Crimes of the Educators, by Sam Blumenfeld and Alex Newman, Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2014, 352 pages, hardcover. To order the book, visit ShopJBS.org

Over the past several years, state capitols and local school districts have become battlegrounds, as parents and teachers have joined in a massive rebellion against the imposition of Common Core State Standards. Dubbed ObamaCore by critics, the Common Core scheme to enlist state governments in enforcing national education standards and curricula has been lavishly funded with over $2 billion in grants from Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. Members and officials of the liberal-left teachers unions, some of President Obama’s staunchest supporters, have joined with conservative organizations and Tea Party groups to stop, defund, and roll back Common Core at the state and national levels. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have both been forced by irate members to abandon support for Common Core.

What is it about Common Core that has elicited such a widespread, broad-spectrum revolt? For many of the teachers, it is the mandated cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all straitjacket ObamaCore imposes. For many parents, it is the subversive, anti-Christian, hypersexualized, pro-homosexual emphasis of the National Sexuality Education Standards, which were developed by the radical Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN); the pornography-promoting Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS); the abortion behemoth Planned Parenthood; and the National Education Association — among others. For many Common Core opponents, it is the invasive, privacy-destroying data mining that attempts to subject all students to surveillance worthy of an Orwellian police state.

In Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children, Samuel L. Blumenfeld and Alex Newman lay bare the rot that runs to the core of Common Core. However, this book is about far more than Common Core, which is but the latest iteration in a long line of revolutionary programs imposed through the government school system by the educational establishment to deconstruct America — socially, politically, psychologically, intellectually, morally, and spiritually: look-say reading, the “new math,” death education, values clarification, sex education, multiculturalism, sensitivity training, outcome-based education, etc.

Our nation is sliding into the infernal abyss — as virtually every assessment and indicator has been starkly demonstrating for decades — and the government-operated, taxpayer-supported “public” schools bear an immense blame for pushing and dragging us into the hellish chasm. How did this come about? Why is this happening? How can our education system be failing so miserably after we poured so many hundreds of billions of dollars into it? Why are our schools wracked with violence and mass murders? Why have all the many ballyhooed “reform” efforts of the past decades failed so wretchedly? Why do other nations outperform our students in virtually every academic area? What can we do about it? Crimes of the Educators provides the answers to these and many other burning questions.

Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman are eminently qualified as a team to tackle this important subject. Blumenfeld has been one of America’s most perceptive observers of education for more than four decades, authoring 10 books on education, in addition to crisscrossing the nation many times on speaking tours. This present volume recapitulates much of the extraordinary research into the education dilemma that Blumenfeld first brought to the American public in the early 1980s with his books Is Public Education Necessary? and NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education. As no previous writings had done, these two volumes lifted the lid and exposed the long-range seditious, statist scheme to overthrow the twin pillars of our society: faith and family. If he had written nothing else, these books alone would have earned Samuel Blumenfeld the deserving thanks and praise of every American who is trying to make sense of the incomprehensible carnage and insanity now rife in our schools and society. However, he did much more. He offered real, concrete solutions — not only political prescriptions to correct the destructive policies afflicting our education system, but practical things parents and teachers could do to immediately remediate and help their children. Blumenfeld’s pioneering books on phonics, tutoring, and homeschooling helped launch the homeschooling movement and have helped hundreds of thousands of students of all ages learn to read and to lead productive lives. He has also been a contributing writer to this magazine since The New American was founded, and before that, to our predecessor magazine, American Opinion. Alex Newman is well known to readers of The New American for his penetrating articles regarding Common Core and other education issues. He is a brilliant young, multilingual, multi-talented journalist who shows an insightful and authoritative grasp of a wide array of complex subjects, from global warming and geopolitics to international monetary machinations, terrorism, and much more.

More at Risk Than Ever

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its shocking report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform. Among its most damning indictments, which Blumenfeld and Newman quote, is this alarming statement summarizing the dire reality of the statistical evidence: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,” the report continued, “we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

The erosion of our educational foundations and the mediocrity that the commission decried are undoubtedly viewed as an act of war by Blumenfeld and Newman, as they less-than-subtly suggest right from the get-go in the title itself — “Crimes of the Educators” — and as they then make abundantly clear in the more than 300 pages that follow. But the erosion and mediocrity were not the result of war by “an unfriendly foreign power.” They were (and are) the result of war by an unfriendly domestic power, a subversive Fifth Column of socialist educators who detested America, its Christian foundations, and the American Founders’ design of limited, constitutional government that thwarted their plans for social engineering and central planning.

Paranoia? Wild “conspiracy theory”? That’s what those with a vested interest in perpetuating our nation’s suicidal descent will say, of course. However, the evidence assembled by the authors speaks for itself — literally. Blumenfeld and Newman name names and provide copious documentation and quotes from original sources. They go back to the early 19th century to show the introduction of the communist ideology into American education by British socialist Robert Owen, who established the New Harmony commune in Indiana in 1825, more than two decades before Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. Owen and his disciples took the American intelligentsia by storm, most especially winning early (and influential) converts at Harvard. They prominently cite, for example, quotations from John Dewey, the “father of progressive education,” a committed socialist and an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, who targeted reading for destruction because it was too “individualistic”; it allows individuals to learn on their own and follow their own plans for their lives, independent of master planners such as Dewey & Company. Dewey and his pro-communist confreres at Columbia Teachers College, Harvard, and other centers of cultural subversion insisted that everyone (except themselves and their fellow elites, of course) must surrender his individuality in the interests of “the cooperative,” “the community,” the collective, the State. Reading, therefore, had to be subverted. Phonics, which is the only logical way to teach an alphabetic system of language such as English, had to be replaced with a revolutionary “look-say” or whole-word method that would teach English as if it were a pictographic language like Chinese. This stood thousands of years of experience and history on its head.

Dewey realized that his revolutionary plan would have to be implemented patiently, gradually, over many years, to avoid arousing suspicion and backlash. He also recognized the need for lining up an authoritative phalanx of “experts” to give the appearance of scientific consensus.

In his essay “The Primary Education Fetish,” which appeared in the Forum in May 1898, Dewey wrote:

Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction. What is needed in the first place is that there should be a full and frank statement of conviction with regard to the matter from physiologists and psychologists and from those school administrators who are conscious of the evils of the present régime.

Among the “evils of the present regime” Dewey decried and detested were personal independence, individuality, and the “endless drill” of phonics-based reading methods.

With backing from the Rockefeller family and other advocates of one-world government, Dewey and associates became the reigning educational gurus. Their intellectual heirs have continued this Deweyite treachery and treason down to the present, as Blumenfeld/Newman amply prove.

One of the many more current examples of the ongoing Deweyite scheme to dumb down and socialize America is the Obama administration’s full embrace of UNESCO’s subversive “sustainability education” program. In his address to a “Sustainability Summit” in 2010, Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan proclaimed: “We must advance the sustainability movement through education.... We at the Education Department are energized about joining these leaders in their commitment to preparing today’s students … to be well-educated about the science of sustainability.” But as Blumenfeld and Newman note, traditional and classical notions of education have no place in the “sustainable” future being planned for humanity.

“Generally, more highly educated people, who have higher incomes, consume more resources than poorly educated people, who tend to have lower incomes,” the UN “toolkit” for global, “sustainable” education explains. “In this case, more education increases the threat to sustainability.” (Emphasis added.)

“In other words,” comment Blumenfeld and Newman, “more education leads to higher incomes, which leads to more consumption, and therefore, is not compatible with their vision of ‘sustainability.’”

After reciting a lengthy litany of recent educational indicators cataloging our nation’s precipitous descent, Blumenfeld and Newman again return to a hard truth that many Americans still do not understand and/or refuse to confront: intentional malice, treason, and conspiracy. “All of the above is the lamentable story of the failure of our public schools to educate American children. Those failures are not the result of an accident,” they write. “They are the result of programs created by the best-organized and best-paid educators on the planet.” “All of these programs that create failure were conceived to produce precisely the results we are getting,” Blumenfeld and Newman note. “But why are American educators able to get away with these crimes? It’s because Americans cannot believe that our professional and highly respected educators could be involved in a conspiracy to deliberately dumb down the nation. They recognize that we are indeed being dumbed down, but they don’t blame the educators. They blame the children and the culture. In short, this conspiracy is protected by its incredulity.”

The “educators” to whom the authors refer are not the ordinary classroom teachers, but the leading lights of the educational establishment at our most prestigious universities, think tanks, and government agencies.

The education establishment that the Deweyites launched has become, say the authors, “an asylum for the educationally insane. Once you accept their mind-set you enter a world of esoteric nonsense that only the inner circle of disciples can understand. To subject perfectly healthy, intelligent children to the teachings of these insanities is a crime.”

Blumenfeld and Newman have performed a most vital service; this writer can think of no more important book on education, nor a more timely assessment of, and prescription for, what ails our schools and our society. Get it, read it, use it — and distribute it widely.