Academics are fast becoming a thing of the past in public schools.

In their place are behavioral psychology and “social and emotional learning” (SEL) designed not to educate but to transform children’s core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Once upon a time, education meant learning how to read, write, do math, and think. It meant learning history and science as well.

That is barely happening now, as government data show.

Perhaps more importantly, once upon a time, school children all over the nation also learned the Ten Commandments—do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, and so on.

They learned the Golden Rule, too: Treat others as you want to be treated.

But those “good old days” are largely gone.

Today, government schools use advanced methods including SEL to instill in children a radical new and oftentimes contradictory “politically correct” value system: radical environmentalism, radical feminism, critical theory, Marxism, social justice, LGBTQ-plus, population control, socialism, hyper-racialism, class struggle, and more.

There’s also an occult connection to it all that would shock most secular observers—not to mention Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents of other traditional faiths.

SEL: The Mechanism for Transformation

In public schools across the United States today, from pre-K through 12th grade and beyond, children are being subjected to what is seemingly just the latest educational fad—silly, perhaps, but no more harmful than anything else—at least on the surface.

The education establishment refers to it as “social and emotional learning,” “social-emotional learning,” or just SEL for short. Generally they speak only in vague generalities using soothing language while dealing with the public.

And it’s true, some of what falls under the SEL umbrella is fairly harmless.

But then again, the food pellets that contain rat poison are fairly harmless, too—at least until the poison, which is just a trace component in the pellets, is digested by the intended victim.

Similarly, SEL all seems innocent enough at first glance.

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” explains the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the leading outfits promoting SEL.

The way proponents explain it, SEL is simply aimed to help children do well emotionally and succeed.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, CASEL’s website, a review of SEL programs, and educators themselves reveal a great deal more about the agenda. And it’s not pretty.

Political Extremism and Radical Values

Behind the nice public facade lurk swarms of psychologists, psychiatrists, “educators,” and radical leftists hoping to exploit a century of psychological research for the purpose of molding children’s beliefs and “deconstructing” the values parents seek to instill.

“With a growing number of partners, CASEL is creating a more comprehensive approach to education, one that will lead to a more equitable, just, and productive society,” the organization’s website boasts under the headline “SEL as a Lever for Equity,” hitting multiple key buzzwords associated with the far-left “social justice” movement.

In other words, one of the purposes of SEL—as its leading promoters admit—is to reform society.

Among the webinars offered there are “SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice,” and also a lecture on how to use SEL to “support antiracist practices.” Another webinar outlines how to use policy to “dismantle inequities.”

Again, the leftist buzzwords are everywhere. And that isn’t an accident.

Under SEL Competencies, CASEL drops multiple bombshells acknowledging the far-left globalist indoctrination taking place under the guise of “social” and “emotional” learning.

“SEL competencies can be leveraged to develop justice-oriented, global citizens, and nurture inclusive school and district communities,” it states, adding that the programs will involve getting children to “assess power dynamics” and confront “issues of race and class across different settings.”

The children are also expected to “develop an understanding of systemic or structural explanations for different treatment and outcomes.”

In short, they are expected to believe the highly controversial hypothesis that America is awash in “systemic” and “structural” racism, and that only massive government-led social engineering can fix it.

The children are also expected to accept and agree with the artificial divisions being fomented along “race” and “class” lines as part of the now-obvious effort to “divide and conquer” America.

Put simply, this is all blatantly Marxist “critical theory” rhetoric masquerading as “education.”

It’s extremely dangerous.

In Practice, Educators Shine the Light

A review by The Epoch Times of a wide range of SEL programs used across the United States found that all contain similar extremism, along with highly controversial teachings on sex, sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, economic liberty, family, marriage, and more.

Interviews with educators and a review of their writings on the subject were also very revealing.

In short, the real goals of SEL go far beyond “helping” children socially and emotionally. And it isn’t difficult to find that out.

In fact, in practice, SEL is frequently and explicitly used in public schools to instill certain attitudes and values in children that many parents, if not most, would find controversial at the very least.

For example, public-school teachers in Florida, to comply with SEL mandates, were ordered to show a number of videos to their middle school students.

These included propaganda videos promoting homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, “diversity,” “inclusion,” and more.

Regardless of one’s views on these subjects, countless parents—especially those from faith traditions including Christianity, Islam, or Judaism—would find the effort to obliterate traditional sexual morality and even biological sex in children’s minds to be objectionable.

Numerous other highly controversial political, religious, economic, and worldview positions are treated as “correct” by the forces behind SEL.

More than a few self-styled SEL educators are very open about how they intend to use SEL to brainwash children.

Open Circle Director Kamilah Drummond-Forrester, who supports “social and emotional development for children,” wrote openly at EdSurge.com about weaponizing SEL to indoctrinate children with her hyper-racialist views.

“Teaching [white children] to be aware of their racial identity would allow them to better understand the privileges that accompany that identity,” she wrote, adding that this would help them dismantle the “concept of ‘whiteness.’”

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) has an important role to play in that education.

“One of the core competencies we focus on, as a necessary foundation for the others, is self-awareness. That self-awareness must include race,” she continued, without acknowledging that many parents probably don’t want their children obsessing about “race” or being propagandized by a far-left activist posing as an educator.

In an article for EdTech Magazine on peddling SEL to students amid coronavirus-inspired online learning, writer Adam Stone touts “SEL-oriented teaching materials from the Zinn Education Project.”

Howard Zinn, of course, is the far-left pseudo-historian whose dishonest and politically motivated narratives were most recently debunked by historian Mary Grabar in the book “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.”

Zinn described himself as “something of a Marxist,” his biographer recounted.

According to EdTech, though, the “SEL-oriented” propaganda from Zinn is supposedly “aimed at nurturing empathy and compassion.”

In the real world, Marxism has everywhere and always nurtured hatred, death, slavery, torture, starvation, shortages, political repression, religious persecution, and other evils.

And yet under the guise of SEL programs and “nurturing empathy and compassion,” millions of children are having their minds poisoned by being force-fed actual Marxist propaganda and fake history.

And perhaps even more alarming, Stone urges educators to use surveillance tools that give “insight into students’ online behaviors—both inside and outside the virtual classroom—to enhance SEL.”

One of the recommended total surveillance tools offers educators “a holistic view of online activity across search engines, social media, email and web apps,” Stone said, adding that an artificial-intelligence engine would perform “real-time assessments” to “flag online behaviors that indicate emotional distress.”

As explained in an earlier segment of this series, Orwellian technology is used to monitor and track “progress” on adjusting children’s attitudes, too. That data is being compiled and saved forever under the label of “emotional intelligence.”

The Big Brother technology is also used to determine whether further “interventions” are needed to coerce the child into holding the desired attitudes, values, and beliefs about the issue in question.

And, as U.S. Department of Education documents make clear, it will also be used to predict “future behavior and interests” of the children.

Educators Speak Out

Of course, educators who have seen through the agenda reject SEL as a massive threat to America’s children.

One of those who spoke out against the SEL abuses taking place in her school, Jennifer McWilliams of Indiana, was even fired for being too vocal about it.

“The thing I find to be the most disturbing about social emotional learning is how well it disguises its true sinister motives,” she told The Epoch Times. “Parents do not understand that SEL psychologically manipulates children to question (and eventually rebuke) any Christian or conservative beliefs that may be taught in the home.”

While parents are led to believe that SEL is like teaching children The Golden Rule, “it is quite the opposite,” McWilliams said.

“Social emotional learning is rooted in progressive, social justice ideology that divides anyone who questions the radical groupthink agenda,” she said. “From my personal experience, not only do parents not understand it but teachers and administrators don’t either.”

SEL also represents the “brainwashing of our children,” McWilliams continued, noting that it trains children to “compromise on everything” with no consideration of what is taught in the home.

“These programs rely on a bombardment of propaganda, conditioning, and role playing to separate children from God and the nuclear family,” she said, saying SEL was the vehicle used to get children to accept as truth the narratives behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The popular SEL program used in McWilliams’s school, Leader in Me, was designed to “shift the culture of the school to influence children’s morals and values based on progressive social justice standards,” she said, adding that it became ubiquitous on campus.

When she began publicly speaking out about it on social media, she was fired for supposedly making the school look bad.

“Parents must speak up and take back control of the influence in their children’s lives. If not, the kids will pay with their freedom,” McWilliams said.

The Occult Origins of SEL

The story behind SEL is even more troubling.

According to a history of SEL by CASEL, the term “social and emotional” originated in a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, a shadowy New Age powerhouse created by wealthy New Age guru and late media baron John Fetzer.

One of the founders of the SEL movement, David Sluyter, served as president and CEO of the organization.

“Our mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world,” the group states on its website, adding that it is working toward a “transformative sacred story for humanity in the 21st century.”

According to Brian Wilson’s book “John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age,” Fetzer was, among other things, a public and fervent devotee of Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist who founded the Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as the Lucis Trust).

So obsessed was Fetzer with Bailey that he and his people would regularly recite her “Great Invocation,” which she claimed was given to her by spiritual beings known as “ascended masters,” Wilson documents in his book.

The Fetzer Institute didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. CASEL initially suggested it would make somebody available for an interview, but didn’t follow up despite multiple requests.

More than a few other prominent names in education were similarly enamored with Bailey’s bizarre teachings from supposed spiritual entities.

United Nations World Core Curriculum author Robert Muller, for instance, who served as assistant secretary-general of the U.N., said in the teachers’ manual that his U.N.-backed global school curriculum was based on the teachings of Bailey and one of her “ascended masters.”

The values being taught to children under Fetzer-inspired SEL programs feature remarkable similarities to those taught by John Dewey, a man almost universally known among educators as the founding father of America’s “progressive” education system.

Dewey, who was inspired by the Soviet educational system, was a co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a religious document rejecting God and prescribing collectivism as the cure for society’s ills.

For at least 12 years—more if they go to college—American children are indoctrinated into the collectivist values of Dewey’s religion, which was essentially just warmed-over communism and atheism hiding behind a religious facade.

Interestingly, as early as 1898, Dewey himself expressed an understanding of the need to utilize psychology, a discipline then still in its infancy, if the plan to re-shape Americans through “education” was going to succeed.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Bailey, citing her ascended masters, recognized the importance of Dewey’s educational schemes in achieving her goal of a one-world order with a global religion.

“Our problem is to attain the kind of overall synthesis that Marxism and neo-Scholasticism provide for their followers, but to get this by the freely chosen cooperative methods that Dewey advocated,” Bailey wrote in her book “Education in the New Age.”

Funding and People

Even a brief review of the funding and individuals behind SEL also reveals a great deal about the agenda.

On its website, CASEL lists, among other financiers, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, who has a friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, put almost $300 million behind the Obama-backed Common Core standards, which formally nationalized and helped globalize America’s education system.

Before that, Gates signed a deal with UNESCO, the subject of part nine in this series, to work on globalizing the world’s education systems.

Also listed among the financiers of CASEL is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which CASEL said “provides generous funding to CASEL to support school districts and their capacity to promote social and emotional learning.”

For some background, the recently deceased patriarch of the family, David Rockefeller, wrote in The New York Times in 1973 that “the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

Rockefeller also boasted in his autobiography “Memoirs” of “conspiring” with a “secret cabal” of globalists, “against the best interests of the United States,” to build a “One World” political and economic system.

Aside from its financiers, CASEL’s leading super-stars also suggest something is amiss, to put it mildly.

Consider the involvement of radical Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond, a board member emeritus of CASEL and known associate of communist terrorist turned educator William Ayers.

Ayers’s Weather Underground group set off bombs across America in cooperation with communist Cuban intelligence. The FBI operative who infiltrated the group’s leadership, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that the organization’s leadership was plotting to exterminate millions of Americans in camps.

Interestingly, Darling-Hammond had an opportunity to test out her educational quackery unimpeded in the Stanford New Schools. The results are now in: In 2010, Stanford New Schools placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California, according to multiple reports.

More than a few other colleagues of Ayers are or were also involved with CASEL and SEL, with his University of Illinois at Chicago being central to the scheme. At least 3 of 13 members listed on CASEL’s website came from that university’s Department of Education and Psychology.

SEL was formally unveiled in the late 1990s. However, the real history behind it goes way back to Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist who studied how to effectively brainwash children to become good communists.

Vygotsky’s contributions in laying the foundations for SEL are widely acknowledged among practitioners and even in the academic literature (pdf).

Interestingly, Vygotsky was a close colleague of Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet psychologist famous for his behavioral-conditioning experiments on dogs.

Vygotsky had been inspired, in part, by American psychologist and educational researcher E.L. Thorndike, a student of close Dewey-ally and associate James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University.

In fact, Vygotsky wrote the foreword to the Russian translation of Thorndike’s “Principles of Learning Based Upon Psychology” published in Moscow in the mid-1920s.

Thorndike didn’t bother to conceal his views on education: Children should be educated like circus animals, and it should be so arranged that the child will be incapable of not doing what the trainer wants.

Vygotsky, too, had grandiose ideas about how Soviet “education” and “psychology” would be used to fundamentally transform the individual, and ultimately, mankind.

“It is education which should play the central role in the transformation of man this road of conscious social formation of new generations, the basic form to alter the historical human type,” Vygotsky wrote in 1930 in the journal of the All-Union Association of Workers in Science and Technics for the Furthering of the Socialist Edification in the USSR.

“New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man,” he added.

SEL is simply the latest tool of the collectivist education establishment in its fiendish drive to create this “new type of man”—a collectivist man who will mindlessly submit to the tyranny of his overlords, without the intellectual ability to effectively resist.

Conclusion

Today, while most educators and parents have little understanding of what is going on, SEL has become ubiquitous in government schools across the nation.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Global Learning Fellow Wendy Turner, a second-grade teacher and self-styled “SEL warrior” quoted in an article on the NEA’s website, explained that SEL is now the top priority for schools.

“SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom,” she said. “It’s about connecting everybody and making them feel safe and secure before you get to the academics.”

In a U.S. Department of Education report, a “review” of existing studies called for subjecting “the entire student body” to constant SEL programming “in order to reinforce social and emotional learning not only in the classroom but also on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in hallways.” Parents should also “reinforce” it at home.

But the facts are now clear: The SEL craze is an extreme threat to America’s youth—and to individual liberty.

The scheme isn’t about helping children at all. Instead, it’s about manipulating and conditioning America’s youth to hold the values and beliefs that the education establishment wants to instill.

Unfortunately, those values and beliefs are incompatible with individual liberty, Western civilization, the U.S. Constitution, the nuclear family, religious liberty, and other key values that underpin the United States.

Parents and policymakers must urgently protect the nation’s children from this dangerous threat.

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

With the possible exception of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis), socialists and communists throughout the past century have all insisted that planetary socialism is needed.

They all agreed, too, on the chief weapon in their arsenal: government indoctrination posing as “education.” From the tyrants in Moscow and Beijing to the infamous Socialist International, the goal of planetary slavery in the form of a global socialist government has long been at the forefront of collectivist thinking. And schools have long been the means.

As the tyrants of the world have discovered by experience over more than a century, subduing people under collectivist rule for any length of time can be difficult—especially if the people can read and think, and if they know their history. But if the children can be brainwashed into collectivism early on in government schools, the process becomes much easier.

And so, socialists and communists from around the world joined forces after World War II to create the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to advance that agenda.

The primary goal of this new body was simple: control education around the world, weaponizing it to advance socialism, globalism, collectivism, and other dangerous “-isms” that threaten individual freedom and self-government.

It was obvious from the beginning, and remains obvious still today, that the views of UNESCO’s leaders are entirely incompatible with a free society. Unfortunately, UNESCO now plays a dominant role in public education worldwide.

Formed in 1945 under the guise of ending war by building “defenses of peace” in “the minds of men” through education, UNESCO worked to hijack control over public schools from the very start. Where no government schools existed yet, UNESCO used American and European taxpayer money to establish them, or to bribe governments to do it. And at every step in the process, these emerging indoctrination centers marketed as “educational” institutions worked fiendishly to brainwash children into collectivism and globalism.

The historical record on this global “education” organization is clear. In fact, it was so obviously dominated by communists, socialists, crackpots, totalitarians, and subversives that President Ronald Reagan ordered a U.S. government withdrawal from UNESCO in 1983. Britain left, too, for the same reason. After some alleged “reforms,” the U.S. government rejoined in 2002. But the Trump administration once again pulled out, along with Israel, in 2018.

When announcing the U.S. exit, the Reagan administration was blunt about the problems. Speaking at a press conference, State Department spokesman Alan Romberg said UNESCO exhibited “hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press.”

Indeed, it was promoting communism, humanism, and even a global “licensing” regime for journalists. Romberg also noted that the outfit “politicized virtually every subject it deals with.” But that was no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention.

Founded by Globalist-Collectivist Fanatics

The very first director-general of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, who also served as executive secretary of its Preparatory Commission, was a collectivist in every sense of the term. Like John Dewey, previously exposed in detail in this series and almost universally regarded as the architect of America’s public-education system, Huxley was also a “humanist.” So devoted was he, that he even served as the first president of the British Humanist Association, working to advance these ideas with Dewey, whose Humanist Manifesto was basically socialism and communism masquerading as a religion.

Huxley was also quick to fill the ranks of UNESCO with communists and socialists, as documented extensively in the book “Freedom On the Altar: The UN’s Crusade Against God & Family” by William Norman Grigg. For instance, the chief of the Soviet “Education Ministry” served as director of UNESCO’s department of secondary education. That trend continues to the present day, with myriad card-carrying members of the Communist Party and Socialist Party literally running the powerful global agency.

Even many of the Americans who worked under Huxley at UNESCO were communists. According to testimony by Chairman Pierce Gerety of the U.S. International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board, charged with preventing communist infiltration of U.S. delegations, UNESCO had a “clique” of Americans working in it “who placed the interests of the Communists and Communist ideology … above their own country.”

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee concluded in 1956 that UNESCO was “by far the worst,” from the standpoint of “disloyal” and “subversive” (communist) Americans in global organizations. That’s because communists recognized the importance of weaponizing education.

Like Hitler and his National Socialist barbarians, Huxley was also a fervent advocate of eugenics, the idea of improving humanity by removing “undesirables” from the racial gene pool. So passionate was Huxley about breeding genetically “superior” human beings and removing “degenerates”—something he compared on numerous occasions to improving the quality of livestock—that he actually led the British Eugenics Society. Prior to founding UNESCO, he served as vice president of the eugenics group. After his term at UNESCO, he became president of the eugenics organization.

UNESCO was one of the ways in which he hoped to promote eugenics. In his infamous 1946 policy document “UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy,” written during preparatory negotiations, Huxley said one of the key tasks for the organization would actually be to promote “radical” eugenics.

“Even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable,” he said, explaining why UNESCO’s leadership has been so obsessed with breaking down children’s moral values.

Huxley was also open about the fact that UNESCO was working to brainwash children into accepting a socialistic world government. A fervent believer in Darwin’s theory of evolution, Huxley declared in “UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy” that “political unification in some sort of world government” would even be “required” for humanity to “evolve” to the next level. “The world is in the process of becoming one,” Huxley said in the document. “A major aim of UNESCO must be to help in the speedy and satisfactory realization of this process.”

Just a few years after its founding, UNESCO was already pumping out propaganda aimed at undermining individual liberty, the family, and the nation-state in the minds of children. In a 10-part series of pamphlets headlined “Toward World Understanding,” for instance, the UN “education” agency called for using schools to promote the concept of “world citizenship.” As part of that, schools would have to “combat family attitudes” on everything from “nationalism” (patriotism) to religious beliefs on the nature of sin and reality.

When reading through UNESCO documents and the writings of its leading operatives, it becomes clear that the goals went beyond even just brainwashing children into dangerous ideologies. In fact, Huxley and his cohorts envisioned creating an entirely new system of secular morality divorced from all the major religions of the world.

Then the plan was to use government schools, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, behavior modification and conditioning, values clarification, indoctrination, and propaganda to replace the old values and systems of morality with the new. It was audacious and extreme. But it’s working.

Before and After Huxley, More Extremism

By the early 1960s, UNESCO had decided that traditional values on sexuality needed to be replaced too. And UNESCO-guided government schools around the world were to be the primary tool to bring about the sought-after change. This would help break down the nuclear family—crucial to any free and civilized society—by promoting promiscuity and the breakdown of sexual morality.

And so, in 1964, UNESCO sponsored a conference in Germany claiming that “sex education should begin at an early age.” Since then, UNESCO has been relentless in sexualizing children, a topic that will be addressed in an upcoming piece of this series.

The trends toward socialism and communism within UNESCO only got more and more extreme. In 1970, for instance, UNESCO hosted a symposium on mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin in Finland.

“Lenin was a man with a mind of great clarity and incisiveness,” declared then-UN boss U Thant at the event. “His ideals of peace and peaceful coexistence among states are in line with the aims of the U.N. Charter.” Apparently nobody at the summit objected to the idea that Lenin, one of the cruelest mass murderers to ever walk the planet, shared the same values as the UN and its “education” arm.

UNESCO’s affinity for socialist and communist leaders continues to this day. Right now, French Socialist Party member Audrey Azoulay, who boasted that she “grew up in a radical left-wing family,” is leading the outfit. Before that, she served as “culture minister” in the government of former French President François Hollande. Of course, Hollande was also a member of the French Socialist Party, which is itself a member of the Socialist International, the leading global alliance of Marxist, socialist, and communist parties, including many with the blood of countless innocents on their hands.

Before Azoulay, UNESCO was run by Irina Bokova, who has a long background and pedigree with the savage Bulgarian Communist Party. Trained in the Soviet regime’s KGB-controlled State Institute of International Relations, Bokova proudly served the mass-murdering communist Bulgarian regime before she and her party reinvented themselves as “socialists.”

She hoped to have communist Chinese operative Qian Tang take over her post after leaving, but was thwarted amid an avalanche of bad publicity in Western nations.

None of this should be a surprise, considering the history of UNESCO. In fact, socialists and subversives in America were instrumental in creating the global agency. As this series explained in part 8 last week, the National Education Association (NEA) was critical. Indeed, the NEA, which has been dominated by socialists and collectivists for at least a century, was openly promoting the creation of a planetary “board of education” in its publications, with the goal of creating what they described as a “world government.”

“World organization may have four branches which in practice have proved indispensable: The legislature, the judicial, the executive, and the educational,” wrote NEA “Journal” chief Joy Elmer Morgan in a December 1942 editorial headlined “The United Peoples of the World.” “To keep the peace and insure justice and opportunity we need certain agencies of world administration such as: A police force; a board of education,” and much more.

Morgan also called for the global government to have a world currency, a new calendar to replace the Christian calendar, a “basic” language, a “board of health,” a “planning board,” a “radio-television commission,” a board to oversee “economic matters,” and much more. If that sounds like a recipe for communism and totalitarian rule, that’s because it is.

For the next three years, the NEA Journal was filled with propaganda supporting a global board of education. And just a few short years after Morgan’s call for such an institution, with powerful support from the NEA and its international allies, UNESCO was born to serve precisely that purpose out of the ashes of the failed League of Nations.

“The organized teaching profession may well take hope and satisfaction from the achievements it has already made toward world government in its support of the United Nations and UNESCO,” gushed Morgan in December of 1946 in the NEA Journal, celebrating the union’s success. “It is ours to hold ever before the people the ideals and principles of world government until the practice can catch up with those ideals.”

UNESCO was literally created to facilitate the emergence of a collectivist global system, and its own leaders spoke openly about it.

Trump’s decision to leave UNESCO was helpful, but as this series will show in the weeks ahead, the danger from this subversive agency and the U.N. itself remain significant—especially when it comes to education. Its tentacles can now be found entangled in schools across the United States and the world. If freedom is going to survive, it’s imperative that Americans become educated on the dangerous agenda of this supposed U.N. “education” agency.

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

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.

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

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

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