The first compulsory attendance laws in America were introduced by Horace Mann in Massachusetts in 1852. This created a shift from what I consider to be true “public schools,” which were open to the public, but controlled by parents in local communities, to “government schools,” which we have had ever since. Today’s schools are funded by the government, regulated, and controlled by the government, and all of the standards are set and enforced by government dictates. By 1900, the U.S. government had an almost complete monopoly on education in our country, as virtually every state in the union had adopted compulsory school laws. If your child did not show up at these schools, you could be prosecuted as truant under these laws.

While most people were compliant and went along with the new government monopoly created by Mann, religious Catholics began looking for a way to give their students a religious education, rather than the “non-sectarian” version offered by the new government model. In 1925, in a U.S. Supreme Court case called, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Catholics gained legal permission to opt-out of compulsory attendance laws and create their own parochial schools. In this landmark decision, the SCOTUS declared that a child is “no mere creature of the state,” and recognized that parents have a compelling interest in the education and upbringing of their own children.

In 1972, another pivotal case, Wisconsin v. Yoder, opened the door for the Amish to opt-out their children from government schools and form their own Amish schools. This enabled them to hire their own teachers and choose their own (religious) curriculum. In the 1970s, there was an explosion of Christian schools being started by Protestants.

Brave pastors in places like Kansas and Nebraska had begun using the classrooms in their church buildings not merely for religious instruction on Sunday, but to teach subjects like Math, Science and History on Monday through Friday as well. Not knowing they were in violation of Mann’s compulsory attendance laws, many of these pastors found themselves handcuffed and arrested while the doors of the church buildings were chained and padlocked. Thankfully, legal organizations like the Rutherford Institute and Christian Law Association began representing these church schools and winning in court. Publishing houses like ACE School of Tomorrow, Bob Jones Press and A BEKA started creating K-12 curriculum for the Christian school classroom and a new movement was underway.

On the heels of the Christian school movement came the modern-day homeschooling movement which began in 1983 when Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) was formed as well as about twenty-six state homeschooling organizations, many of whom created their own homeschooling conferences.

The primary reason all these efforts were made from 1925 through today was to create an alternative system of schooling and education that was not controlled and regulated by the state or federal government. The way the courts have always seen these scenarios is that they are totally separate from, and free from control by, the government because they are privately funded.

With Shekels Come Shackles

There has been a massive push on the part of many conservatives in recent years to create legislation that would enable tax-dollars to “follow the student.” There are many variations of this: ESAs, vouchers, virtual charter schools, and many other public school / private school / homeschool hybrids. The mentality behind this, on the part of some conservatives is, “We pay our taxes, but we aren’t getting any benefit from our tax dollars. We have to pay to educate everyone else’s children, and we should be entitled to get some of our tax money back for the education of our children, even if we choose to send them to a private school or homeschool them.”

This sounds good on paper, but many liberty-minded skeptics of this plan have warned that whatever the government funds it controls. There is no free lunch. If the government pays for the schooling, they can dictate policy regarding how it gets used. Many school choice advocates have derided such views as being mere conspiracy theories and even referred to such theories as being akin to Chicken Little falsely telling his friends “The sky is falling,” when everything was just fine.

Because most states have not yet adopted voucher systems or other such school choice options that fund private schools and homeschools (in fact many state constitutions strictly forbid it), we don’t have a lot of test cases to look at and prove definitively whether such predictions are accurate.

Alberta, Canada and Private School Vouchers

One case we have observed in recent years regarding this matter took place in Alberta, Canada in 2016 where the Canadian government ordered that all private schools in the province that accepted government funds would need to become LGBTQ-complaint (including curriculum compliance and transgender bathroom accommodations) in all their school policies. It turns out almost all private schools DID indeed receive such funds and were susceptible to this order. In Alberta, there is not a separate homeschool exemption (you either homeschool through a private school or directly through the government), so all homeschoolers become impacted by this mandate as well.

Cases like this eventually find their way to courts where judges decide on the constitutionality of such cases, but it demonstrates the intent of government officials to bring private schools (and any homeschooling families connected to them) under their control through the use of tax dollars.

New York’s Hasidic Schools

In New York, there is a system of schools called “yeshivas.” They are institutions for the religious training of Jewish youth. In America, these schools for elementary-age students are called cheder, yeshiva ketana for post bar-mitzvah students and yeshiva gedola for high school students. These schools focus on teach the Talmud (Jewish religious writings) and the Torah (Old Testament scriptures). The intent of these schools is to pass on their religious heritage to the next generation.

For many years these schools operated as a class of private schools separate from the government system. In recent years, however, huge amounts of state funds became available to them, and they readily accepted them. In fact, over the course of four years, these schools received over one billion dollars in government money. This has now opened an investigation of their entire system by the New York government. This situation is likely to go through the courts for some time and it will be interesting to see the outcome.

Standardized Testing

The first regulation that came attached to receiving government funds was a requirement for standardized testing. This did not go well for these schools. Because government schools operate on pre-set government standards, their schools teach to the test. This was one of the objections many had to Common Core standards. The government can create a set of standards that they alone use, encourage employers to reject any students who do not utilize those standards, and penalize students who do not comply with the monopoly.

Regulating the Curriculum

Because the scope and intent of these Hasidic schools are different than the government schools, their students failed to perform well on the standardized tests. This has led to a push from the state government to regulate the curriculum. As a homeschooling parent myself, we often choose to focus on content that is not taught in most government schools (things like Logic, Constitutional Law, the Christian basis for our founding documents, free market enterprise (rather than socialism), ethics, Bible, and many other topics ignored by the government system). My boys are not taught that they can be menstruating persons and my girls are not encouraged to become transgender. We have a completely different approach to education than students in government schools. Our methods and content are radically different. So, it would not surprise me that students taught with different materials, that have a different intent, would fail to do well on a standardized test created by a government school.

I’d love to see government school students tested on their knowledge of the topics taught in our homeschool. Most would completely fail. It is true that most teenagers who attend government schools can list off the top ten rappers and best-selling video games, but few could list ten American presidents or explain the uniqueness of our representative constitutional republic (in fact, most are wrongly taught in government schools that we live in a democracy).

So, which set of standards should be used? The one by the government, or the ones set by private religious schools and homeschools? Most people, even conservatives, would say we should all abide by government standards. I would suggest that is because most Americans have attended government schools and have been brainwashed into believing the government should control education rather than parents. This really is the pivotal issue. No one wants to see students who do not excel academically, but ultimately, that is really a subjective issue. If you believe in forced universal conformity to a set of beliefs and ideologies pushed by the government, you will believe that all students should be forced to learn the same things, in the same way, at the same time as all other children.

If you believe in liberty, you will allow for diversity and freedom for students to be taught in unique ways, even if you personally don’t approve of the methods or content used for those students. I personally, as a Christian, do not agree with Wiccan ideology. But I fully support the right of parents to teach those values to their children if that is their sincere belief. Do I want my tax dollars going to teach Wicca? No, I do not. And most people don’t want their tax dollars going to support Muslim instruction or Christian instruction if they don’t hold to those views. So, what is the solution? All private education should remain truly private. If you pay for your own child’s education out of your own pocket, you can teach whatever you like to your child (or pay a teacher to do so). I can disagree with you, but I’m not going to be a fascist and force you to teach my beliefs, values, and ideologies. I’m not like the government. I believe parents are the best educators for their own children and should decide what they learn and when.

Written by Larry Sand

Forcing Critical Race Theory on children is psychologically damaging.

I come from a time when schools existed to teach the ABCs, basic math and the amazing story of the American founding. While it’s true that Horace Mann, the man who first promoted universal public education, was a central planner, government schools usually turned out educated students whose values comported with those of their parents. But these days, driven by fads and pseudoscience, many schools seem to exist to frighten children by forcing them into believing some craze-du-jour that is often alien to their parents. Of late, the global warming (or is it climate change?) and gender fluidity fads have been cruelly forced upon children as young as five.

Then, most recently, we had the hysterical response to COVID-19. The ensuing school lockdowns have led children to live lives of social isolation, which have increased rates of anxiety, depression and suicide. Additionally, the learning loss has been incalculable. And now, many of those who have been able get back to in-person classes are being subjected to woke schooling and its foundational underpinning, Critical Race Theory (CRT). Those who condemn CRT pedagogy, which maintains that racism is pervasive and permanent, and divides students into “oppressor” and “oppressed” factions, usually comes from those who have an issue with its inherent radicalism. But what about its effects on children’s psyches?

In an eye-opening piece, Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation president Lewis Andrews writes that “woke curricula involve much more than warped views of history, the scientific method, and social relations – they also employ instructional methods that have been shown to inflict serious psychological harm completely independent of what is being taught. These include the frequent use of shaming, forced public confessions of so-called ‘privilege,’ the acceptance of one’s socioeconomic background as an excuse for not achieving, and the promotion of ideological conformity as the best way to deal with social conflict.”

Quoting psychologist Anna Smith, Andrews adds that shame is the ultimate divider. “It’s a me versus them feeling. A deliberate act to cause one to feel like an outsider. As ‘a finger-pointing gesture,’ she says, it can easily induce the very reverse of what was intended.”

Here in Wokefornia, where CRT has reached religious status in some circles, the state is getting close to passing AB 101, which would mandate teaching a one-semester course in ethnic studies in high school. As written, the bill does not include specific content, however. That decision would be left to each school district. And like the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” the red CRT wolves are waiting to pounce. In Los Angeles, the school district is considering a curriculum that disdains “merit” and “individualism,” and claims that “history classes and textbooks focus on the perspective of white colonial culture.”

The San Diego Unified School District is no better. There, students must “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.”

The good news is that a “civil rights violation complaint” has been filed against San Diego schools. The Californians for Equal Rights Foundation along with five partner organizations have filed the complaint against the school district for unlawful, discriminatory critical race training of teachers and employees. CFER claims, “Culturally Responsive Sustaining Practices & Ethnic Studies and other relevant training violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Article I Section 31 (a) of the California Constitution, as well as state anti-discrimination laws and Board policies.”

One can only hope that this lawsuit – and perhaps others – will put a crimp in the rampaging Cultural Marxism we are experiencing. And make no mistake about it – this is Marxism. The godfather of Communism taught his followers that the world was divided into two categories –oppressors and the oppressed. Marx also despised the nuclear family, which he claimed “performs ideological functions for Capitalism” and teaches “passive acceptance of hierarchy.” He thought that the destruction of the family model would make it easier to abolish private property.

Traditionally, teachers have tried to empower kids, but now the regnant pedagogy aims to foster tribalism, anger, resentment, and victimhood. As Lewis Andrews notes, “Sadly, today’s woke curricula do far more to erode a child’s sense of intrinsic worth than to build it up. Indeed, one can hardly imagine a more effective way of grooming disorganized and incompetent adults. As one veteran teacher in the Buffalo Public School system recently put it, anti-racist classrooms have devolved into little more than a series of ‘scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself simply to make another feel empowered.’”

Yes, for many government-run schools and increasing numbers of private ones, it has come to this – child abuse plain and simple – and it’s being perpetrated in plain sight.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. 

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center.

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.

Replacing Liberty With Collectivism

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.”

Taking Collectivism Global

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.

More Federal Power, War on Competition

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.

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.

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.

Literacy Crisis

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.

Quackery Pushed by Collectivists

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.

Resurrecting the Quackery

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.

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.

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.

A Christian Country

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.

Humanist Manifesto

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.

Socialist Aims

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.”

A National Religion

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

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.

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—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.

Replacing Freedom With Collectivism via Education

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.”

Out With 3 Rs, in With Collectivism

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.

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.

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.

Inspiration and Beginnings

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.”

Utopian Beliefs

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.

Purpose of Education

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.

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.

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.

New Harmony

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.

Character Education

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.

Secret Society

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.

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.

Over the last few generations, Christianity has declined at a massive rate in America, with millennials becoming the first generation in American history with self-proclaimed Christians in the minority. Now, the culprit is becoming clear to everyone: Government. In particular, anti-Christian, anti-God indoctrination masquerading as “public education” has been the key driver of those trends.

While it is a widely held misconception that government schools became more secular as the culture did, the reality is that the “public education” system was always intended to turn Americans against God. Indeed, it was created for that purpose. And it has been phenomenally successful in pursuing that goal, with most Christian children abandoning the faith after more than a decade in a public “school.”

According to a massive report headlined “Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline” from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the record is clear on the issue. It is not urbanization, or more education, or the progress of “science,” or even more welfare spending, that has so thoroughly de-Christianized America and the rest of the Western world.

Instead, the data and the historical record show that the more tax money a secular government spends on “education,” the more the public will turn away from God. “Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education,” wrote AEI researcher Lyman Stone in his report, perhaps stating the obvious.

“Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious,” Lyman found. “It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.”

Other researchers have theorized that simply receiving more “education” could explain the trend away from faith and Christianity. However, researchers Raphael Franck and Laurence Iannaccone, who studied the issue in depth, noted that “higher educational attainment did not predict lower religiosity: More and less educated people are similarly religious.”

Similarly, the move toward cities and industrialization could not explain the trends either. Ironically, the two researchers found the opposite. “A more urban and industrialized population was associated with greater religiosity,” the report states, adding that even government welfare largely taking the place of churches supporting the poor did not explain the catastrophic plunge in religiosity.

Indeed, according to Lyman, who also cites other researchers, secularized education provided by government that banishes any mention of God “can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity.” As he puts it, “increasingly secularized government control of education … can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world.”

This is exactly what Scripture warns of. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it,” reads Proverbs 22:6. Jesus warned in Luke 6:40, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” And yet American Christians continued to send their children to anti-Christian government schools.

The fruit is clear, too. Since 1960, the report says, the share of American adults who attend any religious service has plunged from half to about a third. Meanwhile, the share who say they are members of any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to just 62 percent. And the number of American who identify with any religion has plunged from over 95 percent to just 75.

This was deliberate, of course. “The decline in religiosity in America is not the product of a natural change in preferences, but an engineered outcome of clearly identifiable policy choices in the past,” the AEI report explains, again stating the obvious.

This writer has investigated those policy choices in depth. It began with anti-Christian Communist Robert Owen in the early 1800s, who created what whistle-blower Orestes Browson described as a “secret society” to promote the then-radical idea that government should “educate” children.

Horace Mann and John Dewey, the architects of America’s government “education” system, also used “public school” to wage war on Christianity and individual liberty. The outrageous 1962-1963 U.S. Supreme Court rulings against Bible and prayer in school merely formalized the revolution and put the final nails in the coffin.

Decades after sensible conservative leaders such as E. Ray Moore of Exodus Mandate began sounding the alarm and calling for Christians to leave government schools, even the Big Government neo-“conservatives” at the anti-Trump National Review have finally caught on.

“For religious conservatives who care about the fate of American culture, it cannot be emphasized enough that education is the whole ball game,” wrote Cameron Hildtich in NRO in an article about the AEI report. “All other policy areas amount to little more than tinkering around the edges.”

“The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state,” he concluded. “It simply will not do anymore for faithful Americans to drop their sons and daughters off at the curbside every morning for the government to collect as if they were taking out the trash…. the only real road to religious revival is the one that begins with each parent’s first step out of the public school’s doors.”

Finally, the fact that government schools have brainwashed generations of Americans against God and the church is becoming too obvious to hide. Whether it is too late to turn the tide in America and the rest of the West remains to be seen. But at this point, what is clear is that religious parents of all faiths must run for the exits of the government indoctrination system — now.

With coronavirus keeping children home from public schools around the world, a growing coalition of Christians and conservatives is working to make sure that once the crisis is over, millions of children never go back. Instead, the coalition, known as Public School Exit (PSE), hopes to facilitate a massive exodus into the safe sanctuary of homeschooling and high-quality private schools.

Founded by a team of Christian and conservative leaders including this writer, PSE is working on two fronts during this crisis. On the one hand, the group is encouraging parents to try out true homeschooling — not government school at home — during the coronavirus shutdown. At the same time, the group is urging parents to closely examine the material public schools are using. Most parents would be appalled.

There are many compelling reasons for parents to protect their children from government schools, according to PSE and its leadership. That is especially true in Illinois. Consider that state law now mandates LGBT indoctrination of all children in government school. Radical “sex education” with roots in absolute evil, meanwhile, begins in Kindergarten. And that is just the start.

As this writer reported in February for the Illinois Family Institute, the government itself admits that government schools are failing children academically — with devastating results. College professors in the state, for instance, expressed shock that many of their students lack even basic literacy skills. Over two thirds of new students in Chicago community colleges needed remedial education even on basics.

Standardized tests, meanwhile, reveal a disaster of unprecedented proportions across the Prairie State. In Illinois, 2018-2019 test scores showed that just 38 percent of students met or exceeded basic proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA). In math, less than a third were proficient or better. And keep in mind, these standards are hardly difficult or advanced.

Former Superintendent of Public Instruction for Arizona Diane Douglas, one of the experts who serves on the advisory board of Public School Exit, highlighted the irony of Illinois requiring homeschoolers to provide adequate instruction in a broad range of subjects, even as the state is incapable of providing anything close to “adequate instruction” in even the two most basic subjects.

“God gave children to parents, not to government bureaucracies, no matter how well-intended the bureaucracy professes to be,” Douglas told the Illinois Family Institute, adding that the system cannot be reformed. “The government education system does not and cannot have the best interests of an individual child first and foremost. Only a parent can.”

Government schools, by contrast, are more concerned with “social change on the left” and making children into “human capital” for industry, she explained. Unfortunately, government schools do not care “about education for the acquisition of knowledge and the discernment of truth,” added Douglas, whose term as education chief for the state of Arizona ended last year.

Another key reason for Christians, at least, to consider removing their children from public schools, is what the Bible says on these issues. According to Lt. Col. E. Ray Moore, a pastor and retired military chaplain, God in the Bible assigns the education of children to the family primarily, with assistance from the church — not government.

Among other key verses, Moore pointed to Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Psalm 78:4-7, Proverbs 22:6, and Matthew 19:14, to name a few.

He also blasted the idea that Christian children should be put in government school to serve as “salt and light” there. “This is not a command to put children in the pagan and godless public school system,” he said. “To use Matthew 5:13-14 in this way is an abuse of Scripture.”

While some parents and pastors try to argue that children could serve as missionaries in government schools, Moore says that is absurd. “While there are some exceptions, the greatest missionary work is being practiced on Christian children in public schools by the secularists, evolutionists and humanists,” he said, adding that Christians should not be unequally yoked with an anti-Christian system. “They are winning over Christian children to humanism in most cases.”

Another founding director of PSE, Dr. Duke Pesta, is a tenured university professor and academic director at FreedomProject Academy, an online K-12 school rooted in biblical values and truth. All day every day, the prominent academic and educator with a powerful media presence sees firsthand the fruit of government schools and the damage it does to children.

Consider that in surveys of his incoming college students, he found that the majority believe America invented slavery. This despite the fact that slavery was ubiquitous throughout the world all across human history — at least until America’s Founding Fathers laid the foundation for it to be abolished not just in America, but worldwide. This misconception is a direct result of indoctrination at school.

Salt & Light Council President Dran Reese, also a founding director of PSE, is working with a national network of churches and pastors across a wide range of issues. But like other PSE leaders, Reese realized that if Christian parents continue sending their children to public schools — where God cannot even be mentioned, much less worshiped or glorified — the future is bleak for the church in America.

Indeed, one of PSE’s advisory board members, Dan Smithwick of the Nehemiah Institute, has studied worldview for decades. What he found through his research is that the overwhelming majority of Christian children from Christian homes who attend public school will end up leaving the church. The numbers are getting worse, too.

As this writer has documented extensively in a series on the history of public schools for The Epoch Times, that was the plan all along by the architects of the government takeover of education. Men such as Robert Owen, Horace Mann, and John Dewey — each of whom played a key role in the establishment of government control over education in America — hoped the system would crush Christianity. It is doing a good job on that front, data show.

In addition to encouraging and helping parents to ditch government schools for good, PSE is working to break down barriers that prevent families from making the right choice. One service offered by the group, for instance, is a list of vetted and recommended private schools across the nation, including several in Illinois. That list is growing quickly.

Of course, PSE leaders recognize that choosing homeschooling or private schools can require a significant financial sacrifice. But it is worth it, and with enough effort, most families in America can find a way to do it. In the months ahead, PSE will also be establishing a scholarship fund to help truly needy families protect their children, too.

The shutdown brought about by coronavirus has created millions of new temporary homeschool families around the world. Now is the time to strike. If you think children deserve better than the godless and poor quality “education” offered by government schools, PSE leaders hope you will help spread the word. Visit Public School Exit online here to learn more.

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