As it becomes increasingly obvious that homeschoolers do significantly better than victims of government “education” on every academic metric, apologists for the public-school system often fall back on their “socialization” mantra.

But under its true definition, “socialization” is hardly something to be desired. And under the commonly held understanding of socialization — gaining certain desirable social skills — the data show clearly that home-educated children outperform public school students on every key indicator.

Before examining the issue of “socialization,” it helps to define the term itself. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, it is “the process whereby an individual learns to adjust to a group (or society) and behave in a manner approved by the group (or society).”

Contrast that with the biblical command that Christians “be not conformed to this world,” or that they are to be “not of the world.” Throughout the Scriptures, God repeatedly makes clear that His people are not supposed to “adjust” to a society that does not respect Him and His moral code.

In short, if one accepts the common definition of “socialization,” Christians — and anyone else who realizes that the “world” and society are becoming increasingly immoral — should be deeply skeptical at the very least of this supposedly essential process being carried out by government schools. In fact, alarm bells should be ringing.

Of course, many of those who ask about “socialization” regarding home education do not have that definition in mind. Instead, they are mostly thinking about whether children will fail to learn basic social skills such as communication and healthy interaction with others. In that case, the “socialization” questions are based on myths and anti-Christian talking points.

The first myth is that homeschool families deprive their children of contact with other people outside the home. While there are always exceptions, nothing could be further from the truth. Typical homeschool families are involved in educational co-ops with other families, church, sports teams, and all manner of extra-curricular activities.

Under the guidance of their parents and other family members, these children become “socialized” in the best sense of the word. This has been true for virtually all of human history prior to the widespread proliferation of government “education” over the last century.

Indeed, to the extent that the term “socialization” is meant as some sort of process whereby children acquire positive social skills that can be measured, homeschoolers do far better than their government-educated peers. This is true on everything from peer interaction and self-concept to leadership skills, family cohesion, participation in community service, tolerance, and self-esteem.

According to a review of the empirical research on home education published in the Journal of School Choice by National Home Education Research Institute chief Dr. Brian Ray, “87% of peer-reviewed studies on social, emotional, and psychological development show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in conventional schools.”

But there is more to the story. In his book Faithful Parents Faithful Children: Why We Homeschool, Christian author Donald Schanzenbach explains that the entire concept of schools as engines for “socialization” is relatively new and did not exist even 200 years ago. Indeed, the term was not even in the dictionaries of the early 1800s.

Rather, the idea of “socialization” goes back to anti-Christian philosopher Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology in the mid-1800s. His goal was to overturn Christian civilization by replacing the Christian moral order then reigning in the West with the pseudo-scientific principles of “sociology” derived from the “study of society and group life,” as Comte put it.

With that in mind, it is true that what is referred to as “socialization” does occur in government schools. But that should hardly be considered a positive development — much less as reason to subject children to godless indoctrination by a government that openly wages war on Christian morality. As the Bible explains in 1 Corinthians 15:33,

“Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals.’”

In a typical government school today, a child will be surrounded by peers who are all being indoctrinated to believe morality is subjective, the Bible is at best irrelevant if not downright harmful, parents are “old fashioned” and should be ignored, and much more. The pressure from fellow students to get involved in drugs, promiscuity, perversion, crime and evil is ubiquitous.

Schanzenbach, the homeschool author, cites the American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of socialize: “1. To place under public ownership or control. 2. To convert or adapt to social needs. 3. To take part in social activities.” He argues that this is precisely what is happening on all three levels, very much including the placing of children under government control.

“Socialization is an idea in direct opposition to biblical thought,” continues Schanzenbach. “Socialized children will likely spend their lives working against the Kingdom of God just as a matter of natural habit. They will have been taught to do so under the socializing influence of a humanist mindset, taught by example, and assumed in every classroom at the government institutions.”

Even the best teachers in government schools have publicly repudiated the notion that they are helping “socialize” the children in any positive manner. Consider John Taylor Gatto, the New York City and New York State teacher of the year in the early 90s. After realizing the damage he was doing to children in the public system, he sent his resignation letter to the Wall Street Journal.

“I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency,” Gatto explained in his letter that sent shockwaves through the education world. “I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.”

“My orders as schoolteacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path,” added Gatto, who went on to write books on the devastation caused by public schools. “There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen–that probably guarantees it won’t.”

Those who fashioned the system to socialize children appear to have had some of that in mind. Anti-Christian humanist John Dewey, widely regarded as the father of America’s public-school system, outlined his views on the subject in Democracy and Education in 1916 shortly before his infamous trip to fawn over the Soviet Union.

“Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life,” Dewey explained, implying that education was not so much about the individual or God, but about society and the collective. “Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of the group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.”

In other words, in Dewey’s mind, the purpose of education and “socialization” was to train individuals for the benefit of the group and its perpetuation. Whatever this may be or not be, it is certainly not the biblical view of education as a parent-led means of teaching individual children to know, fear and glorify God while giving them the tools to live a moral and meaningful life on this side of eternity.

Next time somebody asks about “socialization” of homeschoolers, you might start by asking exactly what they mean with that term. No matter how they answer, for Christians and even those who simply value true education, homeschooling clearly comes out on top.

Americans educated by government today are, for the most part, hopelessly ignorant of their own nation’s history—and that’s no accident. They’re beyond ignorant when it comes to civics, too. On the history of the rest of the world, or the history of communism, Americans are generally clueless as well. This was all by design, of course.

After generations of flying under the radar, the ongoing corruption of history education in public schools is now suddenly the topic du jour. With the spread of The New York Times’ discredited 1619 Project aiming to “reframe” history through the lens of slavery, which even The New York Times’ own fact-checker called out, Americans everywhere are suddenly paying attention to what’s being taught to impressionable children at taxpayer expense.

Last year, President Donald Trump blamed the escalating mayhem in the streets on indoctrination by schools and the media. In September, he blasted the “toxic propaganda” being peddled as “history” in American classrooms. To deal with it, the president signed an executive order to “promote patriotic education.”

The reason why history is being rewritten is hardly a mystery. In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the totalitarian ruling Party’s motto explaining its strategy is “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And it’s very true—whoever controls the historical narrative will be able to shape the future. Liberty-minded Americans and truth are currently losing the battle—big time.

Totalitarians have long understood the power of historical narratives. Consider Chairman Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in communist China. Under the guise of purging remnants of the old ways of capitalism and tradition, Mao’s communist storm troopers did their best to destroy the records and evidences of thousands of years of Chinese history. Books were burned and monuments destroyed in an orgy of destruction.

After true history was erased and disfigured, the Chinese Communist Party was able to rewrite history on a blank slate to suit its own agenda. Especially important to that effort was the indoctrination of children in government schools. Everything ancient and traditional was portrayed as primitive or even evil, while the new party line surrounding the supposed glories and progress of communism was force-fed to China’s youth.

America’s ongoing cultural revolution hasn’t been quite as dramatic, violent, or thorough—so far. But if left unchecked, the results of this long-term operation may turn out to be just as deadly. And there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the effectiveness of the effort to rewrite the history of the United States, Western civilization, and even the world.

Consider the data. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the “nation’s report card,” just 15 percent of American students were at or above the “proficient” level in history. When it comes to civics, less than 1 in 4 U.S. eighth-grade students performed at or above “proficient” in 2018 on the NAEP, the latest year for which scores are available.

Keeping in mind the wild bias of the Education Department (some 99.7 percent of the bureaucrats’ contributions to a presidential candidate in the 2016 election went to Hillary Clinton), even those numbers probably drastically overstate the true level of historical and civic understanding of U.S. students.

Contrast the dismal scores with previous generations. There was a time when Americans were the best-educated people on the planet—especially when it came to history and civics. According to prominent French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the early-to-mid 1800s and recorded his observations in two volumes before government hijacked education, “every citizen … is … taught the doctrines and evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of the Constitution.”

Some areas on the Western frontier and the deep South weren’t quite as advanced educationally. However, in the more populous and developed areas, “it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon,” de Tocqueville continued.

Today, it’s just the opposite: Finding a person who understands the history of America or the leading features of its Constitution is a sort of phenomenon.

The Rewriting of History in America

The process of rewriting history was a long one. Unlike Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which took about a decade, those seeking to erase and distort America’s incredible and unique history were forced to proceed slowly, working over decades and generations rather than accomplishing it all in one fell swoop. But concrete evidence of this deliberate plot has surfaced periodically since at least the 1940s.

In the early 1950s, Congress became suspicious about the scheming of the major tax-exempt foundations, a subject covered extensively in part 7 of this series on education. To deal with the issue, lawmakers formed the Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the “Reece Committee” after its chairman.

What investigators found should have shocked America to the core. In its final report, the select committee reported that the major foundations of the day, which still exist, had “supported a conscious distortion of history.” The foundations also sought to hijack education for the purpose of undermining American constitutional principles and liberty, investigators found.

One of the expert witnesses who testified during the select committee’s investigation, attorney and investigator Aaron Sargent, an expert in subversion through education, put it clearly. “They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts,” Sargent testified about the goals of the major tax-exempt foundations in the education field. “They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy—one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”

By the time of the congressional probe, the situation was so serious that Norman Dodd, the chief investigator for the committee, said the foundations had orchestrated a “revolution” in the United States. The revolution “could not have occurred peacefully or with the consent of the majority unless education in the United States had prepared in advance to endorse it,” Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony. The attack on real history in school was a crucial element of that.

Of course, the situation only got worse from there. By 1980, pseudo-historian Howard Zinn, a radical exposed in declassified FBI documents as a Communist Party member, had published his book “A People’s History of the United States.” It’s a favorite in public schools. More than 3 million copies have been sold so far, shaping the minds and attitudes of countless millions of Americans while turning them against their own nation and their own political institutions that guaranteed individual liberty for so long.

The propaganda “history” book was full of obvious lies, as exposed most recently by scholar Mary Grabar in her book “Debunking Howard Zinn.” The deception was strategic, too, and powerful. The lies begin right at the start of the book, portraying Columbus as a genocidal monster, and continue onward from there.

“We were really no better than the Nazis in the way Zinn presents it,” she said.

It was carefully calculated. “Rewriting history is what communists do,” continued Grabar, who also serves as a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. “They don’t want people to know about any other form of government or to remember a time when there was freedom and abundance. Like Zinn, the Marxists of today want young people to be so disgusted with their own country that they become inspired to overthrow it.”

While demonizing the United States and Western civilization more broadly, Zinn and other communists work hard to conceal the history of communism—“the horrors of starvation, gulags, repression, and mass murder,” Grabar said. Interestingly, there were clear parallels between Zinn’s fake history and a history written by Communist Party USA chief William Z. Foster published in 1951 dubbed “Outline Political History of the Americas.” Foster wrote openly about how crucial hijacking education would be for the Soviet-style communist regime he envisioned for America.

When starting the project, Grabar said she already knew Zinn’s book was biased. “But even I was surprised by how blatantly and deliberately Zinn lied,” she said, urging students, parents, and community members to use her book to refute the propaganda with facts.

More recently, The New York Times released its 1619 Project, the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Like Zinn’s book, it’s essentially fake history, as historians from across the political spectrum—and even The New York Times’ own fact-checker—publicly confirmed. Like Zinn’s book, it seeks to “reframe” America’s history as one based on oppression, slavery, and racism rather than liberty. And like Zinn’s fake history, the 1619 Project is now being used in public schools across America.

Perhaps most alarming about Hannah-Jones’s false narrative is the notion that racism and evil are embedded “in the very DNA” of America. In other words, there’s nothing short of the complete annihilation of the United States’ very foundations and essence that could possibly resolve the real and imagined shortcomings. The message of the project was obvious and clear: Death to America!

In reality, the truth about American history is almost exactly the opposite of what the project presents. The principles upon which the nation was founded—“all men are created equal,” for instance, and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—paved the way for abolishing slavery worldwide while facilitating the greatest expansion of human freedom and prosperity in world history.

Despite the obvious lies and deception, Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project. Ironically, though, New York Times writer Walter Duranty also won a Pulitzer Prize for peddling lies and communist propaganda. In Duranty’s case, he infamously parroted Stalin’s obvious propaganda and covered up the Soviet genocide in Ukraine that killed by some estimates up to 10 million people.

Effects of Fake History

This strategic rewriting of history in public schools across America has led to dramatic shifts in Americans’ attitudes, values, beliefs, and worldview. For example, national pride among Americans, who arguably live in the richest and freest nation in human history, has reached historic lows, according to a Gallup poll released last summer. Among younger Americans, just 1 in 5 are extremely proud to be American, while among those 65 and older, just over half are extremely proud.

But the real dangers are becoming clear, too. A 2019 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 7 in 10 millennials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. Fully 36 percent of millennials support communism, the survey found. And just 57 percent of them believe the Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist Manifesto. A generation ago, these numbers would have been inconceivable.

“When we don’t educate our youngest generations about the historical truth of 100 million victims murdered at the hands of communist regimes over the past century, we shouldn’t be surprised at their willingness to embrace Marxist ideas,” explained Victims of Communism (VOC) Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith.

“We need to redouble our efforts to educate America’s youth about the history of communist regimes and the dangers of socialism today.”

VOC Director of Academic Programs Murray Bessette explained that American public schools simply don’t teach the true history of communism. Part of the reason for that, he said, is the “ideological character of many involved in developing and delivering curricula for American schools.” Parents must insist on a full account of history, and teachers must seek out programs and materials that teach the whole truth, added Bessette.

The effects of these false narratives pushed on children in government schools are becoming more and more obvious. Just think of the brainwashed armies of young Americans rampaging through the streets rioting, looting, killing, protesting, and destroying. Funded by rich and powerful individuals, companies, and foundations, their goal is to “fundamentally transform” what they view as an evil America. And because they don’t know the truth about their own nation or its history, many genuinely believe in what they’re doing.

Speaking at an Independence Day celebration last summer, the president of the United States hit the nail on the head. “The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump explained. “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains.”

Their goal, the president correctly observed, is not to improve America, but to destroy it.

Fortunately, now that the problem has been identified, steps are being taken to address it. And at the core of that process will be ensuring that young Americans understand the truth about their own nation’s history. During remarks made on Constitution Day, Trump blasted the left’s distortion of American history with lies and deception.

“There is no better example than The New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project,” said Trump, calling it “toxic” propaganda that would “destroy” America. “This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

In reality, as Trump correctly pointed out, “nothing could be further from the truth.”

“America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history,” the president declared.

Trump also promised action to reverse the progress of the history destroyers and rewriters. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” he said. “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

To accomplish that, grants are being awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to help develop a pro-American curriculum that “celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” Trump said. He also said he would soon sign an executive order to create a national “1776 Commission” that will promote patriotic education that will “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.”

Whether the rot and corruption that has taken over the teaching of history and civics in America’s government schools can be reversed remains to be seen. But diagnosing an illness is the first step to treating and curing it. Now that Americans are starting to understand what’s killing their nation, serious efforts can be made to stop the bleeding. Teaching children the truth about U.S. history will be a good first step.

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.

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.

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.

The U.S. public school system was collectivist from the start, as this ongoing series on government education has extensively documented. But as the feds got involved, it quickly went from bad to worse, with the slow and steady decline in education turning into a precipitous collapse.

Today, the schools are a disaster, even by the government’s own measures. Consider, for instance, that the latest scores from the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that more than two-thirds of eighth-graders aren’t proficient in any core subject. It would be hard to do worse.

The U.S. government bears a big part of the blame. And there should be no doubt that it was deliberate.

Because the U.S. Constitution delegated absolutely no power over education to the federal government—and because the 10th Amendment specifically reserves all non-delegated powers to the states or the people—it wasn’t easy for the federal camel’s nose to get under the tent. Indeed, it took almost two centuries for Washington to get seriously involved in public schools.

But communists worked diligently toward that goal for decades. In his 1932 book, “Toward Soviet America,” Communist Party USA leader William Z. Foster boldly outlined the agenda for his fellow revolutionaries. The goal: A U.S. Department of Education that would eventually replace patriotism and Christianity in school with communism and globalism.

“Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches,” Foster declared, an idea that was almost unthinkable to Americans of the day.

He also outlined what this anticipated U.S. Department of Education would do once in charge of schools.

“The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology,” he said. “The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.”

Of course, it took a long time to make that a reality. But anyone who has studied even briefly what is going on in the federally controlled public schools of America today can see that Foster’s agenda has been thoroughly implemented in every respect, all over the country. Unless dealt with, the disease will likely prove fatal.

Federal Involvement Begins

Aside from a few insignificant offices to collect statistics over the years, and Congress recommending Bibles printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia “for use in the schools” in the late 1700s, the feds played virtually no role whatsoever in education in America.

Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1960s, long after the government school system created by collectivists had started destroying traditional education, that the federal government took its first major steps into education.

It began in 1962 and 1963, as documented in this series, with two U.S. Supreme Court rulings declaring that it was somehow a violation of the First Amendment to have prayer or Bible readings in public schools. These lawless opinions, as admitted by one of the justices in his dissent, replaced Christianity at school with the collectivist “religious humanism” of John Dewey, one of the socialist founders of America’s public school system.

Well-educated Americans would have instantly recognized the absurdity of the ruling. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, most of the states had established churches. The idea that this amendment, designed to prevent a national religion, was supposed to prohibit states and communities from having prayer or Bibles in schools, would have been laughed at even in the 1940s or ’50s.

But by the ’60s, public education had already been in place for generations, dumbing down Americans and erasing their understanding of history to the point that such an outlandish anti-constitutional ruling became feasible.

Not long after that rogue court ruling, Congress—almost certainly emboldened by the high court’s flagrant constitutional intrusions into state and local education—launched the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson under the guise of “helping” states to “educate” all “disadvantaged” students, this statute opened up the floodgates of federal funding to K-12 public schools.

As the old cliché goes, with federal funding comes federal control. And in exchange for federal taxpayer money, first released under ESEA, schools were forced to accept a growing array of federal regulations. At this point, the feds have effectively nationalized the public school system; globalizing it is the next frontier.

There are more than 100 subsidy programs now in place under the department, which has a budget approaching $100 billion including “discretionary” and “mandatory” spending. Everything from discipline and academic standards to lunches, data collection, and even the gender of textbook writers is now subject to federal intrusion.

Once the camel’s nose was under the tent, it didn’t take long for the entire smelly beast to shove its way in. The relatively new U.S. Department of Education, which has centralized control over education in an unprecedented manner, has also played a crucial role in weaponizing America’s public education system against individual liberty.

Established in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, the cabinet-level department was basically part of a quid pro quo agreement with the socialist-controlled National Education Association (NEA). The powerful union, which named the socialist and humanist Dewey as its “honorary life president,” was already acting as a sort of national ministry of education.

With the birth of the actual department, it sealed the deal.

By the time the U.S. Department of Education was established, Congress’s investigative committees charged with exposing communists and preventing infiltration of the federal government had long since been disbanded. As such, it’s difficult to determine how many actual communists worked within the department.

But as the Bible says, “by their fruits, ye shall know them.” And the fruit coming from the Department of Education has been rotten to the core from day one.

Whistleblower From Belly of the Beast

From the start, using grants and other means, this unconstitutional behemoth began working to bring all education in the United States under federal control. Worse than that, it worked to systematically dumb down the American people and transform the values of children, according to whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as a senior policy adviser on education in the Reagan administration.

All of it was in line with what the mass-murdering Soviet regime was doing. Indeed, from its earliest days, the U.S. Department of Education was involved in helping to “sovietize” the American public school system, Iserbyt told The Epoch Times in an interview. This agenda has been extremely successful in facilitating the disaster now unfolding in America, she explained.

Upon taking up her post at the Department of Education, Iserbyt found documents revealing that public schools in America were introducing Soviet quackery and curricula in the classroom, with help from the major foundations. In response, the patriotic Iserbyt began leaking the official documents to the press in an attempt to blow the whistle and stop the madness. She eventually compiled the smoking-gun evidence in her explosive book, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.”

“When I was there, what I saw, I realized in retrospect, ‘The Nation at Risk’ report was very important,” Iserbyt said, referring to a government report commissioned by Reagan arguing that the U.S. education system threatened America’s future. “They needed that to convince America that we had terrible schools so they could bring in the reforms they wanted.”

Pointing to the Soviet education system and the forces that worked to bring similar schemes to America, Iserbyt is also convinced that communism was the goal. U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell “wanted to put in the communist system,” Iserbyt argued. “I believe he was a communist. If you read in my book the things he said, there is no way to come up with any other conclusion.”

Among other schemes, Iserbyt said Bell was the one responsible for bringing in the methods of “education” advocated by anti-Christian behaviorist B.F. Skinner and Soviet “psychologist” Ivan Pavlov to American schools.

“These Pavlovian and Skinnerian methods destroy free will by treating people like animals to be trained and to give reflexive responses to stimuli,” said Iserbyt. “This is animal training, not education. This is what was being used in communist countries to train and brainwash their populations, not educate them.”

Because of the Department of Education, it’s being used all over America, too.

“Their agenda was to have absolute control of the American population through these changes in teaching and instruction being brought into the schools through the Department of Education,” she continued, pointing to the important role of the Carnegie Endowment in negotiating with the Soviets on education. “So they claimed all these national reforms were needed to change education from what you know in your head, to what you can do, which is Soviet-style workforce training.”

Iserbyt also witnessed how great educators with valuable experience who loved liberty, such as Edward Curran, who led the National Institute of Education at the U.S. Department of Education, were purged and driven out. Meanwhile, collectivists and quacks continued moving quickly up the ranks.

“The political appointees—most of them were rotten,” said Iserbyt.

To impose the radical “reforms” on America, Iserbyt said she witnessed the Department of Education handing out all manner of enormous grants to fund dangerous quackery, data-gathering, and “efforts to transform the values of children away from traditional Americanism” through education.

“I believe these were very abusive toward traditional values,” she said, pointing to her important short publication, “Soviets in the Classroom, America’s Latest Education Fad.”

The Extremism Continues

Today, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Department of Education remains firmly under collectivist control. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, an analysis by The Hill revealed that 99.7 percent of all political spending by Department of Education bureaucrats went to Hillary Clinton—the highest of any federal department.

Even after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took up her post, the left-wing extremism from the department continued to spew forth. Indeed, on Feb. 12, 2017, the department’s Twitter account posted a quote by Communist Party USA member W.E.B. Du Bois—with his name misspelled, no less, drawing national ridicule.

Among other absurdities, Du Bois claimed the USSR, led by one of the most brutal and murderous regimes in human history, was the “most hopeful country on earth.” During the darkest depths of the “Great Leap Forward,” Du Bois even held multiple meetings with mass-murdering communist Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and the two were always pictured with smiles on their faces.

These are some of the people who control U.S. education. Under the previous administration, the department, using “stimulus” money to bribe states into compliance, even imposed Obama-backed national standards on the nation—standards that are aligned with international schemes, too. Common Core will be dealt with in a future article in this series.

With around 4,000 employees, the Education Department’s budget has been ballooning since it was created. And that’s despite President Ronald Reagan promising to abolish it, and President Donald Trump saying on the campaign trail, “If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.”

There’s currently a bill in Congress, H.R. 899, to abolish the department. When asked why the bill was needed, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the chief sponsor, replied in an interview, “How much time do you have?”

“The left understands that this is where you win or lose—in the schools and in the teaching of the children,” the Kentucky congressman continued.

Massie also noted that under the current administration, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make abolishing the department a bipartisan endeavor. Liberals and progressives, of course, don’t want Trump in charge of their children’s education, any more than conservatives want Obama or Biden running it.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”

The group U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) is working to end all federal involvement in education, too.

“Although this experiment with federal control of local public schools has gone on for half a century now, it has failed,” USPIE President Sheri Few told The Epoch Times. “The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children.

“We need to stop treating children like guinea pigs in some social engineering laboratory.”

The U.S. Constitution and common sense both demand that the federal government gets out of education. That would be a great step forward. However, as this series has documented, the government education system has been controlled by collectivists from the very beginning. That means getting the feds out, by itself, won’t solve the systemic problems plaguing education in the United States today.

Still, ending all “Fed Ed” may be a decent place to start. And with Trump in the White House, perhaps both sides of the aisle could work together on this, as a first step to much more far-reaching reforms.

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.

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.

It may seem counterintuitive, but massive tax-exempt foundations funded by some of America’s most prominent capitalists and industrialists helped foment what congressional investigators described as a collectivist “revolution” in the United States.

The goal was to “so alter life in the United States that it could be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” Many tools were used, but the public education system was the most important and effective.

Congress Investigation

In the early 1950s, with growing concerns of subversion and communist penetration surrounding the enormous foundations, the U.S. Congress launched investigations. Investigators for Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the “Reece Committee,” after the chairman, found that there was good reason to be concerned.

According to the committee’s chief investigator, some of the foundations were weaponizing the American education system to enable what was described as “oligarchical collectivism,” or collectivist rule by an oligarchy. This was done by financing the promotion of “internationalism and moral relativism,” among other dangerous “isms,” investigators found.

The chief culprits included some of the largest and most important foundations in the United States. These included the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller foundations, and the Carnegie Endowment. According to congressional investigators, they were showering money on Columbia University, Harvard, Chicago University, and the University of California to advance their objectives through education. And it worked.

Norman Dodd, the director of research for Congress’s select committee, reported that the foundations had even orchestrated a “revolution” in the United States. The revolution “could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it,” Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony.

The committee’s final report, released in late 1954, found that “some of the larger foundations have directly supported subversion in the true meaning of that term—namely, the process of undermining some of our vitally protective concepts and principles.” Those same entities have also “actively supported attacks upon our social and governmental system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas,” investigators concluded.

Globalism and distorting history were also major priorities. In the final report, the committee noted that the foundations had “supported a conscious distortion of history.” As part of that, they also  “propagandized blindly for the United Nations as the hope for the world,” undermining American constitutional principles and liberty.

One of the experts who testified during the hearings was attorney Aaron Sargent, whose background included special investigations, especially into education and subversion. He told lawmakers that many of the big foundations were actively promoting socialism in the United States, in violation of the law and their charters, and that education was among their key tools.

“First of all, in approaching this problem of foundation influence, the subversive-teaching problem is a foundation problem,” he said, noting that the problem began in the 1890s. “This movement is closely related to Fabian socialism.” These subversives tried to infect America, but found it more difficult than in Britain due to Americanism, a written Constitution, and federal courts capable of protecting constitutional rights.

And so, the radicals “relied upon propaganda and brainwashing,” using the school system to attack patriotism, natural law, and even real history, said Sargent, who was asked to serve as counsel to the select committee but had to decline. “They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts,” he testified. “They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy—one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”

On the educational front, he said, the story actually begins with the Rockefeller-funded Dewey Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, a topic that has already been explored in this series. From there, Dewey “expounded a principle which has become destructive of traditions and has created the difficulties and the confusion … that we find today.” As part of that, “Professor Dewey denied that there was any such thing as absolute truth,” a concept that was “revolutionary in practice.”

Foundations’ Role

In previous articles in this series on the history of public education, the Rockefeller dynasty’s role in funding collectivist “education reformer” John Dewey, widely considered to be the “father” of America’s public school system, was documented extensively. The Rockefeller philanthropies—especially the “General Education Board”—provided millions of dollars to advance Dewey’s quackery around the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th.

But that would be just the beginning. Rockefeller money also helped resettle the communists of the Frankfurt School at prestigious U.S. academic institutions, primarily Dewey’s Columbia University. From there, their subversive poison infected all of U.S. society, mostly through the public education system.

The Rockefeller dynasty was key in shaping education policy. In 1902, facing an avalanche of bad publicity over his ruthless business practices, oil baron John D. Rockefeller created the “General Education Board.” This ostensibly “philanthropic” venture was used to help fund and eventually control education in the United States.

Rockefeller put Frederick Gates in charge of his “charitable” schemes. And Gates was honest about the agenda. “In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand,” Gates wrote in “The Country School of To-morrow, Occasional Papers Number 1.”

“The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.”

He was clear that the goal was not to raise up philosophers, scientists, authors, poets, musicians, artists, lawyers, doctors, preachers, or statesmen. There was already an “ample supply” of those, he said. Instead, the goal was to create docile and largely unthinking workers who could be used and controlled by the elites.

The ultimate goal of all this subversion from the mega-foundations, though, was even more horrifying.

Dodd Interview

In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1982, chief investigator Dodd dropped a bombshell that should have, and would have, shocked America to the core—at least if it had been more widely known. The goal of the foundations’ scheming in education and beyond was to crush individualism, promote collectivism, and prepare the way for the United States to be merged with the totalitarian Soviet Union.

While investigating, Dodd was contacted by Ford Foundation President Alan Gaither and asked to come to the foundation’s offices in New York. “On arrival, after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said, ‘Mr. Dodd, we have asked you to come up here today because we thought that, possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of foundations such as ourselves,’” Dodd recalled in the interview.

Dodd continued: “Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on voluntarily and stated: ‘Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience … operating under directives … the substance of which is, that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.’”

In short, the head of the Ford Foundation, one of the most influential in the world, told the chief congressional investigator of a committee investigating foundations that the foundations were helping to pave the way to a merger of the free world with the slave world. And Americans remained blissfully unaware, as the cancer crept in quietly through the school system over a period of generations.

According to Dodd and the congressional investigation, the Carnegie foundations decided after World War I that gaining control of education would be crucial. The leadership’s goal at that time, Dodd said, was to prevent “a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914.” But the task was so enormous that it would require help. And so, while the Carnegie Endowment would focus on international education matters, the Rockefeller foundations were put in charge of domestic initiatives, according to documents uncovered by investigators in the Carnegie Endowment’s archives.

“The effect was to orient our educational system away from support of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and implemented in the Constitution, and educate them over to the idea that the task now was, as a result of the orientation of education, away from these briefly stated principles and self-evident truths,” Dodd said in the interview.

“What we had uncovered was the determination of these large endowed foundations, through their trustees, to actually get control over the content of American education.”

Investigations also found that since at least the 1930s, Moscow decided to infiltrate educational and large foundations in the United States. Following their orders from the Soviet Union, American communists even created a commission focused on infiltrating and taking over foundations.

One of the major successes identified by the congressional investigators was Soviet agent Alger Hiss, who became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace after playing a starring role in creating the United Nations. He was later exposed as a spy for Joseph Stalin’s mass-murdering regime.

Current State

This work of the major foundations continues to this day. Consider, for example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates pouring billions of dollars into “education reform” and into supporting the collectivist agenda of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In fact, Gates’s foundation was, aside from U.S. taxpayers, the single largest financier of Common Core, the universally reviled national (and internationally aligned) “standards” imposed on the United States by the Obama administration. More on that in a future piece of this education series.

The Rockefeller foundations also continue to be deeply involved in “education.” And key Rockefeller bigwigs have become increasingly open about their real agenda. In his autobiography, for instance, the late dynasty patriarch David Rockefeller dropped a bombshell.

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will,” he wrote on page 405. “If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

When examining these facts, it seems perplexing that the wealth of some of America’s most important super-capitalists would be put to use advancing collectivism, subversion, and even socialism. And yet, it was hardly a new phenomenon. In his important book “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,” Stanford historian Anthony Sutton meticulously documented the role of major bankers and financiers from New York City in financing the communist enslavement of the Russian people.

It is time for Americans to completely rethink education or be destroyed. That rethink must involve discarding all of the quackery and subversive influences brought about by collectivists such as Dewey, and the out-of-control foundations that funded and helped them. The future of United States and liberty literally depend on sorting out this mess.

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

Understanding that future generations are the key to building political power and lasting change, socialists and totalitarians of all varieties have gravitated toward government-controlled education since before the system was even founded.

The communist “Frankfurt School” was no exception in its affinity for “educating” the youth.

Almost 100 years ago, a group of socialist and communist “thinkers” led by Marxist law professor Carl Grünberg established the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. From there, they would move to the United States. And from their new home in New York City, the subversive ideas they espoused would eventually infect the entire planet like a deadly cancer—mostly through the education system.

A Cultural Revolution

The group actually had its genesis in Moscow before officially being founded in 1923. By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks—as Antonio Gramsci would later conclude from his Italian prison cell—realized a change in tactics was needed. The much-anticipated violent revolution of the proletariat predicted by Karl Marx to bring about communism, it turned out, would be much more difficult in Western Europe and the United States than previously anticipated. In fact, it wouldn’t be possible at all without first breaking down the cultural barriers to collectivism, they reasoned.

As such, the Communist Internationale and mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin’s minion Karl Radek arranged a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Among the participants, according to historical records, were Soviet secret police boss Felix Djerzhinski, Hungarian Bolshevik “cultural commissar” Gyorgy Lukacs, and Communist Internationale (Comintern) bigwig Willi Muenzenberg.

At the Moscow meeting, the conspirators decided that what was needed was a more gradual “cultural revolution,” or what eventually came to be known as “cultural Marxism,” in the West and beyond. To advance that program, the subversives agreed on a sinister but brilliant plan. This would involve the destruction of traditional religion and the Christian culture it produced, the collapse of sexual morality and the deliberate undermining of the family, and a wrecking ball to infiltrate and demolish the existing institutions.

Some of these men had experience. For instance, Lukacs, who served as “minister of education and culture” in the Bolshevik Hungarian regime of Bela Kun, had introduced all manner of perversion and grotesque “sex education” in public schools, starting in elementary school. It was part of a campaign to destroy “bourgeois” Christian morality and sexual ethics among the youth. The objective was to eventually de-Christianize Hungary, thereby facilitating a total communist restructuring of the human mind and all of society.

Moving to America

A key tool of these conspirators in Moscow would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. From the Institute in Frankfurt, and later in New York, these cultural revolutionaries would promote feminism, communism, atheism, mass migration, globalism, humanism, multiculturalism, nihilism, hedonism, environmentalism, and all sorts of other “isms” that tended to undermine individual liberty, traditional culture, and morality. Rampant morality-free sexuality and Freudian pseudo-psychology were central to the agenda.

To anyone who has studied America’s public education system today, which spends far more time peddling these “isms” to captive children than providing actual education, the stench of the Frankfurt School’s machinations is unmistakable. In fact, the whole system reeks.

Despite some differences, the group maintained close ties with the Soviet Union. Ironically, though, analysts have long argued that the work of the institute peddling Nietzsche and others helped lay the foundation for the National Socialist takeover of Germany. As the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler gradually parted ways with the more internationally minded socialist tyranny of the butchers in Moscow, the civilization destroyers at the ISR fled to the United States.

There, with crucial assistance from socialist and humanist “education reformer” John Dewey and his disciples, these characters attached themselves to Columbia University’s important Teachers College in 1934. Dewey had been a leading “philosopher” and “educator” at Columbia, retiring just a few years before the Frankfurt School influx was in full swing. Others settled at Berkeley, Princeton, and Brandeis.

With Rockefeller money, Dewey would play a key role in helping the Frankfurt School’s operatives put down roots in America. More on the role of the major foundations in subverting American education will be detailed in an upcoming piece of this series.

The importation of Frankfurt School luminaries was a match made in totalitarian heaven, as Dewey and his disciples had much in common with the cultural Marxist social revolutionaries.

As previously recounted in this series on education, for instance, Dewey was a devoted fan of the Soviet model. In fact, he wrote glowing reports about the supposed successes of Soviet communism in the “New Republic” magazine. Dewey was especially infatuated with the indoctrination centers masquerading as schools—and particularly how they were instilling a “collectivistic mentality” in the children. Dewey’s collectivist, anti-Christian “religious humanism” also appealed to the Frankfurt operatives.

Once the institute’s minions set up shop at Columbia and other prestigious U.S. academic institutions, the Frankfurt School’s rhetoric had to change, at least superficially, as Americans were still ardently devoted to God, country, family, and individual liberty. And so, instead of speaking openly of Marxism and communism, Frankfurt School subversives spoke of “dialectical materialism.” Instead of attacking the family, they attacked “patriarchy.” But the agenda remained the same.

Fighting ‘Fascism’

Almost as soon as they arrived, they began plotting the destruction of America’s traditional values, religion, and form of government under the guise of fighting “fascism.”

Indeed, the luminaries of the Frankfurt School, who represented a wide variety of disciplines, used “education” as a crucial tool for advancing their totalitarian, civilization-destroying philosophies. But they infected much more than just the education system, with their sick ideas spreading out like a poison throughout the intellectual veins of America: the social sciences, entertainment, politics, and beyond.

One of the ways in which Frankfurt School operatives and academics advanced their desired social changes via education was through so-called critical theory. In his 1937 work “Traditional and Critical Theory,” ISR Director Max Horkheimer argued that critical theory—a neo-Marxist tool used to demonize the market system, Christianity, and Western civilization—was aimed at bringing about social change and exposing the alleged oppression of people by capitalism.

Another useful tool for undermining freedom and traditional society was the 1950 work by key Frankfurt School theorists known as “The Authoritarian Personality.” These social “researchers” claimed to discover that the traditional American male and father was actually “authoritarian” because, among other reasons, he held traditional values. Thus, the “patriarchy” and the traditional family—among the most important barriers to tyranny—came under relentless attack as a precursor to “fascism.” Public schools were viewed as tools to combat this alleged problem, and they did so vigorously.

Influence

To understand just how central Teachers College (infected by Frankfurt School and Dewey ideas) would become to the public education in the United States, consider that, by 1950, estimates suggest that a third of principals and superintendents of large school districts were being trained there. Many of these left the college with radical ideas about reality, government, society, family, and economy that came straight from Dewey and the Frankfurt School.

Of course, the damage to America from anti-God, anti-freedom German “intellectuals” began even before the Frankfurt School migrated to Columbia. In fact, Dewey was trained by G. Stanley Hall, who was among the many Americans to study under professor Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig University.

Among other notable highlights, Wundt pioneered the idea of the human being as a soulless animal. Essentially, he viewed people as biological stimulus-response mechanisms that could, and should, be trained in a manner similar to circus animals. This Darwinian, materialist view of the human being reigns supreme today in the education system but has been catastrophic.

Fringe left-wing extremists who support the Frankfurt School’s anti-American agenda have dishonestly attempted to paint criticism of the relevant institutions, academics, and their ideas as “anti-Semitic.” But in reality, the dangerous ideas pose a major threat to Judaism, too, and so countless patriotic and liberty-minded Jews have also joined the fight against the Frankfurt School’s poison.

The threat of these subversives and their cultural Marxism has been recognized at the highest levels of the U.S. government, even recently. Former National Security Council Director of Policy and Planning Richard Higgins, for instance, blasted it in his now-notorious 2017 “Higgins Memo” to President Donald Trump about the ongoing war against the administration and the United States.

The wars against Trump and America “cannot be separated from the cultural Marxist narratives that drive them,” warned Higgins, saying cultural Marxism was most directly tied to the Frankfurt School. “The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory,” he warned. Higgins then quotes Herbert Marcuse, a leading Frankfurt thinker, on how to crush the political and cultural right through persecution and phony “tolerance.”

To this day, reflecting the ISR influx of the early 1930s, Teachers College remains a leading purveyor of socialist poison masquerading as “education.” Its recently released book list includes titles by Bill Ayers, the communist terrorist whose terror group Weather Underground, working with communist Cuban intelligence, bombed the State Department, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, police stations, and more. The Teachers College Press fall selection also includes endless nonsense on “social justice,” racialism, multiculturalism, and other “isms” with roots in Marxism and Frankfurt School strategies.

With society and civilization becoming increasingly unstable as the final vestiges of traditional education are destroyed, the Frankfurt School and its American allies such as Dewey would be pleased with their handiwork. After all, cultural Marxists including Gramsci and ISR thinkers believed that once the old order was destroyed via a “long march” through society’s institutions, Marxism could eventually triumph. On the education front, they now appear largely victorious.

But their overall victory is hardly assured. What comes next depends on whether Americans can be roused from their slumber in time to restore civilization. As the socialists and totalitarians understood well, education will be the key either way.

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.

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.

IFI depends on the support of concerned-citizens like you. Donate now

-and, please-

Written by Anthony J. DeBlasi

At Columbia University’s Teachers College, in the early years of the 20th century, a handful of men inspired by “laws of social evolution” gathered to presume a “science” of education linked with a “science” of human behavior.  They were no mere researchers.  Their sights were on nothing less than the establishment of a new social order.

Laws?  Science?  The scientific method bends out of shape over things like the will.  Love, hate, loyalty, treachery, humility, arrogance, and many other common items of human experience melt science down to its core.  And the study of humans by humans is – well, circular, is it not?

The intellectual arrogance, not to say quackery, of men like John Dewey may be forgiven as a human weakness.  But lording over one’s fellows by presuming to make of them a better breed smells not only of conceit, but of treachery.  In this plot – a good one for mad scientist movies – parent and pastor were to take a back seat while behavioral “experts” rewired the strands of human behavior, using schoolchildren as experimental subjects.  Their motive?  A new age was dawning.  It was a matter of when, not if, collectivism and socialism would come to America.  Was it not the task of the public educator to prepare its subjects for the new order?  Was it not the job of the public teacher to change basic perceptions, attitudes, social relations?

That such high horsing violates democratic basics meant nothing to these “progressives.”  To them, democracy was less a form of government than a means for “reforming” society.  Today’s “liberals” still believe that.  For them, “majority” meant a body to be molded.

The founders of our republic labored diligently to ensure a level political playing field for themselves and for posterity.  But reformist heavyweights of the early 20th century saw fit to tilt the field their way or risk failing in their mission to groom American society for a collectivist future.

Their methodology was and remains to indoctrinate the public through school, media, and church, under the rubrics of “science” and “experts” and “studies” and – most conniving of all – “the changing times.”  Individuals who think for themselves and express unorthodox views must be marginalized and denied equal access to media, market, and due process.  Collectivist agenda operatives are still as anxious as ever to ram their great ideas down the public throat.  If it means becoming “journalists,” political activists, “social justice” mercenaries, or “pastors,” lying and deceiving are not a problem.

How can any majority weed out bad ideas when ideas don’t circulate freely and compete in an open market?  When journalists spread political narratives instead of reporting the news?  When the curiosity of the child, who asks why-why-why, is dulled or washed out by graduation time?  When church and school become conduits of propaganda instead of places for reflection and learning?

It was from the early-twentieth-century Pandora’s box of questionable theory and Marxist fever that the missionaries for educational reform issued.  The minds of the young in this country – particularly those who as teachers and leaders were to transmit the gospel of a new social order – were subverted by Marxist activists a long time ago.

Do you wonder why you never got this in history?

Reorienting the mind

I thought it silly, while in school in 1946, to let kids do what they wanted to do in school.  For me, and for a school pal, the “Progressive” experiment was great fun.  My friend Bob and I were permitted to cut classes we didn’t care for in favor of painting murals on the walls of Brooklyn’s Halsey Junior High School.  That we both succeeded academically proves not the wisdom of Dewey’s theories but that diligent students manage to transcend obstacles to their progress.

Progressive educators now wire young minds via satellite, assuming an unfounded desirability of forming a global community of similar (washed) minds.  What’s wrong with globalist thinking is a subject for a library.  But the right to be different and to associate with those of like kind and mind continues to shelve the one-world notion of human association under “Fiction.”

Quality of life faded after “group” trumped individual, a side-effect of progressive leveling.  The pressure to conform replaced the incentive to rise.  Group orientation made it easier to alienate youth from family and tradition, a precondition for forming a collective social order.  This is a society that links generation with generation in shared values and cultural ties interferes with establishing a collective society under totalitarian rule.

New-age honchos like to operate behind the scenes, à la the Wizard of Oz, pulling levers of screen, magazine, lyrics, and stage to alter society by filling budding minds with “politically correct” images and ideas, playing on youth’s innocence and natural idealism, stirring passions untempered by reflection.  The result of a long plague of such brainwashing and indoctrination is a base of voters with moral and intellectual disability and an abiding aversion to family, country, God, and truth.

The mental holiday declared by early progressive educators spawned a most dangerous social myth, that of value-neutral ethics.  A value-neutral society is for all purposes a valueless society.  Freed of timeless standards of ethical behavior, people act as though anything-goes is normal and right, unaware that they have become valueless selves that no therapy or “self-esteem” program can prop up with real confidence or sinless theology fill with lasting hope.

“Progress”

The original goals and tactics have been forgotten.  Today’s public-school educators are unaware of their own history and why they think and teach as they do.  But though the memory is lost, the desire for bringing forth a “new social order” remains imbedded in their consciousness.

Sadly, the world caves in on minds when they actually face the reality that the only possible reform is self-reform, when better communities and a “better world” can be had only with better selves, so crucial in a democratic form of government.

In conclusion

The “education problem” in America is not one of inadequate funding or management.  It is one of defective educational philosophy.  The legacy of early Marxists on their way to a “global” future under some species of collectivism has been the worst possible foundation for a sound education system.  Established educational philosophy is mired in misconceptions regarding both the nature and the business of education.  Public-school
teachers are victims of teacher education that emphasizes ideology over substance, relativism over enduring values.

Fundamentals that must be restored include the following: school authority is subservient to parental authority.  The school has no business vilifying tradition, slurring religion, or disallowing individual accountability.  In short, it has no mandate to alter society.

And so sparks will continue to fly between those who want parents to be in control of the education of their children, in an atmosphere where multiple points of view may compete fairly, and those who insist on dragging the outdated baggage of their Marxist ancestors to its ultimate destination: the dustbin of history.

This article was originally published at AmericanThinker.com

Last time I presented some of the background about why I enjoyed Bruce Deitrick Price’s new book Saving K-12: A Citizens Guide to Improving Public Education. In this post, I will present a few examples.

Giving the background on a topic is easy. Choosing examples on that topic when there are so many within one book, is not easy.

“The Education Establishment has spent 100 years making public schools dumber,” Price writes. Ouch. He explains:

That’s a common impression which, after years of research, I could finally explain. John Dewey and his colleagues were in love with social engineering. In devotion to this passion, they were willing to throw almost everything else overboard.

Price writes that the “two most challenging questions in education are: why do public schools settle for so much mediocrity and inefficiency; and how can we fix the situation?”

Mediocrity? Here’s Price:

Please note, my harsh judgment of the public schools is not something I dreamed up. You hear about it in the media every day. The U.S. has 50 million functional illiterates (an unforgivable failure by self-proclaimed experts).

Our students don’t compete well on international tests. A brainy guy like Bill Gates studied the public schools and said, you know what, the schools are so bad they are a threat to the country’s future! In fact, Gates merely repeated what a huge governmental commission concluded in 1983 (the famous Nation at Risk report).

In part one I noted my weariness with the failure of the national school reform movement. This is from Bruce Deitrick Price:

If you look back, you can find that many smart, sensible people have been writing laments and alarms about public schools for a long time. The decade 1948-1958 witnessed the publication of at least 10 major books with titles such as Retreat from Learning, Quackery in the Public Schools, Educational Wastelands, and Why Johnny Can’t Read.

“So, we can take it as stipulated,” Price writes, “that the nation’s public schools ran wildly off the tracks, starting a long time ago.”

Are you depressed yet?

In the first two chapters, you’ll read:

1) Culture Wars

“American children wander forlornly in an alien landscape they know little about and understand less.”

2) Reading Wars

“The Education Establishment favors the theories and methods that lead to bad results, and this is most blatantly so in reading…. But why? The short answer, I believe, is because John Dewey and his followers were far-left ideologues. They thought leveling was a good plan.”

So much of the school reform movement’s commentary and analysis amounts to a blah blah blah aimed at not overly offending the educational BLOB. Those writers can then still seem friendly to a system that is not friendly to Western Civilization.

In chapter 6, Price brilliantly compares Common Core with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — both of which, he writes, are “bad to the bone.” “Here are ten descriptions that apply equally to Obamacare and Common Core” (I have only listed the headings):

1. Huge Federal Power Grab
2. Not a Response to Popular Demand
3. Incomprehensible by Design.
4. Public Excluded from Legislative Process
5. Dishonest Marketing
6. Media Complicit
7. Very Expensive and Would Get More So
8. Fundamental Transformation
9. Totalitarian Intent
10. Instant Train Wreck

In chapter 7 Price writes:

Take care of basic skills and basic knowledge, and everything else will fall into place. Unfortunately, our Education Establishment has spent decades building a fact-free school. Kids are kept busy all day but they are not expected to learn a lot.

Math. History. Methods. Common Core. Price covers a lot of ground in 180 pages. In the “About the Author” section at the end of the book, one of the endorsements reads “Bruce Price is one of the 10 people in the country who can explain what’s going on in education.”

Lenin asked his famous question in 1901: “What is to be done?”

Today in education, that question remains as hot and as urgent as an oncoming typhoon.

Oh, if Americans would realize the urgency…every year marks the end of the 12 years another group of kids has spent going from 1st grade through 12th.

Bruce Deitrick Price’s book is worth buying by those who appreciate reading the work of someone who doesn’t pull his punches. Click here for Amazon.com‘s page on Saving K-12.

The Left is working overtime to silence and/or marginalize conservative voices in America
The time to support IFI is now!