We hear so much these days about “establishing a standard” for education. The way to improve the schools, the educrats tell us, is through programs like “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) and now “Common Core.”
Parents need to realize that such programs do not provide a cure for the ills of American education. The problem goes far deeper and further back than most parents realize. The problem is the system, not the measurement of outcomes.
NCLB and Common Core are just “closure” methodologies for a long, steady erosion of the role and rights of parents. Millions of us discovered this decades ago. My wife and I began homeschooling nearly 30 years ago, after we spent countless hours investigating our own local schools, as our children reached school age. Most parents simply put the kids on that big yellow bus, trusting government to “do the right thing.”
How is that working out for us these days? Personally, after realizing the lies I’d been force-fed, I describe myself these days as a “recovering” public school student.
One basic principle we all missed is the separation of education and state. Please show me where the U.S. Constitution allows the federal government, or a “coalition of states,” to govern education. Our forefathers would be appalled at that concept.
Make no mistake. Common Core is a national program. It consists of nearly identical cookie-cutter sets of “standards” handed out by the educational establishment itself to each state governor and legislature. The standards will eventually become the domain of federal government agencies, and the SAT, ACT, and all similar college entrance exams and measurements will be “normalized” to the Common Core standards, circumventing state control and establishing a national progtram. This is inevitable. Why?
The Common Core program will follow federal guidelines because of federal funding. Millions of dollars have already been awarded ahead of the program’s implementation, before the standards even existed. More money is being promised. This is the “bait,” which is being used to snare state governors and legislatures into collusion with the Feds.
The standard for education used to be literacy — competence in math, English, geography, history, civics, and other factual knowledge. We didn’t need a test or a battery of tests to prove the result. Americans excelled in nearly everything when parents taught — or directed and chose the education — of their children.
Indeed, most children used to be home educated in America. Public/government/state funded and controlled education is a relatively recent development, and the outcomes are only now really being understood by its victims — the parents and students of these schools.
It was only after the humanist/statist concept of government schools and educational indoctrination took root in America in the 19th century that the purpose of education began changing. Horace Mann was the architect of this system, and he used an “educational model” of the European militaristic states. Their primary purpose was to provide mercenaries for rent to other nations’ armies for their own government military excursions and conquests. Secondarily, the system provided subservient and docile citizens who would not protest such use of their youth as cannon fodder for the benefit of the State.
Following in the footsteps of big-government advocate Horace Mann was John Dewey, the “father of modern public education,” who was born the same year Mann died (1859). Dewey, an acknowledged humanist, was a signer of the Humanist Manifesto. He also supported collectivism and looked with favor upon the Soviet Union’s education model of indoctrination for the benefit of the State. This model, of course, is based on the collectivist concept that children belong to the government rather than to the parents.
Other like-minded “experts” and groups have also advanced the “progressive” education agenda, including John Dunphy, Dewey’s protégé and constant companion, and the National Education Association and California Teachers Association.
We all must admit the “progressives” have been enormously successful in conditioning Americans to look upon the state as being the most important institution in their lives — more so than the family or the church. After all, a near-majority of our nation’s voters are now dependent, subservient, and only too willing to serve their perceived master, the government. The progressive/public education agenda has played hugely in this conditioning process. And it has done so by design.
This may be a hard pill to swallow for multiple generations of public school teachers who contributed innocently or otherwise to the agenda, as well as for generations of students who were “processed” through the system.
Here is just one nugget extracted from the mountains of evidence available showing the subversive intent behind progressive/public education. This quote appeared in an excellent article written in 2004 by Sam Weaver, who simply uses John Dunphy’s own words to reveal the progressives’ game plan:
“I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being…. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbor’ will finally be achieved.” — excerpt from an article by John Dunphy titled “A Religion for a New Age,” appearing in the January/February 1983 issue of The Humanist magazine.
In so many words, the above excerpt reveals the true objective of modern progressive education. (Please note the word “proselytizers,” and then consider the abject scorn and condemnation against those who would even attempt to “proselytize” the faiths of either Judaism or Christianity in a public school classroom!)
At some point between the late 1940s and the mid 1950s, the doctrines of progressive education achieved dominance in a majority of America’s public schools and universities. The fundamental dogma of this movement is probably best defined as a mixture of collectivist (i.e., socialist) political theory and Freudian/Jungian psychology.
The goal of the progressive education movement is to subvert America’s founding principles and replace them with secular and collectivist directives and “values.” It is a permissive, “Unitarian Universalist” approach to education.
In other words, if you are a communist, socialist, or Fascist, then, by all means, the public school is where you’d want to send your kids. There, they will be taught what to “think,” not how to think, and they will learn nothing significant to keep them from joining the ranks of the burgeoning Democratic Socialist Dependency class. On the contrary, they will be given massive doses of humanist and collectivist indoctrination intended to destroy their faith in God and to make them instead servile serfs who will blindly and obediently worship at the altar of the Almighty State.
If you are a patriotic American who wants to limit government to its proper role or a believer who wants to preserve your faith, or if you simply don’t like being enslaved, then please don’t believe the advocates of government education.
Haven’t you seen enough evidence that they are emphatically collectivist? Just watch the short video below. In this “Lean Forward” commercial from MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry speaks in support of more expensive government education and programs. She tells us we need to have a “more collectivist view of parenting our children.” Note the clear Marxist dialectic and terminology.
It would be a travesty to allow the minds of future generations to be captured and shaped by and for this same collectivist “education” consortium.
Alan Scholl is the executive director of FreedomProject Education.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3qtpdSQox0
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