by George Rasley
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.” Chester M. Pierce, Harvard psychiatrist, speaking as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar.
Dishonesty is one of the Left’s most significant vulnerabilities, but it also the source of much of the Left’s power.
And the Left’s anti-American propaganda is having a big impact.
According to a McLaughlin poll following the recent State of the Union, nearly 90 percent of self-identified liberal Republicans; 85 percent of wealthy; 66 percent of 18-29 year olds, and 64 percent of active duty military believe America is the source of most of the world’s ills: political, economic, and environmental.
How did we get to a place where 64 percent of the men and women defending our country believe it is the source of most of the world’s ills?
Over the next month we are going to explore that question, and the first part of the answer to that question is that our education system, through Common Core for example, has become a vehicle for teaching children to despise their own country, its founders and its founding principles.
As our friend, John Anthony, founder of Sustainable Freedom Lab wrote for us in a 2014 column, in the 1700’s, when the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written, people understood God and the Bible. The New England Primer, the main student textbook, contained passages from the King James Bible. Teachers used Bible verses and the Ten Commandments to teach children to read.
In the 18th century, people understood the permanency of the term, “endowed by their Creator.” Students learned an appreciation for the stability of God’s word in public classrooms.
Over the years teaching changed. Public schools decreasingly referenced God, and religion became an intellectual exercise forbidden in the public square.
- * In 1872’s Minor v. Board of Ed, the Ohio Supreme Court, following four years of court challenges often referred to as the Cincinnati Bible Wars, removed Bible readings from the school day.
- * John Dewey’s progressive approach to education in the early 20th century had an indelible impact on religion in public schools. Dewey, a proponent of secular humanism, believed it was possible to be ethical and moral without religion and that God was not omnipotent.
- * The Supreme Court in 1962 in Engel v. Vitale and in 1963, Abington School District v. Schemmp, issued similar decisions that school prayer violated the First Amendment.
Schoolchildren soon forgot why the Creator is so critical to our rights.
The excision of God from classrooms may be why in 2001, Barack Obama revealed his ignorance of Natural Law and our founding documents when he opined:
“[The Constitution] says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
Obama missed that our Creator already endowed us with our basic rights and requirements to respect one another’s rights. Our founding documents are about protecting “we the people’ from the government, not adding responsibilities on the people’s behalf.
Today, as the McLaughlin poll referenced above implies, Americans believe that issues like climate change and discrimination transcend individual rights. That it is selfish to think only of your rights, and that global citizens must place humankind’s good before personal rights.
So divorced are we from understanding individual rights, such as property rights, that millions of Americans, unquestioningly applaud their loss as insignificant, compassionate, or even necessary.
How has this been accomplished?
According to our friend Kathleen Marquardt, textbooks are full of misinformation, propaganda and lies. Classic literature is banned for using outdated words. Books are ignored or shunned for promoting morality, literacy, reason, common sense, and civility. And while our institutes of higher learning preach, “question authority”, they don’t actually teach questioning anything but Western Culture and its values. They certainly don’t teach students to question the professors’ authority. No longer do students debate tough issues; no one wants to take the side of the non-politically correct.
How did we get from the Declaration of Independence to the State of Political Correctness?
In 1918, Mary Parker Follett wrote, in The New State, group organization would subsume popular government, “The training for the new democracy must be from the cradle – through nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government classes or current events courses or lessons in civics. It is to be acquired through those modes of living and acting which shall teach us how to grow the social consciousness. This should be the object of all day school education, of all night school education, of all our supervised recreation, of all our family life, of our club life, of our civic life.
“When we change our ideas of the relation of the individual to society, our whole system of education changes. What we want to teach is interdependence, that efficiency waits on discipline, that discipline is obedience to the whole of which I am a part… when we know how to teach social discipline, then we shall know how to ‘teach school.’ The object of education is to fit children into the life of the community.” P.363
In Marquardt’s analysis, the goal Follett set for our education system was the complete reformation of the American mind; our lives must focus completely on losing our individual rights in subordination to the group.
Little wonder that after a century of education influenced by Mary Parker Follett’s ideas vast numbers of Americans believe our country is the source of most of the world’s ills.
Another major contributor accomplishing the goal of re-forming the American mind, says Ms. Marquardt, was the book, The Ideal Communist City. The Ideal Communist City includes the design for No Child Left Behind, Common Core and all the other aliases of the behavior modification of children and said about public education, “The best opportunity for contact among children of preschool age occurs in the nursery, which is the best setting for developing the child’s imitative powers and individual activities. He expresses his inclinations most freely here, and his egocentricity is least harmfully repressed. The positive value of group activity, of course, is fully realized only when it is organized and directed by educators who have benefited from advanced social training.” (The Ideal Communist City, pages 57-58.)
Moving from The Ideal Communist City to the BSTEP program, an education program the old federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare hired Michigan State University to design was a very short hop indeed: “A small elite will carry society’s burdens. The resulting impersonal manipulation of most people’s life styles will be softened by provisions for pleasure seeking and guaranteed physical necessities. Participatory democracy in the American-ideal mold will mainly disappear. The worth and dignity of individuals will be endangered on every hand. Only exceptional individuals will be able to maintain a sense of worth and dignity.” (Emphasis ours.)
Today, we see the fruit of a century of the education establishment teaching teachers to teach our children lies about the American founding and its ideas in the #RedforEd movement.
As our friend Michael Patrick Leahy reported for Breitbart:
This teachers union effort, called #RedforEd, has its roots in the very same socialism that President Trump vowed in his 2019 State of the Union address to stop, and it began in its current form in early 2018 in a far-flung corner of the country before spreading nationally. Its stated goals–higher teacher pay and better education conditions–are overshadowed by a more malevolent political agenda: a leftist Democrat uprising designed to flip purple or red states to blue, using the might of a significant part of the education system as its lever.
It should come as no surprise that #RedforEd movement founder Noah Karvelis published his latest manifesto in Jacobin Magazine, an unabashed promoter of Marxism, proudly taking its name from the radical left Jacobins who turned the French Revolution of the 1790s into a bloodbath for their opponents.
The magazine does not specifically use the word “Marxism” in its “about us” page, reported Leahy, instead it calls itself, “a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”
The political and cultural establishment seem oblivious to this obvious connection between a century of education policy that turned teachers into Leftist social engineers, today’s Marxist revolutionaries and the Far-Left Democratic Party political activity of teachers.
The Los Angeles Times wrote last week they could find no connection between the recent spate of teachers strikes and broader Leftwing political objectives, as Joel Pollak of Breitbart News noted:
The Los Angeles Times analyzed the ongoing wave of teachers strikes across California and the nation on Sunday, and determined that there is no broader movement — even though “#RedforEd” organizers might beg to differ.
The phrase “Red for Ed” did not feature once in an extensive article by Anita Chabria and Sonali Kohl, though teachers on the picket lines have told Breitbart News directly they saw their strikes as part of that broader effort.
The Times explained the wave of strikes across California — which was preceded by strikes in West Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Colorado — as the outcome of “local problems” that teachers happen to have in common…
How did we come to a place where 64 percent of the men and women defending our country believe it is the source of most of the world’s ills?
The first part of the answer to that complex question is that we turned over the education of our educators to anti-American collectivists, who have spent the last century inculcating young Americans with a collectivist ideology that despises the people and literature that formed the ideas undergirding the American founding.
The fruit of that decision, undertaken with the active participation of America’s elite institutions and leaders, such as The Los Angeles Times and Common Core advocate Jeb Bush, is an education establishment that, instead of producing citizens immersed in ideas of American civic virtue, has produced generations of the anti-American Marxist zealots now infecting the American education system from the nursery through graduate school, just as Mary Parker Follett hoped for in 1918.
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Editor’s note: In addition to being a long time contributor to Brietbart News, Michael Patrick Leahy is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Tennessee Star.
