Librarians and teachers coast to coast, once again, have been sounding the alarm over a new wave of book bannings rolling across the land. A recent call to arms involved a middle school teacher in central Illinois who was forced to resign her position in March because she showed a controversial book to members of her class.

Sarah Bonner, a teacher at Heyworth Junior High School in Heyworth, Illinois, a small rural community a few miles south of Bloomington, IL, has been a teacher for almost 20 years. The controversy arose when “she held a book tasting.” (Really? “Book tasting?”) This involved Bonner going to a local library, picking out several dozen books on topics she thought might interest her students, and bringing them into class.

One of the books she selected was “This Book is Gay,” written by Juno Dawson. Dawson is now a transgender woman, which means he’s a guy. He wrote the book a year before he “transitioned.” The book is an instructional manual, complete with illustrations, on how to engage in all manner of gay and lesbian sexual activities—anal sex, oral sex, use of sex toys, “water sports,” etc. The instructions are detailed, step by step.

When some parents found out about this, they became incensed and called the police. They complained that the teacher had shown their children obscene material, which for most adults it would be a crime for them to do so. Incredibly, it is not a crime for teachers or librarians. Illinois is one of 42 states where teachers and librarians are exempt from prosecution if they share obscene material with children. Several attempts have been made to remove the exemption, but the teachers’ unions and the American Library Association have fought those efforts tooth and nail.

Why is that? Do you suppose it’s because they know the material is obscene and they want to desensitize children to it? For what purpose?

Of course, Bonner was not prosecuted. She could not have been. But it appears the use of the book was not in line with the teaching standards of the school. Just because the law prevents teachers from being prosecuted for sharing obscene material with children, doesn’t mean school boards should allow such material to be used. The Heyworth School Board did not think so either. They voted 7-0 to force Bonner’s involuntary resignation.

It is not hard to understand why so many people are in favor of introducing how-to manuals on both gay and straight sex to children when you realize that there are large numbers of adults who believe that children of all ages have a God given right to experience sexual pleasure whenever they choose, as long as it is consensual. These adults also believe that sex is not binary, but a continuum. Straight, gay, trans, two spirit, bisexual, attracted to children—all normal. Of course, this is a lie, the roots of which I’ve traced in previous articles.

Belief in the lie explains this case, every other case in this category, the false claims of book banning, the efforts to expand graphic sex education to younger and younger children, and the opposition to removing obscenity exemptions for teachers and librarians. These adults are committed to indoctrinating children into the same beliefs they hold dear, regardless of what the parents want.

Who cares what the parents want?

For Bonner there is written proof of her motives. Last year she published with her co-author Robyn Seglem, a professor of education at Illinois State University, her first book — “Igniting Social Action in the ELA Classroom: Inquiry as Disruption”. Teachers College Press. On page 94 they write this:

Our students are currently in the stage of formulating their ideals. As teachers, we can let them blindly replicate the ideals of their families and communities, or we can offer them opportunities that allow them to push back against ideas (their families’ as well as our own), explore alternative perspectives, and try on new ideas. We can allow them to approach learning with dignity. In doing so, we can help them develop a foundation that they are willing to fight to protect, a set of ideals that will prompt them to accomplish the incredible.

This might be an approach to education that could be appropriate for young adults in college. But middle school? The brain is not fully formed until about age 25 and the last part of the brain that develops is the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that involves executive function, the area that controls problem solving, decision-making, managing multiple streams of thought, delaying gratification. The prefrontal cortex is indispensable to critical thinking. Children in sixth, seventh, eighth grade are not equipped to defend adequately the values their parents have instilled in them.

That’s the point of replacing education with activism. These modern educators, like Sarah Bonner and Robyn Seglem, don’t really want children to think for themselves. They want them to become activists who can be mobilized by pushing their emotional buttons during this period of their life when they have limited emotional controls. One of the easiest ways to trigger their emotions, and to divide them from the values of their parents, is around sex.

Sexualizing children automatically sets most of them at odds with their parents. The approach that is being used today—a theme that runs throughout all of the sex ed materials, the romance novels in school libraries, books like “This Book is Gay”—is the anti-establishment idea that purity is a false value. This has been explicitly stated by multiple sex educators at conferences I have attended.

Purity is a value that is essential for the traditional family to exist. The family is essential for our form of government to exist.

During a few months in 1919, at the end of WWI and the creation of the Hungarian Republic, communist Bela Kun controlled Hungary. During this time, communist Gyorgy Lukacs took control of education in the new nation. He introduced perverse sex education and according the Yugoslav historian, Victor Zitta,

“special lectures were organised in school and literature printed and distributed to ‘instruct’ children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of the bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion which deprives man of all pleasure. Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the church, and to ignore precepts of morality.”

Not even Lukacs was teaching the children about how to engage in gay sex, just that restrictions on sexual activity were outdated. His purpose was to undermine the family and the church. Does this sound familiar?

Parents everywhere need to become as engaged as the parents in Heyworth. We need to clone the Heyworth School Board for every District in the country. Finally, churches need to take a stand to protect childhood innocence. Those churches that have not already sold out to our perverse culture are far too silent on the issues.

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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.

A Cultural Revolution

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.

Moving to America

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.

Fighting ‘Fascism’

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.

Influence

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.

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.