The Subversion of Education in America

The Subversion of Education in America

by Alan Caruba

I'll bet you think that the problems with our nation's schools are a fairly recent phenomenon. Wrong. It dates backs to the 1960's. Those that have implemented the subversion of our educational system have sought to fly well below the radar of public awareness, depending on stealth and duplicity to achieve the wreckage that has already stunted the lives of thousands who have passed through it.

No other topic has evoked as much email as did our weekly "Warning Signs" commentary, "Indoctrination, Not Education." Good. Time to wake up America!

In this and three other commentaries, I will walk you through the history of the problem with the help of an extraordinary book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. The facts I will share with you are found in a fat compendium of research by this former senior official with the US Department of Education who discovered the mother lode, copied it, and fled. She is one of America's unsung heroes.

As Iserbyt points out, in the 1960's "American education would henceforth concern itself with the importance of the group rather than with the importance of the individual." The purpose of education would shift to focus on the student's emotional health, rather than academic learning. Remember the 1960's? Sex, drugs and rock'n roll? Drop out, tune in, and turn on? Just about everything that is wrong with America today had its genesis in this pathetic decade of youthful self-indulgence.

In 1965, there were two major federal initiatives developed with funding from The Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed that year. One was the 1965–1969 Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program and the other was the publication by the government of "Pacesetters in Innovation," a 584-page catalogue of behavior modification programs to be used by the schools.

Let me repeat that: a catalogue of behavior modification programs! We're not talking of programs to teach students anything. We are talking about programs to indoctrinate children passing through the system to believe in values contrary to those on which this nation was based.

In brief, the intention was to create a generation or two of Americans who would accept the United Nations, not the United States, as their new "nation," a global nation, one-world government. The last thing the conspirators wanted was a nation of individuals who could or would actually think for themselves. This is how we ended up with Bill Clinton, the classic student achiever of the 1960's.

Iserbyt writes that, "In 1960, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Convention Against Discrimination was signed in Paris. This convention laid the groundwork for control of American education, both public and private, by UN agencies and agents."

Now connect the dots. In 1960, "Soviet Education Programs: Foundations, Curriculums, Teacher Preparation" was published under the auspices of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was the blueprint for the US school-to-work restructuring that would take place and it would rely on the "Pavlovian conditioned reflex theory." The mastermind of mind control and conditioning was a psychologist, Dr. B.F. Skinner, who was the guru of the mess that passes for education in America today.

Though hard to believe even now, the US adopted the Soviet Communist approach to education. In 1961, Rep. John M. Ashbrook tried to alert Congress to what was happening. Citing a document published by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare called "A Federal Education Agency for the Future," he called the new education programs "a blueprint for complete domination and direction of our schools from Washington. Guess what? He was right.

That is why the educational reform this nation really needs is the complete elimination of the US Department of Education. It won't happen. For the same reason we are now only learning that those "Red baiters" of the 1950's were right to assert the Department of State was shot through with Communists, no one in 2001 is going to believe that the US Department of Education is modeled on Communist theories.