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.

Congress Investigation

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.”

Foundations’ Role

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 To-morrow, 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.

Dodd Interview

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.

Current State

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.

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.

On July 10 at Walled Lake Western High School in Michigan, popular teacher Justin Kucera who taught AP World History and coached varsity baseball and basketball and who by all accounts never brought his politics into his teaching or coaching was fired for tweeting, “I’m done being silent. Donald Trump is our president.” Meanwhile,

Paulette Loe, a now-retired Walled Lake Western teacher, encouraged students to read an article from the Atlantic about “how to beat Trump” while still employed. Nicole Estes, a kindergarten teacher in the district, called Trump a “sociopath” and a “narcissist” on Facebook in 2016 and is still employed at Keith Elementary School [also in Walled Lake Consolidated school district].

It should be unbelievable that a teacher could be fired from a government school for expressing his support for a sitting president while indoctrinators are free to bring their politics into the classroom regularly with no fear of retribution. Sadly, this is now the new normal.

Twelve years ago when I was a member of the English Department at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore working full-time in the writing center, teachers Elliott Hurtig and Jeff Berger-White were teaching the repugnant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Hurtig was also teaching the historically inaccurate Laramie Project, both plays of which espoused politically “progressive,” morally regressive views of homosexuality.

Setting aside the egregious obscenity in Angels in America, I discussed with a purportedly Catholic writing center colleague the ethical problem of teachers presenting resources from only one side of the debate on this most controversial cultural issue. I made the case that in an educational environment, teachers have an obligation to present resources from opposing voices as well. She responded that because she was absolutely sure opposing voices—that is, conservative voices—were wrong, they shouldn’t be allowed to be presented to students.

This is the kind of presumptuousness that has long poisoned education in America from elementary schools through colleges and universities, and has created a dissolute and destructive culture. Leftists demand absolute autonomy and arrogate to themselves the right to indoctrinate other people’s children because they have unilaterally concluded that their political and moral beliefs are objectively true, and opposing views are false. From kindergarten on up, leftists are indoctrinating other people’s children with their arguable leftist beliefs on homosexuality, opposite-sex impersonation, race, sex, American history, and presidential politics with no negative repercussions.

In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills presciently warns about the very arrogance infecting today’s “educators” hell-bent on imposing their beliefs on vulnerable, ideologically malleable students:

The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. … People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief …  that their feelings … are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one. … his own preference … is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety.

In a recent appearance on Mark Levin’s program Life, Liberty & Levin, Dr. John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, chairman of the California Association of Scholars, and author of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities and The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done discussed the root cause of the cultural “shout downs” and riots:

The real problem is way behind the scenes in the classrooms, which the public never sees. … you’ve had a very long campaign of converting the universities into one party campuses. If you go back 50 years … there were 3 left-of-center professors to 2 right-of-center professors. … that’s consistent with a very healthy debate between the left and the right on campus. But by … 1999, a study shows 5 to 1. … By another five to six years later, it’s gone to 8 to 1, and the current studies … coming out now, it’s something like 13 to 1. There’s every reason to believe that that’s getting more extreme all the time because one of these studies looks to the junior ranks—assistant professors, associate professors—and found that the ratio there, left to right, is 48 to 1.  … The hiring being done now is at the rate of about 50 to 1. … So, you’re going to wind up with a complete monoculture within a short period of time. And a one-party campus is a campus that’s dysfunctional. …

The campus is so far left and so irrational now, and it’s leftism that is poisoning the culture. One profession after another is being essentially corrupted. … It’s totally poisoned journalism. It’s poisoned the teaching in the high schools because the high school teachers are all trained on college campuses

Ellis also suggests that parents who continue to send their children to colleges and universities that are in the business of poisoning culture are part of the problem:

Parents have a very fixed attitude, derived from the past, that sending their kids to college is a first rate way to launch them into a life and a career, and then there’s the fact that those great names of the institutions of higher learning of Harvard, Yale, Columbia … are very, very impressive. It casts a kind of spell over the public. They really cannot believe … that what was so glorious is now in fact no longer there.

Conservatives often ask what they can do to help restore health to our ailing culture. Here’s one thing they can do: Don’t send their children to colleges and universities that have “monocultures,” and through those monocultures, poison culture.

Stop being impressed by the worldly accolades poured on the polluted Ivies that now oppose their original mission statements, mottos, logos, and seals. Harvard long ago rejected its original mission statement:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

The Princeton University shield once depicted an open Bible inscribed with “VET NOV TESTAMENTUM,” that signified the Old and New Testaments; a ribbon above the Bible that said, “VITAM MORTUIS REDDO,” which means, “I restore life to the dead”; and a ribbon below the shield with the words “DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET,” which mean, “Under God’s power she flourishes.” Such expressions today would be an embarrassment to the faculty and a trigger to most students.

Dartmouth College’s original motto was “VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO,” which is translated as “A voice crying out in the wilderness,” an allusion to Scripture about preparing the world for Christ. Ironically, Dartmouth is now a cacophonous voice creating wilderness out of the semi-tamed culture Christianity created.

When teachers and college professors preach their leftist sermons in schools, not only do they indoctrinate, but they also leave dissenters at the mercy of social tyrants. In other words, government school preachers and college professors fuel bullying. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills writes,

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first … chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

You know there’s a problem when a left-leaning site like the satirical website the Onion skewers the close-minded propaganda that leftists identify as “education” as it did in a post titled “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea”:

As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion. … Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.(emphasis added for fun).

Leftists are fond of saying that free speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences. They fail to acknowledge that if those consequences are loss of employment, First Amendment speech protections are, in effect, nullified. And we all know, leftists couldn’t care less.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Education-in-a-Pro-Propaganda-Culture_podcast_01.mp3

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Written by Dr. Everett Piper

Once there was a prominent landowner who had a son. Even though the boy was quite well cared for and had everything he needed, he became restless. One day he approached his dad and said: “Father, I don’t want to wait for my inheritance. Frankly, I am suffocating living under your rules and your expectations. I want my freedom. I want my money. It is time for me to move out of the house, get my own place, and live as I want.”

Well, even though the father was understandably brokenhearted, he relented. He gave his son the freedom and the money he demanded. He let the boy decide how to use (or abuse) his inheritance. He permitted the prodigal to leave home. He gave his son his own way.

So, the son packed his bags and moved to the big city and rented an apartment. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he squandered everything he had. He had his freedom. He had his money, and he wasted it all by living his own way.

About the time he was spending his last few dollars of inheritance, a severe recession occurred. Having nothing left, the young man began living on the streets and scavenging in back alley dumpsters for food. He was so hungry he resorted to eating garbage to survive.

As the story goes, one day, this wayward son woke up. He came to his senses and said to all his vagabond friends: “All the ranch hands back home working for my father are much better off than we are. They, at least, sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I am going back home.”

Reflecting on this parable of the arrogant and wayward son causes me to think of today’s colleges and universities.

I think of higher education’s “birthright and inheritance” as seen in the original mission statements of many of our nation’s seminal institutions: Of Harvard’s Christo et Ecclesia, “For Christ and the Church,” of Princeton’s Vitam Mortuis Reddo, “I restore life to the dead,” of Yale’s expressed goal for its students “to know God in Jesus Christ and … to lead a Godly, sober life.”

I think of the academy’s prodigal path, where colleges and universities, contrary to their founding creeds, now refuse even to allow traditional Judeo-Christian ideas to be openly discussed and freely debated on their respective campuses.

I think of faculty who have been denied tenure because they dared to assume they could engage in an open exchange of ideas on matters such as human origins, climate change, identity politics, intersectionality and critical race theory.

I think of the consequences of “living our own way” and eating from the “back alley dumpsters” of safe spaces, gender-neutral pronouns, trigger warnings and micro-aggressions.

I think of the routine reports of binge drinking, date rape, sexual abuse, escalating suicide rates and the pandemic reality of STDs.

But, I also think of our father and his provisions and his teachings: of Veritas; of “Truth”; of Harvard’s early affirmation on its school shield – “If you hold to my teachings you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Finally, I think of the historical “home “of the academy and the intellectual freedom we used to have under our father’s roof as opposed to the ideological fascism we now experience at the hand of our arrogance and rebellion.

In the story of the prodigal son, Jesus tells us: “Not long after squandering his birthright, there was a bad famine in the land, and the son began to hurt. Having nothing left but his “way,” this young man began working in the fields, feeding the pigs, thinking he must do so to survive. He was so hungry he was now eating the corncobs in the pig slop.”

As a lifelong educator, I look at my academic peers in today’s colleges and universities and I can’t help but ask myself, “has our own way resulted in what we expected when we told our father we wanted to move out of his house?” Did we get what we wanted when we spent our inheritance? Is our chosen path as liberating as we hoped?

Have “our wildest dreams” led us to where we expected or have we stumbled into a nightmare, wading in fields of pig slop and eating the “corncobs” of abuse, dysfunction, selfishness and addiction? Did we get the freedom we hoped for when we left home or have we become slaves to the consequences of frivolous spending and childish irresponsibility?

One last question: Is it possible that “Dad” was smarter than we thought he was all along?

Perhaps it is time for American education to leave the corncobs behind and go home.

Dr. Everett Piper, former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is a columnist for The Washington Times and author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).

Written by Walter Williams

For many parents, August is a month of both pride and tears. Pride because their teenager is taking that big educational step and tears because for many it’s the beginning of an empty nest. Yet, there’s a going-away-to-college question that far too few parents ask or even contemplate: What will my youngster learn in college?

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni provides some answers that turn out to be quite disturbing. ACTA evaluated every four-year public university as well as hundreds of private colleges and universities. That’s more than 1,100 institutions that enroll nearly 8 million students, more than two-thirds of all students enrolled in four-year liberal arts schools nationwide. ACTA’s findings were published in their report “What Will They Learn? 2018-19.” It doesn’t look good.

The ACTA assigned grades tell some of the story. Just 23 (2%) of the over 1,100 colleges earn an A grade; 343 colleges (31%) earn a B grade; 347 (31%) get a C grade; 273 (24%) earn a D; and 134 (12%) colleges earn an F. If you’re thinking that your youngster will get a truly liberal arts education, you are sadly mistaken. It turns out that less than half of the schools studied require courses in traditional literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history and economics. At some colleges, students can fulfill their humanities requirement with a course titled “Global X: Zombies!” A U.S. cultural pluralism requirement can be fulfilled with “The Economics of ‘Star Trek.'” And an arts and Literature requirement can be fulfilled with either the “History of Comics” or “Game Design for Non-Majors.”

Colleges often do not live up to their own promises. In college mission statements, as well as their course catalogs, they frequently exalt the virtues of a “well-rounded” liberal arts education. The reality is something different with only 68% of the schools ACTA surveyed requiring three or fewer of the seven core subjects. Their curricula poorly represent critical subjects such as U.S. history, economics and foreign languages.

The list of schools that received ACTA’s “A” grades includes Pepperdine and Baylor, known for their commitment to the liberal arts and academic excellence. But there are some lesser-known colleges such as Christopher Newport University, Colorado Christian University, Kennesaw State University, Bluefield College and Regent University that deserve accolades.

ACTA’s “F” list includes prestigious names such as University of California, Berkeley, Bowdoin, Hamilton and Vassar colleges. Ivy League colleges received ACTA’s two “Bs,” four “Cs,” one “D” and one “F.” These grades reflect significant overall curricular weaknesses. For example, Yale doesn’t require college-level math courses; Harvard accepts an elementary-level foreign language study; and Brown has an “open curriculum,” which means students may take whatever classes they want, without strict requirements. Even though some of the best-known colleges earn poor marks for their general education curricula, it doesn’t necessarily mean they do all things poorly. A student can get an excellent education at these schools if classes are chosen wisely.

There’s another college-related issue not given much voice and that’s how important is a college education in the first place. That’s an issue raised by a Market Watch article, “Half of young Americans say their degree is irrelevant to their work.”

Parents think a college education is necessary for success. Their youngsters think differently. According to the TD Ameritrade study, 49% of young millennials said their degree was “very or somewhat unimportant” to their current job. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in an October 2018 report, found that many students are underemployed, filling jobs that can be done with a high school education. More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, janitors and salesmen.

The bottom line for parents and their youngsters is that spending four or more years in college and accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in debt is not the only road to a successful life.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage.