For over a year now, Americans have been up in arms over the Obama administration’s unconstitutional efforts to bribe and bludgeon state governments into surrendering control over K-12 education through the controversial so-called “Common Core” national standards — and the outrage is still growing. A peek beneath the surface, however, reveals that the nationalization of American schools is actually just one component of a much broader global agenda being pushed by the Obama administration, the United Nations, Bill Gates, and others: the globalization of education.
In fact, just this week, an invitation-only conference hosted by former Florida Governor and pro-Common Core ringleader Jeb Bush entitled “Globalization of Higher Education” took place in Texas. Among the attendees: Hillary Clinton, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, UNESCO officials, university presidents, and more. While higher education appears to be the next target of reformers, the globalization of K-12 schooling is on the verge of completion — at least if the American people do not rise up and stop it.
For decades now, the globalists at UNESCO and other UN outfits have been openly plotting to impose what they sometimes refer to as the “World Core Curriculum” on all of humanity. According to the agency, it is all linked to UN Agenda 21. In addition to gathering up unprecedented amounts of data on everyone, the global “education reform” movement is essentially seeking to instill radical new values in children — turning them into “global citizens” with views inherently at odds with Biblical Christianity — to facilitate the total regimentation of human society. Countless programs and initiatives such as “Education for All” are working toward that goal.
Despite the virtual media blackout, none of it is much of a secret — even in the United States. In fact, Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan even boasts openly that the U.S. Department of Education he leads is “cooperating” with groups such as the United Nations, often dubbed a “dictators’ club,” to “improve” education in America. In a 2010 speech to UNESCO, Duncan even referred to the UN “education” agency as one of the administration’s “global partners” in the effort to globalize schooling as part of the “cradle-to-career education agenda.”
“Today, education is a global public good unconstrained by national boundaries…. It is no surprise that economic interdependence brings new global challenges and educational demands,” Duncan told the globalist UN bureaucrats, boasting of the billions of dollars U.S. taxpayers were being forced to send foreign governments and institutions for “educational reform” abroad. “Our goal for the coming year will be to work closely with global partners, including UNESCO, to promote qualitative improvements and system-strengthening.”
The “education” agenda, of course, has less to do with actually educating children and more to do with promoting globalist political goals and values through indoctrination at school. “Education is still the key to eliminating gender inequities, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, and to fostering peace,” Duncan continued, with “sustainability” being UN-speak for central planning and global government. Quoting former South African President Nelson Mandela, Duncan noted that education “is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Unsurprisingly, billionaire UN devotee and population-control zealot Bill Gates — the primary financier of all things Common Core, other than U.S. taxpayers via the federal government — is deeply intertwined with the planetary effort. According to the latest estimates, while his own children attend an elite non-Common Core private school, the Microsoft founder has poured more than $2 billion into creating and promoting the dubious national standards for everyone else. Together with UNESCO, though, Gates is determined to impose the globalist vision of education on children worldwide.
In 2004, for example, on behalf of Microsoft, Gates personally signed a “Cooperation Agreement” with UNESCO to accelerate the globalization of education through information technology and communication. “Together, UNESCO and Microsoft aspire for there to be a quantum leap in the quality of courses and in accelerating their uptake by educationalists … through the availability of standards, guidelines or benchmarks,” the agreement explains, calling for the creation of a “master curriculum (Syllabus).” “UNESCO will explore how to facilitate content development,” the document states.
After signing the agreement, as reported by Eagle Forum chief Phyllis Schlafly in 2005, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura gave a speech offering more insight into the plot. Among the goals of the partnership, the UN agency boss explained: “fostering web-based communities of practice including content development and worldwide curricula reflecting UNESCO values.” As the document itself explains, “Microsoft supports the objectives of UNESCO as stipulated in UNESCO’s Constitution.” (For more on UNESCO values, see “Common Core and UN Agenda 21: Mass Producing Green Global Serfs.”)
It may or may not be a surprise to many Americans to learn that in a 2011 document about an advanced training program produced by UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, the would-be global Department of Education, even uses the term “Common Core.” The course outline, which boasts that the UN institute has trained more than 1,500 “education planners and managers” from around the world, adds under the Common Core header: “Educational planners and managers need insight into the effects of demographic shifts, globalization, and social and political change on education.”
“The fourth part of the course presents the main development frameworks, including the ‘new’ international commitments as part of Education for All/ Fast Track Initiative, Poverty Reduction, Millennium Development Goals, and discusses their impact on the role and methods/instruments of educational planning,” continues the document, which essentially outlines the training program being used to put legions of globalized education bureaucrats devoted to UNESCO’s vision in key positions worldwide.
UNESCO’s vision for a truly global education regime under the “World Core Curriculum” goes back decades, too, as its officials openly admit. “In the middle of my life I discovered that the only true, objective education I had received was from the United Nations where the earth, humanity, our place in time and the worth of the human being were the overriding concerns,” wrote the late Robert Muller, former UN assistant secretary general and the architect of the “World Core Curriculum” plot. “So at the request of educators I wrote the World Core Curriculum, the product of the United Nations, the meta-organism of human and planetary evolution.”
He described his planetary Common Core-like scheme as “a curriculum of our universal knowledge which should be taught in all schools of Earth.” One of his chief inspirations, he said, was former UN Secretary-General U Thant, a Marxist radical, whom Muller quotes as saying: “The world will not change and find peace, if there is not a new education.” Another one of Muller’s major inspirations was UN apparatchik and occultist Alice Bailey, who founded the Lucis Trust (formerly Lucifer Publishing Company) and claimed to channel spirits.
UNESCO’s use of the term “Common Core,” too, goes back decades. In 1984, for example — the same year President Ronald Reagan withdrew U.S. participation from the UN agency — the outfit released a 51-page document entitled “A Methodological Guide to the Application of the Notion of Common Core in the Training of Various Categories of Educational Personnel.” That scheme was aimed at training teachers worldwide using the same standards, so that they, in turn, could fan out across the globe to “educate” students all over the world.
Even as far back as the late 1940s, UNESCO was actively promoting the use of education as a means to achieve what its first Secretary General, Julian Huxley, described as “political unification in some sort of world government,” which he claimed was “necessary.” In a 1949 pamphlet on using the classroom to promote “world understanding,” UNESCO said: “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only produce precarious results.” So, to deal with that, schools should use various means to “combat family attitudes.”
Critics and analysts have slowly started taking notice. “Some have decried Common Core as the nationalization of American education. Far more dangerous, however, is the globalism of Common Core that demotes American values, undermines American constitutional principles and detaches students from their families and faith,” observed Catholic journalist and public speaker Mary Jo Anderson in a piece for Crisis magazine. “Common Core is simply the newest attempt in the decades-old battle (Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000) to impose a U.N. globalist worldview aimed at ‘peace,’ sustainability and economic stability at the expense of freedom.”
Indeed, Common Core represents merely the culmination of decades of quiet efforts by the globalist education establishment to foist its new values for its envisioned new society on the American people. In 1994, for example, Democrat President Bill Clinton signed “The Goals 2000: Educate America Act” foisting “National Standards” on schools across America. Then, Republican President George W. Bush signed the “No Child Left Behind Act” developing national “accountability” schemes to ensure that government schools were teaching what the federal government demanded.
Before the 1960s, of course, the federal government had virtually no role whatsoever in American education. The Constitution specifically prohibits it by not granting any power over education to the national government, and thus, reserving that sphere for the states or the people. Today, however, schools are largely operating under federal control, despite the rhetoric, as they comply with federal mandates to keep the federal funds flowing. Common Core is merely the next step — but almost certainly close to the end game.
Even before UNESCO came on the scene, tyrants and would-be tyrants always understood that controlling education — and the minds of the youth, by extension — was the key to power. From Marx and Stalin to Hitler, all of them knew corrupting children was their path to total domination. Today, Americans are faced with powerful globalist forces determined to shape the views and minds of their children through globalized “education.” And the outcome of this battle will almost certainly determine the future course of humanity.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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