading the outfit. Before that, she served as "culture minister" in the government of former French President François Hollande. Of course, Hollande was also a member of the French Socialist Party, which is itself a member of the Socialist International, the leading global alliance of Marxist, socialist, and communist parties, including many with the blood of countless innocents on their hands.
Before Azoulay, UNESCO was run by Irina Bokova, who has a long background and pedigree with the savage Bulgarian Communist Party. Trained in the Soviet regime's KGB-controlled State Institute of International Relations, Bokova proudly served the mass-murdering communist Bulgarian regime before she and her party reinvented themselves as "socialists."
She hoped to have communist Chinese operative Qian Tang take over her post after leaving, but was thwarted amid an avalanche of bad publicity in Western nations.
None of this should be a surprise, considering the history of UNESCO. In fact, socialists and subversives in America were instrumental in creating the global agency. As this series explained in part 8 last week, the National Education Association (NEA) was critical. Indeed, the NEA, which has been dominated by socialists and collectivists for at least a century, was openly promoting the creation of a planetary "board of education" in its publications, with the goal of creating what they described as a "world government."
"World organization may have four branches which in practice have proved indispensable: The legislature, the judicial, the executive, and the educational," wrote NEA "Journal" chief Joy Elmer Morgan in a December 1942 editorial headlined "The United Peoples of the World." "To keep the peace and insure justice and opportunity we need certain agencies of world administration such as: A police force; a board of education,” and much more.
Morgan also called for the global government to have a world currency, a new calendar to replace the Christian calendar, a "basic" language, a "board of health," a "planning board," a "radio-television commission," a board to oversee "economic matters," and much more. If that sounds like a recipe for communism and totalitarian rule, that's because it is.
For the next three years, the NEA Journal was filled with propaganda supporting a global board of education. And just a few short years after Morgan's call for such an institution, with powerful support from the NEA and its international allies, UNESCO was born to serve precisely that purpose out of the ashes of the failed League of Nations.
"The organized teaching profession may well take hope and satisfaction from the achievements it has already made toward world government in its support of the United Nations and UNESCO," gushed Morgan in December of 1946 in the NEA Journal, celebrating the union's success. "It is ours to hold ever before the people the ideals and principles of world government until the practice can catch up with those ideals."
UNESCO was literally created to facilitate the emergence of a collectivist global system, and its own leaders spoke openly about it.
Trump's decision to leave UNESCO was helpful, but as this series will show in the weeks ahead, the danger from this subversive agency and the U.N. itself remain significant -- especially when it comes to education. Its tentacles can now be found entangled in schools across the United States and the world. If freedom is going to survive, it's imperative that Americans become educated on the dangerous agenda of this supposed U.N. "education" agency.
11. Rise of 'Fed Ed' Accelerated Demise of Real Education -- by Alex Newman, 12/09/2019
The U.S. public school system was collectivist from the start, as this ongoing series on government education has extensively documented. But as the feds got involved, it quickly went from bad to worse, with the slow and steady decline in education turning into a precipitous collapse.
Today, the schools are a disaster, even by the government's own measures. Consider, for instance, that the latest scores from the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that more than two-thirds of eighth-graders aren't proficient in any core subject. It would be hard to do worse.
The U.S. government bears a big part of the blame. And there should be no doubt that it was deliberate, experts and former insiders tell The Epoch Times.
Because the U.S. Constitution delegated absolutely no power over education to the federal government -- and because the 10th Amendment specifically reserves all non-delegated powers to the states or the people -- it wasn't easy for the federal camel's nose to get under the tent. Indeed, it took almost two centuries for Washington to get seriously involved in public schools.
But communists worked diligently toward that goal for decades. In his 1932 book, "Toward Soviet America," Communist Party USA leader William Z. Foster boldly outlined the agenda for his fellow revolutionaries. The goal: A U.S. Department of Education that would eventually replace patriotism and Christianity in school with communism and globalism.
"Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches," Foster declared, an idea that was almost unthinkable to Americans of the day.
He also outlined what this anticipated U.S. Department of Education would do once in charge of schools.
"The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology," he said. "The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new Socialist society."
Of course, it took a long time to make that a reality. But anyone who has studied even briefly what is going on in the federally controlled public schools of America today can see that Foster's agenda has been thoroughly implemented in every respect, all over the country. Unless dealt with, the disease will likely prove fatal.
Aside from a few insignificant offices to collect statistics over the years, and Congress recommending Bibles printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia "for use in the schools" in the late 1700s, the feds played virtually no role whatsoever in education in America.
Indeed, it wasn't until the 1960s, long after the government school system created by collectivists had started destroying traditional education, that the federal government took its first major steps into education.
It began in 1962 and 1963, as documented in this series, with two U.S. Supreme Court rulings declaring that it was somehow a violation of the First Amendment to have prayer or Bible readings in public schools. These lawless opinions, as admitted by one of the justices in his dissent, replaced Christianity at school with the collectivist "religious humanism" of John Dewey, one of the socialist founders of America's public school system.
Well-educated Americans would have instantly recognized the absurdity of the ruling. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, most of the states had established churches. The idea that this amendment, designed to prevent a national religion, was supposed to prohibit states and communities from having prayer or Bibles in schools, would have been laughed at even in the 1940s or '50s.
But by the '60s, public education had already been in place for generations, dumbing down Americans and erasing their understanding of history to the point that such an outlandish anti-constitutional ruling became feasible.
Not long after that rogue court ruling, Congress -- almost certainly emboldened by the high court's flagrant constitutional intrusions into state and local education -- launched the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson under the guise of "helping" states to "educate" all "disadvantaged" students, this statute opened up the floodgates of federal funding to K-12 public schools.
As the old cliché goes, with federal funding comes federal control. And in exchange for federal taxpayer money, first released under ESEA, schools were forced to accept a growing array of federal regulations. At this point, the feds have effectively nationalized the public school system; globalizing it is the next frontier.
There are more than 100 subsidy programs now in place under the department, which has a budget approaching $100 billion including "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending. Everything from discipline and academic standards to lunches, data collection, and even the gender of textbook writers is now subject to federal intrusion.
Once the camel's nose was under the tent, it didn't take long for the entire smelly beast to shove its way in. The relatively new U.S. Department of Education, which has centralized control over education in an unprecedented manner, has also played a crucial role in weaponizing America's public education system against individual liberty.
Established in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, the cabinet-level department was basically part of a quid pro quo agreement with the socialist-controlled National Education Association (NEA). The powerful union, which named the socialist and humanist Dewey as its "honorary life president," was already acting as a sort of national ministry of education.
With the birth of the actual department, it sealed the deal.
By the time the U.S. Department of Education was established, Congress's investigative committees charged with exposing communists and preventing infiltration of the federal government had long since been disbanded. As such, it's difficult to determine how many actual communists worked within the department.
But as the Bible says, "by their fruits, ye shall know them." And the fruit coming from the Department of Education has been rotten to the core from day one.
From the start, using grants and other means, this unconstitutional behemoth began working to bring all education in the United States under federal control. Worse than that, it worked to systematically dumb down the American people and transform the values of children, according to whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as a senior policy adviser on education in the Reagan administration.
All of it was in line with what the mass-murdering Soviet regime was doing. Indeed, from its earliest days, the U.S. Department of Education was involved in helping to "sovietize" the American public school system, Iserbyt told The Epoch Times in an interview. This agenda has been extremely successful in facilitating the disaster now unfolding in America, she explained.
Upon taking up her post at the Department of Education, Iserbyt found documents revealing that public schools in America were introducing Soviet quackery and curricula in the classroom, with help from the major foundations. In response, the patriotic Iserbyt began leaking the official documents to the press in an attempt to blow the whistle and stop the madness. She eventually compiled the smoking-gun evidence in her explosive book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America."
"When I was there, what I saw, I realized in retrospect, 'The Nation at Risk' report was very important," Iserbyt said, referring to a government report commissioned by Reagan arguing that the U.S. education system threatened America's future. "They needed that to convince America that we had terrible schools so they could bring in the reforms they wanted."
Pointing to the Soviet education system and the forces that worked to bring similar schemes to America, Iserbyt is also convinced that communism was the goal. U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell "wanted to put in the communist system," Iserbyt argued. "I believe he was a communist. If you read in my book the things he said, there is no way to come up with any other conclusion."
Among other schemes, Iserbyt said Bell was the one responsible for bringing in the methods of "education" advocated by anti-Christian behaviorist B.F. Skinner and Soviet "psychologist" Ivan Pavlov to American schools.
"These Pavlovian and Skinnerian methods destroy free will by treating people like animals to be trained and to give reflexive responses to stimuli," said Iserbyt. "This is animal training, not education. This is what was being used in communist countries to train and brainwash their populations, not educate them."
Because of the Department of Education, it's being used all over America, too.
"Their agenda was to have absolute control of the American population through these changes in teaching and instruction being brought into the schools through the Department of Education,” she continued, pointing to the important role of the Carnegie Endowment in negotiating with the Soviets on education. "So they claimed all these national reforms were needed to change education from what you know in your head, to what you can do, which is Soviet-style workforce training."
Iserbyt also witnessed how great educators with valuable experience who loved liberty, such as Edward Curran, who led the National Institute of Education at the U.S. Department of Education, were purged and driven out. Meanwhile, collectivists and quacks continued moving quickly up the ranks.
"The political appointees—most of them were rotten," said Iserbyt.
To impose the radical "reforms" on America, Iserbyt said she witnessed the Department of Education handing out all manner of enormous grants to fund dangerous quackery, data-gathering, and "efforts to transform the values of children away from traditional Americanism" through education.
"I believe these were very abusive toward traditional values," she said, pointing to her important short publication, " Soviets in the Classroom, America's Latest Education Fad."
Today, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Department of Education remains firmly under collectivist control. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, an analysis by The Hill revealed that 99.7 percent of all political spending by Department of Education bureaucrats went to Hillary Clinton -- the highest of any federal department.
Even after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took up her post, the left-wing extremism from the department continued to spew forth. Indeed, on Feb. 12, 2017, the department's Twitter account posted a quote by Communist Party USA member W.E.B. Du Bois -- with his name misspelled, no less, drawing national ridicule.
Among other absurdities, Du Bois claimed the USSR, led by one of the most brutal and murderous regimes in human history, was the "most hopeful country on earth." During the darkest depths of the "Great Leap Forward," Du Bois even held multiple meetings with mass-murdering communist Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and the two were always pictured with smiles on their faces.
These are some of the people who control U.S. education. Under the previous administration, the department, using "stimulus" money to bribe states into compliance, even imposed Obama-backed national standards on the nation -- standards that are aligned with international schemes, too. Common Core will be dealt with in a future article in this series.
With around 4,000 employees, the Education Department's budget has been ballooning since it was created. And that's despite President Ronald Reagan promising to abolish it, and President Donald Trump saying on the campaign trail, "If we don't eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach."
There's currently a bill in Congress, H.R. 899, to abolish the department. When asked why the bill was needed, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the chief sponsor, replied in an interview, "How much time do you have?"
"The left understands that this is where you win or lose -- in the schools and in the teaching of the children," the Kentucky congressman continued.
Massie also noted that under the current administration, there's a tremendous opportunity to make abolishing the department a bipartisan endeavor. Liberals and progressives, of course, don't want Trump in charge of their children's education, any more than conservatives want Obama or Biden running it.
"Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children's intellectual and moral development," Massie said. "States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students."
The group U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) is working to end all federal involvement in education, too.
"Although this experiment with federal control of local public schools has gone on for half a century now, it has failed," USPIE President Sheri Few told The Epoch Times. "The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children.
"We need to stop treating children like guinea pigs in some social engineering laboratory."
The U.S. Constitution and common sense both demand that the federal government gets out of education. That would be a great step forward. However, as this series has documented, the government education system has been controlled by collectivists from the very beginning. That means getting the feds out, by itself, won't solve the systemic problems plaguing education in the United States today.
Still, ending all "Fed Ed" may be a decent place to start. And with Trump in the White House, perhaps both sides of the aisle could work together on this, as a first step to much more far-reaching reforms.
12. Common Core, Still in Place, Nationalized Educational Quackery -- by Alex Newman, 12/24/2019
Perhaps nothing has done more to rouse Americans from their slumber on government education than the so-called Common Core standards, which were quietly imposed on the nation by the leftist Obama administration using tax-funded "bribe" money and arm-twisting. People were furious. Trump called the standards "a total disaster." But the anger only scratched the surface of the problem.
Despite the public outrage over the dumbed-down standards and the centralization of education in the hands of federally funded elites, the toxic scheme is still firmly entrenched across the United States. Often under new names, the Common Core wreaked havoc on an already dismal education system created by collectivists. The devastation continues, too, as federally funded research on the program has revealed.
The outrage expressed by American voters about this has been intense. In 2014, as the battle was reaching its climax, the annual PDK/Gallup poll on attitudes toward public schools revealed that almost two-thirds of Americans opposed Common Core, while about one-third supported it. President Donald Trump ran on a platform of getting rid of it, seizing on that fury to propel him into the White House.
"Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top are all programs that take decisions away from parents and local school boards," he said. "These programs allow the progressives in the Department of Education to indoctrinate, not educate, our kids. What they are doing does not fit the American model of governance. I am totally against these programs and the Department of Education. It's a disaster. We cannot continue to fail our children -- the very future of this nation."
He was right, of course. And it was hardly a mystery why that message resonated with so many. Teachers, parents, and taxpayers were all outraged. Common Core had become politically toxic like nothing before in the history of U.S. public education -- and for good reason.
First of all, in flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution, the scheme centralizes control over education at the national level. Public surveys reveal that just a tiny fringe minority of Americans -- about 15 percent -- believe that the federal government ought to dictate what is taught in the classroom. The overwhelming majority believe that local, elected school boards should be in charge.
In part 10 of this series on education, the history behind the federal government's gradual takeover of education was explored. Common Core, then, wasn't the beginning of the federalization of education, and it almost certainly won't be the end. In fact, it has often been described as just a "symptom" of the problem, rather than the problem itself.
Another major issue with the standards is that Common Core makes a mockery of real education. To understand just how atrocious the standards are from an educational perspective, consider that the only two subject-matter experts on the Common Core Validation Committee both refused to sign off on the scheme.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky, professor of education emerita at the University of Arkansas, served as the only English-Language Arts expert on the committee. She vehemently rejected it. One of the biggest problems, she said, is that the Common Core "reduces both literary study and the opportunity for kids to develop critical thinking skills."
Among other concerns, Stotsky blasted the replacement of great literature with Obama's executive orders and EPA regulations as reading material. The standards "were written hastily by people who didn't care how poorly written they were," added the English expert, who is not opposed to national standards, per se, but has testified against Common Core in legislatures across America.
The absurd Common Core "math" standards, meanwhile, have been the subject of endless jokes. But unfortunately, the large-scale handicapping of America's youth is no laughing matter. The only math expert on the Common Core Validation Committee, Dr. James Milgram of Stanford University, spoke out clearly and forcefully against the standards.
"The Core Mathematics Standards are written to reflect very low expectations," he said. "They are as non-challenging as possible with extremely serious failings." Indeed, there are "actual errors" in some of the math, he said, adding that the standards "are neither mathematically correct nor especially clear."
Even some of the people who worked on writing the standards have spoken out. Dr. Louisa Moats, an internationally renowned reading expert who served as a contributor to the Common Core’s literacy standards, for instance, has been warning that children will not learn to read properly using the national scheme. "My warnings and protests were ignored at the time," Moats said in an interview.
And yet, despite those warnings and many others from leading experts, the educational establishment -- backed by endless supplies of federal tax money and billions from Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates-- proceeded to impose it on America anyway. Even under the Trump administration, those same standards remain firmly in place.
Marketed as a way to make Americans "college and career ready," the opposite would have been closer to reality. The ACT standardized test results released this year, for instance, revealed that college-bound students in the United States are doing worse than they have ever done in the ACT examination's history.
And just as critics warned, American students -- already far dumber and less educated than previous generations -- have continued to suffer academically as Common Core accelerated the destruction of education. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed that more than two-thirds of U.S. eighth-graders are not even proficient in any core subject.
The federal government knows this well, too. In a federally funded study by the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL) released this year, researchers found results they didn't expect. In short, the investigation concluded that Common Core produced "significant negative effects" in both English and math. "The magnitude of the negative effects [of Common Core] tend to increase over time," added Mengli Song, one of the researchers involved.
Other experts have highlighted the indoctrination component, too. Tenured English professor Dr. Duke Pesta, director of FreedomProject Academy and one of the nation's leading experts on Common Core, has delivered hundreds of speeches about the standards all over the United States that have been viewed millions of times online. And his assessment could hardly be worse.
He told The Epoch Times that one of the goals of Common Core's creators was to indoctrinate American children into progressive ideology. "Common Core -- now re-branded state by state to fool people into thinking it has been removed -- is a key part of a broader movement to transform American education," said Pesta, who hosts the popular education-focused Doctor Duke Show.
"Common Core is more than just weak standards: it is also bound up with the curriculum, pedagogy, teacher training, high-stakes standardized testing, and data gathering so typical of the progressive and statist push to override traditional knowledge-based education with left-wing and socialist 'social justice' education," he said.
"Social justice education transforms public school classrooms into places of radical political advocacy that appropriates the prerogatives of parents and seeks to re-socialize students along progressive lines."
In his talks, Pesta includes seemingly endless examples of this sort of dangerous indoctrination from Common Core-aligned textbooks and materials. Fake history. Fake science. Social-justice propaganda in math questions. Outrageous "reading" assignments. Virtually every semi-involved parent of a public-school child these days has seen it too.
The history of Common Core is deliberately opaque, too. To skirt federal statutes prohibiting direct U.S. government meddling in what is taught at schools, Common Core was officially created at the direction of the federally funded, Washington-based trade groups known as the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
Then the Obama administration used "bribe" money, as critics put it, from the so-called stimulus package -- all combined with threats and even waivers from the Bush-era "No Child Left Behind" scheme -- to force states to accept it. Virtually every state caved. And even in the handful of states that resisted, Common Core has entered through the back door.
Common Core was crafted by "Achieve, Inc.," an organization controlled by U.S. and global elites whose top leaders had openly advocated abolishing local school districts and nationalizing control of all education. This same group also created the “Next Generation Science Standards” that are so outrageous they don't even include a reference to the scientific method.
But the road to nationalized and even globalized education didn't begin with Common Core. In fact, before that was even dreamed up, the federal government used Goals 2000 under President Bill Clinton, followed by President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind, to help centralize education in the United States.
Before those two schemes, President George H.W. Bush pushed "America 2000," dubbed "a long-term national strategy" to accomplish "education goals" outlined by Bush. At one of the summits peddling the scheme, Shirley McCune, who worked on the effort with the U.S. Department of Education and the National Education Association (NEA), said it wasn't just about education, but rather about the "total restructuring of the society."
"We have moved into a new era," she said, boasting about the ongoing "human resource development restructuring" taking place. One of the two main functions of schools, McCune said, is "to prepare students not for today's society, but for a society that's 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road."
"So we have to anticipate what the future is, and then move back and figure out what it is we need to do today," she said, without explaining what sort of fortune-telling methods might be used. "That's called anticipatory socialization, or the social-change function of schools."
Most incredibly, perhaps, she revealed that "what the revolution has been in curriculum is that we no longer are teaching facts to children." That is because it's "almost impossible for us to guess the kinds of facts that they will need," McCune said, without explaining how children would be able to think or have a frame of reference without knowing facts.
In an upcoming piece in this series, the nexus between Common Core and the ongoing globalization of education will be explored in much more depth. Interestingly, the U.N.'s "World Core Curriculum" is based on the teachings of Alice Bailey, the same occultist who inspired McCune, according to former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Robert Muller, who wrote the U.N.'s global education curriculum.
Separately, another upcoming piece in this series will examine the explosion in data gathering and data-mining by government. It's impossible to truly understand Common Core and what's happening in education without understanding the massive amounts of personal information on children being vacuumed up by authorities and the crony companies that work with them.
For now, it's important that Americans understand a few important facts: Common Core is still very much alive, it's still handicapping children on an industrial scale; promoters hope to ensnare nongovernment-school children as well, and there are no plans to get rid of it on the horizon. All of that is a documented fact.
But it's also crucial to realize that Common Core itself is not the problem. Instead, it's a symptom of the problem that has been explored in the previous 10 parts of this series. It's merely the next step forward in "fundamentally transforming the United States of America," as Obama put it.
Getting rid of Common Core would be great. But unfortunately, it will not fix the government education system that's destroying the United States by destroying the nation's children. That will require much more fundamental reforms that get to the root of the problem.
13. Big Brother Schools Using Big Data to Manipulate and Spy on Kids -- by Alex Newman, 01/22/2020
Using data primarily gathered through the public-education system, Big Brother and the collectivists running the government schools now know more about American children than their own parents do. The awesome powers offered by "Big Data" will blow your mind.
In fact, authorities have vacuumed up so much private information on America's youth that, according to a U.S. Department of Education report, it's now possible to predict the "future behavior and interests" of children. It also allows the government to manipulate their thoughts and attitudes like never before.
The data-gathering has become so intrusive and extreme that some critics have even referred to it as the "data-rape" of American children. And this is just the start.
From biometric data and private health care information to academic records, online browsing habits, and mental-health data, government schools and technocratic policymakers across the United States want it all -- from "cradle to career" and beyond, as authorities often put it. Thanks to federal grants, they're getting it, and sharing it.
Hundreds of data points on each child are now being collected and stored in databases accessible by state and federal authorities. Privacy laws and regulations prohibiting the creation of national databases with student information were ignored and pushed aside beginning during the Obama administration, and even earlier.
Through a byzantine combination of public schools, government agencies, social-media companies, crony contractors, testing companies, non-profit organizations, and more, there's now more data collected on children than anyone could have imagined even just a few short years ago. Many times, the children do not even realizing they're giving their private data to Big Brother—forever.
The tip of the iceberg occasionally becomes visible. Right now, for example, there's an ongoing lawsuit against the non-profit College Board, currently headed by Common Core architect David Coleman, for allegedly collecting and selling private student data to third parties without the consent of the children or their parents. According to the plaintiffs, numerous laws have been broken.
That is all a big deal, of course. And it's wrong. But it pales in comparison to the dangers of what Big Government and Big Business are doing right now -- and what they have planned for the future.
The Common Core national standards imposed on the United States by the Obama administration, covered in the most recent piece in this series, super-charged the government's data-harvesting and data-mining operations. After that, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which Obama referred to as a "Christmas miracle," took it even further.
But it has been going on for quite some time. Consider a 2012 "Issue Brief" titled "Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics." In the report, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology dropped a bombshell regarding what all this data was going to be used for: Basically, the feds want to make predictions about your children.
In the report, authorities said that "online learning systems" allow the government to "capture streams of fine-grained learner behaviors." These systems send to a database the "time-stamped student input and behaviors captured as students work within the system," the document explained.
Authorities then combine that behavioral data with other external information sources, including sensitive personal data held by the school, the district, or the state, according to the report. Then, the information is put to use making predictions and shaping "interventions."
"A predictive model combines demographic data (from an external student information system) and learning/behavior data from the student learning database to track a student's progress and make predictions about his or her future behaviors or performance," the report explains (emphasis added).
The data being collected can also allow government to peer into the minds of students. "Big data captured from users' online behaviors enables algorithms to infer the users' knowledge, intentions, and interests and to create models for predicting future behavior and interest," the report adds.
Using controversial federally funded "surveys" under the guise of "health," public schools across the United States have been collecting some of the most intimate data imaginable: political views, religious beliefs, sexual behaviors, sensitive information on parents or the home, private medical information, and much more.
Among the creepiest elements of the data-gathering and data-mining machine is the ability it gives to peer into the innermost thoughts and feelings of students. With access to this data, and the computing power to process it all, government and those connected to it can become nightmarishly powerful -- and they will, if nothing is done to stop it, as the people of China are discovering under the "social credit" system.
Consider a 2010 speech to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), also the subject of part 9 in this series, by then-U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. In it, the Chicago radical celebrated the rapidly expanding data-gathering colossus and the new powers it would unleash.
"More robust data systems and a new generation of assessments can assist teachers and principals to improve their practices and tailor their instruction in ways that were largely unthinkable in the past," said Duncan, who regularly boasted about using schools to brainwash children with "sustainability" propaganda. "We have advanced data systems that we are constantly improving."
In the decade since then, those "advanced data systems" have become ever more sophisticated, enabling governments to build unfathomable personal profiles on every public-school student in the United States. Even students in private schools and home schools are now in the cross-hairs of the data-mining machine.
Some of the technological tools that have already been used by the federal government in these areas have sparked grave privacy concerns. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Education released a report titled "Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century" that became a lightning rod for criticism.
Among other developments, the report included revelations about the sorts of technology being used in some federal programs to gather data on children. One of the tools, for example, was described as a "facial expression camera." The report said this was used to "detect emotion" and "capture facial expressions," with the data then processed through software and fed into databases.
Other tools described in the report, which has since been taken off the Education Department's website, included a "posture analysis seat," a "pressure mouse," and a "wireless skin conductance sensor." All of these existing technologies are used to monitor and collect "physiological response data" that can "examine student frustration."
"Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself," the report explains, with "affective" data referring to students' attitudes and feelings, rather than academic or educational abilities. "Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge."
More recently, a U.S. company called BrainCo developed a headband that measures and collects data on students' "brainwaves." BrainCo, which is part funded by Chinese state-owned companies, has already trialed the devices on 10,000 students in China. Back in 2017, the CEO talked of building the "world's largest database," which could be analyzed by artificial intelligence to better detect emotions. Some U.S. schools have reportedly tried the devices, too.
In 2017, the federal government funded a project to build a "friendly social robot" to collect highly sensitive psychological data on children. Known as "EMAR," or Ecological Momentary Assessment Robot, the robot "gathers teen mental health data in a public high school setting," the National Science Foundation said.
One of the major concerns surrounding all this intrusive data-gathering technology is that it's being used by government schools and the education establishment to manipulate the thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of children. As the technology advances, it will allow bureaucrats and technocrats to do much more of this in the future, too.
Under new “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) programs, which are currently all the rage in educational circles, authorities set goals for various attitudes and values they want children to hold. By testing for these "affective" characteristics, the technology can help determine whether children hold the government-mandated attitudes. If not, the programs then help to develop "interventions" to get the desired attitude inculcated in the child.
As far back as 2016, Education Week revealed that, under the guise of providing "personalized learning experiences," new technology was aiming at students' "individual emotions, cognitive processes, 'mindsets,' and character and personality traits." So-called "non-cognitive competencies" were also targets.
That same year, the U.S. Department of Education released a "National Education Technology Plan" peddling "assessments" that measure "non-cognitive competencies" including "attitudes that facilitate functioning well in school, work, and life." How the feds would determine the correct "attitudes" for children to have was not specified.
The potential for abuse is self-evidently enormous. What if these tools get into the hands of evil-doers? What if they already are in the hands of evil-doers? Do Americans really want unelected bureaucrats at the far-left U.S. Department of Education—where 99.7 percent of 2016 donations to presidential campaigns went to Hillary Clinton -- determining what attitudes and values children will hold on controversial issues such as homosexual marriage, immigration, and abortion?
When one realizes that the public education system was literally created by Utopian collectivists to fundamentally transform society, as this series has documented extensively since the first segment, the dangers are obvious and extraordinary.
Indeed, the architects and current leaders of the government-school machine have long been open about their desire to shift the United States away from a liberty-minded Christian society, and toward collectivism and humanism. With these powerful tools, resistance will become increasingly difficult, if not futile, for children held captive by the system.
Another major concern is that all of this data being gathered by schools is being fused with labor and career data. For years, authorities have been openly working on connecting the various "education" databases packed with information gathered on Americans by schools with that collected by other government organs.
Officials are hoping that this enormous amount of data, all brought together in one place, will help them do what previous attempts at central planning have always failed to do: accurately understand the needs of the economy, and then adjust production, employment, consumption, training, and education accordingly.
Then, imagine combining all of that with emerging developments such as artificial intelligence and super computers with unprecedented capabilities, plus all of the data being gathered on Americans by agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the National Security Agency, and more. Big Brother will know everything about everyone, literally from "the cradle," as the Utopians themselves often say.
It's a recipe for disaster -- or even a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.
Around the world, the U.N. is also leaning heavily on governments to start collecting, sharing, analyzing, using, and weaponizing all sorts of data on children via schools. And more than a few foreign governments -- communist China and certain Western European governments, among others -- have been more than happy to jump on the bandwagon.
Humanity must resist. Americans, in particular, have the means to effectively resist, if only they can find the will.
Privacy is extremely important to a free society. That's why America's Founding Fathers enshrined it in the Constitution. Without privacy, liberty cannot exist. And without liberty, prosperity and other blessings enjoyed by the people of the United States will end as well.
Americans must demand an end to the Orwellian data-gathering apparatus, and protect their children from it, before it's too late.
14. The Sordid History and Deadly Consequences of 'Sex Ed' at School -- by Alex Newman, 04/06/2020
Very few people realize that the reason children today are being sexualized at school is because pedophiles sexually abused hundreds of children, then claimed that the victims enjoyed it. That's a fact, and the documents prove it.
In government schools all across the United States today, young children are literally being encouraged to experiment with fornication, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, and all manner of sexual activities. It often begins as early as kindergarten and elementary school.
In fact, what passes for contemporary "sex education" in the United States and around the Western world would have been unthinkable just a generation ago -- even a few years ago. And believe it or not, it's getting more and more radical by the day.
In California, a top school district official defended teaching pedophilia to children because it's one of a number of "different types of sexual orientation" that "have existed in history."
The consequences of all this sex-ed mania have been devastating, too.
But it was not always this way. And the history of how the United States got here will blow your mind.
The proliferation of "sex education" in American government schools has its roots in the pseudo-scientific quackery of sexual revolutionary Alfred Kinsey.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of children were allegedly raped, molested, and brutalized, and their experiences recorded under the guise of "science."
Even before Kinsey unleashed his perversion on an unsuspecting American public, though, communist butchers had experimented with the use of so-called "sex education" to break down family, culture, traditional morality, and nations. It worked well.
Long before Kinsey came on the scene, sex educators say, there was a sort of sex education being taught in schools. But it wasn't called that. And comparing it with what Kinsey and his fellow sex fiends and perverts would unleash on America would be like comparing alfalfa to meteors.
In the early to mid-1900s, sex education in the United States, often described as "hygiene," consisted primarily of religious and moral teachings on the subject. The programs also warned children about the horrifying consequences of extramarital and premarital sex -- venereal disease, mental scars, the moral and emotional problems, and so on. That was the norm for generations.
The relatively new idea that children must be taught graphic and obscene sex education only emerged seriously in the United States in the middle of the last century. It came from Kinsey, who was financed by the Rockefeller foundations and the American taxpayer.
In his "Kinsey Reports" published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kinsey dropped what was described as an "atom bomb" on American society. Widely viewed as perhaps the worst books to have ever been published in America, the "findings" would unleash a wave of perversion and a "sexual revolution" that continues to claim more victims with each day that passes.
One of the elements of his "sex research" involved pedophiles, who sexually abused children while gathering "scientific data," experts have concluded. Kinsey's own data show that potentially hundreds of children were raped or molested by one or more pedophiles using a stopwatch to figure out when the children might experience "orgasm."
About 200 boys under the age of 12 were among the victims.
Table 34 in Kinsey's report documents, for example, that one 4-year-old boy supposedly endured 26 alleged "orgasms" in a 24-hour period.
Even babies a few months old were repeatedly abused. One 11-month-old baby was reported to have had 14 "orgasms" in a period of 38 minutes, as documented by the child abuser himself and then afterward recorded as Kinsey's data. Even a 4-month-old baby girl reportedly had an "orgasm."
However, experts noted that it is not even physically possible for children so young to have an orgasm. Instead, Kinsey's report reveals that one way the "subjects" defined an orgasm in their "partners" was marked by "violent convulsions of the whole body; heavy breathing, groaning, sobbing, or more violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears (especially among younger children)." Does that sound like an orgasm? Perhaps to a pedophile seeking to justify his monstrous crimes.
Experts such as Dr. Judith Reisman, the world's top expert on Kinsey and the author of multiple books on his research, have pointed out that this would be the equivalent of claiming adult-female rape victims enjoyed being raped, as evidenced by their screaming, crying, and convulsing. And yet this is exactly what Kinsey did. And America, tragically misled by Kinsey and his media dupes, believed him.
Why Americans should trust child molesters and rapists for insight into "child sexuality" has never been adequately explained by Kinsey or his disciples. As Reisman put it, why in the world would somebody ask a rapist whether his victim enjoyed it, and then present that to the world as "science" and "evidence" that children enjoy being molested?
"If he would do that to kids, how can you trust anything this psychopath would have to say?" she asked.
Kinsey's so-called "sex research" has been widely debunked and ridiculed by other experts as well. Professor of constitutional law Dr. Charles Rice of Notre Dame University, for instance, blasted Kinsey's work. "Any judge, legislator or other public official who gives credence to that research is guilty of malpractice and dereliction of duty," he said.
Incredibly, Kinsey even claimed the children enjoyed this abuse, and that sex with adults -- even incest -- could be beneficial to them. Among other outrages, Kinsey, citing what critics have blasted as his "junk science," also posited that children are actually "sexual beings" from birth. As such, they must be "educated" in every manner of sexual activity and perversion conceivable.
This radical idea is literally the foundation of all modern sex education today.
Based on his fraudulent findings that children experience orgasms from birth, Kinsey declared that children need early, explicit sex education throughout their school lives. He also claimed children should be taught masturbation, homosexual acts, and heterosexual acts. He even claimed sexual abuse of children did not produce serious damage to children, which is self-evidently ludicrous.
According to Reisman, Kinsey's claims and pseudo-science have produced unprecedented levels of child sexual abuse, pedophilia, sexual torture, and more. Laws were changed and repealed based on Kinsey's fraudulent data, leaving women and children unprotected and sparking a deadly avalanche of sex education that may bury civilization beneath its icy embrace.
In the May 1954 edition of "Sexology," a "sex science" magazine that styled itself as the "authoritative guide to sex education," Kinsey is quoted making an astounding claim. After arguing that it was possible to sexually stimulate infants as young as 2 months or 3 months old, Kinsey claimed it was "clear" that "the earlier" children are started on "sex education," the "more chance they will have" to supposedly "develop adjusted personalities and wholesome attitudes toward sexual behavior."
By 1958, inner-city public schools serving primarily black children in the District of Columbia became testing grounds for the radical sexual reeducation envisioned by Kinsey and company. This included showing children "explicit" films that featured details of "barnyard animals mating," "animated drawings of male ejaculation," and even the use of a torso model with male and female genitalia.
Reisman writes that children as young as 3 years old were targeted for this sort of "education," according to reports from the now-defunct Sunday Star newspaper.
The effects were predictable. Soaring rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, devastation of the family unit, skyrocketing numbers of fatherless homes, an explosion in venereal diseases, surging crime levels, massive increases in mental health problems, and more.
After those "successes," the Kinsey-inspired sex education began spreading across the United States.
Many of the early sex-education curricula -- often under misleading names such as "family life education," as it was known in Virginia -- openly cited Kinsey's data as the source.
Pedophile advocacy groups such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) also have openly recognized the importance of Kinsey's "research" to their cause.
Long after Kinsey died, his disciples continued to push the idea that these fraudulent findings by child rapists were foundational to the sexualizing of children in public schools. "The specific findings about these children are totally relevant to modern sex education," former Kinsey Institute boss Dr. John Bancroft told CBS in a televised interview.
The Kinsey Institute did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
The institute had previously included responses to controversies by Bancroft on their website, which, while expressing concerns about the data, confirmed that Kinsey had obtained information on orgasm in children from men who "had been sexually involved with young boys and who had in the process observed their orgasms," and one man in particular.
One of Kinsey's first major speeches was about the supposed need for sexual education for children, explained Reisman, who has worked with the Department of Justice and now serves as a research professor of psychology at Liberty University. But Kinsey claimed only properly trained "experts" could do the teaching.
Thus, in 1964, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, now known just as SIECUS, was officially born. These operatives would be Kinsey's specially trained "sex experts."
Indeed, the formation of SIECUS was among the most crucial milestones on the road to the ubiquitous sexualizing of America's children -- and the destruction of their innocence and future families.
The organization, which received plenty of money from tax-exempt foundations and American taxpayers, was founded by Dr. Mary Calderone. The highly controversial figure had previously served as the medical director for Planned Parenthood.
In the late 1950s, Calderone went to the Kinsey Institute in Indiana. At a meeting, the group of radical sexual revolutionaries plotted how to advance their cause, and even assigned roles, Reisman told The Epoch Times during a series of interviews. It was decided that SIECUS would handle sex education, with multiple Kinsey Institute representatives serving on the board.
"SIECUS emerged out of the Kinsey Institute after this meeting, where they decided SIECUS should carry out the sex-education that Kinsey envisioned," Reisman said. "SIECUS was really Kinsey's arm—and the Kinsey Institute's arm -- into the schools."
In 1979, despite receiving all sorts of government funding, Calderone compared the task ahead for SIECUS to the "spreading of a 'new religion,'" according to Reisman. First, Calderone said, adults would have to be converted, so that children could eventually "flourish" and have an understanding that "sexuality" unrestrained by any moral standards was supposedly "healthy."
SIECUS actually has been rather open about this. In the May-July 1982 SIECUS Report, on page 6, the outfit dropped a bombshell about its links with the Kinsey Institute:
"Few people realize that the great library collection of what is now known as the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana was formed very specifically with one major field omitted: sex education," the report explained, according to Reisman. "This was because it seemed appropriate, not only to the Institute but to its major funding source, the National Institute of Mental Health, to leave this area for SIECUS to fill."
The report also revealed that SIECUS applied for a "highly important grant" from the taxpayer-funded National Institute of Mental Health that "was designed to implement a planned role for SIECUS." This role, according to the same report, was to "become the primary data base for the education for sexuality."
Today, SIECUS peddles its raunchy sex education all across the nation. For some perspective, the organization's "National Sexuality Education Standards" call for starting the process in Kindergarten, teaching children its values on homosexuality, genitalia, sexual activity, and more.
It brags about this, too. "SIECUS is not a single-issue organization because sex ed, as SIECUS envisions it, connects and addresses a variety of social issues," the group says on its website. "Sex ed sits at the nexus of many social justice movements—from racial justice and LGBTQ rights to the #MeToo movement."
The group's new tagline reveals a great deal, too: "Sex Ed for Social Change."
In addition to the nexus with the large foundations -- and especially those tied to the Rockefeller dynasty -- the humanist movement played a role in all this, too. In fact, so significant were the links that SIECUS boss Calderone became "Humanist of the Year" in 1974, continuing the long and well-documented humanist takeover of education in the United States that began with John Dewey, as covered in part 4 of this series.
Planned Parenthood, which today specializes in aborting children by the hundreds of thousands, also has played a key role in sexualizing American children with sex education.
More than a few critics have highlighted the conflict of interest here: On one hand, the tax-funded abortion giant encourages children to fornicate, while on the other, it charges big money to abort the children produced by those children fornicating.
Even before Kinsey, subversives had realized the potential horrors that sexualizing children and undermining sexual morés could wreak in society -- and they loved it.
In 1919, German homosexual activist Magnus Hirschfeld created the Institute of Sex Research. Among its goals was the promotion of "free love," masturbation, homosexuality, euthanasia, population control, abortion, feminism, and more. In the United States, this agenda was peddled as a way to fight back against the spread of sexually transmitted disease and poverty.
Communists also played a key role. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Russian communists vigorously promoted perverted sex education and "free love." However, after realizing that society (and their regime) would collapse if it continued, that was stopped in 1924 -- at least in Russia, while the "New Soviet Man" was being created.
Outside of the enslaved communist nations, though, Marxists would continue promoting their radical sex revolution in free nations, something that continues to this day.
Bolshevik Deputy Commissar for Education and Culture Gyorgy Lukacs, who assumed his post in Hungary's Bela Kun regime in 1918, pioneered this strategy in Hungary, with catastrophic results. Upon taking power, Lukacs and his comrades mandated raunchy sex education very similar to what is used today in the United States.
His goal was to obliterate Hungary's Christian civilization and values on the road to a Marxist Utopia. His tools included mandating puppet shows featuring perverted sex acts to young school children, encouraging promiscuity in sex education, and mocking Christian-style family values at the bedrock of civilization.
While the Bela Kun regime in Hungary did not last long, Lukacs became a crucial player in the Frankfurt School, as exposed in part 6 of this series. This group also played a key role in spreading sex education and sexual immorality throughout the West. They did this not just by encouraging sex education, but by deliberately and strategically breaking down traditional values, especially those having to do with sexuality, marriage, monogamy, and family life.
By the early 1900s, the socialist-controlled National Education Association, which was the subject of part 8 in this series, began advocating for "sex hygiene" to be taught in schools as well. The excuse was combating venereal diseases, which of course in the real world have exploded in response to the promiscuity unleashed by widespread sexual liberation.
Another key figure in promoting the idea of sex education was G. Stanley Hall, the progressive who trained Dewey, the architect of today's "progressive" indoctrination program masquerading as public education. Hall's pretext for pushing sex education was that some girls believed they could get pregnant by kissing.
Ultimately, sex education was a means to an end: Changing the values of children and undermining the family in order to fundamentally transform society away from a free, Christian civilization and toward a new "Utopia."
Indeed, in a 1979 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headlined "An Analysis of U.S. Sex Education Programs and Evaluation Methods," researchers revealed that the "goals" of sex education in American schools had become "much more ambitious" than parents realized. Those goals included "the changing of ... attitudes and behaviors," something that the authors acknowledged wouldn't be supported by many Americans.
Even before that, the United Nations and its U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has been crucial in indoctrinating humanity as documented in part 9 of this series, got on board with the sex education, too. A report on the February 1964 UNESCO-sponsored International Symposium on Health Education, Sex Education and Education for Home and Family Living recommended "sex education [should] begin at the primary school level."
The document also called for sex ed to be "integrated into the whole curriculum" and argued that "boys and girls should be taught together." Taking a cue from Kinsey, the U.N., which has always been close to the Rockefeller dynasty that financed Kinsey, called for "anti-dogmatic methods of teaching" to be used, also claiming “moral norms are relative concepts which change with time."
The "anti-dogmatic" teaching and the moral relativism would be crucial. Thus, all of the sex education has been combined with what is known as "values clarification," a scheme that UNESCO -- an outfit dominated by communists, socialists, and humanists from day one—has encouraged in education for decades.
This subversive process is aimed at having children reject moral absolutes -- in sexuality and everything else—by using mental and emotional manipulation.
It works by giving children hypothetical situations in which the ethical solution appears to be doing something that they were taught was wrong. For instance, a common example involves a hypothetical life raft that can only hold eight people, but there are currently nine in it. The students are told who is in the boat -- a doctor, an engineer, a nurse, a cop, and so on -- then asked who should be sacrificed for the "greater good."
A better answer than choosing a victim to murder would be for the passengers to take turns swimming alongside the raft, of course. But that would ruin the whole point of the exercise, which is to get children to reject the idea of right and wrong, as well as the teachings of their own parents and pastors.
Combined with the raunchy sex education that encourages an "anything goes" mentality and offers children tantalizing claims about "safe" pleasure with no moral standards and no consequences (babies can be aborted, after all), the result has been absolutely catastrophic.
The fruit of all this radical sex education is now clear to see. The institutions of marriage and family are in free-fall. Half of marriages now end in divorce. And even the couples that stay together often struggle, big time.
Birth rates, meanwhile, have plummeted below replacement levels across the West.
Civilization is literally dying amid a cocktail of loveless sex, drug abuse, suicide, despair, venereal disease, pornography, and sexual chaos.
The effects on the individual are horrific, too. "Little brains are not designed to process sexual stimuli of any kind," said Reisman, adding that sex education is confusing and creates anxiety for any normal child. Indeed, these stimuli rewire their brains to accommodate the "new" information, she said.
It also causes children to mimic the behaviors they are exposed to, leading to addiction to sexual stimuli.
"The addiction to sexual stimuli and acting out leads to depression, identity disorders of various kinds, STDs, mental health problems, emotional distress, anger, loss of academic achievement, and more," said Reisman, one of the world's leading academic experts in this field.
"In the past, shocking sex stimuli often confused many kids into assuming they were homosexual," she added. “Now many youngsters will assume that they are transgender, especially as they are encouraged everywhere they turn, and often by their own very troubled parents."
The data already show this, with a 2017 study from the University of California-Los Angeles finding that more than one-quarter of Californian children aged 12 through 17 identify as "gender non-conforming" or "androgynous." In Sweden, where sex education is even more radical and ubiquitous than in the United States, reports indicate that the number of "transgender" children is doubling each year.
"Juvenile mental health as well as physical and sexual health have deteriorated in every measurement of well-being historically identified by our society," Reisman said, adding that this downward trend continues.
Another expert who has explored the horrific consequences of sex education on children is the late psychoanalyst and medical doctor Dr. Melvin Anchell, who wrote the minority report for President Lyndon Johnson's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography and also served as an expert witness for the attorney general's 1985 Commission on Pornography and Obscenity.
Among other concerns, he said these sexual indoctrination programs targeting young children cause "irreparable harm" to their victims that lasts their entire lives.
Anchell, who has a great deal of experience in the field of sex education, documented the damage done to children in books including "Killers of Children: A Psychoanalytic Look At Sex Education" and "What's Wrong With Sex Education."
Citing vast amounts of data and evidence, Anchell argued that sexualizing children causes unspeakable and often permanent harm, severely damaging the children's future marriages, families, relationships, and lives. In some cases, it can even contribute to psychopathy, suicide, mass-murder, and more.
Unwed child-bearing also exploded right around the time sex-education schemes became ubiquitous in the 1960s. The evidence shows children growing up without a father on average do much worse on every metric than children in homes with a mother and a father.
In the black community, consider that only about 15 percent of children were born out of wedlock between 1940 and 1950. By 2008, after 60 years of sex education, almost 3 out of 4 black babies were born to unwed mothers.
Among whites, less than 5 percent of babies were born out of wedlock prior to 1960. By 2008, that exploded to about 30 percent.
Of course, comprehensive sex education is often marketed to the public as a tool for combating unwed teenage pregnancy and STDs. In fact, the data is clear: After the introduction of sex education, STDs and unwed teen pregnancies skyrocketed. Obviously, reducing STDs and unwed pregnancies was never the goal. If it had been, the experiment would have been stopped by the 1960s at the latest—not turbocharged.
Comprehensive sex education in the United States and around the world is becoming progressively more extreme, with tiny children now being exposed to obscenity, perversion, sexualization, LGBT propaganda, and more.
In 2018, UNESCO released "international technical guidance on sexuality education" urging schools to teach children about "sexual pleasure," masturbation, and "responses to sexual stimulation" before they even turn 10. By 12, the standards call for children to be taught that "non-penetrative sexual behaviors" can be "pleasurable."
If the epidemic of perversion, sexualization, and grooming of children is not brought under control, Reisman warned of "dark" consequences such as "cultural collapse." Also, Americans can expect a continued crumbling of families, an explosion in crime, far more suicide, escalating government tyranny, even more drug abuse, widespread poverty, and much more.
"'The Brave New World' really was never brave," Reisman said, a reference to Aldous Huxley's famous book about a future of free sex and total government regimentation of every aspect of life. "We may find ourselves living it."
Asked why governments and other powerful institutions seem so determined to sexualize children at younger and younger ages, Reisman said it was partly a matter of following the money. "Governments are backed by people and organizations with money, increasingly the pornography industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the Sex Industrial Complex," she said.
"Big-government advocates nurse mind-numbed subjects to be dependent upon them," she added. "If they get children early with sex training, the victim child will have limited critical thinking capability, little real education. Government will have willing subjects to regurgitate propagandistic barbarisms -- like Social Justice Warriors, college kids/professors, repeatedly screaming the F word at anyone with another thought."
To deal with the existential crisis, Reisman had two main points: Remove children from public school, and open criminal investigations into Kinsey's sex-education machine.
"Remove children from public schools; return to parents or grandparents the training of their children," she said. "Parents are the primary educators of their children and need to reclaim that mantle and responsibility."
Beyond that, she also called for restoring Judeo-Christian moral standards and repealing exemptions to obscenity laws that protect public-school officials who distribute obscene material to children -- something that would be a felony in most circumstances.
On top of that, she called on lawmakers to resurrect H.R. 2749 to investigate the Kinsey Institute for any "past and present criminal activity." The institute has argued that "patient confidentiality" precludes sharing the information, but Reisman and other advocates say it is essential that Americans learn the truth about what happened.
The sex-education craze unleashed by the communists, then given credibility by "Dr." Kinsey, combined with the "progressive" government takeover of education, have brought family, civilization, and political liberty to the brink of collapse.
It's time for Americans to seriously address these matters before it all comes crashing down.
15. Homeschooling Revolution Gets Coronavirus Boost -- by Alex Newman, 04/09/2020
We're all homeschoolers now! At least for the foreseeable future.
Government schools all across the United States have shut because of fears about the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, liberating tens of millions of children from government classrooms. That means millions of parents are being involuntarily forced to try out education at home, often for the first time.
In a matter of weeks, the homeschooling movement has ballooned to over 55 million children from around 3 million, just in the United States. It's unprecedented.
Have no fear, though: Homeschooling has a long and amazing history in the United States and around the world. And the data is in: Home education works. Typically, it works amazingly well. Home-educated students on average perform far better than their government-schooled peers on every single metric, data show. It also has a well-established history of success.
Experts and activists told The Epoch Times this was a historic opportunity. Once the dust settles, critics of the government school system -- with its escalating indoctrination, sexualization, and dumbing down of children -- hope that the educational landscape in the United States and beyond will be forever changed.
Understandably, some parents are expressing frustration at this new reality. Establishment pundits claim to be worried, too. But talk of a "silver lining" involving a mass exodus from government schools has now moved from the fringes to the mainstream -- a process that is accelerating amid the CCP virus (commonly known as the novel coronavirus) pandemic.
President Donald Trump recently declared that children should never be "trapped" in "failing government schools." Talk show host Rush Limbaugh last year urged listeners to try out homeschooling. And evangelist Franklin Graham, responding to a New Jersey statute mandating LGBT ideology in public schools, called on parents to remove their children from public schools.
And that was before COVID-19.
But this won't be uncharted territory. Indeed, long before the government usurped control over education at the urging of collectivists -- a process recounted in detail in this series on public education -- parents and families worldwide were the primary educators of children. Even when kids were sent away for some formal schooling, the basics such as reading and writing were generally taught by parents, grandparents, and older siblings.
Many of America's most prominent heroes were primarily educated at home. The Father of America, George Washington, was mostly educated at home, receiving just a few years of formal education. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was also primarily home-schooled. A century later, President Abraham Lincoln was a homeschooler, too. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
This has been the norm worldwide throughout most of human history.
"Homeschooling today is simply a revival of a millennia-old practice of parent-led, home-based education," explained Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal "Home School Researcher."
"Long before government certification and approval of teachers, human beings -- in places as far and wide as Germany, Kenya, Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan -- were inventing amazing processes and gadgets, creating great art, running complex businesses, building bridges and castles, writing incredible literature, battling wars, and curing diseases without a preponderance of children and citizens being taught, trained, and indoctrinated in state-run institutions called schools," added Ray, one of the world's top academic experts on homeschooling.
Parent-led education at home was the norm in colonial America, and throughout the United States -- both in rural areas and the cities -- until around 1900, Ray told The Epoch Times.
"Government-run schools did not come with the American flag, apple pie, and God," he explained, contradicting the prevailing myths about government education.
One of the areas Ray has been researching for decades in home-education is what the data show. Like other academic researchers, he's found that home-educated students typically perform significantly better than children subjected to government education -- usually 15 to 30 percentile points higher on standardized academic tests, and much better in socialization, too.
"The largest study comparing homeschool students to others amazingly revealed that homeschool 8th-grade students score the same as 12th-grade public school students," he said, referring to a study by Dr. Lawrence Rudner at the University of Maryland that administered academic tests to more than 20,000 home-educated students.
"There is no empirical evidence that a nation or society needs most or any of its children to attend state or government-run institutions called schools in order to be a civil and educated society," Ray said, adding that the modern homeschool movement is "proof-positive" that the current government-education machine isn't necessary for children to do well.
"The renascence of parent-led home-based education -- homeschooling -- is simply a re-affirmation of the natural abilities of parents and children and of the value to any society of a family-centered -- rather than a government-run institution-centered—life," he said.
While establishment voices and the government-education system scramble to warn parents about the supposed dangers of home education, experts and critics of the public-school system told The Epoch Times that this crisis offers an incredible opportunity for parents.
Former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas, for instance, said that the ongoing shutdown of public schools offers parents the "greatest opportunity of their lives" to retake control over what their children learn.
"This is such a great time for parents to try homeschooling and really give their children a true education," she told The Epoch Times.
Warning that public education was harming children morally, academically, and spiritually, Douglas suggested that the future of America is on the line.
"The goal of American public-education architects like John Dewey was to under-educate and indoctrinate our children with secular humanism and socialism," said Douglas, who now serves on the educational advisory board of organization Public School Exit.
Homeschooling expert Dr. Izzy Lyman, author of "The Homeschooling Revolution," called on those already in the movement to help out the expected influx of newcomers.
"It's an unprecedented opportunity for veteran home educators to offer encouragement and advice to parents who are now unexpectedly part of the mass homeschooling revolution," she told The Epoch Times.
"During this exceptionally challenging time for our nation, one hopes that more families discover a silver lining—the joy and fun of learning together," said Lyman, who serves as a county commissioner in Michigan and whose work has been published in The Wall Street Journal and many other leading publications.
More than two decades ago, Lt. Col. E. Ray Moore, an early pioneer in the homeschooling renaissance that began to flower about 50 years ago, decided that only a massive escape from the public education system into the safe sanctuary of homeschools and Christian schools could prevent the moral collapse of the United States. To bring that about, he created the Exodus Mandate, with a mission of sparking a mass exodus of Christians from public schools.
This current crisis, he said, may be just what the doctor ordered to help break the public school's virtual monopoly.
"If this COVID-19 virus had come to our culture in 1980, we would not have had the infrastructure with families, 6 million alumni, magazines, books, homeschool conventions, organizations and associations to assimilate the many new children [into home schooling]," Moore, who now leads a coalition of dozens of organizations called the Christian Education Initiative, told The Epoch Times.
"It is happening now. The biggest decision has been made for families, that is, to go home and educate your children."
The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), perhaps the most powerful and prominent home-education organization in the world, has even released a guide giving parents an easy-to-follow guidebook to begin homeschooling amid the crisis. These include connecting with homeschoolers, knowing the law, finding the right curriculum, and making decisions on how to do it.
HSLDA attorney Mike Donnelly, who also oversees the organization's international operations, expects that many people will look back at the CCP virus pandemic as the time they decided to take the plunge and take charge of their children's education. And this won't be just an American phenomenon, but rather a global one.
Indeed, according to UNESCO, the United Nations "education" agency, more than 1.5 billion students are currently home from school around the world. And while the U.N. outfit hopes to lead "global cooperation" schemes on how to deal with it, the reality is that many parents will almost certainly choose to home-school, experts say.
"Home education is a global movement of parents seeking the best life opportunities for their children in response to a variety of factors," Donnelly told The Epoch Times, adding that throughout the world, the homeschooling movement was gaining steam. "Home education is the fastest growing and most popular education innovation in the world today with the capacity to unlock limitless learning opportunities for millions of children."
However, certain governments are less than happy about the trend.
"The harsh persecution of homeschooling parents in Cuba is a travesty that should not be tolerated," said Donnelly, adding that ruling elites even in nations such as Germany and Sweden are persecuting home-schoolers and using their control over school systems to control citizens.
“The way a country treats parents who homeschool is a litmus test -- it demonstrates how a nation's leaders view their fellow citizens.
"Do they trust them? Free societies must respect and protect the rights of parents to choose what kind of education their children shall receive -- and this includes home education."
It's not just the CCP virus that is causing massive growth for the homeschooling movement, however. "Parents are increasingly frustrated and frightened about public schools," Donnelly said. "Bullying, controversial curriculum choices, and special learning needs are just a few of the reasons more and more people worldwide are turning to home education."
By contrast, "research continues to show that home education delivers good results across all measured areas of academic achievement and socialization."
While it's currently being rediscovered by millions of parents amid this pandemic, it's important to remember that home education was the norm for millennia across virtually the entire globe.
Outside of fascist Sparta and its military schools, the first known proponent of compulsory "education" was Plato. In his infamous treatise "The Republic," the Greek philosopher called for a regime led by a "Philosopher King" that would require everyone to receive an "ideal education." Plato's elitist thinking was, in key respects, very much in line with that of 19th-century "reformers" such as Horace Mann.
Despite Plato's ramblings, though, the idea of a government-mandated, government-provided education didn't catch on until thousands of years later. Instead, throughout virtually the whole world, parents, religious institutions, and sometimes local communities were the primary educators of children -- with parents retaining ultimate control.
The process and the motivations of those who created the government-school system have been extensively documented in this series. Basically, collectivists who wanted to undermine individual liberty and Christianity in the United States realized that the most effective way to do that was a takeover of the education system by government.
By the early 1900s, the foundations of that takeover were complete in America. From there, the schools became increasingly radical and dangerous -- and increasingly less rigorous academically, focusing instead on "socializing" children and instilling government-approved attitudes.
By the 1960s and 1970s, following Supreme Court rulings purporting to ban the Bible and prayer from schools, more and more parents were looking for an escape route. Many chose private schools, a topic that will be addressed in a future part of this series. But millions would eventually choose to leave formal "school" altogether, giving birth to the modern homeschooling revolution.
Perhaps the most important single player in this was Dr. Raymond Moore, a former missionary who discovered that government schools were harming children -- especially young children. In a series of interviews between 1979 and 1983 on Dr. James Dobson's nationally syndicated program, Moore introduced home-education to millions of Americans. It was a spark that caught on and started a wildfire. The rest is history.
The official beginning of the contemporary homeschooling revolution is usually dated to around 1980 by leaders in the movement. Prominent home school advocate Israel Wayne, an author of many books on education and a leader in the home-education community, lived through much of that history in a family that pioneered the rebirth of home-education in America. He had a front-row seat.
"In the early 1980s, parents began to realize that they could educate their children better than the State," Wayne, a home-schooling father of 10 children, told The Epoch Times. "Because of compulsory attendance laws, many parents were faced with fines and imprisonment for merely desiring to teach their own children in their own homes."
Wayne's family even developed escape plans to hide from social services if and when they came to the door. "Thankfully, through the work of the Home School Legal Defense Association and state homeschooling associations, homeschooling is now legal in some form in every state in the U.S., and is growing internationally," said Wayne, author of "Answers for Homeschooling: Top 25 Questions Critics Ask."
Wayne offered over a dozen reasons for parents to choose homeschooling. These include passing on values to one's children, building closer relationships, customized academics, a great student-to-teacher ratio, real-life learning opportunities, ability to compensate for gifts or special needs, the fact that parents care more about their children than anyone else, costing a fraction of what tax-funded schools cost, higher scores on academic achievement tests, better social skills, teaching children how to think rather than merely test-taking, and much more.
Anti-homeschooling forces have existed since the rebirth of the movement decades ago. The National Education Association, for instance, regularly attacks home education, arguing that only state-certified teachers should be allowed to educate children. Those attacks have been intensifying as the education establishment frantically seeks to stop the growing exodus.
The Washington Post recently ran the headline "Homeschooling During the Coronavirus Will Set Back a Generation of Children." And anti-homeschooling extremists at Harvard Law School are planning a summit aimed at accelerating the war on home educators, with one of the organizers calling for a "presumptive ban" on the practice and another claiming there is no such thing as "parental rights."
By contrast, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News, among countless others, have run featured pieces touting home education amid the crisis. In an opinion piece by Wall Street Journal deputy editorial features editor Matthew Hennessey, himself a home school father, he argued that an increase in homeschooling numbers would be a "silver lining in a very dark cloud."
Without question, the ongoing resurgence of homeschooling has been among the most important developments on the educational horizon in the United States and beyond. While this lost tradition was almost wiped out by the government takeover of education over the last century, it's now coming back in a major way. And CCP virus may turbocharge the movement.
When the dust finally clears after the devastation wrought by the CCP virus, there may be one very bright spot: millions of new homeschooling families dedicated to ensuring the best possible education for their children. The opportunity is there. Now, it's up to Americans to seize it.
16. Historic Crossroads for Private Education: Boom or Bust? -- by Alex Newman, 07/06/2020
Private education in the United States is at a historic crossroads, and the outcome of the fight will have a profound impact on the future.
Leading advocates of expanding private options told The Epoch Times that a recent high-court ruling and various government "choice" programs such as tax credits could dramatically boost private-school enrollment.
"It's the most important breakthrough for Christian education in over 150 years in this country," said former Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who wrote the first tax-credit program in Arizona more than two decades ago.
However, it could "potentially leave a crack in the door" for government to try to take control, he said.
Indeed, if the United Nations and the education establishment in charge of U.S. government schools get their way, independent private schools may end up dead for all intents and purposes -- with government funding ultimately leading to government control. Experts say that's the plan.
What remains to be seen is who will come out on top.
Alongside homeschooling, private education dominated in America for centuries. In fact, until the mid-1800s, government-controlled education was practically unheard of in America or most of the world.
In the city of Philadelphia, historical records reveal that between 1740 and 1776, more than 125 private schoolmasters advertised their services, according to colonial-era historian and author Louis Booker Wright.
Their institutions taught everything from Latin and Greek to math, science, foreign languages, navigation, and business. Children typically arrived at school already able to read.
The vibrant free-market education system in the United States, combined with churches and parents, worked incredibly well, laying the foundation to create the freest and most prosperous nation in human history.
Children in the nation's wide array of private academies and religious schools generally received an education that was drastically superior to what is offered today in public schools, as evidenced by the textbooks and tests from that era.
It was all done at a fraction of the cost, too.
Even poor children could receive a free or low-cost education from a dizzying array of charities, churches, scholarship programs, and more.
Then collectivists, humanists, and socialists used government to take over education, as recounted in previous articles in this series on the history of public education.
And it was all downhill from there.
As government hijacked control over education beginning in the mid-1800s in Massachusetts under the leadership of collectivists such as Horace Mann, Protestant Christianity was still by far the dominant religion in the United States.
And so, on the surface, at least, the newly born public schools proliferating across the United States were nominally Protestant.
In fact, many Protestant Americans, alarmed by massive Catholic immigration, hoped to use public schools to assimilate the new arrivals into America. (Those Protestants, for the most part, remained blissfully unaware that humanists and socialists were making plans of their own to use the public schools not to uphold and promote Protestant Christianity, but to undermine it.)
By the 1900s, Catholics, anxious to protect their own faith and traditions, had created a vast network of thousands of "parochial" schools all across the United States outside of government control. There, students learned the Catholic religion under the tutelage of nuns and other church officials, subsidized by the Catholic Church.
Protestants and anti-Catholic forces sought to stop this spread, even passing state laws and state constitutional amendments seeking to quash the parochial schools, or at least deny them any public funding.
The proposed "Blaine Amendment" to the U.S. Constitution, which would have prohibited the use of tax money by states for "sectarian" (meaning Catholic) schools, was offered by Sen. James Blaine (R-Maine) in the mid-1870s. It failed to get through Congress.
However, most states eventually adopted some form of the "Blaine Amendment." Those prohibited any direct or indirect support for religious (Catholic) schools until late last month, when the Supreme Court dealt the measures a major blow.
Unlike Catholics, Protestants were largely content to remain in government-controlled schools as long as prayers were offered and the Bible was read from time to time. By the early 20th century, Protestant Christians had largely abandoned private education, with a few notable exceptions.
However, by a series of gradual changes, government schools were quietly transformed from nominally Christ-centered institutions into humanist and collectivist outfits seeking to fundamentally transform society.
That was the plan all along, as outlined by John Dewey, the chief architect of America's modern-day public-school system.
It wasn't until the infamous Supreme Court rulings of 1962 and 1963 formally banned Bible reading and collective prayer that many Protestant churches and leaders recognized the urgent need to create their own schools once again.
It wasn't always easy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, for instance, the state of Nebraska tried to seize children whose parents insisted that they be educated at an independent Christian school. A number of parents even ended up in jail.
But the battle over the right to educate children at private expense, outside of government control, has largely been won -- at least for now.
Today, estimates suggest there are well over 20,000 private religious schools in the United States, most of them Catholic or Protestant, along with some Jewish schools.
About 10 percent of American students are in private Christian schools, with around 3 percent being homeschooled, estimates suggest.
But those numbers could balloon, very soon.
On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that the state's discrimination against religious schools in its tax-scholarship program was unconstitutional.
President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly expressed a desire to rescue children from "failing government schools," was delighted with the decision.
"Today's SCOTUS ruling is a historic win for families who want SCHOOL CHOICE NOW!" he said in a tweet, echoing comments by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. "School Choice is a civil rights issue, and no parent should have to send their child to a failing school. I will continue to fight for School Choice and will always defend Religious Freedom!"
Franks, who has been at the center of this battle for more than 30 years, wrote the original tuition tax-credit legislation in Arizona that served as the model for similar programs implemented in over 15 other states so far, including the one in Montana at issue in Espinoza.
Those programs have helped to liberate more than half a million children from public schools, he said, with the potential for millions more in the years ahead.
In a phone interview with The Epoch Times, Franks said he believes the ruling will provide an unprecedented boost to private and Christian education. This should help large numbers of low-income families access a high-quality education in accordance with their values.
"I truly believe there is a brighter future for America's children on the basis of this case," he said, adding that it would be easy to underestimate the significance as well as the "dramatic and positive impact" this ruling will have.
"The whole future can be affected profoundly by who holds the reins of our children's education."
The goal, Franks said, is to allow religious and nonreligious people to control the education of their children, rather than leaving that power in the hands of government bureaucrats. That will lead to a much better education for everyone, he said.
"Only two people can ultimately make the decision about a child's education -- parents or bureaucrats," he said. "Not to denigrate the education class, but sooner or later, you have to put the decision over the children either in the hands of those who don't know the child, or in the hands of the people who love those children and would do absolutely anything for them -- their parents."
Among other benefits, Franks said the ruling would "dramatically expand private and religious education" in the states that have tax-credit programs such as those in Arizona and Montana.
He also said that, by allowing parents to keep their own money and choose other educational options, state governments would save huge amounts of money. In many states, private schools provide a superior education at half the cost, Franks said, citing Utah as one example.
"Just from a fiscal point of view, this is going to take the burden off taxpayers," Franks said, adding that the additional competition would force public schools to improve as well.
Calling the Espinoza ruling "the most significant education reform we've had since before the Blaine amendments," Franks said he didn't know "anything that's moved us this far in the right direction in the last 150 years."
In short, the decision, combined with growing disgust over what's being taught in public schools and the "coronavirus boost being enjoyed by homeschooling, means nongovernment education may be ascendant once again -- at least if the educational establishment is prevented from seizing control over private schools and home education, too. That's a real risk.
Franks, the architect of the tax-credit program, does have concerns about the prospect of increased government control. Asked about the possibility that government may seek to regulate schools benefiting from the tax-credit program, he acknowledged that it wasn't out of the question.
"I believe some of the elements of this decision could potentially leave a crack in the door, and I share that concern very deeply," he said.
While he also backs tax-funded vouchers for private schools because "they are a step in the direction away from total government control," vouchers are "far from ideal, because they present the danger that tax dollars could change the essence of the schools."
However, the former congressman was adamant that the Espinoza ruling and the tax-credit programs at issue were entirely different from vouchers or subsidies in several key ways.
"This is not an issue of whether public dollars can fund religious education," he said. "These are not public dollars, and they never were, even though that is what the left wants people to believe."
Instead, the tax-credit program simply allows parents and donors to keep some of their own money and avoid the "double burden" of paying for a private school while also having to spend the same amount or more to send a child to a public school.
"That is not fair," he said.
"These are private dollars for a private scholarship for parents to choose a private school of their private choice, and it privately drives the left nuts."
In some states with vouchers, where money goes from government to schools or families, government has come in to dictate to private schools. That has never happened so far under a tax-credit system, he said.
"With shekels come shackles," Franks said. "That's why I'm so adamantly convinced this is a better mechanism."
He compared the tax-credit system for private schools to giving a tax-deductible contribution to a church.
"It would be a really dark road to go down to say that anything that affects what you owe on your taxes becomes public money," Franks said, noting the implications for churches.
"Unless all of our money is government's, then these contributions are not public money."
"I wish I could say every dollar I never got was an expense, but obviously it's not," he said, noting that even some major media outlets have misrepresented the nature of the debate and the ruling.
Still, Franks acknowledged that there are dangerous and serious efforts to hijack control of all education, including private schools.
"It's important for people to recognize, that is absolutely the goal of the left -- to take over Christian schools and make them just like public schools," he said.
"That's what the left, the NEA [National Education Association], and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] all want. They do not want to lose control."
"We need to be eternally vigilant. There's a great danger, and our children are the prize that goes to the winner of that debate."
In many state-level voucher programs, where states use tax funds to support private and religious schools, government is already regulating and seeking to control the schools in question. The Supreme Court has also given its approval for such schemes.
Everything from hiring and admissions to curricula and standards is in the crosshairs. And critics warn that as "school-choice" schemes proliferate across the United States, private schools and homeschoolers will get hooked on government money and then, eventually, be forced to obey the government.
Think of the tax funding -- vouchers, aid, subsidies, or whatever -- as the cheese in the mousetrap. At first, the cheese looks free. But after the mouse grabs it, the trap closes, with catastrophic results.
Former senior education adviser Charlotte Iserbyt, who served at the Department of Education during the Reagan administration before blowing the whistle on what she saw there, warned that the Espinoza decision would lead to a government takeover of "the last remnants of homeschool, private and religious education for our children."
"Any entity, including schools -- public or private -- that takes one penny of tax money for anything, including busing, desks, pictures on the wall, school lunch, textbooks -- you name it -- will be controlled and will have to conform to federal regulations," she told The Epoch Times.
Iserbyt, who wrote the explosive book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America," said that in the case of private schools, the control would eventually extend to curriculum and teacher training, too.
Citing a wide array of court cases, regulations, and statements by officials over the years, Iserbyt warned that government funding or support would be the death of independent education not controlled by government. And she has warned for decades that this is the plan of the education establishment.
In recent years, the war on private schools in the United States and worldwide has accelerated and is becoming obvious.
In New York, for instance, Jewish yeshiva schools, which enjoy some tax funding, are now being targeted by authorities for allegedly not providing enough "secular" education.
In Sweden, government used a "school choice" scheme to get all private and religious schools dependent on government. Then it forced them all to teach the government's controversial curriculum while forbidding prayer or Bible reading during school hours. Homeschooling was banned, too.
At the global level, the United Nations "Human Rights Council," which includes communist China and other murderous dictatorships, has been calling for greater government control over private schools, too.
In 2015, the council called on governments around the world to "fulfill the right to education" by, among other schemes, "putting in place a regulatory framework guided by international human rights obligations for education providers that establishes, inter alia, minimum norms and standards for the creation and operation of educational institutions."
Ultimately, to protect educational liberty, some advocates are calling for a complete separation of school and state.
Lt. Col. E. Ray Moore, executive director of the Exodus Mandate, has been urging Christians to get out of the government-school system for decades.
Recently, the pioneer homeschooler praised the Supreme Court for protecting the ability of religious people to use the tax-credit program on the basis of religion.
However, he too warned about the prospect of the Espinoza ruling opening the door to future tax-funded voucher programs that would endanger the independence of private and Christian education.
"A complete separation of school and state is the safest position for private religious education," he told The Epoch Times, saying the United States was facing an incredible opportunity to rekindle freedom in education.
In a phone interview with The Epoch Times, Liberty University law professor Jeffrey Tuomala also expressed concerns about the potential for government and regulation of private education.
In many cases, it's already happening, he said -- especially where vouchers or other direct aid is being offered by government.
However, when asked if the First Amendment was really intended to support secular public schools while banning religious ones, he opened up about his research into these crucial constitutional questions.
"The high court has never defined religion," he said. "Yet it has made the difference between secular and religious fundamental."
The question, then, is how one can know whether government has "established" a religion if the terms aren't even defined.
In the 10 Commandments case involving Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, in which the judge placed a monument of the Decalogue in the judicial building, the federal courts rejected the definition offered by Moore that was enshrined by Virginia in 1776 under the leadership of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
The Virginia definition referred to religion as "the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it."
The federal courts in the 10 Commandments case rejected that, and even said it would be "unwise, and even dangerous" to offer one definition of religion.
"You look at that and say that's ridiculous," Tuomala said. "But that's the state that it's in."
In fact, the founders viewed schooling and education as a crucial part of "the duty which we owe to our Creator."
And thus, "education falls within Madison's definition, and therefore, the Constitution's definition, of religion," said Tuomala, who will elaborate on his views of this topic at the Christian Legal Society's annual national conference.
"Basically, as I see it, the state is violating the establishment clause when it establishes schools -- any schools -- because they shape the minds of children," he said.
"The state has no business telling people what to think. We're a republic. We're supposed to tell our officials what they're supposed to think. It's totally contrary to our system of government for the government to tell us what we're supposed to do and think."
It appears clear at this point that private education and homeschooling are going to make up an increasingly significant portion of the educational landscape in the United States in the years ahead.
Advocates of educational liberty recognize this, just as do advocates of total government control.
For those who hope to preserve parental rights, religious liberty, educational freedom, and the independence of private schools and homeschools, there's a major battle coming.
However, for the sake of America's children -- and the nation's embattled constitutional republic—it's a battle that liberty-minded Americans must fight with all their might.
The future of liberty and civilization is literally at stake.
17. Trading Academics for Far-Left 'Social-Emotional Learning' -- by Alex Newman, 08/21/2020
Academics are fast becoming a thing of the past in public schools.
In their place are behavioral psychology and "social and emotional learning" (SEL) designed not to educate but to transform children's core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.
Once upon a time, education meant learning how to read, write, do math, and think. It meant learning history and science as well.
That is barely happening now, as government data show.
Perhaps more importantly, once upon a time, school children all over the nation also learned the Ten Commandments -- do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, and so on.
They learned the Golden Rule, too: Treat others as you want to be treated.
But those "good old days" are largely gone.
Today, government schools use advanced methods including SEL to instill in children a radical new and oftentimes contradictory "politically correct" value system: radical environmentalism, radical feminism, critical theory, Marxism, social justice, LGBTQ-plus, population control, socialism, hyper-racialism, class struggle, and more.
There's also an occult connection to it all that would shock most secular observers -- not to mention Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents of other traditional faiths.
In public schools across the United States today, from pre-K through 12th grade and beyond, children are being subjected to what is seemingly just the latest educational fad -- silly, perhaps, but no more harmful than anything else -- at least on the surface.
The education establishment refers to it as "social and emotional learning," "social-emotional learning," or just SEL for short. Generally they speak only in vague generalities using soothing language while dealing with the public.
And it's true, some of what falls under the SEL umbrella is fairly harmless.
But then again, the food pellets that contain rat poison are fairly harmless, too—at least until the poison, which is just a trace component in the pellets, is digested by the intended victim.
Similarly, SEL all seems innocent enough at first glance.
"Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions," explains the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the leading outfits promoting SEL.
The way proponents explain it, SEL is simply aimed to help children do well emotionally and succeed.
What could be wrong with that?
Well, CASEL's website, a review of SEL programs, and educators themselves reveal a great deal more about the agenda. And it's not pretty.
Behind the nice public facade lurk swarms of psychologists, psychiatrists, "educators," and radical leftists hoping to exploit a century of psychological research for the purpose of molding children's beliefs and "deconstructing" the values parents seek to instill.
"With a growing number of partners, CASEL is creating a more comprehensive approach to education, one that will lead to a more equitable, just, and productive society," the organization's website boasts under the headline "SEL as a Lever for Equity," hitting multiple key buzzwords associated with the far-left "social justice" movement.
In other words, one of the purposes of SEL -- as its leading promoters admit -- is to reform society.
Among the webinars offered there are "SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice," and also a lecture on how to use SEL to "support antiracist practices." Another webinar outlines how to use policy to "dismantle inequities."
Again, the leftist buzzwords are everywhere. And that isn't an accident.
Under SEL Competencies, CASEL drops multiple bombshells acknowledging the far-left globalist indoctrination taking place under the guise of "social" and "emotional" learning.
"SEL competencies can be leveraged to develop justice-oriented, global citizens, and nurture inclusive school and district communities," it states, adding that the programs will involve getting children to "assess power dynamics" and confront "issues of race and class across different settings."
The children are also expected to "develop an understanding of systemic or structural explanations for different treatment and outcomes."
In short, they are expected to believe the highly controversial hypothesis that America is awash in "systemic" and "structural" racism, and that only massive government-led social engineering can fix it.
The children are also expected to accept and agree with the artificial divisions being fomented along "race" and "class" lines as part of the now-obvious effort to "divide and conquer" America.
Put simply, this is all blatantly Marxist "critical theory" rhetoric masquerading as "education."
It's extremely dangerous.
A review by The Epoch Times of a wide range of SEL programs used across the United States found that all contain similar extremism, along with highly controversial teachings on sex, sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, economic liberty, family, marriage, and more.
Interviews with educators and a review of their writings on the subject were also very revealing.
In short, the real goals of SEL go far beyond "helping" children socially and emotionally. And it isn't difficult to find that out.
In fact, in practice, SEL is frequently and explicitly used in public schools to instill certain attitudes and values in children that many parents, if not most, would find controversial at the very least.
For example, public-school teachers in Florida, to comply with SEL mandates, were ordered to show a number of videos to their middle school students.
These included propaganda videos promoting homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, "diversity," "inclusion," and more.
Regardless of one's views on these subjects, countless parents -- especially those from faith traditions including Christianity, Islam, or Judaism -- would find the effort to obliterate traditional sexual morality and even biological sex in children's minds to be objectionable.
Numerous other highly controversial political, religious, economic, and worldview positions are treated as "correct" by the forces behind SEL.
More than a few self-styled SEL educators are very open about how they intend to use SEL to brainwash children.
Open Circle Director Kamilah Drummond-Forrester, who supports "social and emotional development for children," wrote openly at EdSurge.com about weaponizing SEL to indoctrinate children with her hyper-racialist views.
"Teaching [white children] to be aware of their racial identity would allow them to better understand the privileges that accompany that identity," she wrote, adding that this would help them dismantle the "concept of 'whiteness.'"
"Social and emotional learning (SEL) has an important role to play in that education."
"One of the core competencies we focus on, as a necessary foundation for the others, is self-awareness. That self-awareness must include race," she continued, without acknowledging that many parents probably don't want their children obsessing about "race" or being propagandized by a far-left activist posing as an educator.
In an article for EdTech Magazine on peddling SEL to students amid coronavirus-inspired online learning, writer Adam Stone touts "SEL-oriented teaching materials from the Zinn Education Project."
Howard Zinn, of course, is the far-left pseudo-historian whose dishonest and politically motivated narratives were most recently debunked by historian Mary Grabar in the book "Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America."
Zinn described himself as "something of a Marxist," his biographer recounted.
According to EdTech, though, the "SEL-oriented" propaganda from Zinn is supposedly "aimed at nurturing empathy and compassion."
In the real world, Marxism has everywhere and always nurtured hatred, death, slavery, torture, starvation, shortages, political repression, religious persecution, and other evils.
And yet under the guise of SEL programs and "nurturing empathy and compassion," millions of children are having their minds poisoned by being force-fed actual Marxist propaganda and fake history.
And perhaps even more alarming, Stone urges educators to use surveillance tools that give "insight into students’ online behaviors -- both inside and outside the virtual classroom -- to enhance SEL."
One of the recommended total surveillance tools offers educators "a holistic view of online activity across search engines, social media, email and web apps," Stone said, adding that an artificial-intelligence engine would perform "real-time assessments" to "flag online behaviors that indicate emotional distress."
As explained in an earlier segment of this series, Orwellian technology is used to monitor and track "progress" on adjusting children's attitudes, too. That data is being compiled and saved forever under the label of "emotional intelligence."
The Big Brother technology is also used to determine whether further "interventions" are needed to coerce the child into holding the desired attitudes, values, and beliefs about the issue in question.
And, as U.S. Department of Education documents make clear, it will also be used to predict "future behavior and interests" of the children.
Of course, educators who have seen through the agenda reject SEL as a massive threat to America's children.
One of those who spoke out against the SEL abuses taking place in her school, Jennifer McWilliams of Indiana, was even fired for being too vocal about it.
"The thing I find to be the most disturbing about social emotional learning is how well it disguises its true sinister motives," she told The Epoch Times. "Parents do not understand that SEL psychologically manipulates children to question (and eventually rebuke) any Christian or conservative beliefs that may be taught in the home."
While parents are led to believe that SEL is like teaching children The Golden Rule, "it is quite the opposite," McWilliams said.
"Social emotional learning is rooted in progressive, social justice ideology that divides anyone who questions the radical groupthink agenda," she said. "From my personal experience, not only do parents not understand it but teachers and administrators don’t either."
SEL also represents the "brainwashing of our children," McWilliams continued, noting that it trains children to "compromise on everything" with no consideration of what is taught in the home.
"These programs rely on a bombardment of propaganda, conditioning, and role playing to separate children from God and the nuclear family," she said, saying SEL was the vehicle used to get children to accept as truth the narratives behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).
The popular SEL program used in McWilliams's school, Leader in Me, was designed to "shift the culture of the school to influence children's morals and values based on progressive social justice standards," she said, adding that it became ubiquitous on campus.
When she began publicly speaking out about it on social media, she was fired for supposedly making the school look bad.
"Parents must speak up and take back control of the influence in their children's lives. If not, the kids will pay with their freedom," McWilliams said.
The story behind SEL is even more troubling.
According to a history of SEL by CASEL, the term "social and emotional" originated in a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, a shadowy New Age powerhouse created by wealthy New Age guru and late media baron John Fetzer.
One of the founders of the SEL movement, David Sluyter, served as president and CEO of the organization.
"Our mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world," the group states on its website, adding that it is working toward a "transformative sacred story for humanity in the 21st century."
According to Brian Wilson's book "John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age," Fetzer was, among other things, a public and fervent devotee of Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist who founded the Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as the Lucis Trust).
So obsessed was Fetzer with Bailey that he and his people would regularly recite her "Great Invocation," which she claimed was given to her by spiritual beings known as "ascended masters," Wilson documents in his book.
The Fetzer Institute didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. CASEL initially suggested it would make somebody available for an interview, but didn't follow up despite multiple requests.
More than a few other prominent names in education were similarly enamored with Bailey's bizarre teachings from supposed spiritual entities.
United Nations World Core Curriculum author Robert Muller, for instance, who served as assistant secretary-general of the U.N., said in the teachers' manual that his U.N.-backed global school curriculum was based on the teachings of Bailey and one of her "ascended masters."
The values being taught to children under Fetzer-inspired SEL programs feature remarkable similarities to those taught by John Dewey, a man almost universally known among educators as the founding father of America's "progressive" education system.
Dewey, who was inspired by the Soviet educational system, was a co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a religious document rejecting God and prescribing collectivism as the cure for society's ills.
For at least 12 years -- more if they go to college -- American children are indoctrinated into the collectivist values of Dewey's religion, which was essentially just warmed-over communism and atheism hiding behind a religious facade.
Interestingly, as early as 1898, Dewey himself expressed an understanding of the need to utilize psychology, a discipline then still in its infancy, if the plan to re-shape Americans through “education” was going to succeed.
Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Bailey, citing her ascended masters, recognized the importance of Dewey's educational schemes in achieving her goal of a one-world order with a global religion.
“Our problem is to attain the kind of overall synthesis that Marxism and neo-Scholasticism provide for their followers, but to get this by the freely chosen cooperative methods that Dewey advocated," Bailey wrote in her book "Education in the New Age."
Even a brief review of the funding and individuals behind SEL also reveals a great deal about the agenda.
On its website, CASEL lists, among other financiers, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Gates, who has a friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, put almost $300 million behind the Obama-backed Common Core standards, which formally nationalized and helped globalize America's education system.
Before that, Gates signed a deal with UNESCO, the subject of part nine in this series, to work on globalizing the world's education systems.
Also listed among the financiers of CASEL is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which CASEL said "provides generous funding to CASEL to support school districts and their capacity to promote social and emotional learning."
For some background, the recently deceased patriarch of the family, David Rockefeller, wrote in The New York Times in 1973 that "the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history."
Rockefeller also boasted in his autobiography "Memoirs" of "conspiring" with a "secret cabal" of globalists, "against the best interests of the United States," to build a "One World" political and economic system.
Aside from its financiers, CASEL's leading super-stars also suggest something is amiss, to put it mildly.
Consider the involvement of radical Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond, a board member emeritus of CASEL and known associate of communist terrorist turned educator William Ayers.
Ayers's Weather Underground group set off bombs across America in cooperation with communist Cuban intelligence. The FBI operative who infiltrated the group's leadership, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that the organization's leadership was plotting to exterminate millions of Americans in camps.
Interestingly, Darling-Hammond had an opportunity to test out her educational quackery unimpeded in the Stanford New Schools. The results are now in: In 2010, Stanford New Schools placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California, according to multiple reports.
More than a few other colleagues of Ayers are or were also involved with CASEL and SEL, with his University of Illinois at Chicago being central to the scheme. At least 3 of 13 members listed on CASEL's website came from that university's Department of Education and Psychology.
SEL was formally unveiled in the late 1990s. However, the real history behind it goes way back to Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist who studied how to effectively brainwash children to become good communists.
Vygotsky's contributions in laying the foundations for SEL are widely acknowledged among practitioners and even in the academic literature (pdf).
Interestingly, Vygotsky was a close colleague of Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet psychologist famous for his behavioral-conditioning experiments on dogs.
Vygotsky had been inspired, in part, by American psychologist and educational researcher E.L. Thorndike, a student of close Dewey-ally and associate James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University.
In fact, Vygotsky wrote the foreword to the Russian translation of Thorndike's "Principles of Learning Based Upon Psychology" published in Moscow in the mid-1920s.
Thorndike didn't bother to conceal his views on education: Children should be educated like circus animals, and it should be so arranged that the child will be incapable of not doing what the trainer wants.
Vygotsky, too, had grandiose ideas about how Soviet "education" and "psychology" would be used to fundamentally transform the individual, and ultimately, mankind.
"It is education which should play the central role in the transformation of man this road of conscious social formation of new generations, the basic form to alter the historical human type," Vygotsky wrote in 1930 in the journal of the All-Union Association of Workers in Science and Technics for the Furthering of the Socialist Edification in the USSR.
"New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man," he added.
SEL is simply the latest tool of the collectivist education establishment in its fiendish drive to create this "new type of man" -- a collectivist man who will mindlessly submit to the tyranny of his overlords, without the intellectual ability to effectively resist.
Today, while most educators and parents have little understanding of what is going on, SEL has become ubiquitous in government schools across the nation.
National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Global Learning Fellow Wendy Turner, a second-grade teacher and self-styled "SEL warrior" quoted in an article on the NEA's website, explained that SEL is now the top priority for schools.
"SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom," she said. "It's about connecting everybody and making them feel safe and secure before you get to the academics."
In a U.S. Department of Education report, a "review" of existing studies called for subjecting "the entire student body" to constant SEL programming "in order to reinforce social and emotional learning not only in the classroom but also on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in hallways." Parents should also "reinforce" it at home.
But the facts are now clear: The SEL craze is an extreme threat to America's youth—and to individual liberty.
The scheme isn't about helping children at all. Instead, it's about manipulating and conditioning America's youth to hold the values and beliefs that the education establishment wants to instill.
Unfortunately, those values and beliefs are incompatible with individual liberty, Western civilization, the U.S. Constitution, the nuclear family, religious liberty, and other key values that underpin the United States.
Parents and policymakers must urgently protect the nation's children from this dangerous threat.
18. Schools Using Fake 'History' to Kill America -- by Alex Newman, 09/26/2020
Americans educated by government today are, for the most part, hopelessly ignorant of their own nation's history -- and that s no accident. They're beyond ignorant when it comes to civics, too. On the history of the rest of the world, or the history of communism, Americans are generally clueless as well. This was all by design, of course.
After generations of flying under the radar, the ongoing corruption of history education in public schools is now suddenly the topic du jour. With the spread of The New York Times' discredited 1619 Project aiming to "reframe" history through the lens of slavery, which even The New York Times' own fact-checker called out, Americans everywhere are suddenly paying attention to what's being taught to impressionable children at taxpayer expense.
President Donald Trump recently blamed the escalating mayhem in the streets on indoctrination by schools and the media. In September, he blasted the "toxic propaganda" being peddled as "history" in American classrooms. To deal with it, the president even said he will sign an executive order to "promote patriotic education."
The reason why history is being rewritten is hardly a mystery. In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the totalitarian ruling Party's motto explaining its strategy is "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." And it's very true -- whoever controls the historical narrative will be able to shape the future. Liberty-minded Americans and truth are currently losing the battle -- big time.
Totalitarians have long understood the power of historical narratives. Consider Chairman Mao's "Cultural Revolution" in communist China. Under the guise of purging remnants of the old ways of capitalism and tradition, Mao's communist storm troopers did their best to destroy the records and evidences of thousands of years of Chinese history. Books were burned and monuments destroyed in an orgy of destruction.
After true history was erased and disfigured, the Chinese Communist Party was able to rewrite history on a blank slate to suit its own agenda. Especially important to that effort was the indoctrination of children in government schools. Everything ancient and traditional was portrayed as primitive or even evil, while the new party line surrounding the supposed glories and progress of communism was force-fed to China’s youth.
America's ongoing cultural revolution hasn't been quite as dramatic, violent, or thorough -- so far. But if left unchecked, the results of this long-term operation may turn out to be just as deadly. And there should be no doubt in anyone's mind about the effectiveness of the effort to rewrite the history of the United States, Western civilization, and even the world.
Consider the data. According to the U.S. Department of Education's 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the "nation's report card," just 15 percent of American students were at or above the "proficient" level in history. When it comes to civics, less than 1 in 4 U.S. eighth-grade students performed at or above "proficient" in 2018 on the NAEP, the latest year for which scores are available.
Keeping in mind the wild bias of the Education Department (some 99.7 percent of the bureaucrats' contributions to a presidential candidate in the 2016 election went to Hillary Clinton), even those numbers probably drastically overstate the true level of historical and civic understanding of U.S. students.
Contrast the dismal scores with previous generations. There was a time when Americans were the best-educated people on the planet -- especially when it came to history and civics. According to prominent French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the early-to-mid 1800s and recorded his observations in two volumes before government hijacked education, "every citizen ... is ... taught the doctrines and evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of the Constitution."
Some areas on the Western frontier and the deep South weren't quite as advanced educationally. However, in the more populous and developed areas, "it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon," de Tocqueville continued.
Today, it's just the opposite: Finding a person who understands the history of America or the leading features of its Constitution is a sort of phenomenon.
The process of rewriting history was a long one. Unlike Mao's Cultural Revolution, which took about a decade, those seeking to erase and distort America's incredible and unique history were forced to proceed slowly, working over decades and generations rather than accomplishing it all in one fell swoop. But concrete evidence of this deliberate plot has surfaced periodically since at least the 1940s.
In the early 1950s, Congress became suspicious about the scheming of the major tax-exempt foundations, a subject covered extensively in part 7 of this series on education. To deal with the issue, lawmakers formed the Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the "Reece Committee" after its chairman.
What investigators found should have shocked America to the core. In its final report, the select committee reported that the major foundations of the day, which still exist, had "supported a conscious distortion of history." The foundations also sought to hijack education for the purpose of undermining American constitutional principles and liberty, investigators found.
One of the expert witnesses who testified during the select committee's investigation, attorney and investigator Aaron Sargent, an expert in subversion through education, put it clearly. "They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts," Sargent testified about the goals of the major tax-exempt foundations in the education field. "They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy -- one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”
By the time of the congressional probe, the situation was so serious that Norman Dodd, the chief investigator for the committee, said the foundations had orchestrated a "revolution" in the United States. The revolution "could not have occurred peacefully or with the consent of the majority unless education in the United States had prepared in advance to endorse it," Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony. The attack on real history in school was a crucial element of that.
Of course, the situation only got worse from there. By 1980, pseudo-historian Howard Zinn, a radical exposed in declassified FBI documents as a Communist Party member, had published his book "A People's History of the United States." It's a favorite in public schools. More than 3 million copies have been sold so far, shaping the minds and attitudes of countless millions of Americans while turning them against their own nation and their own political institutions that guaranteed individual liberty for so long.
The propaganda "history" book was full of obvious lies, as exposed most recently by scholar Mary Grabar in her book "Debunking Howard Zinn." The deception was strategic, too, and powerful. The lies begin right at the start of the book, portraying Columbus as a genocidal monster, and continue onward from there.
"We were really no better than the Nazis in the way Zinn presents it," Grabar told The Epoch Times.
It was carefully calculated. "Rewriting history is what communists do," continued Grabar, who also serves as a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. "They don't want people to know about any other form of government or to remember a time when there was freedom and abundance. Like Zinn, the Marxists of today want young people to be so disgusted with their own country that they become inspired to overthrow it."
While demonizing the United States and Western civilization more broadly, Zinn and other communists work hard to conceal the history of communism -- "the horrors of starvation, gulags, repression, and mass murder," Grabar said. Interestingly, there were clear parallels between Zinn's fake history and a history written by Communist Party USA chief William Z. Foster published in 1951 dubbed "Outline Political History of the Americas." Foster wrote openly about how crucial hijacking education would be for the Soviet-style communist regime he envisioned for America.
When starting the project, Grabar said she already knew Zinn's book was biased. "But even I was surprised by how blatantly and deliberately Zinn lied," she said, urging students, parents, and community members to use her book to refute the propaganda with facts.
More recently, The New York Times released its 1619 Project, the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Like Zinn's book, it’s essentially fake history, as historians from across the political spectrum -- and even The New York Times' own fact-checker -- publicly confirmed. Like Zinn's book, it seeks to "reframe" America's history as one based on oppression, slavery, and racism rather than liberty. And like Zinn's fake history, the 1619 Project is now being used in public schools across America.
Perhaps most alarming about Hannah-Jones's false narrative is the notion that racism and evil are embedded "in the very DNA" of America. In other words, there's nothing short of the complete annihilation of the United States' very foundations and essence that could possibly resolve the real and imagined shortcomings. The message of the project was obvious and clear: Death to America!
In reality, the truth about American history is almost exactly the opposite of what the project presents. The principles upon which the nation was founded -- "all men are created equal," for instance, and are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" -- paved the way for abolishing slavery worldwide while facilitating the greatest expansion of human freedom and prosperity in world history.
Despite the obvious lies and deception, Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project. Ironically, though, New York Times writer Walter Duranty also won a Pulitzer Prize for peddling lies and communist propaganda. In Duranty's case, he infamously parroted Stalin's obvious propaganda and covered up the Soviet genocide in Ukraine that killed by some estimates up to 10 million people.
This strategic rewriting of history in public schools across America has led to dramatic shifts in Americans' attitudes, values, beliefs, and worldview. For example, national pride among Americans, who arguably live in the richest and freest nation in human history, has reached historic lows, according to a Gallup poll released this summer. Among younger Americans, just 1 in 5 are extremely proud to be American, while among those 65 and older, just over half are extremely proud.
But the real dangers are becoming clear, too. A 2019 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 7 in 10 millennials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. Fully 36 percent of millennials support communism, the survey found. And just 57 percent of them believe the Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist Manifesto. A generation ago, these numbers would have been inconceivable.
“When we don't educate our youngest generations about the historical truth of 100 million victims murdered at the hands of communist regimes over the past century, we shouldn't be surprised at their willingness to embrace Marxist ideas," explained Victims of Communism (VOC) Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith.
“We need to redouble our efforts to educate America's youth about the history of communist regimes and the dangers of socialism today."
In comments to The Epoch Times, VOC Director of Academic Programs Murray Bessette explained that American public schools simply don't teach the true history of communism. Part of the reason for that, he said, is the "ideological character of many involved in developing and delivering curricula for American schools." Parents must insist on a full account of history, and teachers must seek out programs and materials that teach the whole truth, added Bessette.
The effects of these false narratives pushed on children in government schools are becoming more and more obvious. Just think of the brainwashed armies of young Americans rampaging through the streets rioting, looting, killing, protesting, and destroying. Funded by rich and powerful individuals, companies, and foundations, their goal is to "fundamentally transform" what they view as an evil America. And because they don't know the truth about their own nation or its history, many genuinely believe in what they're doing.
Speaking at an Independence Day celebration this summer, the president of the United States hit the nail on the head. "The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions," Trump explained. "Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains."
Their goal, the president correctly observed, is not to improve America, but to destroy it.
Fortunately, now that the problem has been identified, steps are being taken to address it. And at the core of that process will be ensuring that young Americans understand the truth about their own nation's history. During remarks made on Constitution Day, Trump blasted the left's distortion of American history with lies and deception.
"There is no better example than The New York Times' totally discredited 1619 Project," said Trump, calling it "toxic" propaganda that would "destroy" America. "This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom."
In reality, as Trump correctly pointed out, "nothing could be further from the truth."
"America's founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history," the president declared.
Trump also promised action to reverse the progress of the history destroyers and rewriters. "We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country," he said. "We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world."
To accomplish that, grants are being awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to help develop a pro-American curriculum that "celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history," Trump said. He also said he would soon sign an executive order to create a national "1776 Commission" that will promote patriotic education that will "encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history."
Whether the rot and corruption that has taken over the teaching of history and civics in America’s government schools can be reversed remains to be seen. But diagnosing an illness is the first step to treating and curing it. Now that Americans are starting to understand what's killing their nation, serious efforts can be made to stop the bleeding. Teaching children the truth about U.S. history will be a good first step.
19. CCP Virus Ushers In Brave New World of Techno-Utopian 'Education' -- by Alex Newman, 12/02/2020
Beginning in the 1940s, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner posited that children could be conditioned and trained, much like circus animals, rather than "educated" in the traditional sense. It was considered a radical idea, at least back then. But it's here now.
Using a system of simple rewards and punishments to encourage or discourage behaviors, the scientist experimented with animals inside so-called "Skinner Boxes". Inside a typical Skinner Box, an animal would find a bar or a lever to be pressed. Each time it performed well and pressed down on the lever, the creature would receive a reward such as food or drink. Punishments, including an electric shock, could also be dispensed for the wrong behavior.
After enough of the conditioning with "programmed instruction" through "teaching machines", the animal learned to do exactly what the scientist wanted. The goal had been achieved: It was possible to modify behavior scientifically using this process known as "Operant Conditioning". Eventually, Skinner expected to be able to predict behavior, too.
Motivated by his view of humans as mere biological stimulus-response machines, Skinner theorized that, like rats and pigeons, children could also be conditioned into behaving in a particular manner through "teaching machines". His experiments in modifying the behavior of animals were relatively successful. But the next frontier was to find out whether children's attitudes, values, and beliefs could be manipulated, too.
A scandal involving a picture in a magazine of Skinner's baby daughter in what was believed (inaccurately) to be a "Skinner Box" caused public outrage. And, thus, experiments on children in Skinner Boxes, or "Operant Conditioning Chambers" as they were formally known, were frowned upon, to put it mildly.
Today, however, the very same principles are at work in education -- but instead of bars and levers, today's methods involve computers, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and Big Data. If left unchecked, humanity could be on the verge of unleashing a disaster from which it may never recover.
Public alarm over the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus is being weaponized by the education establishment, global organizations, and their data-hungry Big Tech allies to fundamentally transform public schools. Under cover of the CCP virus, education is now changing in ways that would have been unimaginable just last year.
AI schemes that reward children with fun sounds or images, for example, are being rolled out in a way that will completely revolutionize education -- and not in a good way. Despite the slick marketing about "personalized education" by "experts" and those who hope to profit from the transformation, the real danger is that these tools will allow ruling elites to manipulate and even control children on a previously unimaginable scale.
Another major red flag: Communist China is leading the way.
The looming educational shift into the digital world is also, according to its own advocates, one key component of the so-called "Great Reset", a global scheme backed by the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund to essentially institute global feudalism (you will own nothing, they say) and technocratic rule in place of self-government.
Of course, this brave new "education" world is terrible news for freedom, privacy, and real education. For would-be social engineers and Utopian central planners, though, it's just what the legions of Doctors of Education and the Priests of High Technology and Psychology have been ordering for decades.
From sidelining teachers for computer programs and algorithms, to moving schooling online in a way that produces endless amounts of permanent data and records on every child while giving government unprecedented access to the home, these changes will have a dramatic impact on the future of whole societies.
The trends toward digitization and shifting everything online will also make it easier for the education establishment to manipulate students through computerized rewards and punishments. Computer systems will then track each child's attitudes and behaviors so they can ultimately be changed at will by those behind the technology as children stare mindlessly into their devices seeking that next reward.
Naturally, the educational transformation is being peddled as necessary to continue providing "education" despite the CCP virus. But in reality, the tools and systems being created -- if not halted -- will be far more dangerous to children than the CCP virus.
Despite the enormity of the changes, there has been very little public discussion about it. Yes, global elites and policy wonks are talking about it, fairly openly, in fact. But at the level of citizens and voters, the transformation, when mentioned at all, is being marketed as an inevitability that is above public input. The changes are occurring worldwide, too.
World Economic Forum (WEF) boss Klaus Schwab -- perhaps the lead proponent of the "Great Reset" -- boasted in a piece on WEF's website that "all aspects of our societies and economies," including in particular education, must be "revamped" in response to the CCP virus.
Even months before the WEF's "Great Reset" was publicly unveiled in June by leaders of international organizations and businesses, the WEF was already peddling its proposals for drastic educational changes in response to COVID-19.
For instance, in an April 3 article headlined "Homeschooling during the coronavirus pandemic could change education forever, says the OECD," WEF senior writer Douglas Broom was gushing about the expected transformation and how "technology is replacing face-to-face teaching."
"Experts believe the innovations teachers use during the outbreak may lead to lasting change, with technology playing a bigger role in schools in the future," explained Broom, pointing to the growing reliance on Big Tech firms such as Microsoft, Google, and Zoom.
The supposed experts being cited in the report make perfectly clear that the looming transformation goes far beyond simply replacing face-to-face teaching with a similar experience delivered online.
One expert quoted in the report, for instance, describes a fundamental change in the role of teachers themselves. No longer would they be "imparting received knowledge." Instead, they will become a "co-creator of knowledge" alongside the children.
Said more simply, in the brave new CCP-virus world of "education", teachers will no longer be teachers -- glorified babysitters, perhaps, but not educators in the traditional sense. Computers and algorithms will become the true teachers.
In a separate WEF article on how COVID-19 has changed education forever, two WEF communications officials note that many are making "e-learning part of their 'new normal'."
In his book on the Great Reset, Schwab celebrates what he described as the "accelerating" of the "digital transformation". COVID-19, he says, was the "catalyst".
"One major effect of confinement will be the expansion and progression of the digital world in a decisive and often permanent manner," he said, quoting Google CEO Sundar Pichai's forecasts of a "significant and lasting" effect on sectors such as education.
In a segment on the "acceleration of digitization", Schwab noted that during "confinement", his prison-like term for lockdown, people depended on the Internet for most things, including education.
The transition to digital and online education was so swift in Asia and other regions that there will be growing pressure on "traditional methods of education to validate their worth and justify their fees," the WEF founder said.
He goes on to tout a concept dubbed "eversion" in which everyone is forced into a "digital, 'weightless' world" where activities such as education have "no choice but to take place digitally." And this shift online will be permanent, he said, with "apps for tutoring and other forms of support" becoming the new norm.
Of course, the total monitoring and control goes way beyond education. Schwab even touts "smart toilets" that will track "health data" and perform "health analyses".
But it gets even creepier. One of the crucial elements of the "Great Reset", Schwab said, is the "Fourth Industrial Revolution", which will lead to "a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity."
The terrifying and existential dangers of this should be obvious -- especially when used against children in schools under the guise of "education".
Proponents barely bother to hide the fact a key goal is to prepare children for living in a technocracy where self-government is replaced by the reign of scientists, engineers, and "experts" in the service of the ruling class.
"Education must free itself from the old mindsets and meet the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution requirements so, it must prepare young people for a world governed by scientific and technological progress," wrote Ioan Craciun in an article headlined "The Great Reset -- Education & Digital Literacy" for the Romanian Cyber Security Journal, sounding like the Communist Party planners of yesteryear.
Part 12 of this series, headlined "Big Brother Using Big Data to Manipulate and Spy on Kids," detailed the rapid spread of Orwellian technology that has become ubiquitous in schools across the United States and beyond.
Quoting documents from the U.S. Department of Education, that piece noted that the school system was working to use the data it's vacuuming up on children to "predict" their future behavior and interests -- and to manipulate them, too.
"Big data captured from users' online behaviors enables algorithms to infer the users' knowledge, intentions, and interests and to create models for predicting future behavior and interest," explains a 2012 Department of Education "Issue Brief" titled "Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics" (pdf).
That was all before the COVID-19 lockdowns. That was before literally everything having to do with school and the classroom was taking place online, all across the United States and beyond.
If it was a problem in February -- and it was a problem of monumental proportions to those who value privacy, freedom of thought, individuality, parental rights, and more -- it's orders of magnitude more serious now, when unfathomably more data is being collected on each child.
The emergence of AI makes this threat even more dangerous.
Writing in Chinese outlet Caixin, "Eye on AI" podcast host Craig Smith argued that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic "presents an historic opportunity to democratize education with artificial intelligence."
The former New York Times correspondent explained that "new forms of AI, based on deep neural networks, can now uncover patterns about how students perform and help teachers optimize their strategies accordingly."
Indeed, so-called "AI tutors", software programs that "teach" students interactively online, are already being used under the guise of providing "individualized" attention in a way that Smith said can "remake education as we know it." If left unchecked, it will remake children as well.
Companies are already gobbling up massive amounts of data as students interact with AI, computers, and even their teachers in online environments amid the COVID-19 pandemic. And governments around the world -- including mass-murdering dictatorships -- are scouring the globe looking for AI tools to deploy in their education systems.
"Researchers are now working on incorporating chatbots and even realistic human avatars into these tutoring systems to make the teaching, now done primarily through text, even more engaging," Smith explained.
Still, Smith suggests this will be a good thing. After all, he says, AI does better at teaching than human teachers. This is because AI and computers are "more patient and often more insightful," he says, as if machines could have "insight".
Writing in Forbes, Fusemachines CEO Sameer Maskey, whose company offers "AI solutions", also touted the alleged benefits of AI as a personalized teacher in the transformation of education. "AI systems that act as personal tutors can help the student-teacher ratio problem by providing feedback and support when teachers don't have the bandwidth," he said.
Consider, though, that the power to educate and shape children with these tools is massive, especially on a societal scale as envisioned by these AI advocates.
The natural question that must be asked, then, is who will program the AI, algorithms, and computers that will educate the children of the future? Will it be liberty-minded, God-fearing patriotic Americans? Or will it be the totalitarian-minded "educrats" who currently dominate education and school policy -- or perhaps even members of the Chinese Communist Party?
The answer is becoming clear. Indeed, the communist Chinese regime is leading the pack thus far, with more than $1 billion already invested in "AI education", according to Caixin Global. Tens of millions of students in China are now using some form of AI to learn, it added.
America will not be too far behind. But the trend is truly global, being imposed from the top down.
As the pandemic was shuttering schools around the world, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sprang into action.
Exposed in part 9 of this series, the controversial U.N. agency has been at the forefront of the effort to standardize "education" worldwide -- and to weaponize it against individual freedom and even the nation-state on the world stage. That is one of the reasons the Trump administration decided to ditch it.
One of UNESCO's primary efforts amid the CCP virus pandemic was creating the "Global Education Coalition" bringing together governments, U.N. agencies, and Big Tech firms. Among its promises: U.N. guidance on "distance learning solutions".
"More than ever, learners need to be accompanied as much academically as emotionally," argued UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education Stefania Giannini. "This is a wake-up call for education systems to place dedicated efforts on socio-emotional skills."
The reference to the "Social-Emotional Learning" (SEL) manipulation, exposed in Part 16 of this series, should set alarm bells ringing, especially in the context of AI manipulation masquerading as education. Even according to its creators and advocates, SEL, with roots in the occult, is intended to shape the attitudes, values, and beliefs of children in favor of left-wing causes.
Among the key coalition members is the World Health Organization (WHO). In a video announcing the partnership, WHO boss Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, infamous for his loyalty to Beijing and his role on the Politburo of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, vowed to help create "online digital tools" for schools.
On its website, UNESCO also boasts about how AI can help "combat COVID-19" in fields including education. Indeed, the U.N. agency is even partnering with IBM and other tech firms to "imagine different forms of education" involving AI.
UNESCO also touts an enormous range of controversial tech firms, some of which are already being used in American schools, that it believes governments should partner with in "educating" children.
"The shift to online and distance learning during this COVID-19 crisis makes it more apparent than ever: Artificial intelligence is at the forefront of these innovations," said UNESCO Director of the Division for Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems Borhene Chakroun while announcing a partnership with Ericsson on AI in education.
UNESCO, the site continues, "is supporting the efforts of Member States in leveraging AI for equitable and quality education."
Last year, the U.N. brought governments from around the world together in Beijing for a summit at which they adopted the "Beijing Consensus on Artificial Intelligence and Education". Among other concerns, the final agreement called for governments worldwide to use AI in "education", and to shape the values of people in a manner consistent with U.N. views.
The document, made even more relevant by COVID-19, is unbelievably creepy. For instance, it instructs governments to "adjust curricula to promote the in-depth integration of AI and transformation of learning methodologies."
Also at the forefront of the push for AI in education is the U.N. International Telecommunications Union, an agency run by a Chinese national who has supported Beijing's interests.
Perhaps even more troubling, the U.N. document makes clear that the AI "education" must promote U.N.-backed values on everything from gender and globalism to the environment and governance. This is a recipe for disaster.
Aside from China, the United States is also at the forefront of these dramatic changes in schooling taking place under the radar.
One of the few critics who have sounded the alarm about the looming "techno-fascist" educational regime is professor John Klyczek, author of the book "School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education".
In an interview with The Epoch Times, he warned that the COVID-inspired "distance learning" was speeding up the evolution of "adaptive learning" programs, technology that can provide socio-emotional "biofeedback" from students, as well as the AI systems to data-mine the endless amount of psychological data being collected on children.
Eventually, all of this data will be weaponized to create communist Chinese-style "Social Credit" algorithms to monitor, track, and assess every single child. These systems can and will -- if not stopped -- be used to dictate students' access to schools, jobs, and more.
The U.S. Department of Education is paving the way. In an Orwellian federal regulation written with help from Big Tech companies issued this summer on "Distance Education and Innovation", the federal government authorized the use of "adaptive learning and other artificial intelligence" that can even replace the "human instructor".
The scheme also purports to authorize cognitive-behavioral Big Data learning analytics designed to condition students to serve in what Klyczek described as a "digitally planned economy".
Much of the technology is being bankrolled through federal "Rethink K-12 School Models Grants" funded under the "CARES" stimulus package. Other funding comes from major foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that helped finance the toxic Common Core standards under President Barack Obama.
"Big Government and Big Business are colluding to monetize students' learning analytics for the purposes of corporate-government workforce planning," Klyczek explained, adding that companies such as Google were exploiting lockdown anxiety to gather "socio-emotional" data on children with help from government schools.
"Between job-training courseware, Google wellness checks, and police visits for failing to attend virtual class, COVID distance learning is technocratically amalgamating education, health care, criminal justice, and workforce planning into a central command monolith managed by ubiquitous data surveillance," Klyczek added.
The Epoch Times contacted America's three largest school districts for comment. Just one, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), responded. But it offered almost no information of substance.
According to the superintendent, the district reached out to Amazon in March for help in the move toward "digital learning". Other companies involved include Schoolology, Verizon, Microsoft, and more, all of which are working toward this brave new educational world.
When asked what sort of protections existed for student data, the LAUSD Office of Communications and Media Relations responded that accounts on Zoom, Schoolology, and other programs were "password protected".
Already, the invasion of family homes through government school online has resulted in police showing up for alleged problems such as toy guns in the home or lack of attendance in online class.
Over the longer-term, the LAUSD chief added, students can also be vaccinated for COVID-19 through the "school-based health system".
On the front lines of these changes are teachers and school board members -- and many are not happy.
Elected school-board member and 24-year teacher Ted Lamb of Virginia, for instance, expressed alarm about the rapid and dangerous changes taking place in education.
Among other concerns, Lamb has noticed that there's an increasing reliance on algorithms, AI, and computer systems at the expense of human teachers. He described the changes coming in as a result of COVID-19 as tantamount to trying to fit a square into a triangle.
"This will take away privacy of students and families, which will have negative consequences for sure," he told The Epoch Times, adding that classroom teachers are not being told what will happen with all the data being generated. Students are not doing well either, research shows.
The technology is now giving government schools access to children's homes and family life in an unprecedented way, too, said Lamb, who also serves as a leader with Conservative Teachers of America. And it is helping to produce a "tech driven, anti-social" generation.
Far more concerning than the virus, Lamb added, are the hidden agendas including LGBT activism, Critical Race Theory, the Black Lives Matter curriculum filled with "despicable philosophies", and more that are coming in. The situation has gotten so bad that he believes parents should get their children out of public school.
Of course, the CCP virus has already driven an enormous number of families out of the school system.
Just as was predicted in Part 14 of this series on education, "Homeschooling Revolution Gets Coronavirus Boost", the number of homeschoolers is surging. According to an August poll by Gallup, the population of homeschool families has doubled just since last year. Those numbers are likely to keep growing, and that is excellent news for the cause of education and liberty.
But even homeschool families are not safe from the technocratic new educational systems. For instance, the Gates-funded Khan Academy, popular with some homeschoolers, allows children to interact with a computer program all day, with punishments and rewards offered digitally in the form of sounds and images. It's basically a glorified Skinner Box.
With Tesla boss Elon Musk now openly talking about implanting microchips in people's brains, it's only a matter of time before the science fiction-style dreams of these Utopians become a real-world nightmare for humanity. Without concerted action to stop it -- and soon -- public schools will lead the way into a technocratic dystopia that threatens freedom and self-government in an unprecedented way.
Thus far, almost nobody critical of the agenda to re-shape humanity and the world with modern-day AI-powered Skinner Boxes is even talking about it. But considering the stakes, now is the time for a national discussion on these dangerous developments taking over "education", before it's too late.
20. Echoes of Mao: Weaponizing Schools With 'Critical Race Theory' -- by Alex Newman, 04/13/2021
Long before California's infamous "ethnic studies" curriculum made national headlines last month for literally suggesting children chant to the Aztec gods of cannibalism and human sacrifice, the insidious weaponization of "race" and "racism" had already overtaken the nation's government school system.
The racist effort to divide and conquer Americans by "race," all under the guise of examining everything through the "lens of racism" and fighting "structural" or "systemic" racism, has come to be known as Critical Race Theory, or CRT.
Just think of it as half-baked pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook aimed at stirring up as much racial hatred, resentment, division, and conflict as possible.
Like cult leaders, the growing overpaid legions of tax-funded "experts" in CRT want the public to believe that this is some complicated and mysterious "epidemic" that only overpaid "experts" can understand. But the reality behind CRT is actually pretty simple.
The premise is basically this: All "white people" are racist oppressors with power and privilege, and all non-white people are oppressed victims.
From that flows the silly premise that America -- among the least racist nations on earth, studies show -- is a "systemically racist" abomination that must be "decolonized" and dismantled.
In fact, any institutions created by peoples or nations of mostly European heritage are evil and must be pulverized. And any people who lack sufficient melanin must repent for their collective guilt.
f all that sounds evil and unhinged, good -- it is.
Unfortunately, it’s also now a staple in the diet of impressionable young victims of government schools across America.
The goal is not really fighting racism, as its proponents claim.
In fact, a number of studies show that "diversity training," an offshoot of CRT aiming to put the cult's views into practice, "can activate bias or spark a backlash," warned the Harvard Business Review.
"Many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward," it said.
Duh!
The same is true for children: When they're bombarded with racial division and hyper-racial extremism, they not only begin thinking in terms of race, they also begin resenting those supposedly in other "groups" alleged to be in conflict with them.
And that’s precisely the point. In the Soviet Union, like Marx decades earlier, totalitarians divided people by "class," driving a wedge between the "bourgeoisie" and the "proletariat."
Similar divisions were created and exploited by Chairman Mao in communist China.
In America, where the poor live materially better than the rich in many nations, the "class conflict" narrative was not as effective.
And so, as in National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, socialist and communist agents from abroad and homegrown subversives turned to "race" as the key fault line to exploit.
It has been bubbling beneath the surface in America for years -- even decades. But in recent months, it has exploded into the national consciousness as increasingly extreme examples of tax-funded CRT indoctrination spark outrage from parents and normal people.
There’s a long history behind this ideology of hate in America.
Part 6 of this series explored the enormous influence of the Marxist "Frankfurt School" and its "Critical Theory" schemes on American culture—and particularly in its government-controlled education system. CRT is an outgrowth of this deadly weapon, adapted to the American scene.
A big part of the lie depends on fraudulent history taught to children such as the almost universally discredited “1619 Project” and the debunked diatribes of communist Howard Zinn, as documented in part 17 of this series.
The end result is disaster.
Naturally, adults of all "races" with even basic critical-thinking skills, common sense, and a rudimentary understanding of history could see right through the CRT propaganda.
But young children in government schools for five days a week? They make for easy victims. After all, mommy and daddy said to listen to the teacher.
That’s why the forces behind CRT are focusing so heavily on targeting children.
What does CRT and the race-mongering look like in practice?
In California, for example, the newly adopted "Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum," approved by the state Board of Education on March 18, suggests children seek help from pagan Aztec gods for "a revolutionary spirit" in a chant. "The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression," writes Christopher F. Rufo.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the nation, has already indicated that it will be requiring "ethnic studies" for graduation starting in 2023. The whole state may eventually follow. And the cancers that begin in California often spread nationwide.
In one of the wealthiest districts in the nation, Silicon Valley's Cupertino Union School District, third-grade students were reportedly ordered to "deconstruct" their racial, gender, religious, family structure, and sexual identities.
After that, they were told to create an "identity map" and rank themselves based on the "power and privilege" received from the "intersection" of their various "identities."
"A white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman," offered the school materials in an example of how to understand the results.
In short, under this twisted worldview, your melanin content makes you either an oppressor to be destroyed, like the bourgeoisie, or a victim who must destroy others, like the proletariat.
This sort of madness is taking place all across "red" states, too.
North Carolina's largest school district, Wake County, for instance, launched a campaign to eradicate "whiteness in educational spaces." As part of that, teachers were ordered to "disrupt whiteness" and "override families," according to Rufo.
It's not new, either. In 2017, outraged parents fumed at a Rockingham County Board of Education meeting after learning that a teacher forced children of European heritage to stand in front of the class and apologize for their "white privilege."
In Ames, Iowa, and cities and towns across America in recent years, the "Black Lives Matter Week of Action" has been peddling "diversity and globalism," "the disruption of the Western nuclear family," "transgender, queer affirming, and collective value," and more.
To understand just how aggressive the peddlers of this Marxist narrative in schools have become, consider news reports from mid-March about government-school teachers who plotted to "infiltrate" parents' groups opposed to the indoctrination, use "hackers" to mess with their communications, and even "expose these people publicly" for speaking out.
Victims of these tactics who have lived through the horrors that stem from them recognize the same schemes clearly.
Prominent Chinese exile Lily Tang-Williams, who grew up under Chairman Mao but eventually fled to the United States, remembers those exact tactics being used in Mao's government-indoctrination centers for children masquerading as "public schools."
"It creates hatred, guilt, and division in our country," she said about CRT being peddled on children in school. "It is a tool used by the radical left to divide and conquer."
Having grown up during Mao's reign and experienced the entire 10-year Cultural Revolution, Williams sounded the alarm about what's happening in America today.
"Let me tell you, this racist theory is nothing more than a tactic to separate citizens into 'oppressed' and 'oppressor' classes, and it is something I have heard before," said Williams, who recently testified before the New Hampshire legislature on this issue.
Mao's regime sought to "Destroy Four Olds," she told The Epoch Times, referring to the mass-murdering communist Chinese tyrant's campaign to eradicate China's old ideas, culture, habits, and customs.
"He and his regime used identity politics to divide people into 10 classes, five red, and five black," she explained. "The red classes included poor and lower-middle peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary cadres, and revolutionary martyrs. The black classes were landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad-influencers, and rightists."
Every member of the "black classes" was considered guilty by association, simply for having been born into a family, and was said to have been "born black."
"Mao urged Red Guards to publicly shame the black classes by raising their fists, making them do self-criticism, confess and denounce themselves, or they would get beat up, locked up in a room to write about their 'blackness,' apologize for their families or themselves, and be sent to re-education camps to do hard labor," Williams continued, adding that some young members of the families would do anything to escape the shame and association, including reporting their own relatives to the Chinese Communist Party.
Tens of millions of Chinese died amid the Cultural Revolution "due to those murderous policies," said Williams, who serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) with this writer and others in the field.
"What is happening in America today with CRT, in our schools, in our work places and governmental agencies, really reminds me what happened during the Cultural Revolution," she added.
Aside from being destructive to society, the CRT madness is going to harm children of all types, too, experts say.
"It is horrendous and utterly harmful psychology to tell people, especially young children and teens, who do not believe that they are racists, and may actively despise racism, that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racists," explained Doctor of Clinical Psychology Gary Thompson with the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center.
"Woke Supremacy is just as psychologically destructive on people as White Supremacy," added Thompson, who happens to be a black American.
Thompson told The Epoch Times that many public schools are now teaching children as young as second and third grade that "whiteness is synonymous with evil, that the police systematically hunt down and murder black men deliberately, and all these other highly charged political convictions that they're teaching as if they’re uncontested fact."
Parents across the nation are scrambling for ways to fight back and protect their children.
Thompson, who also serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education, said his personal opinion was that attempts by average parents to eliminate CRT from their children's public school would be "futile."
"If CRT does not fit your family values, the option of leaving public schools may be a viable option for parents," he said, echoing a growing sentiment in America as enrollment in public schools continues to plummet.
Partly in response to CRT propaganda, millions of parents have fled government schools over the last year for homeschooling and private schools.
Unfortunately, the CRT madness is no longer confined just to government schools. Even many "woke" elite and self-styled "Christian" schools have been jumping on the bandwagon, so parents must do their due diligence.
Ignoring the voices of some of America's most prominent black Christian leaders -- Voddie Baucham and Bishop E.W. Jackson, for instance -- many liberal churches and seminaries have taken the plunge, too.
Some critics have argued that indoctrinating children with CRT at taxpayer expense is already against the law.
Executive Director Wenyuan Wu with Californians for Equal Rights Foundation has been fighting the battle in California and beyond for years. And she argues that CRT in the classroom is "illegal and unconstitutional."
"Teaching CRT that's predicated on racial divisions and a social dichotomy of victim versus oppressor fundamentally violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution, which guarantees equal protection of the laws, Title VI/VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, California's constitutional principle of equal treatment and a plethora of anti-discrimination laws," she warned.
In Florida, top officials are taking action. In fact, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis just promised the ideology would not be in his state's public schools.
"Let me be clear there is no room in our classrooms for things like Critical Race Theory, teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money,” DeSantis said.
"They're trying to make people view each other based on race, I want to do the opposite. I want to treat people as individuals," he added. "I want to treat people based on character."
But of course, dividing people is the goal -- not an unintended side-effect -- and the constant appeals to "white supremacy" are simply a red herring designed to force critics to remain silent.
The stakes could not be higher.
CRT's leaders and cult-like adherents have labeled virtually everything the far-left and Marxists hate as "white supremacy": the U.S. Constitution, Christianity, math, the rule of law, punctuality, individualism, Western civilization, the nuclear family, objective truth, and more.
Nothing and nobody are safe.
Adults largely recognize the evil and idiocy of this. However, America's children -- like children in other nations who have been indoctrinated to hate their parents and their compatriots before committing ghastly atrocities -- do not know better.
It will be up to parents to protect their own children, and thereby the nation and its freedoms.
21. The Totalitarian Agenda Behind LGBT Sex-Ed Revolution at School -- by Alex Newman, 07/07/2021
Extreme sexualization and LGBTQ-plus indoctrination of children at younger and younger ages in public schools are now ubiquitous nationwide -- and it's part of a much broader agenda that goes well beyond just encouraging confusion and promiscuity for its own sake.
The real goal of that agenda is ultimately to destroy the nuclear family as the foundation of civilization, experts say. As Karl Marx and countless other totalitarians understood, the state will step in to fill the void left by the family unit. In short, sex-ed is aimed at undermining the very building blocks of society.
In the not-too-distant past, so-called sex education for young children and normalizing gender confusion in tax-funded schools would have been unthinkable and even considered criminal.
Today, the most extreme forms of sex education imaginable -- including encouraging young children to engage in fornication, sodomy, group sex, abortions, and even "sex-change" surgeries -- is a reality in the United States and beyond.
If it weren't for exceptions offered to school employees in state obscenity laws, it would still literally be a crime to give children much of the material being used in classrooms nationwide under the guise of "sex education".
But the worst is yet to come. If the well-funded sex education behemoth gets its way, sexualization of children in schools masquerading as "health" and "comprehensive sexuality education" (CSE) will undermine the final restraints on unchecked government control over the individual.
Liberty, family, and civilization are all in the crosshairs now. The stakes couldn't be higher.
Virtually all of the curricula being used to teach sex to children are deeply problematic to anyone with a shred of decency, modesty, or common sense.
In many states and districts, the sexualization starts as early as kindergarten, with children being introduced to homosexuality, gender fluidity, homosexual parenting, "anatomy" that includes graphic images of genitalia, and more. Oftentimes, the sexualization and LGBT material is mandated under state law.
One of the most frequently used resources in public schools across America that has been endorsed by state and local officials nationwide as "compliant" with state mandates is known as "Rights, Respect, Responsibility" (3Rs).
Created by sexual revolutionaries at Advocates for Youth, a partner of tax-funded abortion giant Planned Parenthood, the program has shocked parents from across the political spectrum -- for good reason.
Starting as young as kindergarten or first and second grade, children learn (pdf) that girls can supposedly have male genitalia and vice versa. This self-evidently fraudulent claim is emphasized over and over again throughout the child's younger years, causing widespread confusion among impressionable youngsters.
When they become teens, the program teaches them about "pansexuality", the attraction to people of any gender or gender identification.
Throughout elementary school, children are exposed to obscene images that have been widely condemned as pornographic, including "cartoons" in books such as "It's Perfectly Normal". The book features cartoon images of naked children, sexual intercourse, children masturbating, and more.
Under 3Rs, by the time the children are around 11, they're taught how to seek out information about sex on the internet. The children are constantly taught to rely on Planned Parenthood for information and "services", too.
Before becoming teens, they learn about "making changes in the world" through "LGBT advocacy".
At around age 12, abortion is introduced as an "option" to deal with unwanted pregnancies. And by age 13, years before they reach the legal age of consent, the children are taught how to obtain various forms of contraception and birth control.
Throughout the curriculum, which is aligned with the National Sex Education Standards (pdf) developed by Advocates for Youth and other advocates of sexualizing children, young people are led to believe that they can choose their gender and that they may have been born in the wrong body.
Worse, they are taught how to act on it, putting them at risk of seeking out dangerous hormonal and surgical "treatments" with lifelong consequences. Studies show that most children confused about their gender end up growing out of it by adulthood.
This indoctrination is in spite of the fact that the American College of Pediatricians (pdf) argues it's "child abuse" for adults to try to convince children that a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal or healthy.
Another frequently used resource is "Teaching Tolerance" (now known as "Learning for Justice"), created by the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
As part of promoting "tolerance" to children, the SPLC recommends the highly controversial book "10,000 Dresses" by Marcus Ewert for students in kindergarten through second grade.
Among other lessons, the book teaches the children, typically aged 5 through 8, to ignore their parents and impersonate the opposite sex if they feel they were born in the "wrong" body.
Numerous state education bureaucracies and officials have endorsed the extreme SPLC program despite the objections of parents.
Making matters worse, those officials sometimes act on it, too. From California to Florida, school districts are using "Gender Transition Plans" to help students start "transitioning" to a new gender, even without the consent of parents.
Public-school efforts to confuse children have been so successful that a 2017 University of California-Los Angeles study found that more than 1 in 4 California children ages 12 through 17 are now "gender non-conforming".
Even in ultra-conservative Utah, state prescription data show that the number of minor girls undergoing "gender transition" processes increased by about 10,000 percent from 2015 to 2020.
While the creators of the 3Rs program claim it is "medically accurate" in order to comply with state law, that is objectively false.
On a worksheet for 7th graders purporting to outline the risks of various sex acts, for example, children ages 11 and 12 are taught that "anal sex using a condom correctly" is a "low-risk" activity.
In reality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that condoms are only 60 to 70 percent effective in preventing HIV even with perfect and consistent use. The Food and Drug Administration has never approved condoms for anal sex.
In other words, children who believe the sex-ed lies being taught in government schools are at serious risk of becoming infected with deadly sexually transmitted diseases.
Similarly, consider Planned Parenthood's "Healthy, Happy and Hot" booklet (pdf), which tells youth infected with HIV that they don't have to inform their partners about their infection. In fact, the document even claims that laws requiring disclosure "violate the rights of people living with HIV".
Another Planned Parenthood sex-ed document (pdf) recommends teaching children 10 and under that "sexual activity" can be part of "commercial sex work" and that they have a "right" to "decide when to have sex".
The same toolkit encourages teaching children under 10 about homosexuality, masturbation, gender fluidity, and more. It also teaches them that they have a "right" to abort their unborn child.
Planned Parenthood, funded by the American taxpayer, is one of the world's largest peddlers of sex-ed resources. Its materials are used and promoted in government schools worldwide.
Incredibly, despite the group’s rhetoric about "choice", women's rights advocate Reggie Littlejohn has repeatedly exposed Planned Parenthood's cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party's forced abortions and other brutal population-control schemes.
The pervasive sexualization of children in public schools is now pushing the boundaries against one of the last taboos: pedophilia, pederasty, and adult sex with children.
Under California's LGBT mandate for schools, the Brea Olinda Unified School District (BOUSD) was caught including ancient Greek men's proclivity to have sexual relations with boys -- considered child rape in every state in the union -- as part of teaching children LGBT history.
When confronted by outraged mother Stephanie Yates of Informed Parents of California, BOUSD Assistant Superintendent of Curricula Kerrie Torres said the children were being taught about it "because we are talking about historical perspectives of how gender relations and different types of sexual orientations have existed in history."
Yates, the mom, sounded incredulous. "So sex between a man and a boy is a sexual orientation?" she asked.
The assistant superintendent held her ground. "It's something that occurred in history, and so this is really important for us to include," Torres said.
Despite there being a video of the exchange, frantic "fact-checkers" tried unsuccessfully to quell the outrage, bizarrely defending the lessons.
But the truth is there for all to see. Increasingly, public schools are working to normalize sexual relationships between adults and children.
The message throughout 12 years of sexualization and indoctrination in school in essentially all the sex-ed major programs is simple: If there's "consent", nothing else matters, anything goes, and there are no rules when it comes to sex.
This view flies in the face of the teachings of all the world's major religions and civilizations for thousands of years. In fact, it's practically unprecedented in human history, with the possible exception of what the Bible records in Sodom and Gomorrah.
Even outside of sex-ed classes, where in some states parents can technically opt their children out, the extreme sexualization and perversion have reached epidemic levels.
In English classes, for instance, children are told to read abominable "books" that feature extremely graphic descriptions of sexual acts and sexual violence.
There is also an intersection between radical sexualization and critical race theory indoctrination exposed in part 19 of this series.
One exercise with endless variations that has been deployed in government schools nationwide has children "deconstruct" their identities and examine their "power and privilege" based on their race, gender, and sexual identity.
As part of the scheme, children are taught that being "cisgendered" (not transgender) or "heterosexual" gives them power and privilege, along with being white, while being transgender or homosexual makes them oppressed.
In such an exercise forced on 7- and 8-year-old government-school victims in Silicon Valley, the children were offered an example to drive the point home: "A white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome, and speaks English has more privilege than a black transgender woman."
Just like Marxists have divided populations for over a century, children are classified into "oppressor" or "oppressed" categories based on whatever fault lines the subversives can concoct -- with "sexuality" and "gender" now a key part of the mix.
This is not just happening in America. The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), exposed in part 9 of this series, is at the forefront of the effort to sexualize children worldwide, and especially in the West.
Indeed, many of the most outrageous elements of America's most frequently used "sex-education" programs are perfectly consistent with UNESCO's 2018 "International technical guidance on sexuality education".
Citing Planned Parenthood's ideologically driven "research" and "evidence" more than 20 times, the U.N. sex-ed standards call for teaching children about "sexual pleasure" before they hit 10.
Incredibly, by age 5, children are supposed to describe how "gender and biological sex" are supposedly "different".
By age 9, the U.N. guidelines teach children about masturbation and call for children to "describe male and female responses to sexual stimulation". Children should also "demonstrate respect for diverse practices related to sexuality" and "explain how someone's gender identity may not match their biological sex" by 9, the standards say.
By 12, children are expected to believe that "non-penetrative sexual behaviors" are "pleasurable" and less likely to result in infection than normal sex. The U.N.'s "learning objectives" demand that 12-year-olds "support the right for everyone" to "express their sexual feelings".
Critics have blasted this as "grooming" children.
The U.N. document even includes helpful tips for educators on how to handle outraged parents and religious leaders concerned about the indoctrination.
Of course, there's a reason the U.N. sex-ed document calls for sexualization of children "from the beginning of formal schooling".
As U.N. LGBT czar Vitit Muntarbhorn put it in a 2017 interview with an Argentinian newspaper, to change the mentality of the population in favor of new sexual norms, "it is so important to start working with young people, the younger the better."
The focus on sex and perversion is clearly and literally ubiquitous in government schools across America and beyond. But why?
Until very recently, this was not seen as acceptable -- much less necessary. In fact, prior to the grotesque pseudo-science of pervert Alfred Kinsey exposed in part 13 of this series, it would have been considered a criminal offense to subject children to these obscenities.
Advocates of sexualizing children as early as possible typically frame their arguments in terms of reducing STDs and unwanted or teen pregnancies while pursuing nebulous notions of "health" and "reproductive freedom" or "reproductive justice".
Despite the fact that the explosion in teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease coincided with the sexualization of children in school by sexual revolutionaries, the tax-funded behemoths behind the push pump out endless junk studies purporting to support their fraudulent claims.
But obviously, if children were not having sex outside of marriage, the problems that "sex education" purports to solve would virtually cease to exist.
In short, there's a much darker agenda at work. The sex "educators" themselves barely bother to hide it anymore.
Consider SIECUS, the group that grew out of Kinsey's perverted pseudo-science. While it was once known as the Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States, now it is just SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change. And indeed, "social change" is the goal -- radical, horrifying "social change".
As far back as 1979, the CDC admitted there was an ulterior motive. In a report headlined "An Analysis of U.S. Sex Education Programs and Evaluation Methods", researchers revealed that the "goals" of sex education in American schools had become "much more ambitious" than parents realized. Those goals included "the changing of ... attitudes and behaviors."
The government has long understood the consequences of this. Late psychoanalyst Dr. Melvin Anchell, who worked on President Lyndon Johnson's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, warned that these sexual indoctrination programs targeting children cause "irreparable harm" to their victims -- damage that lasts their entire lives.
Among other dangers, Anchell identified severe damage to children's future marriages, families, relationships, and lives. In some cases, it can even contribute to psychopathy, suicide, and mass murder, he said.
Long before that, communist revolutionaries sought to demonize marriage and obliterate the family, too, producing unprecedented disaster. Consider, for example, the horrifying experience of Soviet Russia in the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Sexual revolutionaries in the West have understood this for over a century, too. Atheist "psychiatrist" Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a self-styled "Freudo-Marxist" who was a Communist Party member and an associate of sex fanatic Sigmund Freud, saw what he first termed the "sexual revolution" not as an end in and of itself.
Instead, Reich saw it as a means to obliterate the family, and thereby facilitate the destruction of religious values. Ultimately, the hope was to achieve the breakdown of Western civilization by destroying the familial transmission belt by which values are passed on from one generation to the next.
The goal: Allow Marxism to truly take root on the blank canvas created by the destruction of the old order. To that end, Reich strongly encouraged "sex education" in school to "divest parents of their moral authority". As the family and the church are weakened through the unleashing of sexual anarchy via "sex education", the government steps in and takes over in the roles formerly reserved for those two divinely ordained institutions.
Sharon Slater, president of Family Watch International and co-chair of the national Protect Child Health Coalition, told The Epoch Times that the goal is eventually to get the world onboard with this new value system.
"If they can raise up a generation indoctrinated in their harmful abortion rights, promiscuity rights, and radical transgender ideology, they will have indoctrinated the future leaders of the world," said Slater, who works to counter the agenda at the U.N.
"In fact, CSE is the number one tool of the abortion rights and LGBT rights lobby to promote their agendas worldwide by shaping the views of youth."
One of the most important tools created by her organization is a documentary called "The War on Children: The Comprehensive Sexuality Education Agenda". It shines a light on the horrors being forced on children.
"CSE is a dangerous worldwide agenda intended to sexualize children at the youngest ages," she said. "I couldn't sleep at night knowing what I knew and knowing most parents had no idea their children were being taught such harmful things."
Even former sex-ed teachers have blown the whistle on the subversive agenda behind sex ed. Monica Cline, for instance, spent a decade working as a comprehensive sex educator with Planned Parenthood before defecting and starting an organization dedicated to countering that.
"A big piece of this, which for some people, it's something I think [is] hard for them to understand, is that there is a huge movement through socialism that really wants to do away with the nuclear family," she told The Daily Signal, noting that abolishing private property is also part of the agenda.
"Sex education is a big piece of that, because when you teach children to dehumanize themselves, to take intimacy and family and marriage out of sex, even to the point of killing your own children through abortion, you are essentially killing the family. You're destroying the family."
Encouraging people to "read any curriculum" being used in sex-ed programs to see the tactics and graphic nature of the material, Cline noted that parents are always cut out of the picture when it comes to sex education.
"They want the children dependent on the government, or on public health, whatever it may be, but they do not want the children to be depending on the parent anymore," she said. "And so, all of this really is to break down the family. And they're essentially ... we're watching it happen."
In extended comments to The Epoch Times, Kimberly Ells, author of "The Invincible Family" and a longtime researcher and activist against the global sexualization of children, warned that the radical CSE programs have dangerous objectives that must be resisted.
"He who wins the youth wins the future," she said, echoing a common axiom. "So if government schools shape children's views on sex, gender, and family formation -- and if those views reject the family as the core of civilization -- then the core of civilization is up for grabs, and the government intends to grab it."
Among other concerns, Ells warned that these programs are undermining parental authority, family values, and even family formation by encouraging children to reject their parents' teachings and view sex as merely a pleasurable "right", rather than part of a stable marriage.
The results of undermining family and marriage were predictable: Over 40 percent of American children are now born out of wedlock (pdf), with almost 1 in 4 American children now living in a single-parent household.
The consequences of this family disintegration are horrific -- and the problem is getting worse. But even beyond the crime, dependence, and poverty is the danger of tyranny stepping in to fill the void left by parents and families.
"Children who become slaves to the sexual appetites of their bodies early are more likely to become slaves in other areas of their lives," said Ells, who has spoken at the U.N.
Teaching children to reject biological sex as a relevant characteristic of one's identity is even more nefarious. "At its core, this two-pronged ideology rejects the biological family -- based on physiologically oppositional sex -- as the fundamental unit of society," she said.
"The T in LGBT is by far the most problematic. Same-sex marriage annihilates the idea that men and women are complementary. But transgenderism annihilates the idea that men and women inherently exist at all."
Already, she said, legal movements around transgenderism are setting the stage for the "marginalization" of mothers, fathers, and families by law.
"When parents' ties to their children are obscured or weakened, it creates an environment hospitable to government intervention and socialist-communist revolution," Ells said. "That is why Marx's Communist Manifesto openly called for the 'abolition of the family'."
"Dethroning the family creates a void that can and must be filled -- though it is impossible to adequately fill it. If we are to avoid the disembowelment of the family and the domination of the state that follows its disembowelment, we must resist efforts to cancel biological sex."
Ells called on parents and policymakers to resist the erasing of male and female and end funding for U.N. agencies peddling the dangerous agenda. She also urged the removal of "sexual rights" advocates such as Planned Parenthood from schools and an end to CSE programming at all levels.
Governments and school boards all across America have failed in their duty to protect children from the ubiquitous evils that now pervade the so-called "public education" system masquerading as "health" and "tolerance".
In part 13 of this series on education, the gut-wrenching history of this abusive sexualization of children in school was exposed, featuring extensive interviews with Dr. Judith Reisman, who recently passed away. It literally goes back to perverts who sexually molested large numbers of children under the guise of "science".
Americans are now confronted with a tax-funded monster that threatens not just the innocence of their children, but their liberties, families, and even the very future of their civilization.
Obviously, government at all levels has failed to protect children from the dangerous agenda they themselves unleashed. That leaves parents as the last barrier.
If the grotesque sex-ed extremism destroying America and her youth is going to be stopped, it will be up to loving moms and dads to lead the fight.
22. Pushing Parents Out, Biden Administration Further Weaponizes 'Education' -- by Alex Newman, 10/25/2021
When it comes to education policy, the Biden administration is making the radicalism of the Obama years look mild by comparison.
The goal is to ultimately replace parents with bureaucrats and "experts" to facilitate the indoctrination of America's youth. That transformation is accelerating.
Not only are the education system and America's children being weaponized against America, federal law enforcement is now being weaponized against parents who speak out about it.
If left unchecked, catastrophe awaits. However, the more monstrous the federally directed abuses in schools become, the more outraged Americans join the fight.
The future of the nation is literally on the line in this issue. The outcome of the battle between who will raise children -- government or parents -- will determine the fate of America.
The attitude toward parents in Washington has long been hostile. Hillary Clinton famously claimed in 1996 that it "takes a village" to raise children. What she really meant, of course, was a government village.
In fact, during the Obama years, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan publicly called for some children to be in government "boarding schools" 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Others should remain in school, including "after school programming", for 12 to 14 hours each day, he declared.
A policy document (pdf) drafted by the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services called for home visits by government officials and argued that parents could be "equal partners" with government in the rearing of their children.
But as fringe as those totalitarian views may sound to normal people, the extremism has now been taken to a whole new level under the current administration.
When Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona if parents should be the "primary stakeholder" in the education of their children, it would have been easy to spit one's coffee on the floor.
"Stakeholder"?! What?
Of course, parents should never be viewed as mere "stakeholders" in the education of their children, "primary" or otherwise. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, "stakeholder" is defined as "one that has a stake in an enterprise" or "one who is involved in or affected by a course of action".
To call a mother or father a "stakeholder" in one of the most important facets of their child's life is like calling a pilot of a private plane a "stakeholder" in whether his plane will land successfully or not. Technically it's true. But it's an outrage nonetheless.
Mothers and fathers should be in charge of their children's education -- not bystanders or "stakeholders". This has been the case in virtually every human society for millennia. It's also what the Bible clearly prescribes.
But the Biden administration, by contrast, does not believe parents should have any say in the "education" of children.
Cardona could not even bring himself to concede that parents should be the "primary stakeholders" in their children's education.
"I believe parents are important stakeholders," Cardona responded to Braun's question, adding that "educators" also "have a role in determining educational programming."
Indeed. That's a nice way of saying: Parents, get out of the way, the Biden administration and its "experts" know better what and how your child should learn. More on that later.
Democrat Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAullife, who wisely sent his children to private school, famously put it this way in a debate in September: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."
As if matters could not get any worse, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, responding to an outrageous letter from the National Association of School Boards (NASB) painting concerned parents as possible "domestic terrorists", decided to sic the FBI on moms and dads.
Among other concerns, Garland cited (pdf) "harassment" and "intimidation" by parents against the people brainwashing their kids with critical race theory (CRT), Marxist ideology, gender confusion, hyper-sexualized propaganda, and more. No examples of actual, legitimate threats were cited.
One of the examples of the supposed "threat" cited by the NASB was Scott Smith. What sort of dangerous domestic terrorist was Smith? Well, he was arrested for "disorderly conduct" while trying to tell the school board about his daughter being allegedly sodomized by a male pretending to be a girl in the girls' restroom under the federally supported "transgender" dictates on bathrooms.
The other examples are equally outlandish: a ticket for "trespassing", a nasty letter, a "Nazi salute" to protest mandatory face masks, somebody describing the school board as "Marxist", and similar horrors requiring the might of the federal beast.
This is, of course, not about actual threats or violence, however. It's naked intimidation of parents who are struggling to make their voices heard.
It's also the political weaponization of federal law-enforcement in a way that's unprecedented in American history. In fact, most parallels involve totalitarian dictatorships rather than civilized and free societies.
Fortunately, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state and local leaders are working to protect children in their jurisdictions from this outrageous abuse by the Biden administration. But it's not enough to stop the freight train of evil being pumped into local schools by Washington.
The irony of treating desperate moms and dads as terrorists after pretending not to see months on end of actual domestic terrorism from rioters and looters burning down major American cities and even police precincts defies belief. Welcome to the "new normal".
Even the former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, Kevin Brock, has warned that the FBI should ignore Garland's Orwellian directive.
After sparking a firestorm of criticism and alarming Americans across the political spectrum -- and after being rebuked by state and local school boards nationwide -- the NASB reluctantly apologized.
But nobody with a brain believes for a second that the education establishment would not sic the FBI and Homeland Security on angry parents if it thought it could get away with it.
Not long before announcing that the FBI and the Department of Justice would be employed to bully and intimidate parents, the Biden administration announced "civil rights" investigations into state leaders that refused to force children to wear masks at school against their parents' wishes.
The threat, made by Cardona, invoked the communist understanding of "rights" to claim that everyone has a "right" to a government "education". As such, states that do not force all children to wear face masks are somehow violating the supposed "rights" of some children to an education.
Yes, seriously. This is the so-called logic of the people who have usurped control over "educating" your children for you.
When Florida and other states sought to limit the ability of local school boards to force masks on children against their parents' wishes, the Biden administration also vowed to send COVID stimulus money to local officials who defied their state government and state law.
Before that, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a video urging children confused about their gender to report their local communities to the feds if government schools did not fully bow down to the "transgenderism" madness being pushed on America from D.C. and Hollywood.
The video, which featured transgender Health and Human Services bigwig Dr. Rachel Levine and senior officials from the Department of Education and the DOJ, gave multiple websites for children to get the feds involved in protecting their "rights" to use opposite-sex bathrooms, play on opposite-sex sports teams, and more.
The message was clear: Trust Biden, not your family or your community. And if anyone interferes with your supposed "right" to shower or relieve yourself or wrestle with members of the opposite sex, team Biden will unleash the fury of the weaponized federal machine.
So far there has been no federal intervention to protect the rights of Scott Smith's daughter, though.
At the top of Biden's "education" agenda is using the education system to further divide parents and children, as well as the nation, while weaponizing impressionable youngsters in the war against their own country and its institutions.
Earlier this year, for example, the Department of Education proposed a "regulation" to inject even more Marxist race-mongering and CRT into public schools nationwide.
Under the scheme, the feds are bribing schools with "grants" and "incentives" paid with U.S. taxpayer money.
Among other elements, the administrative edict creates "American History and Civics Education programs" designed to radically change the teaching of history and civics. Between statements on "systemic racism" and "anti-racist practices", the nature of the changes being sought is easy to discern.
Indeed, the Department of Education actually cited the debunked "1619 Project", a fake history narrative addressed in part 17 of this series, as one of the inspirations for the effort.
The New York Times' propaganda version of history, which has been ridiculed even by left-wing historians for its errors, turns U.S. history on its head. It paints the first nation in history founded on the premise that all are created equal -- the first nation where abolition of slavery took root -- into a uniquely evil nation with racism and slavery supposedly in its very "DNA".
Also cited by the Education Department for the proposed regulation was the work of Ibram X. Kendi, one of the premier proponents of CRT and author of books such as "Anti-Racist Baby".
Among other ideas, Kendi advocates a "Department of Antiracism" that would serve as an unelected racial dictatorship with power to overturn any law or rule it dislikes.
To qualify for the Education Department funding, state and local "education" officials would have to incorporate the administration’s extremist ideologies into the classroom -- evil ideologies that divide children by "race" for sinister purposes while teaching a twisted (and false) version of American history and government.
Almost 40 U.S. senators and tens of thousands of citizens in official comments blasted the scheme's overtly anti-American extremism.
Only after that massive outcry did the administration backtrack even slightly and remove some of the most outrageous language and references. But the somewhat scaled-back rule was still implemented, and the vision remains clear despite the attempted obfuscation.
To illustrate just how committed the administration is to this poison, in early October they appointed political activist Precious McKesson to a senior post at the Education Department. McKesson is a strong advocate of CRT, and she even recently expressed her support for teaching all children about the alleged "systemic racism" of America.
Ironically, perhaps, Garland's son-in-law's company reportedly supports CRT teaching in government schools, sparking concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the decision to sic the feds on parents.
The proposed $3.5 trillion "Build Back Better" abomination that Biden and congressional Democrats are trying to ram through Congress without the support of a single Republican is packed with "education" gimmicks, too. If approved, the descent into collective madness will accelerate.
One of the major schemes Biden and his handlers are trying to get through, this time with the "Reconciliation" bill, is a $200 billion program for universal pre-kindergarten. The goal: Get all of America's children into government indoctrination programs even earlier.
Under the proposed plan, which may be rammed through Congress on a partisan vote with no filibusters allowed, all children in America ages 3 and 4 would receive federally directed, tax-funded "pre-K" through government schools.
None of this should be surprising. During the Obama years, the same warped view of "education" and parents reigned in Washington and throughout the monstrosity improperly referred to as the nation's "public education" system.
Common Core, for example, was used to cement national standards into place using bullying and bribes from the stimulus slush fund.
And lest anyone think this was actually about "improving" education, the federal government funded a study showing "significant negative effects" on grade 4 reading after the standards were put in place. Less than one third of the victims of government school at grade 8 are proficient in core subjects, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveals.
But academic achievement was never really the goal. Under Obama and Common Core, parents and elected school boards were out, while D.C. bureaucrats and special-interest groups funded by billionaire profiteers were in.
The plan succeeded wildly, with parents nationwide unable to help their children with "Common Core" math while states and school districts struggle for breathing room in the straitjacket of the national standards.
Also under Obama, federally funded so-called Full-Service Community Schools revealed perhaps the most brazen attempt to sideline parents in American history. These federally backed institutions, which are now scattered across the nation, promise to handle the dental health, mental health, nutritional needs, and much more for every child in their "care".
It would be more honest to refer to these institutions as "parental replacement centers", but of course those behind the agenda would never be so honest.
As explored in part 10 of this series, this federal usurpation of authority over families and schools accelerated rapidly under Obama. It's now reaching a climax under Biden. And it has resulted in the absolute decimation of whatever may have once been decent in America's disastrous "education" system.
From the 1960s' Supreme Court opinions imposing humanism and ousting Christianity to the federal funding that eventually paved the way for control over standards and so much else, Washington's influence over schools has been toxic from the start.
Under Obama and now Biden, the globalization of the indoctrination system described in part 9 of this series also came out of the closet, with Obama's Education Secretary referring to the U.N. education agency as his "global partner" in the process.
Indeed, Common Core's own architects and proponents bragged that the controversial standards were aligned with "international standards" even as training for "global citizenship" became ubiquitous.
This is about more than the government simply brainwashing your children. This is about removing you from the picture almost entirely so that the forces of wickedness, perversion, and tyranny can poison your children's minds and souls unimpeded by pesky parents.
As this series has documented extensively, this was always the goal of the "education" establishment going back to the Utopian and even socialist architects of the system: communist Robert Owen, collectivist Utopian Horace Mann, and socialist-humanist luminary John Dewey.
Obviously, attending school board meetings to express concerns is not a viable strategy for protecting children. In fact, it may even lead to harassment and intimidation from the politicized and disgraced FBI. It may be worth doing, but it will not save your children.
While it's critical for parents to be involved and for state and local government to resist the Biden administration's escalating attacks, the only true long-term solution is an exodus from the government's indoctrination system.
23. The Schools Are on Fire; Time to Get the Children Out -- by Alex Newman, 10/20/2022
Imagine the school building is on fire, and your precious children are trapped inside. You can hear the blood-curdling screams growing louder. The flames are getting bigger, and the heat is getting hotter. Your heart races.
Even standing outside looking in, you feel your children's terror and pain. No matter how hard you try to tell yourself it will all be OK, you know they're in mortal danger.
You look around frantically, searching for somebody --anyone, really -- to do something—anything! "Somebody do something!" you shout. But there's no response, and you hear no sirens wailing in the distance.
In fact, nobody is coming to rescue your children -- certainly not the arsonist politicians or the education establishment who set the building on fire in the first place. It finally dawns on you that if you don't act soon, catastrophe is inevitable and your children are doomed.
What do you do?
If you said circulate a petition, lobby your legislators, or run for school board, you're obviously not a parent yourself.
Anyone with a child will tell you that there’s only one possible thing to do in a case like this: Run inside, grab your loved ones, and run from the fire until you can’t run anymore. Then, sound the alarm and wake the town.
The time has come to treat this situation like the deadly threat that it is. If you still have children in a public school, or if you know anyone with children trapped inside, act like the building is on fire -- because it is!
In fact, it’s much worse than that. Unfortunately, even the burning building isn't an adequate analogy for the horror that’s being perpetrated against children in government schools today.
A fire will merely harm your children physically. That's bad enough, of course -- and it’s happening. But physical wounds can be healed. This is much worse.
As this series on public "education" should've made clear by now, government schools are indeed harming children physically -- think transgender "treatments" involving hormones and surgical mutilation, for instance, or the epidemic of suicide, drug abuse, physical fights, and other plagues.
The quack methods used to "teach reading" are literally doing physical harm that can be observed in brain scans, producing a lifelong handicap in millions of children as described in part 5 of this series.
Even more ghastly than the physical trauma, though, is that the schools are destroying children mentally, emotionally, academically, spiritually, culturally, morally, and more.
While the victims of government schools may not be competent in reading, math, writing, science, or history, they can tell you all about "intersectional oppression", "global citizenship", "gender" ideology, and the supposed dangers of alleged man-made global warming purportedly caused by the gas they exhale.
Polls show America's youth are rapidly moving away from the values of liberty and the Christian faith of their forefathers and toward "woke" socialism that threatens to destroy not just children and their families, but even the nation and civilization itself.
Socialism has been marketed to public-school victims so successfully that, combined with a fake history curriculum demonizing America and concealing the barbarism of tyranny, more than two-thirds of millennials in polls say they will vote for socialists.
All over the country, tiny children are taught that they should "choose their pronouns", that they may have been born in the wrong body, and that irreversible surgeries and hormone "therapies" can help them become their "true" selves. "Transition" plans and hiding them from parents are now the norm.
This monstrous situation is the latest peak of the insanity, but ever-more outrageous abuses and atrocities will be perpetrated against American children -- at least if the adults in the room, parents who love their children more than anyone on the planet, don't put a stop to it.
At this point, it should be obvious that everything good and dear is in mortal danger.
The question of "reform" often comes up in discussions on how to address this existential crisis. Can't the burning building just be reformed?
Whether it be abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and Common Core or reining in the teachers' unions and banning critical race theory or gender ideology, countless ideas have been proposed. Many have even been tried.
For decades, conservatives have squandered millions of dollars on "public-school reform". For almost two years, conservatives have been showing up at school board meetings to complain. Countless great teachers have tried everything to protect their students.
And yet, nothing works. The system continues to devour children by the millions as the extremism in the classroom escalates and the Biden administration deploys the FBI to terrorize concerned moms.
That's because the "system" is a hydra with many heads: Neutralize or chop one off, and it grows right back while the others work together to continue devouring the youth.
Talking about "reform" is to answer the wrong question.
It’s like asking how to reform cancer; it's a silly question. Nobody wants their cancer "reformed". Rather, they want it cut out and annihilated before it does any more damage.
Talk of "reform" also illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding about what has happened. Government schools aren't "broken", as commonly argued by conservatives. Rather, they’re working very well at their intended purpose: fundamentally transforming America by dumbing down, indoctrinating, sexualizing, collectivizing, and weaponizing future generations, as this series has documented extensively.
Even the arguments for a public-school system itself fail the smell test.
Suggesting that the government must control education because a handful of parents may not be able to afford to send their children to school, one of the most common claims, is preposterous.
Apply that same thinking to grocery stores and instantly the absurdity of it becomes clear. It's true that grocery stores and food are important. And it’s true that there are some people who can't afford groceries.
But it hardly follows from those two facts that government should create a network of "free" (tax-funded) grocery stores that will determine what, when, how, and even if children will eat. Then, imagine those free grocery stores feeding their "customers" toxic waste, and you get a sense of the situation America finds itself in with "education".
Outside of the most brainwashed victims of communist dictatorships in Cuba or North Korea, everybody can see the stupidity of such an idea.
And yet, it's the same essential idea that underpins the trillion-dollar-per-year atrocity that is the government-controlled education-industrial complex.
The notion that the public should desire "standardized" children, where everyone learns the same thing at the same time in the same way is so outrageous that it almost doesn't need to be addressed. What other industry would that be tolerated in? Talk about "putting all your eggs in one basket!"
Even if those who created the system had been well-intentioned, socialist programs never deliver on the promises they were founded on and always produce failure.
The key question, then, is what to do. For parents, the answer should be obvious by now: It's time to remove your children from these abusive environments and get them a real education, either at home or in a high-quality private or Christian school.
All of the data shows home-educated children are running circles around their government-"educated" peers on everything from academics and socialization to careers and tolerance. The National Home Education Research Institute has been compiling the data for decades.
For most families, home education appears to be the gold standard. Nobody loves your children as much as you do, and nobody is in a better position to provide the personalized, loving, and unique instruction that will help them grow into well-educated adults capable of self-government.
In a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the money, virtually any parent -- even those with no high-school diploma -- can do a much better job than government schools. In fact, it's easy to make a compelling argument -- only half-jokingly -- that doing nothing at all would be better than forcing children to endure 12 years of what passes for "education" in public schools today.
Aside from home education, there are thousands of private schools across the nation doing a wonderful job. Options exist for everyone: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, classical, experimental, and many more.
However, there are more and more private schools—including "Christian in name only" options -- that are overpriced replicas of the government's woke indoctrination centers. Buyer beware.
Pastors, priests, and rabbis should be sounding the alarm, too. Decades of research from the Nehemiah Institute shows the vast majority of Christian children in government schools will leave the faith by the time they get through K–12 indoctrination. That's no accident.
When I declared publicly for the first time that I thought parents should remove their children from public schools, a number of leading American conservatives I spoke with hesitated.
But times have changed. Just in the past few years, a who's who of conservative leaders has called on parents to remove their children, and the idea has moved from the fringe into the mainstream of conservatism.
The late talk-radio titan Rush Limbaugh, whose show reached an estimated 18 million people per week, regularly used to call on parents to remove their children from public schools.
Responding to a New Jersey statute requiring LGBT indoctrination of public-school children, one of the most prominent contemporary evangelical leaders in the world, Franklin Graham, also urged parents to pull them out in an interview on Todd Starnes's radio show.
Even Donald Trump, as president of the United States, repeatedly warned parents to protect their children from the "progressive indoctrination" in what he described as "failing government schools". In fact, he identified this indoctrination as the cause of the unrest and polarization tearing the nation apart.
Other prominent conservative leaders who have called on families to exit the system in recent years include Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, James Dobson, and many more. Across America, more and more pastors are urging their congregations to ditch government schools, too.
Increasingly, prominent minds have even called for abolishing the system entirely. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger argued that the system was unconstitutional. Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, citing government schools' growing hostility toward Christianity, made a similar argument last year.
Even some of America's leading educators have made the case for smashing the system. Late New York City and New York State teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto, for many years, called on people around the world to demolish government education entirely.
Ironically, key leaders of the education establishment itself are starting to see the writing on the wall. American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten complained last year that conservatives have been trying to drive families out of public schools into private alternatives.
Millions of families have fled the system in recent years, and millions more will flee in the years to come as awareness spreads.
What America needs isn't more "conservatives" on impotent "school boards", though there's no harm in running for school board once one's own children are safely out of the system.
What's really needed is to rip the destructive government-school monopoly out by the roots and start again from scratch.
Instead of a new education "system", Americans should seriously consider returning to the 17th and 18th-century paradigm that produced the best-educated, most literate population anywhere on Earth at any time in human history. In short, what's needed is a "non-system". Freedom works.
Abolishing government indoctrination centers wouldn't undermine education one bit, any more than abolishing collective agriculture in the Soviet Union ended farming or food production. It would make it drastically better.
There will be other battles ahead. For example, there's an effort right now to get private schools and even home-educating families dependent on tax dollars so they can be controlled. There are even efforts to ban home education entirely -- efforts that, following Adolf Hitler's example, are gaining traction across Europe and are even being peddled by busybodies and tyrants in Ivy League law schools who think they know how to raise your children better than you.
For a century, conservatives, Christians, and those who love America have been fighting a losing battle against the weaponization of government "education". No matter how many millions of dollars are wasted in the fight, the situation keeps getting worse.
It’s time to stop playing a rigged game on the education establishment's battlefield using its rules. American parents should flee the system and build parallel institutions like their country and their liberty depend on it -- because they do.