Chapter Twelve, Part I: Sabotaging Education

Education plays an important role in fostering individual well-being and self-fulfillment, maintaining social stability, and securing the future of a nation. No great civilization in the history of humanity has taken education lightly.

The fundamental purpose of education is to maintain humanity’s moral standards and preserve its divinely bestowed culture. It is the means by which knowledge and craftsmanship are imparted and people socialized. Traditionally, the well-educated respect heaven, believe in the divine, and seek to follow the virtue of benevolence. They possess extensive knowledge of traditional culture as well as mastery over one or more trades. Dedicated to their vocations, they believe in treating others with kindness. They serve as the pillars of society, the national elites, and the guardians of civilization. Their extraordinary character and behavior earn divine favor and blessings.

Thus, ruining traditional education is an indispensable step in the communist specter’s plan to sever the connection between humanity and the divine. To this end, communism has adopted various strategies to attack and undermine education in both the East and the West.

In Eastern countries that are home to deep-seated cultural traditions, deception alone is insufficient to brainwash the populace. Communist parties have systematically slaughtered the well-educated elites to stop these bearers of culture from imparting the nation’s traditional heritage to the next generation. Simultaneously, they bombarded the rest of the population with incessant propaganda.

In the West, national histories are younger and traditional roots are relatively new, giving communism fertile ground for covertly contaminating society by subverting and sabotaging education.

The complete breakdown of American education is one of the most distressing things to have happened to the country in the past few decades. It signals the success of communism’s mission to infiltrate and corrupt Western society.
This chapter focuses mainly on the United States as an example of how education in free societies has been sabotaged by communism. From this example, readers may infer how education is being undermined in other countries along similar lines.

The communist infiltration of American education manifests in at least five areas:

Promoting Communist Ideology Among the Young

Communist ideology gradually took over Western academia by infiltrating important traditional fields of study, as well as fabricating new sciences beholden to its ideological influence. Literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, the study of law, media, and other concentrations have become inundated with various derivatives of Marxist theory. “Political correctness” is now the guideline for censoring free thought on campuses.

Reducing the Young Generation’s Exposure to Traditional Culture

Orthodox thought, genuine history, and classical literature have been slandered and marginalized in many different ways. Common justifications for this include arguments that the classics are no longer relevant to modern students, or that school curricula need to make room for more “diversity” of thought.

Lowering Academic Standards Starting in Primary School

Because instruction has been progressively dumbed down, students of the younger generations are less literate and mathematically capable. They possess less knowledge, and their ability to think critically is stunted. It is hard for these students to handle key questions concerning life and society in a logical and forthright manner, and even harder for them to see through communism’s deceptions.

Indoctrinating Young Students With Deviated Notions

As these children grow older, the concepts instilled in them become so strong that it is nearly impossible to identify and correct them.

Feeding Students’ Selfishness, Greed, and Indulgence

This includes conditioning them to oppose authority and tradition, inflating their egos and sense of entitlement, reducing their ability to understand and tolerate different opinions, and neglecting their psychological growth.

Communism has made great progress in all of these areas.

1. Communist Elements in Primary and Secondary Education

Although communism is most obvious at the university level, it has deeply influenced primary and secondary school education. Its influence has undermined children’s intellectual development and maturity, making them more susceptible to leftist influences in college. It has caused generations of students to have less knowledge and a diminished ability to reason and engage in critical thinking. The progressive education movement led by John Dewey initiated the trend more than a century ago. Subsequent education reforms have generally followed in the same direction.

In addition to instilling atheism, the theory of evolution, and communist ideology in students, primary and secondary education in the United States employ psychological manipulation that destroys students’ traditional beliefs and morals. It instills moral relativism and modern concepts that convey a corrupt attitude toward life. This occurs across all sectors of education. The sophisticated measures used make it almost impossible for students and the public to guard against the trend.

KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, introduced in Chapter Five, described in 1985 how communist ideological infiltration in America was nearing completion: “Even if you start right now, here this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of Americans, it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.” [1]

A third of a century has passed since Bezmenov gave his interview. During this period, even as we witnessed the downfall of the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, communism’s infiltration and subversion in the West didn’t stop. Communist elements in the West set their sights on education as a primary target. They took over all tiers of the institution, promoting their own twisted theories on education, pedagogy, and parenting.

a. Dumbing Down Students

The United States is a constitutional republic. Presidents, lawmakers, town mayors, and school-district committee members are all elected by the voting public. Whether such a political framework can be pursued in a manner that is truly beneficial to all depends not only on the moral level of the people, but also on the level of their knowledge and discernment. If voters are not well-versed in history, political and economic systems, and social issues, they will have difficulty electing officials whose platforms are based on the long-term and fundamental interests of the country and society. This jeopardizes the country’s future.

In 1983, a group of experts commissioned by the US Department of Education wrote the report A Nation at Risk after eighteen months of research. The report stated:

For our country to function, citizens must be able to reach some common understandings on complex issues, often on short notice and on the basis of conflicting or incomplete evidence. Education helps form these common understandings, a point Thomas Jefferson made long ago in his justly famous dictum: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.”

Individuals with little knowledge and poor critical thinking abilities are unable to recognize lies and deception. Thus communism targets education in order to ensure the next generation of students will be foolish and ignorant — and vulnerable to manipulation.

The report makes these additional points:

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, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. [2]

The report quoted analyst Paul Copperman as saying, “For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”

The report cites some shocking findings: In addition to US students’ grades often ranking near the bottom compared to those of students in other nations, 23 million American adults were functionally illiterate — that is, they only possessed the most basic reading, writing, and comprehension skills. The rate of functional illiteracy was 13 percent among 17-year-olds and reached as high as 40 percent among certain less affluent groups.

From 1963 to 1980, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the university entrance examination, declined dramatically, with the average verbal score dropping by more than 50 points, and the average math score dropping by nearly 40 points. “Many 17-year-olds do not possess the ‘higher order’ intellectual skills we should expect of them. Nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.” [3]

In the 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein compiled data on the knowledge gaps of American students in the subjects of history, civics, math, science, technology, fine arts, and more. He gave the example of the history exam in the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress, on which 57 percent of students scored “below basic” and only 1 percent achieved an “advanced” score. Surprisingly, on a multiple-choice question that asked students to select which country had been a US ally during World War II, 52 percent chose Germany, Japan, or Italy instead of the Soviet Union. Results in other areas were equally disappointing. [4]

The decline in the quality of education in the United States is obvious. Since the 1990s, the term “dumbing down” has appeared in many books on education and has become a concept American educators cannot avoid. John Taylor Gatto, a senior teacher and educational researcher in New York City, wrote, “Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level.” [5]

To avoid making the American education system look bad, in 1994 the College Board redefined the scores of the SAT. When the modern form of the SAT began to be adopted in 1941, the average score of the language exam was 500 points (out of a possible 800 points). By the 1990s, the average score had dropped to 424 points; the College Board then redefined 424 as 500 points. [6]

The decline in the quality of education is not just reflected in the decline in students’ literacy. Due to a lack of basic knowledge, the critical thinking faculties of American students have fallen sharply. American scholar Thomas Sowell observed: “It is not merely that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.” [7]

The reason for the decline of grades is not that students today are not as intelligent as before, but because communism is quietly carrying out a war against the next generation, using the education system as its weapon. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former senior policy adviser to the US Department of Education, wrote in 1999: “The reason Americans do not understand this war is because it has been fought in secret — in the schools of our nation, targeting our children who are captive in classrooms. The wagers of the war are using very sophisticated and effective tools.” [8]

b. The Destructive Nature of Progressive Education

The backlash against tradition in American primary and secondary schools began with the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century. The following generations of progressive educators concocted a series of sham theories and discourses that served to alter curricula, water down teaching materials, and lower academic standards. This brought enormous damage to traditional education.

From Rousseau to Dewey

Dewey, the father of American progressive education, was greatly influenced by the ideas of the eighteenth-century Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau believed that people are good by nature and that moral decline is caused solely by social ills. He said all men were free and equal at birth and that given a natural environment, everyone would enjoy their innate rights. Inequality, privilege, exploitation, and the loss of man’s innate kindness were all products of society. For children, Rousseau advocated a model of “negative education” that would leave them to their own discovery. This education was to be absent of religious, moral, or cultural teaching.

In fact, humanity is endowed with both benevolence and wickedness. Without nurturing benevolence, the wicked aspects of human nature will dominate to the point where people consider no method too base and no sin too evil. Rousseau misled many followers with his elegant rhetoric. The deleterious influence his pedagogical theory has had on Western education is hard to overestimate.

About a century later, Dewey picked up where Rousseau had left off and furthered his destructive work. According to Dewey, who was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, children should be weaned from the traditional tutelage of parents, religion, and culture and given free rein to adapt to their environments. Dewey was a pragmatist and moral relativist. He believed that there was no unchanging morality and that people were free to act and behave as they saw fit. Promoting the concept of moral relativism is a critical first step in leading humanity away from the moral rules set by the divine.

Dewey was one of thirty-four people who signed their names to the original Humanist Manifesto, penned in 1933. Unlike the humanists of the Renaissance, twentieth-century humanism is, at its core, rooted in atheism. Based on modern concepts such as materialism and the theory of evolution, it regards the universe as self-existent rather than created and holds that human beings are the product of a continuous biochemical process.

In this calculus, the object of education is to mold and guide students according to the educator’s wishes — something not fundamentally different from Karl Marx’s “new man.” Dewey himself was a democratic socialist.

American philosopher Sidney Hook said, “Dewey had supplied Marxism with the epistemology and social philosophy that Marx had half seen for himself and had half sketched out in his early works but had never adequately spelled out.” [9]

In 1921, as civil war raged across Russia, the Soviets took the time to produce a sixty-two-page pamphlet featuring excerpts from Dewey’s Democracy and Education. In 1929, the rector of the Second State University of Moscow, Albert P. Pinkevich, wrote favorably of Dewey, saying that his ideas were very close to those of “Marx and the Russian Communists.” [10] Biographer Alan Ryan wrote that Dewey “supplied the intellectual weapons for a decently social democratic, non-totalitarian Marxism.” [11]

Progressive educators make no pretense about their goal to transform students’ attitudes toward life. To achieve this aim, they have overturned all aspects of learning, including class structure, teaching materials and methods, and the relationship between teachers and students. Personal experience is considered superior to knowledge learned from books or teachers. Lectures have taken a backseat to projects and activities.

The conservative American website Human Events listed Dewey’s Democracy and Education as number five on its list of the ten most harmful books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It pointedly observed that Dewey “disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking ‘skills’ instead.” [12]

Astute critics have taken to task the progressive bent in education from the very beginning. Mortimer Smith’s 1949 book And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education provides a concise and comprehensive rebuttal to the principal tenets of progressive education. [13] Progressive educators have dismissed such critics as “reactionaries” and used various means to suppress or ignore them.

Dewey spent twenty-five years as a tenured professor at Columbia University. During the period in which he taught the philosophy of education at the Teachers College, at least one-fifth of all primary and secondary school teachers received instruction or advanced degrees at Columbia. [14] In contrast to figures like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, Dewey appears to have had no aspiration to become a revolutionary guru or take over the world, but the system of education he created became one of communism’s most powerful weapons.

Indulging Students

According to Rousseau’s theory of education, humans are born good and free, but are made bad by society. Therefore, the best method of education is to give children free rein and yield to the child’s own whimsical development. Under the influence of Rousseauean thought, progressive educationists since Dewey have often echoed these ideas: One should not force the values of parents or teachers upon students; children should be allowed to make their own judgments and decisions while growing up.

English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once elegantly gave the following retort to this sort of view: “[British radical John] Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion, and be able to choose for itself. I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. ‘How so?’ said he, ‘it is covered with weeds.’ — ‘Oh,’ I replied, ‘that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries.’” [15]

The quick-witted poet used the analogy to convey to his friend a principle: Ethics and wisdom are painstakingly cultivated. Leaving a garden untended will cause an overgrowth of weeds. Failing to educate children allows the negative aspects of human nature to predominate as they grow up.

Good and evil are simultaneously present in human nature. Though children are by comparison simpler and purer than adults, they also are susceptible to laziness, jealousy, combativeness, selfishness, and other negative traits. Society is a big dye vat. If children are not properly raised, then by the time they have come to their “age of discretion and choice,” they will have long been contaminated by bad thoughts and bad habits. Attempts to educate them at that point will be too late.

This indulgence of students reached its peak in the pedagogical literary work Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, published in 1960. The book’s author, A. S. Neill, established in 1921 an English boarding school, Summerhill, whose students at the time ranged in age from five to sixteen. The school gave children complete autonomy. Children were allowed to decide whether they wanted to go to one class but not another, or no class at all. Neill’s views on education were heavily influenced by Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School philosopher and vigorous proponent of sexual freedom, and the two often corresponded.

Besides academics, the school was extremely lax on ethics, discipline, and male–female relations; it followed all anti-traditional values. According to a former student who attended in the 1960s, male and female students were allowed to have mock weddings and sleep with each other. Neill allowed staff and students to swim naked together in an outdoor swimming pool, and some staff members were permitted to date students. His thirty-five-year-old stepson, who taught ceramic art, would often bring upper-grade girls back to his room. [16]

In his book, Neill says, “Every older pupil at Summerhill knows from my conversation and my books that I approve of a full sex life for all who wish one, whatever their age.” He even hinted that, if not prohibited by law, he would have openly permitted boys and girls to share dorms. [17] When Summerhill was published, it quickly became a bestseller. In the 1960s alone, it sold more than three million copies and became required reading at teachers’ colleges.

An ancient Chinese saying says, “A strict teacher produces outstanding students.” Studies in the West have found that strict teachers get better results in the classroom. They also have a more positive influence on their students’ conduct. [18] Sadly, in the United States and other Western countries, under the influence of progressivism and educational autonomy, laws have been enacted that limit the scope of parents and teachers in managing students. This has caused teachers to become afraid to discipline students. Students’ bad habits are not corrected in a timely manner, or at all, thus leading to a precipitous decline in their sense of morality as well as their academic performance.

Student-Centered Education

The most important function of education is to maintain and pass on the traditional culture of human civilization. Perhaps nowhere was this more the case than in ancient China, where educators and scholars were held in the highest regard. “A teacher is to pass on the Tao, teach the classics, and clear up confusion,” as a Chinese saying goes. Dewey’s progressive educational thought removes the authority of teachers and downgrades their importance. His stance is anti-intellectual and against common sense — in essence, against education itself.

Advocates of progressive education claim that students must be placed at the center and allowed to explore on their own, to reach their own answers. The real intention of progressive education is to cut students off from their bonds with traditional culture. Traditional curricula contain knowledge accumulated over thousands of years of human civilization. A negation of teachers’ authority in the process of education is a negation of their role in carrying forward the knowledge of civilization. This is the ulterior motive of communism.

Daisy Christodoulou’s 2014 book Seven Myths About Education analyzes and refutes misconceptions spread in modern education, including claims that “facts prevent understanding,” “teacher-led instruction is passive,” “projects and activities are the best way to learn,” and “teaching knowledge is indoctrination.” [19] Most of these myths stem from progressive education and have been passed down for several generations, becoming a plague on educational culture. For instance, take the first misconception, that fact-learning prevents true understanding. Modern American education has degraded traditional methods of attention to memorization, reading aloud, and practice, characterizing them as “mechanical memorization,” “rote learning,” and “drill to kill.” Rousseau attacked memorization and verbal lessons in his 1792 novel Emile, or On Education, and Dewey’s progressive educators furthered such theories.

In 1956, American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and collaborators published a framework for categorizing educational goals, widely known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. It divided human cognition into six levels, from low to high. In 2001, the levels were revised to be “remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.” The latter three are regarded as higher-order thinking because they involve comprehensive analysis. While withholding judgment on the strengths and weaknesses of the Bloom classification itself, it may be seen that since the framework was proposed, progressive educators have used the goal of cultivating “higher-order thinking” as a pretext to do away with traditional teaching methods.

It goes without saying that learning a large amount of basic knowledge is a prerequisite for any kind of intellectual mastery. Without a reserve of knowledge, the so-called higher-order thinking, critical thinking, and creative thinking can only serve to deceive oneself and others. Bloom’s classification system provides a seemingly scientific excuse for the inexplicable approach of progressive educators.

One tenet in the theory of student-centered instruction is that students should choose what they learn, according to their own interests. The theory also states that teachers should educate students only in what the students are interested in.

Every teacher hopes to make learning enjoyable, but children have limited knowledge and experience, making them ill-equipped to discern what is important to learn and what isn’t. While there are different methods of instruction, teachers must take responsibility for guiding students so they can broaden the scope of their interests beyond that which attracts their immediate attention. Simply catering to the superficial interests of students, as advocated by “student-centered” instruction, encourages permanent infantilization.

Studies have found that there is now a tendency in American society for adults to remain in a state of adolescence longer than in other populations. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine defined adolescence as a period from twelve to thirty years of age. Research supported by the MacArthur Foundation went even further and said, based on traditional markers of adulthood, a person nowadays may not be considered an adult until age thirty-five. [20] The education system and media are directly responsible for this extended period of adolescence that many adults have found themselves in.

One of the excuses given by progressive educators for lowering teaching requirements is that with higher enrolments in secondary and post-secondary schools, and with students coming from across society, the average level of attainment cannot be as high as it was in the past. This understanding is wrong. In a democratic society, the object of public schooling is to allow those who otherwise wouldn’t have the means to receive an education the opportunity to do so — not to lower academic standards, which causes everyone’s learning to suffer. Progressivism claims that “useless” classical subjects such as Greek and Latin should be replaced with more contemporary subjects, but in the end, most schools don’t end up introducing high-quality courses in subjects useful for modern life, such as mathematics, economics, and modern history. The curriculum and teaching-method reforms advocated by progressive educators deceive students who are not yet well-informed, as well as parents who defer to schools, teachers, and so-called experts.

Some teaching methods proposed by progressive education are useful when applied to some subjects and areas of learning. However, when we look at the progressive education movement and its specific background and outcomes, it becomes clear that progressive education sets itself up in opposition to traditional education, thereby mutating education and ultimately ruining students.

c. Ruining Students’ Moral Character

On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado murdered twelve students and one teacher and injured at least twenty more in a carefully planned massacre. The tragedy shocked the nation. People wondered why the two students would carry out such a cold-blooded attack, gunning down their classmates and a teacher they’d known for years.

By comparing social phenomena in different historical periods, educators noticed that up to the 1960s, common problem behaviors among US students were minor, like tardiness, talking in class without permission, or chewing gum. After the 1980s, there were worse problems, like excessive drinking, drug abuse, premarital sex, pregnancy, suicide, gang activity, and even indiscriminate shootings, which have only increased in frequency since Columbine. These downward trends are a concern to millions in the United States and other countries, but few understand the real roots of these developments, and no one is able to prescribe an appropriate treatment for the disorder.

The distortion and the downward spiral of the moral standards of American youth are no accidents.

Atheism and Evolution

Fred Schwarz, a pioneer of anti-communist activism, observed, “The three basic tenets of Communism are atheism, evolution, and economic determinism.” [21] Those three key elements of communist ideology have been adopted in American public schools.

The divine created humankind and laid down the moral standards that should regulate human life. Belief in the divine lays the foundation of morality for society and underpins the existence of the human world. Communism forcibly spread atheism and the theory of evolution in schools as a means of destroying morality. This is to be expected in communist states like China and the former Soviet Union, but in the United States, it was carried out covertly.

Under the pretext of separation of church and state, leftists oppose the teaching of creationism in American public schools, while on the other hand promoting the theory of evolution. This education inevitably leads the number of religious believers to decline, as children are indoctrinated with the idea that the theory of evolution is scientific truth and not to be questioned.

Since the 1960s, courts around the United States have shut down Bible study in public schools, again under the pretext of separation of church and state. An appeals court ruled in 1981 that students enjoyed freedom of speech, unless the speech was a prayer, at which point it became unconstitutional. [22]

In 1987, students in Alaskan public schools were told not to use the word “Christmas” since it contained the word “Christ.” They were also told they couldn’t exchange traditional Christmas cards or presents. In 1987, a federal court in Virginia ruled that newspapers promoting the gay rights movement could be distributed on a high school campus, but religious newspapers were banned. In 1993, an elementary school music teacher in Colorado Springs was prevented from teaching Christmas carols because of alleged violations of the separation of church and state. [23]

Teaching and test materials in the United States have undergone extensive revision due to the anti-theist orientation of the education system, in combination with decades of political correctness. In 1997, Diane Ravitch, an education historian, was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administered federal tests in schools. She noticed that passages in reading tests had been scrubbed by editors to remove white males as heroes or any references to Christianity. The maxim that “God helps those who help themselves” was changed to “People should try to work things out for themselves whenever possible.” [24]

On the one hand, the American public education system ejected belief in God from schools under the pretext of upholding the separation of church and state. On the other hand, evolution, with its unresolved gaps, was held to be a self-evident truth to be instilled in children who had no mental preparation or defense. Children tend to believe in the authority of their teachers.

Parents with religious beliefs teach their kids to respect others, but children who are instilled with the theory of evolution are likely to challenge the religious education given by their parents. At the very least, they will no longer take their parents’ religious instruction as seriously. The result is that education pulls children away from parents with religious beliefs. This is the most challenging problem that families with religious beliefs face when it comes to their children’s education, and it’s the evilest aspect of the anti-theistic education system.

Communist Ideology

Chapter Five of this book illustrates the nature of political correctness: It works like the thought police of communism, using a set of distorted political standards to replace authentic moral standards. Since the 1930s, political correctness has played a dominant role in the American education system. When put into practice, it comes in different forms, some of which are extremely deceptive.

E. Merrill Root, author of Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks, published in 1958, conducted research into eleven sets of history teaching materials used in Illinois between 1950 and 1952 and found that they characterized American history as a power struggle between rich and poor, between the privileged few and the underprivileged. This is the essence of Marxian economic determinism. [25]

In 2013, a school district in Minnesota adopted a project named All for All, which shifts the focus of teaching toward racial and income inequalities. This ideology blames the poor performance of students on systemic racial or income discrimination. The project demanded that all teaching activities be based on advancing racial and income equality and that only teachers and administrators who were deeply aware of the issues associated with these inequalities be employed.

The project was designed for students from pre-K through twelfth grade. Tenth-grade English classes focused on the themes of colonization and immigration, as well as “social constructions” of race, class, and gender. The eleventh-grade framework claimed, “By the end of the year, you will have … learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical … lenses to literature.” [26]

In July 2016, California adopted a new social science framework for public elementary and high schools. The already left-leaning framework was revised to even more resemble left-wing ideological propaganda. Content that should be emphasized in history and social science courses — like the founding spirit of America, and military, political, and diplomatic history — was watered down or ignored. By contrast, the values of the 1960s counterculture were passionately highlighted and made to seem like the nation’s founding principles. The curriculum also articulated a clearly anti-traditional framework on the subjects of sex and family.

Take the eleventh-grade courses, for example. The new framework claimed its focus was on the rights movements of minority races, tribes, and religions, as well as women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans. In reality, religion was seldom mentioned, but much was written about sexual minorities. LGBT groups were included first and were given a significant share of the eleventh-grade history courses. The LGBT portions were written in a tone clearly supportive of “sexual liberation.” For example, in a discussion on AIDS, it was suggested that people’s fear of the disease weakened the civil rights and sexual liberation movements. [27]

Sexual content occupied many chapters, squeezing out other content far more worthy of attention for young people. For example, in the course on World War I, students hardly learned about the critical role played by the US Army, but were taught that American soldiers enjoyed the looser European sexual customs. [28] This left-leaning framework was full of distortion and bias, guiding students to hate their own country. Though the framework was adopted only in the state of California, the impact of this approach has been felt nationwide.

d. Psychological Manipulation

Pushing the concept of moral relativism upon students via psychological conditioning is another common method of corrupting the youth.

In 1978, hundreds of parents and teachers attended hearings for the Protection of Pupils’ Rights Amendment, a federal law that affords certain rights to parents of minor students with regard to surveys that ask questions of a personal nature. The hearing testimonies totaled more than thirteen hundred pages. In her 1984 book Child Abuse in the Classroom, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly summed up the issues described in the testimonies, including the use of “education as therapy.” Unlike traditional education, which aims to impart knowledge, education as therapy focuses on changing students’ emotions and attitudes. This kind of education plays psychological games on students; for example, they are asked to fill out surveys on personal issues and to make adult decisions, weighing in on issues like suicide and murder, marriage and divorce, and abortion and adoption. [29]

Such courses weren’t set up to take care of the students’ mental health — they were intended to change students’ moral values through psychological conditioning.

Psychology and Education

Modern education is heavily based on philosophy and psychology. In addition to Dewey’s progressive education, other theories that have had a significant impact on the US education system include Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, Carl Rogers’s humanistic psychology, and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, which combines theories from Marx and Freud. Herbert Marcuse, a theorist of the Frankfurt School, called for the removal of all inhibitions so that young people could let loose their “natural instincts” and indulge their personal whims. [30] It was this thinking that helped accelerate the birth of the counterculture of the 1960s.

Deeply influenced by the above-mentioned schools of thought on psychology, the first director general of the World Health Organization, Canadian psychiatrist Brock Chisholm, proposed a shocking theory: In order to release the individual from psychological pain, morality and the concept of right and wrong must be neutralized. He said in a 1946 lecture:

What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? It must be a force which discourages the ability to see and acknowledge patent facts … which produces inferiority, guilt, and fear. … The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong. …

We have been very slow to rediscover this truth and to recognise the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt and fear, commonly known as sin, under which we have almost all laboured and which produces so much of the social maladjustment and unhappiness in the world. …

If the race is to be freed of its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. [31]

Chisholm waged war on morality. Seemingly influenced by Chisholm, humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers came up with “values clarification” classes, which served the purpose of eradicating traditional values and the concepts of right and wrong.

Eventually, Dewey’s moral relativism, the Frankfurt School’s rejection of inhibitions, and Chisholm’s psychological theories worked together to attack and undermine traditional values. They destroyed the moral fortifications of public schools in the United States.

Moral Relativism

Americans who attended schools in the late 1970s may remember an imagined scenario many teachers brought up in class, which went like this: As a ship sinks, the captain, several children, a pregnant woman, and a gay man get in a lifeboat. The lifeboat is overloaded and one person must be let go. The teachers would ask the students to discuss and decide who must get off the lifeboat, giving up his or her life. The teacher would not comment on or judge the students’ comments.

This story was often used in the values clarification classes that emerged in the 1970s. This kind of lesson was also applied in affective education, the Lions Quest drug-prevention program, and sex education.

William Kilpatrick, author of the 1993 book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong: And What We Can Do About It, described such classes as having “turned classroom discussions into ‘bull sessions’ where opinions go back and forth but conclusions are never reached.” Kilpatrick wrote:

It has resulted in classrooms where teachers act like talk show hosts, and where the merits of wife swapping, cannibalism, and teaching children to masturbate are recommended topics for debate. … For students, it has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always merely subjective. … It has created a generation of moral illiterates: students who know their own feelings but don’t know their culture. [32]

Sowell understood that these sessions utilized the same techniques developed in totalitarian countries to brainwash people:

1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance

2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance

3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure

4. Stripping the individual of normal defenses, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate

5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs—a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form [33]

Sowell notes that the sessions encourage students to rebel against the traditional moral values taught by their parents and society. Classes are conducted in a neutral or a “nonjudgmental” way, in which the teacher does not distinguish between right and wrong, but rather searches for what feels good for an individual. The focus of values clarification “is on the feelings of the individual, rather than on the requirements of a functioning society or the requirements of intellectual analysis.” [34]

Death and Drug-Prevention Education

In September 1990, the US television channel ABC aired a program that concerned many viewers. In it, a school takes students to a morgue as part of its “death education” and students view and touch corpses. [35]

Common activities of the death education classes included asking the students to draw their own tombstones, select their own coffins, arrange their own funerals, and write their own obituaries. Students were asked the following questions:

“How will you die?”

“When will you die?”

“Have you ever known anyone who died violently?”

“When was the last time you mourned? Was it expressed in tears or silent pain? Did you mourn alone or with someone else?”

“Do you believe in an after-life?” [36]

Obviously, these questions have nothing to do with studying. They are designed to probe the students’ outlook on life, their religious beliefs, and their personalities. Some of the questions are aimed to elicit particular reactions and can have a negative impact on teens.

It is said that death education can help students establish the right attitude in the face of death. However, some students who attended these classes have committed suicide. For the same 1990 program, ABC interviewed one student at Columbine High School who said her suicide plans were directly related to the death education she received there. She said the classes made death seem glamorous, “very exciting, [and] very appealing.” [37] Although a causal relationship has not been established scientifically, it is certainly reasonable for parents to suspect and fear that by exposing psychologically immature students to confronting information on death and suicide, some students may be more likely to develop depression and hopelessness, which may contribute to reasons for committing suicide.

Drug-prevention education has also become very popular in schools. However, in 1976, a four-year study on a drug-prevention education course called Decide found that students who took the course picked up drug use earlier and used drugs more extensively than a control group that did not take the course.

In both 1978 and 1985, professor Stephen Jurs conducted a research project comparing the rate of smoking and substance abuse among students who had taken a self-esteem course called Quest and those who had not. The course was designed to help students make wise and healthy decisions, but the results showed the opposite—participation was followed by an increase in drug experimentation. Those who didn’t take the course maintained a steady or lowered rate of smoking and substance abuse. [38]

Neither death education nor drug-prevention education has generated the expected outcome, so what was the real purpose? To pollute children.

Children are very curious but have an immature moral foundation. New and strange content stimulates their curiosity and can lead them down a dark path. In the meantime, such education tends to desensitize students, making them view violence, pornography, terror, and moral decadence as simply normal parts of life. Their tolerance of evil increases in turn. The entire exercise is part of an evil use of art, violence, and pornography to bring about moral decline.

Pornographic Sex Education

Traditionally in both the East and the West, sex has been a taboo topic in public. According to both traditions, the divine established that sexual conduct must take place only within marriage. All other forms of sexual conduct are considered promiscuous and sinful, violating the divine standards of morality. This makes sex and marriage inseparable, and sex can’t be a matter of public discussion in a properly functioning society. In traditional society, youth received education in physiology, and there was no need for today’s version of sex education.

The modern concept of sex education was first introduced by Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, founder of the Frankfurt School. His purpose was to completely overturn traditional Western values. In 1919, Lukács was appointed minister of culture in the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik regime. He developed a radical sex-education program that taught students about free love and that marriage was outdated.

In the United States, Alfred Kinsey, financed by the Rockefeller foundations, published his best-selling Kinsey Reports in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In his since-debunked research, he used pedophiles to conduct sexual experiments on infants and children. Kinsey’s idea that children are “sexual beings” from birth and thus must be explicitly educated in every manner of sexual activity is the foundation of modern sex education. [39]

Rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy began to rise rapidly, especially against the backdrop of the 1960s sexual revolution. Those who wanted to solve such social problems promoted sex education. But in an education system that had already deviated from traditional moral teachings, sex education treated intercourse as disconnected from marriage and instead emphasized the prevention of disease and pregnancy — thus following the Lukács model of sex education by ignoring all moral aspects of sexual activity.

This form of education then became a tool for destroying youth. Students have also been exposed to the extramarital, promiscuous conduct of homosexuality, thus normalizing such behavior. The result of all this has been that the younger generation indulges in what they think is freedom, while in reality, it is a path that turns away from divinely ordained standards. This sort of sex education from elementary school onward has already destroyed the traditional values of family, individual responsibility, love, chastity, honor, self-control, loyalty, and more.

Dewey’s “learning by doing” form of progressive education is a convenient tool for Marxists. The sex-education program Focus on Kids, widely promoted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recommends an activity in which teachers organize students to compete in a “condom race,” in which teams of students must put a condom on a sex toy and then remove it as quickly as possible. [40] In another Focus on Kids exercise, the teacher instructs students to brainstorm ways to be intimate. Be Proud! Be Responsible! is another program endorsed by the CDC and promoted by Planned Parenthood and other organizations. The program requires students to role play — for example, pretending to be two female students discussing having safer sex together. [41] To the majority of people who still have traditional values in their hearts, it is difficult to distinguish these supposedly educational activities from child pornography.

The main proponent of the program, Planned Parenthood, is the largest single provider of abortions and sex education in the United States and has a presence in many countries around the world. The organization was founded in 1921 as the American Birth Control League. Its founder, Margaret Sanger, was a progressive socialist who traveled to Stalin’s Russia, where she solidified her belief in eugenics. “We should breed out the feebleminded families who have done and still are doing much social and racial damage,” she said in a draft article. Sanger was also a strong proponent of the sexual liberation movement. She is on record as saying that an extramarital affair she had “really set me free.” [42] She even gave her sixteen-year-old granddaughter the advice to engage frequently in sexual intercourse, saying that “three times a day was about right.” [43]

Sex education textbook It’s Perfectly Normal has been translated into twenty-one languages and has sold more than one million copies worldwide. The book uses almost one hundred nude cartoons to depict various normal and abnormal movements, feelings, and physical sensations of masturbation between opposite sexes and homosexuals, as well as birth control methods and abortion. The author claims that children have the right to know all such information. [44] The main theme of the book is that a variety of sexual behaviors are all “perfectly normal” and that none should be subject to moral judgment.

In a widely used high school sex-education textbook, the author teaches children that some religions believe that sex outside of marriage is sinful, then writes, “You will have to decide for yourself how important these messages are for you.” [45] To summarize, this worldview holds that all values are relative, and that right and wrong are for children to decide for themselves.

Today, U.S. public schools have two basic types of sex-education classes. The first type, which is strongly promoted by today’s educational mainstream (as described above), includes instruction on sexual behaviors, birth control, the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, and the like. The other type teaches young people to control their sexual desire, does not discuss birth control, and encourages abstinence from sex until after marriage.

It is undeniable that social morality, especially the general attitude toward sex, has deviated far from traditional, faith-based morality. The media and the internet are flooded with pornographic content, all of which drags children toward the edge of the abyss. In today’s atheism-dominated education field, most public schools that follow “value neutrality” don’t want to, or don’t dare to, teach children that sex outside of marriage is immoral, nor do they teach children right from wrong based on traditional moral principles.

Sex education remains a controversial topic in society today. There are numerous arguments in different sectors around the issue of safety in sexual activity, focusing on the rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. However, the fact that schools are publicly teaching teenagers about sexual behavior will obviously increase the incidence of sex outside of marriage. Even if there were no teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases, would promiscuity among teenagers be acceptable? With a decadent attitude toward sexual conduct in ascendance, communism is working to achieve its goal of destroying human morality.

Self-Esteem and Egocentrism

Since the 1960s, a new dogma heavily promoted in schools is responsible for a major downward slide in educational quality: the cult of “self-esteem.” On its surface, self-esteem should refer to a feeling of confidence and self-respect that arises from one’s own abilities and accomplishments. However, the self-esteem promoted in US schools is something entirely different.

In her book The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America’s Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem, education researcher Maureen Stout writes about a common phenomenon in American schools: Students care about their grades, but don’t care about what they learned or how much effort they put in. To satisfy the students’ demands for better grades, teachers are forced to reduce the difficulty of exams and assignments. But this only results in even less effort on the part of underperforming students. Stout asserts that teachers seem accustomed to the phenomenon and are even of the belief that school should be like the womb — isolated from the outside world so students can gain emotional comfort but not intellectual development or resilience. The focus is on students’ feelings, rather than their overall growth. [46] As many commentators have pointed out, the dogma of self-esteem confuses cause and effect. True self-esteem is the outcome of effort, not a precondition for success. In other words, feeling good does not lead to success; one feels good after achieving success.

This misconception of self-esteem is the by-product of the psychotherapeutic style of education ascendant since the 1960s. Psychotherapeutic education ended up indoctrinating a large number of young people with a sense of entitlement and victimhood. Stout delineates the common mindset as “I want to do what I want, how I want and when I want, and nothing and no one is going to stop me.” [47]

American education exaggerates the ideas of freedom and self-centeredness in the name of sentimental self-esteem. This style of education produces generations of young people who don’t value morality and don’t assume responsibility. They care only about their own feelings and not those of others. They pursue enjoyment and comfort, but do everything they can to avoid the effort, sacrifice, and suffering that are needed to secure a future for themselves. This has wreaked havoc on the morality of American society.

e. The Infiltration of Education

Control Over US Elementary and Secondary Education

For a long while after the founding of the United States, the federal government was not involved in education; it was the responsibility of state governments to make those decisions. In 1979, the federal government established the Department of Education and its jurisdiction has been enlarged ever since. Currently, its power over education strategies and the allocation of education budgets far surpasses what it previously had. Parents, school districts, and state governments, which used to have a greater say in education, are increasingly compelled to take orders from federal government officials. Parents and school districts have gradually lost their power to decide what gets taught and how it’s taught.

Power itself is neutral — those who wield it can do either good or evil. The centralization of power in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather a matter of how the person or institution uses its power and to what end. Centralization in American education has become a major issue due to Marxist infiltration at all levels, especially the central bureaucracy. Under such circumstances, once a wrong decision is made, the impact is extensive, and the few clear-headed individuals who remain cannot simply reverse the damage.

As explained by writer and former teacher Beverly K. Eakman, one of the dilemmas of the centralized approach to American education is that the officials in charge are unable to see how their educational strategies develop in the long term and how great of an impact they have over time. Although some strategies may raise doubts, most people do not have the time, energy, resources, or courage to investigate for themselves. Even if their suspicions are aroused in some cases, without other pieces of the puzzle, they can do little more than obey what they’re told by their supervisors. Everyone thus becomes part of a gigantic machine. It is difficult for them to see the consequences of their decisions for students and society, and as a result, their moral accountability is attenuated. [48] Communism can take advantage of the weaknesses in this system and break down society’s defenses layer by layer.

Teachers’ colleges, publishing houses, educational accreditation organizations, and teacher-accreditation institutions have all become targets of infiltration.

The Role of Teachers’ Unions

Chapter Nine of this book discussed how communism manipulates and utilizes unions. Teachers’ unions have become one of the key reasons behind the failure of American education. These unions do not care about raising the quality of education, instead acting as professional organizations that reward failure, protect incompetence, and sacrifice conscientious teachers who aspire to make a contribution and who truly dedicate themselves to teaching students.

In the article “How Teachers’ Unions Handcuff Schools,” City Journal editor and writer Sol Stern gives the example of Tracey Bailey, a former high school science teacher who won the National Teacher of the Year Award in 1993. At the time, the chief of the American Federation of Teachers called Bailey to say how pleased he was that a union member had won the honor. Bailey later dropped his membership and now believes that big teachers’ unions are a primary reason for the failure of American public education. He holds that unions are simply special interest groups protecting the status quo and pillars of “a system that too often rewards mediocrity and incompetence.” [49]

Major American teachers’ unions are well funded and have immense influence; they are ranked among the most powerful political lobby groups in the country, and they have become the primary obstacle that hinders positive reform within the education system. For example, the California Teachers Association, under the American Federation of Teachers, uses its huge war chest collected from members to push for legislation and make political donations. In 1991, California sought to add Proposition 174 to its state constitution, allowing families to use school vouchers provided by the state government to choose the best schools for their children. However, the California Teachers Association blocked the proposition and even threatened schools into revoking their contracts with a hamburger franchise that had donated $25,000 to support the proposition. [50]

The Exclusion of the Family From Children’s Education

Another key goal of communism is the removal of the child from his or her parents as soon as he or she is born, having the community or nation raise the child instead. This is not an easy feat, but things have been quietly moving in this direction.

In communist countries, students from the “bourgeoisie” class are encouraged to sever their relationships with their parents. In addition, exam-centric education extends the time that students must spend in school, thus reducing the impact parents can have on their children.

In Western countries, different approaches are used to exclude the influence of the family from children’s education. These include maximizing students’ school time, reducing the age requirement for children to attend school, preventing students from taking textbooks and study materials home, and discouraging students from sharing controversial topics they learned in class with their parents.

Courses such as values clarification education attempt to separate students from their parents. A parent of a student taking the Quest class commented: “It seemed as if the parents were always put in a bad light. The story would be about a father and his son, say; and the father was always overbearing, always too strict, always unfair.” Oftentimes, the subtext of such courses is “your parents don’t understand you, but we do.” [51]

Sometimes, due to legal requirements, students must first obtain parental consent before they can participate in certain activities. On such occasions, teachers or administrative staff may use misleading and ambiguous words to make it very difficult for parents to know the details of what they’re agreeing to. If parents complain, school authorities or the school district have methods of dealing with the complaint: procrastinating, shirking responsibility, or taking a superior stance. For example, they might say that parents do not have the professional knowledge of educators, that other school districts are doing the same thing, that only your family is complaining, and so on.

Most parents don’t have the time or resources to engage in a prolonged argument with the school or school district. Moreover, a concerned parent is generally only a problem for the few years before their child’s graduation. In the meantime, the child is almost held hostage by the school, and parents don’t dare to offend the school authorities. When parents do protest educational practices, school authorities may label them as extremists, troublemakers, religious bigots, fanatics, fascists, and so on. By doing so, school authorities deter other parents from voicing an objection. [52]

In the preface to her book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, Iserbyt argues that America is engaged in a secret war, in which the wagers use sophisticated tools such as “Hegelian dialectic (common ground, consensus and compromise),” “gradualism (two steps forward; one step backward),” and “semantic deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding).” [53] Schlafly, in the foreword to her book Child Abuse in the Classroom, cited an invasive trend toward what one US senator called a “therapy” approach in education. “The promoters of this strange ‘therapy’ education speak in a jargon designed to prevent parents from understanding either the purpose or the methodology,” she wrote. Examples of such jargon include values clarification, “behavior modification,” “moral reasoning,” “decision-making,” “higher-order critical thinking skills,” and “humanism.” [54]

For decades, American educators have created a dazzling array of terms such as constructivism, cooperative learning, experiential learning, deep understanding, problem-solving, inquiry-based and outcome-based education, personalized learning, conceptual understanding, procedural skills, lifelong learning, student–teacher interactive instruction, and so on. There are too many to list. Some concepts appear sensible at first glance, but investigation into the context of the terms and where they lead to reveals that their purpose is to discredit traditional education and advance the dumbing down of education.[55]

Large-Scale Changes to Subjects and Textbooks

None Dare Call It Treason, published in 1964, analyzes the textbook reform program of the 1930s. The new textbooks created under this reform combined content from different disciplines, such as history, geography, sociology, economics, and political science, and abandoned the content, value system, and way of codifying found in traditional texts. “So pronounced was the anti-religious bias” and “so open was the propaganda for socialistic control of men’s lives” that the textbooks downgraded American heroes and the US Constitution, author John A. Stormer writes. [56] The set of textbooks was extensive and the mix of content did not fall within the scope of any traditional discipline. Therefore, experts had difficulty judging their merit, as much of the content fell outside of their professional purview. Many years later, when the public realized the problem and began to oppose the materials, five million students had already been educated with them. By then, it was impossible to change the textbooks back to their traditional form. If these changes to the textbooks had been implemented in a transparent way, they immediately would have been questioned and met with resistance from experts and parents.

Similar changes to school curricula and teaching materials continued to take place throughout the century. While a minority of people may recognize and oppose these moves, their voices are ignored and have little chance of stopping the planned changes amid the presence of progressive lobbying. After several rounds of reforms, the new generation of students is then separated even further from tradition, making it almost impossible to go back.

American textbooks are constantly undergoing updates and revisions, and some say it’s because knowledge is growing at an accelerating rate. But the fundamental knowledge needed at the primary and secondary levels of education does not change much over time. So why have there been so many different textbooks published and continuously reprinted? The surface reason is that publishers compete with each other. Superficially, they don’t want students to repeatedly use the same set of textbooks for many years because it doesn’t generate revenues for these companies. But at a deeper level, just like the reorganization of textbook content, the process has been used to distort the teaching materials for the next generation.

Education Reform: A Dialectic Struggle

Since the 1950s and 1960s, American education has seen a series of reforms, but none brought the expected improvements. In 1981, American students’ SAT scores reached a record low, triggering the publication of the 1983 report A Nation at Risk and the ensuing “back to basics” movement. In order to change the embarrassing condition of education in the United States, several administrations since the 1990s successively have launched large-scale reforms, to little effect. Not only did they not help, but they also brought problems that were more difficult to solve. [57]

Most people involved in education reform sincerely want to do good for students and society, but due to the influence of various communist ideas, their intentions often backfire. The results of many of these reforms end up promoting communist ideas. Just as in other fields, the infiltration through education reform doesn’t need to win all of its battles at once. The success of a reform is not its true goal. In fact, every reform is designed to first fail in order to provide an excuse for the next reform, which is a deeper deviation than the last, further alienating people from tradition. This is the dialectic of struggle — one step back, then two steps forward. In this way, people will not only not regret the collapse of tradition — they won’t even know what it is.

References

1. Yuri Bezmenov, as quoted in G. Edward Griffin, Deception Was My Job: A Conversation with Yuri Bezmenov, Former Propagandist for the KGB (New York: American Media Inc., 1985).

2. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (Washington DC: US Department of Education, 1983), https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html.

3. Ibid.

4. Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher, 2008), chap. 1.

5. John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2005), 12.

6. Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can’t Read, Write, or Add (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 148–9.

7. Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 4.

8. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail (Ravenna, OH: Conscience Press, 1999), xvii.

9. Sidney Hook, as quoted in Robin S. Eubanks, Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon (Scotts Valley, CA: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 48.

10. Albert P. Pinkevich, as quoted in Eubanks, Credentialed, 49.

11. Alan Ryan, as quoted in Eubanks, Credentialed, 45–46.

12. “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Human Events, May 31, 2005, http://humanevents.com/2005/05/31/ten-most-harmful-books-of-the-19th-and-20th-centuries/.

13. Mortimer Smith, And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949).

14. John A. Stormer, None Dare Call It Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964), 99.

15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as quoted in I. L. Kandel, “Prejudice the Garden Toward Roses?” The American Scholar 8, no. 1 (Winter 1938–1939): 77.

16. Christopher Turner, “A Conversation About Happiness, Review – a Childhood at Summerhill,” The Guardian, March 28, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/28/conversation-happiness-summerhill-school-review-mikey-cuddihy.

17. A. S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (New York: Hart Publishing Company, 1960), chap. 3.

18. Joanne Lipman, “Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results,” The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2013,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-tough-teachers-get-good-results-1380323772.

19. Daisy Christodoulou, Seven Myths About Education (London: Routledge, 2014).

20. Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), Kindle Edition.

21. Fred Schwarz and David Noebel, You Can Still Trust the Communists … to Be Communists (Socialists, Statists, and Progressives Too) (Manitou Springs, CO: Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, 2010), http://www.schwarzreport.org/resources/you-can-trust-the-communists-to-be-communists.

22. Stein v. Oshinsky, 348 F.2d 999 (2nd Cir. 1965); Collins v. Chandler Unified School District et al., 644 F.2d 759 (9th Cir. 1981).

23. John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling (Baltimore: Odysseus Group, 2000), chap. 14.

24. Diane Ravitch, “Education after the Culture Wars,” Daedalus 131, no. 3 (Summer 2002), 5–21.

25. E. Merrill Root, Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks (Papamoa Press, 2018), Kindle edition.

26. Katherine Kersten, “Inside a Public School Social Justice Factory,” Washington Examiner, February 1, 2018, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/inside-a-public-school-social-justice-factory.

27. History Social Science Framework, adopted by the California State Board of Education July 2016 (Sacramento: California Department of Education, 2017), 431, https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/cf/documents/hssfwchapter16.pdf.

28. Ibid., 391.

29. Phyllis Schlafly, ed., Child Abuse in the Classroom (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1984), 13.

30. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 35.

31. Brock Chisholm, as quoted in B. K. Eakman, Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality through Education (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House Publishers, 1998), 109.

32. William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong and What We Can Do About It (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 16–17.

33. Sowell, Inside American Education, 36.

34. Ibid., 48.

35. 20/20, “Death in the Classroom,” ABC, August 30, 1991, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbiY6Fz6Few.

36. Sowell, Inside American Education, 38.

37. 20/20, “Death in the Classroom.”

38. Kilpatrick, Why Johnny, 32.

39. Judith A. Reisman et al., Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People (Lafayette, LA: Lochinvar-Huntington House, 1990).

40. Robert Rector, “When Sex Ed Becomes Porn 101,” The Heritage Foundation, August 27, 2003, https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/when-sex-ed-becomes-porn-101.

41. Ibid.

42. Margaret Sanger, as quoted in Norman K. Risjord, Representative Americans: Populists and Progressives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 267.

43. Margaret Sanger, as quoted in Madeline Gray, Margaret Sanger (New York: Penguin Adult Hc/Tr, 1979), 227–228.

44. Rebecca Hersher, “It May Be ‘Perfectly Normal,’ but It’s Also Frequently Banned,” National Public Radio, September 21, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/09/21/350366435/it-may-be-perfectly-normal-but-its-also-frequently-banned.

45. Kilpatrick, Why Johnny, 53.

46. Maureen Stout, The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America’s Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2000), 1–3.

47. Ibid., 17.

48. B. K. Eakman, Educating for the ‘New World Order’ (Portland, OR: Halcyon House, 1991), 129.

49. Sol Stern, “How Teachers’ Unions Handcuff Schools,” City Journal, Spring 1997, https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-teachers%E2%80%99-unions-handcuff-schools-12102.html.

50. Troy Senik, “The Worst Union in America: How the California Teachers Association Betrayed the Schools and Crippled the State,” City Journal, Spring 2012, https://www.city-journal.org/html/worst-union-america-13470.html.

51. Kilpatrick, Why Johnny, 39.

52. Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman, Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children (Washington D.C: WND Books, 2015), chap. 14.

53. Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down, xvii.

54. Schlafly, Child Abuse, 14.

55. Valerie Strauss, “A Serious Rant about Education Jargon and How It Hurts Efforts to Improve Schools,” The Washington Post, November 11, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/11/a-serious-rant-about-education-jargon-and-how-it-hurts-efforts-to-improve-schools/?utm_term=.8ab3d85e9e45.

56. Stormer, None Dare, 104–106.

57. Diane Ravitch, “The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students,” The New York Times, July 23, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opinion/sunday/the-common-core-costs-billions-and-hurts-students.html.

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