A coalition of Republican lawmakers led by U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced legislation to shut down the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that there is no constitutional authority for the controversial bureaucracy to exist. Top Republicans from Reagan to Trump have called for such a move but it has remained elusive thus far.

The bill, dubbed “H.R. 899 – To terminate the Department of Education,” is just one sentence long: “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2023.” If approved, the federal agency would have to cease operations prior to next year, with control reverting to states and local communities.

The liberty-minded Kentucky lawmaker, who announced the move on Twitter on February 14, has been a longtime champion of ending federal involvement in education. “Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” the congressman said when he filed the same bill in the previous Congress.

“States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students,” he said. “Schools should be accountable. Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school.”

Massie expanded on his views in an interview with this writer shortly after Trump’s election. Noting that the outfit was established by unpopular President Jimmy Carter as a “re-election tactic, as a ploy,” Massie said his own legislation was originally a response to constituents concerned about federal indoctrination of their children under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Seizing on the opportunity, Massie filed the bill, putting liberals in the very awkward position of having to defend the Trump administration’s involvement in the education of children if they wanted to keep the department. “The left understands that this is where you win or lose — in the schools and in the teaching of the children,” Massie said.

Other lawmakers who joined Massie by co-sponsoring the bill include the influential former U.S. House Freedom Caucus Chairman U.S. Representative Andy Biggs. Also co-sponsors are U.S. Representatives Mary Miller of Illinois, Russ Fulcher of Idaho, Georgia’s Mike Collins, Lauren Boebert from Colorado, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, and Chip Roy of Texas.

The Department of Education has been a key player in the dumbing down and radicalization of public education across the nation. Whistleblowers such as the late Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as senior education adviser in the Reagan administration, warned that it was filled with subversives working to dumb down Americans and undermine the principles the nation was founded on.

U.S. Parents Involved in Education, a national grassroots group working to end all federal involvement in education, celebrated the bill. “Now more than ever, parents and other freedom-loving Americans see the nefarious influence of USED and want to end its unconstitutional authority over education,” said USPIE President Sheri Few, praising Massie for his persistence on this key issue.

Shutting down the department would represent a “first, big step,” said Few. However, there are other agencies unconstitutionally meddling in education as well, she warned, adding that USPIE has a blueprint with five steps to fully get the feds out of education. Considering the atmosphere in D.C., USPIE is currently working on a plan for states to extricate themselves from Fed Ed on their own, she added.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send an email to your U.S. Representative encouraging him/her to co-sponsor H.R. 899. Remind your representative that unelected federal bureaucrats are too far removed to understand or dictate policies for local school districts in Illinois. They should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development. Local school boards, elected by local voters, are best equipped to determine education policy.

More, you may want to point out that reducing the size of the federal government may help let taxpayers keep more of their hard-earned money.

It has been almost 20 years since it has been documented that children in our schools are in grave danger of being sexually abused by teachers.  In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft completed a U.S. Department of Education sponsored study on Educator Sexual Misconduct.  The seminal findings showed that 9.6 percent of children in our schools, public and private, are victims of educator sexual misconduct sometime between kindergarten and 12^th grade.

Almost nothing has been done about this.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS), at least, has begun to make some steps toward addressing the imminent threat to children by expanding the CPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) and greatly increasing the capability to investigate abuse allegations. They have had some success.

According to their recently released report, from late 2018 until the end of 2022 the OIG opened a little over 1,700 cases and closed almost 1, 400, leaving 300 plus cases still open. With 30 investigators on their staff, that’s not bad.

What is not so good is only 16 criminal charges wound up being filed against the accused and not all of them were convicted. It is not clear how many were convicted or what sentences they received. Moreover, we don’t even know who they were. In the CPS OIG report they are not named. Incredible.

We also don’t know how many of the accused were fired, lost their license, or merely received some kind of internal discipline. One teacher shared “images from a pornographic website while sharing his screen with students,” supposedly inadvertently. The Board gave him a “Level Three Performance Improvement Plan,” whatever that is. It’s essentially nothing. Why?

It appears that most of the accused are still working for CPS, but who knows?

Reading between the lines of the OIG report, it appears that the CPS administration and the Board have to dance delicately through the contractual minefield set up by the teachers unions to protect all teachers regardless of what they might have done. Why would there be any question about firing a teacher who shows pornography to children, whether it was on purpose or accidentally? That teacher should be gone and any union that stands behind him or her discredits itself.

Historically and even to this day, very little attention has been focused on the predators in our schools.  In 2021, Illinois State Representative Michelle Mussman (D-Schaumburg) introduced House Bill 1975, supposedly to address sexual abuse in the schools.  That bill requires educating teachers about educator sexual abuse and how to recognize the signs of “grooming.”  It is a common practice of child sexual predators to “groom,” or seduce, children over a long period of time.  Essentially, the predator will develop an increasingly intimate relationship with the child, introduce secrecy at some point, and eventually sexualize the relationship.

Mussman named the act “Faith’s Law,” after Faith Colson, a former Schaumburg High School Student who had been groomed and sexually exploited by one of her teachers starting in 2001. Based on Dr. Shakeshaft’s study we know that Faith was only one of an estimated 16,000 students in Illinois who were abused by an educator that year.

But what does this bill do to prevent what happened to Faith and 16,000 other Illinois children in 2001? Not much, if anything. The bill requires that teachers be trained to recognize grooming behavior, schools to set up policies to establish better boundaries between teachers and students, and to create a list of sexual abuse response and prevention resources to be made available to the public. The bill also expands grooming beyond electronic activity to include in person and third-party conduct.

This proposal proves that our legislators, including Mussman, simply do not take the protection of childhood innocence seriously, or are too uninformed themselves to fashion a solution.

How could anyone graduate with a childhood education degree and not know what grooming is?  There are mountains of published papers on grooming.  Everyone even remotely connected to issues of child protection knows that grooming behaviors should be viewed as a giant red flag.  Expanding the grooming law does little since you must prove intent to abuse to prosecute.  That’s almost impossible until after the abuse occurs.

Libraries already are filled with sexual abuse prevention resources, most of which nobody reads.  Just ask your librarian.  As for creating policies that establish appropriate boundaries between teacher and student?  If this hasn’t already been done in every school the people in charge should be prosecuted for malfeasance.

This law is little more than virtue signaling.

One reason the problem is so large is due the teachers’ unions.  They actively protect teachers who are predators.  Examples are everywhere of the unions shielding teachers who regularly engage in grooming behaviors.  The unions will not let them be fired.  Teachers have been known to assign obscene materials to children to read as part of a class assignment and nothing happens to the teacher. Even when caught sexually abusing children the unions often go to bat for them.

Another problem is the obscenity exemption for teachers in Illinois.  This allows librarians to provide, and teachers to recommend, highly sexualized and often deranged and perverted books for children to read or study.  Providing this kind of material to children is a typical grooming behavior of predators.  Such materials are used to begin to sexualize the relationship and to arouse the child.  It’s completely legal in Illinois schools.

Senate Bill 818, which was voted for by Mussman and 59 fellow Illinois House Democrats (all Republicans voted against it), makes the grooming problem even worse.  It mandates that all schools implement sex education programs – Kindergarten to 12^th Grade – which are to be based on the “National Sex Education Standards,” although there is a provision that allows each district to opt out of the standards if they want.

Such a farce.  These “standards” were developed by an ad hoc group of sexual progressives.  In addition to Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, Answer, and Advocates for Youth, a host of other left leaning sexual activists developed the document.

Those who created the standards believe that every person has a right to experience sexual pleasure from birth to death, that children have a right to experience sexual pleasure whenever and with whomever they want, that purity is a false value, and that children should be encouraged to experiment sexually with same and opposite sex relationships.  The standards teach that all sexual activity is good as long as there is mutual consent, disregarding that children cannot legally give consent.

Only a handful of school districts in Illinois opted into the standards. In Chicago they were using the perverse standards even before the law was passed.

The National Sex Education Standards do not call for a class in comprehensive sex ed. No. The standards require that sex ed be infused in every class, that it be part of every subject wherever possible.

These are not standards. This law destroys every remaining sexual standard established over the last two millennia. And it turns every teacher into an accomplice for every predator in our schools. It is institutionalized grooming on a mass scale and neutralizes any possible good, however little, Faith’s Law might have achieved.

Despicable.

As Mao Zedong took over China with his communist revolutionaries, he sparked one of the largest mass migrations of the 20th century. Between 1948 and 1950, an estimated 2 million Chinese refugees fled Mao’s regime and escaped to Taiwan and other countries around the world. While Mao was razing and restructuring Chinese culture and society, these refugees were able to begin new lives in safer and freer countries.

While the Chinese mass migration makes the history books, a similar 2-million-in-2-years migration is currently happening—across educational borders. An analysis published by Harvard’s Education Next Institute (EN) recently announced that, between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2022, “Our polling data indicate that district-operated schools lost 4% of student enrollments to other types of schooling between 2020 and 2022.” EN went on to say, “If that percentage is accurate, it means that nearly 2 million students have shifted from traditional public schools to alternative school arrangements.”

Individual examples of the recent dramatic shift in educational choices are not hard to find. While New York City (NYC) public schools have been steadily losing students over the past five years, they lost 10 percent of their remaining students during the COVID-19 epidemic alone. Those children are not expected to return, and the NYC public school system is now at a 15-year enrollment low. California’s state school system is at a 20-year enrollment low; over 270,000 students have left since COVID. Los Angeles alone lost more than 10 percent of students. The Chicago government school system is projected to have lost 100,000 students—more than 25 percent of total enrollment—by the end of the ten-year period between 2015 and 2025.

And states such as Michigan, Rhode Island, and Minnesota have all experienced drops in enrollment, continuing even after the initial COVID-19 year. Now, EN does caution that “the overall picture shows less change than media reports portray,” and that these trends do not constitute a “mass exodus,” but the statistics are nonetheless remarkably significant.

Harsh lockdown policies and virus mitigation measures have surely been significant in shifting the nation’s educational choices. According to Education Next’s analysis:

“In November 2020, Education Next polling data revealed widespread parental worries about the learning loss, social isolation, emotional distress, and physical inactivity induced by school closures, online learning programs, and other measures designed to prevent Covid spread.”

However, the presence of COVID-19 lockdown policies can’t be the only factor; EN also points out that when pandemic measures were relaxed, their polls showed a notable improvement in parent satisfaction. “By spring 2022 … parental distress had subsided.” Yet enrollments continue to decline. Something else must be up.

As the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) suggests, what started as “pandemic pods” during the thick of the crisis eventually became co-ops and “microschools,” which many families have found to work better for them than government schools. Catholic schools and private schools were more likely to remain open during the pandemic and thus received an influx of students. In short, FEE assesses, “Parents are recognizing that they have many more options for their children’s education and are continuing to abandon government-assigned district schools.”

This change is notably visible in EN’s data. Contrary to their government schools over the same two-year period, private schools (8 to 10 percent), charter schools (5 to 7 percent) and homeschooling (6 to 7 percent) all boasted shares of enrollment greater than when the pandemic started. And the enrollment numbers match the parental polls:

“Parents expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their child’s school if their student was attending a private or charter school rather than a district school.”

This change in the nation’s educational landscape has provoked a range of reactions from the nation’s leaders—on the one hand, no fewer than 18 new states over the past two years have passed laws broadening education choice. However, not all government officials have been as friendly to the widening school choice trend; the U.S. Department of Education recently considered instituting new hurdles for charter schools to receive government funds, inciting bipartisan protest and raising the hue and cry of even powerful liberal advocate Michael Bloomberg. Government reactions to parental choices will likely continue to unfold along one or the other of those two lines, and for Christians, who are commanded to pray for our leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), this is both a timely and an important area to focus on.

In a plummeting culture such as ours, educational choice is becoming increasingly imperative. Former governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, inadvertently expressed one reason why: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This is a stark departure from the biblical model of education, in which parents are responsible for teaching their children (Deuteronomy 6:7, Ephesians 6:4). Schools help parents accomplish that goal; parents don’t abdicate their responsibility to the school system, and neither should that responsibility be divested from them by force of law.

When parents decide that their child would be better served by a private school, charter school, homeschooling, or online learning, it should not be the authority of the school district, local, state or federal governments to tell them otherwise. Doing so flips the biblical model on its head, and comments such as McAuliffe’s are foundationally wicked, because they imply that schools, not parents, are the ultimate authority over the education of children.

Education freedom should be championed in every state in the Union. Make no mistake about it, parents who want their children to attend government schools should be able to do so. However, the rising migration across educational borders—only accelerated by the the pandemic—also means “we, the people,” must work to reduce all barriers to education choices so that parents, not the government, are enabled to make the best decisions possible about their children’s development. This should be a consideration in picking candidates to vote for in this upcoming election, and in every future election we participate in.

As state governments respond to public pressure and work to rein in LGBT extremism in schools, the White House issued an executive order seeking to impose more gender confusion and homosexual activism on school children across the nation and beyond. The effort puts parental rights squarely in the crosshairs.

This executive order represents all-out war being declared by Biden on the traditional family, biological reality and biblical sexual norms, according to critics and analysts. It comes as inflation surges, supply chains collapse, millions of illegal immigrants pour across the open Southern border, and social tensions reach alarming levels.

Perhaps the most dangerous element of the scheme is to declare any effort to stop a child from mutilating his or her body as harmful to the child. The idea is embedded throughout the document, and could result in devastating interventions in families by education officials and even child welfare services. Parents nationwide are already facing such tactics.

Among other school-related policies, the executive order calls on the U.S. Department of Education to establish a “Working Group on LGBTQI+ Students and Families.” The new outfit will be in charge of imposing a broad range of pro-LGBT policies on states, school districts, and educational institutions — including “more access to gender-affirming care.”

According to the White House, the policies promoted by this new homosexual and transgender working group are intended to “promote safe and inclusive learning environments in which all students thrive.” That is, of course, thinly veiled code language for promoting homosexuality and gender confusion at school while demonizing traditional values.

In reality, the students who are truly excluded and unsafe — in many cases even facing bullying from staff — are those who resist or even question the LGBT dogma. Countless children nationwide have reported vicious persecution from school officials and fellow students for refusing to bow before the golden LGBT statue.

Another key element of the executive order targets so-called “conversion therapy,” which is designed to help people — especially young people — struggling with unwanted sexual attraction or gender dysphoria. While Biden has no power to ban it with an edict, his order will encourage states to broadly infringe on free speech, religious liberty, parental rights, and the right of people to seek counseling they want.

Ultimately, one of the goals is to push back against the “more than 300 anti-LGBTQI+ laws” introduced across America that protect school children from indoctrination and protect girls from having to compete in sports against males. The scheme also seeks to curtail state efforts to limit children’s ability to obtain life-altering opposite-sex hormones and surgical mutilation under the guise of “health care.”

“The message of the president’s new order is unambiguous: absolutely zero restrictions on bombarding children with morally degenerate sexual and gender propaganda and then permanently mutilating their genitals will be tolerated in Joe Biden’s America,” wrote Darren Beattie at Revolver.News, calling for Republicans to criminalize the mutilation of children.

The consequences of allowing this war on children to continue butchering countless victims are beyond intolerable. And so, this lawless decree by Biden’s handlers must be exposed and resisted by every American and every political leader at every level of government.

Watch Alex Newman being interviewed by Dr. Duke Pesta here:

This article was originally published by FreedomProject.com.

Lawmakers and union bosses are increasingly speaking out against the violence and rampant sexual abuse that plagues children in government schools across Illinois and beyond. Laws have even been proposed and passed to supposedly deal with the escalating crisis.

However, nothing is being done to address the root causes of the problem: godlessness, hopelessness, and the lack of accountability for students and adults, all of which permeate government-controlled “education” today.

Consider the gravity of the situation. At one government school in Chicago, a dozen staff members had to be removed for what were described by the district as “inappropriate adult relationships with students,” as well as for helping cover it up.

The scandal, which included adults grooming and even having sex with children, sparked national news in November. Incredibly, while the district fired most of those involved and is seeking to pull their teaching licenses, it does not appear that prosecutors were called in due to supposed loopholes in the law.

But the sexualization and abuse of children is also nothing new. According to a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation, police investigated more than 520 juvenile sexual assault and abuse cases in the city’s government schools over a 10-year period. Hundreds of students were victimized and even raped by teachers and school employees. The stories are heart-wrenching.

In response to the horror, last month, Gov. JB Pritzker signed “Faith’s Law” (HB 1975) into law expanding the definition of “grooming” and adding protections for children against predators in schools. The measure was named after Faith Colson, who was sexually abused by a teacher 20 years ago in Schaumburg, Illinois.

“Students deserve to be safe in their classrooms, period,” declared the far-left governor, who has been a major advocate of sexualizing children in schools. “Anything short of that is a call to action and Faith’s Law is another critical step in creating and preserving safe and welcoming learning environments for all students.”

But of course, with Pritzker’s full support, government schools in Illinois are literally grooming and sexualizing students right now in the same way pedophiles do, as former teacher and celebrated activist Rebecca Friedrichs explained in a piece for the Washington Times.

From exposing children to graphic sex materials and perversion to breaking down taboos and modesty under the guise of “comprehensive sex education,” children across the state and beyond are being put in great danger by the hyper-sexualized so-called “education” being foisted on them by government “educators.”

Even two decades ago, the U.S. Department of Education reported that as many as 10 percent of children in government schools would be sexually abused by employees of the system before graduation.

“The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by [Catholic] priests,” Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft, who researched the issue, was quoted as saying by CBS about the problem.

Violence in Illinois government schools is out of control, too. It got so bad that in 2019, the legislature felt compelled to pass a law known as the School Threat Assessment Bill (HB 1561). The measure required schools to develop threat assessment teams, protocols, and more.

But it obviously has not worked, with lawmakers and union leaders demanding more action to enforce compliance and protect students from violence. State Representatives Fred Crespo (D-Streamwood) and Tony McCombie (R-Sterling) are now co-sponsoring legislation to beef up the 2019 law.

“We hear every day more stories, unfortunately, about incidences in our schools and we need to keep our kids safe, we need to keep our teachers safe, and hopefully this will be a pro-active movement that we can do just that,” said Rep. McCombie about the bill.

Illinois Education Association (IEA) President Kathi Griffin, who is backing the legislative action, spoke out as well.  “Violence is increasing in our schools across the state,” she said in a statement last month. “Our educators should not have to constantly worry about their safety and the safety of their students.”

“This is not their problem to solve. They’re under enough stress already,” continued Griffin in her remarks urging school districts to obey school safety laws. “School administrators need to take immediate action to keep our students, staff and communities safe.”

Meanwhile, as shown by government data highlighted by the Illinois Family Institute, government schools are destroying children academically, too. Less than a third of 8^th-grade students are proficient in any core subject, the latest National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) revealed.

In short, countless children in government schools are being sexually abused and brutalized by adults and fellow students — even as they suffer academically — while government passes meaningless laws pretending to address the symptoms of the horrific problem.

Of course, the real reason that children in government schools are facing more and more violence, dumbing down and sexual exploitation by adults is that the environment is corrupt to the core — by design. It is the fruit of removing God and biblical morality from education as part of an evil agenda.

Once one understands that the goals of the architects of the government system were never to provide a sound education, true solutions such as an exodus from public schools and defunding the corrupt system can grow. That is already starting to happen, but much more urgency is needed.

Read more:

Educators Called Out For ‘Ideological Grooming’ of Student (AFR)

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.

Using data primarily gathered through the public-education system, Big Brother and the collectivists running the government schools now know more about American children than their own parents do. The awesome powers offered by “Big Data” will blow your mind.

In fact, authorities have vacuumed up so much private information on America’s youth that, according to a U.S. Department of Education report, it’s now possible to predict the “future behavior and interests” of children. It also allows the government to manipulate their thoughts and attitudes like never before.

The data-gathering has become so intrusive and extreme that some critics have even referred to it as the “data-rape” of American children. And this is just the start.

From biometric data and private health care information to academic records, online browsing habits, and mental-health data, government schools and technocratic policymakers across the United States want it all—from “cradle to career” and beyond, as authorities often put it. Thanks to federal grants, they’re getting it, and sharing it.

Hundreds of data points on each child are now being collected and stored in databases accessible by state and federal authorities. Privacy laws and regulations prohibiting the creation of national databases with student information were ignored and pushed aside beginning during the Obama administration, and even earlier.

Through a byzantine combination of public schools, government agencies, social-media companies, crony contractors, testing companies, non-profit organizations, and more, there’s now more data collected on children than anyone could have imagined even just a few short years ago. Many times, the children do not even realize they’re giving their private data to Big Brother—forever.

The tip of the iceberg occasionally becomes visible. Right now, for example, there’s an ongoing lawsuit against the non-profit College Board, currently headed by Common Core architect David Coleman, for allegedly collecting and selling private student data to third parties without the consent of the children or their parents. According to the plaintiffs, numerous laws have been broken.

That is all a big deal, of course. And it’s wrong. But it pales in comparison to the dangers of what Big Government and Big Business are doing right now—and what they have planned for the future.

The Common Core national standards imposed on the United States by the Obama administration, covered in the most recent piece in this series, super-charged the government’s data-harvesting and data-mining operations. After that, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which Obama referred to as a “Christmas miracle,” took it even further.

But it has been going on for quite some time. Consider a 2012 “Issue Brief” titled “Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics.” In the report, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology dropped a bombshell regarding what all this data was going to be used for: Basically, the feds want to make predictions about your children.

In the report, authorities said that “online learning systems” allow the government to “capture streams of fine-grained learner behaviors.” These systems send to a database the “time-stamped student input and behaviors captured as students work within the system,” the document explained.

Authorities then combine that behavioral data with other external information sources, including sensitive personal data held by the school, the district, or the state, according to the report. Then, the information is put to use making predictions and shaping “interventions.”

“A predictive model combines demographic data (from an external student information system) and learning/behavior data from the student learning database to track a student’s progress and make predictions about his or her future behaviors or performance,” the report explains (emphasis added).

The data being collected can also allow the government to peer into the minds of students. “Big data captured from users’ online behaviors enables algorithms to infer the users’ knowledge, intentions, and interests and to create models for predicting future behavior and interest,” the report adds.

Using controversial federally funded “surveys” under the guise of “health,” public schools across the United States have been collecting some of the most intimate data imaginable: political views, religious beliefs, sexual behaviors, sensitive information on parents or the home, private medical information, and much more.

Among the creepiest elements of the data-gathering and data-mining machine is the ability it gives to peer into the innermost thoughts and feelings of students. With access to this data, and the computing power to process it all, government and those connected to it can become nightmarishly powerful—and they will, if nothing is done to stop it, as the people of China are discovering under the “social credit” system.

Consider a 2010 speech to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), also the subject of part 9 in this series, by then-U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. In it, the Chicago radical celebrated the rapidly expanding data-gathering colossus and the new powers it would unleash.

“More robust data systems and a new generation of assessments can assist teachers and principals to improve their practices and tailor their instruction in ways that were largely unthinkable in the past,” said Duncan, who regularly boasted about using schools to brainwash children with “sustainability” propaganda. “We have advanced data systems that we are constantly improving.”

In the decade since then, those “advanced data systems” have become ever more sophisticated, enabling governments to build unfathomable personal profiles on every public-school student in the United States. Even students in private schools and home schools are now in the cross-hairs of the data-mining machine.

Some of the technological tools that have already been used by the federal government in these areas have sparked grave privacy concerns. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Education released a report titled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century” that became a lightning rod for criticism.

Among other developments, the report included revelations about the sorts of technology being used in some federal programs to gather data on children. One of the tools, for example, was described as a “facial expression camera.” The report said this was used to “detect emotion” and “capture facial expressions,” with the data then processed through software and fed into databases.

Other tools described in the report, which has since been taken off the Education Department’s website, included a “posture analysis seat,” a “pressure mouse,” and a “wireless skin conductance sensor.” All of these existing technologies are used to monitor and collect “physiological response data” that can “examine student frustration.”

“Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself,” the report explains, with “affective” data referring to students’ attitudes and feelings, rather than academic or educational abilities. “Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge.”

More recently, a U.S. company called BrainCo developed a headband that measures and collects data on students’ “brainwaves.” BrainCo, which is part funded by Chinese state-owned companies, has already trialed the devices on 10,000 students in China. Back in 2017, the CEO talked of building the “world’s largest database,” which could be analyzed by artificial intelligence to better detect emotions. Some U.S. schools have reportedly tried the devices, too.

In 2017, the federal government funded a project to build a “friendly social robot” to collect highly sensitive psychological data on children. Known as “EMAR,” or Ecological Momentary Assessment Robot, the robot “gathers teen mental health data in a public high school setting,” the National Science Foundation said.

One of the major concerns surrounding all this intrusive data-gathering technology is that it’s being used by government schools and the education establishment to manipulate the thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of children. As the technology advances, it will allow bureaucrats and technocrats to do much more of this in the future, too.

Under new “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) programs, which are currently all the rage in educational circles, authorities set goals for various attitudes and values they want children to hold. By testing for these “affective” characteristics, the technology can help determine whether children hold the government-mandated attitudes. If not, the programs then help to develop “interventions” to get the desired attitude inculcated in the child.

As far back as 2016, Education Week revealed that, under the guise of providing “personalized learning experiences,” new technology was aiming at students’ “individual emotions, cognitive processes, ‘mindsets,’ and character and personality traits.” So-called “non-cognitive competencies” were also targets.

That same year, the U.S. Department of Education released a “National Education Technology Plan” peddling “assessments” that measure “non-cognitive competencies” including “attitudes that facilitate functioning well in school, work, and life.” How the feds would determine the correct “attitudes” for children to have was not specified.

The potential for abuse is self-evidently enormous. What if these tools get into the hands of evil-doers? What if they already are in the hands of evil-doers? Do Americans really want unelected bureaucrats at the far-left U.S. Department of Education—where 99.7 percent of 2016 donations to presidential campaigns went to Hillary Clinton—determining what attitudes and values children will hold on controversial issues such as homosexual marriage, immigration, and abortion?

When one realizes that the public education system was literally created by Utopian collectivists to fundamentally transform society, as this series has documented extensively since the first segment, the dangers are obvious and extraordinary.

Indeed, the architects and current leaders of the government-school machine have long been open about their desire to shift the United States away from a liberty-minded Christian society, and toward collectivism and humanism. With these powerful tools, resistance will become increasingly difficult, if not futile, for children held captive by the system.

Another major concern is that all of this data being gathered by schools is being fused with labor and career data. For years, authorities have been openly working on connecting the various “education” databases packed with information gathered on Americans by schools with that collected by other government organs.

Officials are hoping that this enormous amount of data, all brought together in one place, will help them do what previous attempts at central planning have always failed to do: accurately understand the needs of the economy, and then adjust production, employment, consumption, training, and education accordingly.

Then, imagine combining all of that with emerging developments such as artificial intelligence and super computers with unprecedented capabilities, plus all of the data being gathered on Americans by agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the National Security Agency, and more. Big Brother will know everything about everyone, literally from “the cradle,” as the Utopians themselves often say.

It’s a recipe for disaster—or even a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.

Around the world, the U.N. is also leaning heavily on governments to start collecting, sharing, analyzing, using, and weaponizing all sorts of data on children via schools. And more than a few foreign governments—communist China and certain Western European governments, among others—have been more than happy to jump on the bandwagon.

Humanity must resist. Americans, in particular, have the means to effectively resist, if only they can find the will.

Privacy is extremely important to a free society. That’s why America’s Founding Fathers enshrined it in the U.S. Constitution. Without privacy, liberty cannot exist. And without liberty, prosperity and other blessings enjoyed by the people of the United States will end as well.

Americans must demand an end to the Orwellian data-gathering apparatus, and protect their children from it, before it’s too late.

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.

Written by Makenna McCoy

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced a new rule that aims to protect the First Amendment rights of students, teachers, and student organizations at public colleges and universities.

The final rule, entitled Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities, serves to defend First Amendment rights in two primary ways. First, in order to receive grants from the Department of Education, public colleges and universities must uphold religious liberty and free speech rights. Second, public colleges and universities must treat religious student groups the same as any secular student group, providing them with the same rights, funding, and privileges.

In announcing the rule, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos declared, “Students should not be forced to choose between their faith and their education, and an institution controlled by a religious organization should not have to sacrifice its religious beliefs to participate in Department grants and programs.”

Although the same guidelines for public universities do not apply to private universities, the rule does require private universities to abide by their own policies on freedom of expression in order to receive Department funding. WORLD also notes that the rule lays out “a shield for religious schools” by establishing that Title IX’s prohibition of discrimination based on sex, which some now claim encompasses sexual orientation and gender identity, is not binding for colleges “controlled by a religious institution.”

The new rule has been particularly beneficial for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a Christian campus ministry. Greg Jao, Director of External Relations for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, pointed out that the rule was necessary because universities were accepting some faith-based student groups and refusing others. Most often, he says, the groups that were rejected were those that required their student leaders to comply with the group’s religious beliefs.

Jao also recognizes that the rule not only benefits Christian groups, but all religious organizations because “universities should welcome all religious groups equally, in order to encourage tolerance, pluralism and religious diversity.”

The Department of Education rule will go into effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register sometime in November.

This article was ordinally published at NCFamily.org.

Written by Walter E. Williams

The Michigan State University administration pressured professor Stephen Hsu to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation because he touted research that found police are not more likely to shoot black Americans. The study found: “The race of a police officer did not predict the race of the citizen shot. In other words, black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were.” For political reasons, the authors of the study sought its retraction.

The U.S. Department of Education warned UCLA that it may impose fines for improperly and abusively targeting white professor Lt. Col. W. Ajax Peris for disciplinary action over his use of the n-word while reading to his class Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that contained the expressions “when your first name becomes “n——r,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are). Referring to white civil rights activists King wrote, “They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as ‘dirty n——r-lovers.'”

Boston University is considering changing the name of its mascot Rhett because of his link to “Gone with the Wind.” Almost 4,000 Rutgers University students signed a petition to rename campus buildings Hardenbergh Hall, Frelinghuysen Hall and Milledoler Hall because these men were slave owners. University of Arkansas students petitioned to remove a statue of J. William Fulbright because he was a segregationist who opposed the Brown v. Board of Education that ruled against school segregation.

The suppression of free speech and ideas by the elite is nothing new. It has a long ugly history. Galileo Galilei was a 17th-century Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes called “father of modern physics.” The Catholic Church and other scientists of his day believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo offered evidence that the Earth traveled around the sun — heliocentrism. That made him “vehemently suspect of heresy” and was forced to recant and sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition and was later commuted to house arrest for the rest of his life.

Much of today’s totalitarianism, promotion of hate and not to mention outright stupidity, has its roots on college campuses. Sources that report on some of the more egregious forms of the abandonment of free inquiry, hate and stupidity at our colleges are: College Reform and College Fix.

Prof. William S. Penn, who was a Distinguished Faculty Award recipient at Michigan State University in 2003, and a two-time winner of the prestigious Stephen Crane Prize for Fiction, explained to his students, “This country still is full of closet racists.” He said: “Republicans are not a majority in this country anymore. They are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people.”

The public has recently been treated to the term — white privilege. Colleges have long held courses and seminars on “whiteness.” One college even has a course titled “Abolition of Whiteness.” According to some academic intellectuals, whites enjoy advantages that nonwhites do not. They earn higher income and reside in better housing, and their children go to better schools and achieve more. Based on that idea, Asian Americans have more white privilege than white people. And, on a personal note, my daughter has more white privilege than probably 95% of white Americans.

As George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” If the stupid ideas of academic intellectuals remained on college campuses and did not infect the rest of society, they might be a source of entertainment — much like a circus.

The President of the United States and America’s most popular talk-show host both blasted the public-school system for indoctrinating U.S. children with anti-American propaganda. The mayhem and destruction being seen in the streets right now, they explained, is a direct result of this subversive indoctrination masquerading as education.

Both leaders agreed: The deadly lies being taught to children in government schools across America must end if the nation is to be salvaged. And Trump, at least, seemed confident that the days of “far-left fascism” running rampant in America’s schools an culture were numbered. Limbaugh also said the brainwashing would have to be reversed.

By speaking out, the dynamic duo — two of the most influential men not just in America, but in the world — just gave a major boost to the American public’s understanding about the root of so many of the nation’s problems. As doctors understand well, having an accurate diagnosis is key to finding a cure.

However, even though both men have called for Americans to save their own children from government schools (or at least “failing government schools,” as Trump put it earlier this year), neither leader spent much time on actual mechanics for a solution. Still, just talking about it at the national level is a crucial start to eventually getting a solution.

Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3 in honor of America’s Independence Day, Trump put it this way: “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.”

He was right, of course, as FreedomProject Media has been documenting for years. Trump also delved into the nature of that brainwashing. “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,” he said, adding that the goal was to destroy America.

Responding to the fact that there are still a significant number of Americans who believe the fake-media narrative, talk-radio titan Limbaugh, who reaches an estimated 15 million listeners per day, was even bolder. He said on air after Trump’s speech that the reason for the ignorance and anti-American hatred was simple: Government-school indoctrination by radical leftists.

“We’ve lost teachers. We have lost public education, not to mention academe. We have lost higher education,” Limbaugh said. “We have a bunch of left-wing activists disguised as teachers who have literally been, for almost two generations now, poisoning with hatred and vile racism the innocent, young-skulls-full-of-mush students who show up in their classrooms — and that’s what we’re gonna have to reverse ultimately.”

Limbaugh spoke out again on July 8, saying the nation’s problems could be traced back to the indoctrination of children (and future journalists) in government schools. And last year, he declared that one of the answers to the crisis was homeschooling and removing children from public schools. Numerous other top leaders have made similar pleas.

In his 2020 State of the Union speech, Trump called for saving children from what he described as “failing government schools.” And on the campaign trail in 2016, he blasted the “indoctrination” of America’s youth by “progressive” bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Education. This is major progress in exposing the crucial problem facing America.

When some of the most powerful men in the world speak the truth clearly and passionately about the threat of government-school indoctrination to children and the nation, millions of people listen. A mass exodus from the public schools has begun. Already, the North Carolina state website to register for homeschooling has crashed due to exploding demand amid coronavirus.

Perhaps it is not too late to save America after all.

This article originally posted at FreedomProject.com

As if the sexualization and radical politics were not enough cause for alarm, the latest data shows public schools are failing Illinois children academically, too — and big time! Indeed, the vast majority of high-school graduates are unprepared for basic college work.

According to a recent report by Chicago Public Media, almost two thirds of the new students enrolled in Chicago-area community colleges placed below college level on their placement exams. That means they must complete remedial education to proceed, even under the watered-down “college” standards that exist today.

Furthermore, even though the colleges only offer two-year degrees, just one in ten of those students in remedial classes — euphemistically dubbed “developmental education” — end up graduating within three years. By contrast, the figure is about one third among students not in remedial education.

One developmental English professor at a community college in Chicago, Tara Whitehair, was quoted revealing that many students lack even a “basic foundation” in “literacy.” Comparing that to the “foundation for a house,” Whitehair said it “takes time” to bring students up to that level.

In previous generations, graduating from 2nd or 3rd grade without strong literacy skills would have been unthinkable. Today, however, according to the government’s own literacy data, many high-school graduates would struggle to read their own diploma.

Other professors interviewed for the story confirmed the extent of the disaster. “When I ask them to go to a [reading] and say, ‘What is this text saying? Put this into your own words’ … they can’t,” Wright College English Professor Carrie Mocarski said. “They can’t comprehend the writing. … Generally we’re not talking about academic journals, we’re talking about newspaper articles.”

The reporter confirmed the dismal situation. “Students also haven’t learned to write academic essays,” reported Kate MgGee in an in-depth piece about “Starting College Behind.” “Many don’t know how to craft a thesis statement or cite research. They struggle with sentence structure, topic sentences, vocabulary and grammar.”

If these were 3^rd graders, or even perhaps 5^th graders, it might be understandable that they struggle with sentence structure, grammar, or vocabulary. Yet it completely boggles the mind to contemplate how anybody could graduate from junior high — much less high school — without being able to write a thesis statement or cite research.

The problems begin early, though. According to 2019 results from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as “America’s Report Card,” less than one third of American 8th-grade students are proficient in any core subject. That includes math and English. In 4^th grade, NAEP data show well over a third of children are “below basic,” which means they cannot read at all.

Despite spending an astonishing $17,000 per pupil annually, the 12^th highest in the nation, Illinois is slightly worse off than the atrocious national average when it comes to NAEP scores. But it is not the money that is the issue — some of the highest spending districts, such as Baltimore and Detroit, have among the lowest scores in the nation.

Other data confirms the fact that American children are getting dumber and dumber with each passing generation. The SAT, for instance, must be regularly re-centered to conceal the ongoing plunge in scores and educational levels.

According to recent ACT’s data, which also relies on standardized testing, just two out of five high-school graduates were ready for college work, with the numbers continuing to drop. Only about one in four graduating students had the “foundational work readiness skills needed for more than nine out of 10 jobs recently profiled in ACT’s JobPro database,” ACT researchers found.

Incredibly, instead of addressing the real problem — a fraudulent K-12 “education” that leaves students unprepared for anything except collecting welfare and contemplating “gender identity” — lobbyists are working to scale back or even eliminate remedial education completely. More tax-funded “financial aid” to the students, even when the overwhelmingly majority will never graduate, is also being advocated, along with more hand-holding by ever more “advisors.”

Others wring their hands and blame “poverty,” “systemic racism,” “oppression,” and all sorts of other real and imagined problems. And yet, Americans today are dumber than ever before, despite the nation and its people being richer and less racist than ever before. Data from the 1800s, for instance, reveals that Americans were far more literate than compared with today.

With government schools pumping out illiterate and innumerate graduates by the millions after bilking taxpayers for more than $200,000 per child over the span of 12 years, the question must be asked, “What are the schools actually doing?” The answer is simple: indoctrinating, sexualizing, and confusing the children on an unprecedented scale.

In any other industry, these sort of abysmal numbers would be prosecuted as fraud and extortion. But when it comes to government schools, the education establishment simply demands more money and more victims. This is absolutely outrageous. It should not be tolerated for another instant.

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

Here was the headline: “Only 33 Percent of Students Proficient in English, Math.”

Last month, IFI’s Laurie Higgins wrote: “Devilish Details in School Sexuality-Indoctrination Bill.” And in a recent IFA Spotlight podcast, Higgins discussed the Illinois state senate’s approval of the bill mandating the teaching of “Leftist assumptions about deviant sexuality” in government-run schools. It also requires that eighth grade children will have to be tested on them “in order to move on to high school.”

Let us back up for a minute — here is Higgins explaining the legislation that recently passed the state senate:

Exploiting taxpayer funds and captive audiences of children constitutes the most egregious form of propaganda imaginable. This outrageous effort to use children and public monies to advance a Leftist ideology must be opposed with the kind of fervor and tenacity usually demonstrated only by Leftists.

. . .

If passed, the ideologically-driven school sexuality-indoctrination bill—also known deceptively as the “Inclusive Curriculum” bill (SB 3249)—would require not only that k-12 teachers teach about the “roles and contributions” of homosexuals and those who reject their biological sex but also to tell students about the sexual predilections of those contributors. In other words, when teachers teach about the accomplishments of Sally Ride or the plays of Oscar Wilde, they would have to discuss their disordered sexual feelings and life choices as well. I wonder if Leftists will require that students be taught that Wilde’s first homosexual encounter was with a 17-year-old when Wilde was 32.

Such propagandizing is “decidedly not the role of public schools,” Higgins explained.

SB 3249 has already passed in the senate and now awaits House approval.

Okay, let us fast-forward now to the new report from the U.S. Department of Education’s NationsReportCard.gov:

About two thirds of eighth graders in American government schools do not even rank as “proficient” in reading or math, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress. In some districts, less than eight out of 100 students were proficient in either subject.

The results were hardly surprising to anyone who monitors the dismal state of what the government euphemistically refers to as “public education.” Indeed, the fact that even a third of American victims of government “schools” can be considered “proficient” in reading or math is more of a surprise. But even that minority may be attributable to the dumbed-down metrics used.

You can peruse the lousy Illinois test scores in that report as well.

Based on what you’ve just read, who could possibly think that the state of Illinois should mandate more LGBTQIA(etc.) propaganda rather than focusing on reading, math and science? Of course not! But to progressive lawmakers, there’s little that’s more important than the radical Leftist social agenda. Certainly not proficiency in the areas of study the schools are in existence to create.

This is also from the article linked at the opening of this post:

“The atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news,” explained George Mason University Professor Walter Williams, a longtime critic of the abysmal failure of public “education” in America. “Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.”

Incredible!

If parents don’t get involved quickly, there will be a day when student proficiency is higher in the history of the contributions of those identifying as part of the ever-growing LGBTQIA(etc.) cabal. Forget about proficiency in math when Oscar Wilde liked boys and wrote fiction! That day may already be here.

Of course, it’s not just this legislation that causes government schools to go astray from what used be their priority:

As The Newman Report and FreedomProject Media have documented extensively, the victims of government schools will be highly proficient in believing in global-warming alarmism, gender ideology, LGBT propaganda, globalism, humanism, socialism, and more. But as the latest NAEP results show, the schools are utterly failing to teach even the basics — reading, writing, and math — that would allow students to educate themselves.

“Parents,” the article concludes, “you have been warned.”

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to urge him/her to reject SB 3249, the effort to politicize curricula in order to advance biased and unproven beliefs about sexuality to young children in government schools. Contact them repeatedly!

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About two thirds of eighth graders in American government schools do not even rank as “proficient” in reading or math, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress. In some districts, less than eight out of 100 students were proficient in either subject.

The results were hardly surprising to anyone who monitors the dismal state of what the government euphemistically refers to as “public education.” Indeed, the fact that even a third of American victims of government “schools” can be considered “proficient” in reading or math is more of a surprise. But even that minority may be attributable to the dumbed-down metrics used.

Breaking the numbers down, the NAEP, more commonly known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” revealed that barely one third of eighth-grade students in 2017 America scored “proficient” or above in reading. Much of that failure has to do with the teaching of “sight words” in government-schools across America, a scheme that has been exposed as quackery since it was first tried over 150 years ago.

In mathematics, the numbers are even worse. The 2017 results showed that fully 67 percent of eight-grade students in America are not “proficient” in math. By the time students hit 12th grade, the situation is even more alarming. According to the NAEP, just one in four American high-school seniors was proficient in math last year.

The NAEP is a test administered by the feds every two years to what they describe as a “nationally representative sample” of students across the country. Around 150,000 students at each tested grade level take the test. Unlike other federally controlled testing schemes, the NAEP is not considered “high-stakes,” because poor results do not negatively affect teachers, students, or schools. But they nevertheless reveal some important facts.

“The atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news,” explained George Mason University Professor Walter Williams, a longtime critic of the abysmal failure of public “education” in America. “Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.”

Professor Williams, who highlighted the even more disastrous proficiency rates among black students, noted that the problem goes even deeper. “It’s grossly dishonest for the education establishment and politicians to boast about unprecedented graduation rates when the high school diplomas, for the most part, do not represent academic achievement,” he wrote. “At best, they certify attendance.”

That means universities are perpetrating a fraud of massive proportions by admitting all these illiterates into higher “education.” But when the obvious goal of government-controlled schools and colleges is to prepare social-justice warriors and anti-American revolutionaries — all at taxpayer expense — it should be obvious why such elaborate frauds would be used to keep Americans in the dark.

As The Newman Report and FreedomProject Media have documented extensively, the victims of government schools will be highly proficient in believing in global-warming alarmism, gender ideology, LGBT propaganda, globalism, humanism, socialism, and more. But as the latest NAEP results show, the schools are utterly failing to teach even the basics — reading, writing, and math — that would allow students to educate themselves. That is 100 percent deliberate.

Parents, you have been warned.

This article was originally published by FreedomProject.com