Jamie Lee, Contributor
Waking Times

“Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether education is fulfilling its purpose.

A great majority of the so called educated people do not think logically or scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us the objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education.

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.

The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”  –Martin Luther King Jr.

Compared to 40 other modernized countries, the United States currently ranks 17th in literacy, 17th in math, 21st in science out of 40  according to the recent report put out by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). The United States has fallen to rank 49th in life expectancy of 120 countries while maintaining the dubious rank of being number one in incarcerations, military spending, childhood obesity, hours of television watched, student debt and the highest national debt any country has ever incurred in history.

These continual poor performance rankings persist despite spending more on education than any other country with the exception of Switzerland, who ranks in the top five in education.

Currently, only 64% of students who begin college graduate within six years. Those who do graduate have collectively amassed over one trillion dollars in long term student debt. It is of no surprise that over 72% of students who have finished college in the past three years have moved back in with their parents. Additionally, young adults between the ages of 18-26 also have the highest unemployment rate in this country putting further strain on middle class families.

The U.S. tops the world list in 2010 in spending $860 Billion dollars on public education which is a 30% increase from the $660.5 Billion spent in 2000. All of this increase has come from the Federal level while in the same period state and local government spending has been relatively flat, between $28-29 Billion per year. So if hundreds of billions has been spent on public education over the past decade by our Federal government then why are schools so desperately in need of more funds and we are seeing staff size being reduced across the country in our public schools?

*****

Much of the blame for the failure in our public schools has been unfairly placed on local staff and educators. What few outside the public school system realize is that more and more of what material the educators can teach and how they must instruct to achieve standardized national test scoring is tied to the schools receiving critical funding each and every year.

School administrators spend copious amounts of time and energies applying for grants and reviewing, comprehending and complying with yearly changes in federal and state codes and regulations while annually having to pink slip staff each Spring not knowing how much funding will be cut the following school year.

Since 2004, federally directed programs like President Bush Jr.’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) and President Obama’s “Race to the Top” (RTTT) have married critical public school funding to school average test score performances. The governments stated goals of these programs was to get a national standardized education performance system in place set to a standard benchmark as well as to develop a one-size-fits all nationalized education system so that if a family relocated to another state the curriculum and testing would be equalized and consistent.

Teachers and administrators across the nation who fall below this federally mandated benchmark and then fail to show significant improvement in their schools annual yearly performance are threatened with the loss of their jobs and reduced school funding. The benchmark set by NCLB was determined by a formula known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).  By 2010 the national failure rate was over 50% with Florida ranking the worst at 89% and California towards the low end at a 26% failure rate.  Principals and teachers were put on notice that if the numbers did not come up to benchmark standard, their jobs could be in jeopardy.

While public media hails each new Presidential educational initiative, over the past few years our public schools are quietly being foisted with a new business global educational “product” called Common Core (CC). Common Core is a subsidiary of Core International, a publicly traded (only on the India Stock Exchange) IT tech company based out of India. Over the past five years CORE International has been the fastest growing company in India with an amazing annualized 52% growth rate in net income.

*****

Very few have any idea how our modern public educational system was born as to who drafted, funded and designed our current education system and what their stated plans and goals were for public education. Many feel that given the amount of money we spend on public schools that we should be producing much higher quality students that are equal to, or superior to, education in other countries. Yet that was never the intention of the original framers of our education system, as you will read below. In fact the system is working exactly as these few men of enormous wealth had planned it all out nearly a century ago.

“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

~ First mission statement of the J.D. Rockefeller-endowed General Education Board in 1906

In the dawn of the 20th century a revolutionary new Industrialized Society was in the process of forming. Only a very few men began to make vast fortunes in the fields of coal, steam, oil, transportation and finance as Man’s ability to mass harvest Nature’s resources through advancing technological engineering created overnight Oligarchists.

No one amassed more wealth more quickly than J.D. Rockeller through his oil interests. In the early 1900’s he amassed the equivalent of $663 billion in today’s dollars. Other emergent industrialists created great wealth for themselves with legendary names like J.P. Morgan, Carnegie, Mellon, Guggenheim, Vanderbilt, Peabody and Ford. Today we know them by the foundations they created, totaling over $550 Billion in todays dollars, and by their vast corporate holdings and businesses (Chase Bank, Ford Motor Company, J.P. Morgan Bank, Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, etc.).

With their incredible sudden wealth also came enormous tax bills. Their solution was to create for themselves, with the help of bought politicians, tax-exempt non-profit organizations or NGO’s. In 1900, there were 21 corporate NGO’s and by 1990, some 50,000 had spawned. Through the creation of the NGO’s not only could they shelter wealth but were also able develop a new science called “Scientific-Social Engineering” to influence federal, state and local politicians and the public at large for their own wishes,desires and needs.

Through newly created social propaganda campaigns, created by the likes of Walter Lipmann and Edward Bernays, the Fathers of Marketing and Propaganda respectively, they were able to regularly sell the public at will on the idea that their NGO’s were solely philanthropic and for the good of all.

In his book, “PR! A Social History of Spin”, Stewart Ewen writes:

“Novel strategies of social management and the conviction that a technical elite might be able to engineer social order were becoming attractive…Accompanying a democratic current of social analysis that sought to educate the public at large, another – more cabalistic – tradition of social-scientific thought was emerging, one that saw the study of society as a tool by which a technocratic elite could help serve the interests of vested power.”

These ‘Titans of Industry’, as the PR men dubbed them, were at the top and the planned to stay at the top for generations to come. Their strategy was to keep the working middle class from ever rising to power through controlling of the public education systems in the United States. When you are at the top you spend a lot of time and money making sure you stay at the top and the last things these Robber Barons would allow is for the uprising of the middle class into their hierarchy.

With such large controlling wealth through their foundations came a resilient web of many useful ‘friends’ in the politically arena and in business. With connections in banking, Wall Street, law firms, media executives and proprietors along with behind the scenes PR firms they could ensure any type publicity and financial backing they wished including the masking of their true agendas. Through the largess of their foundations the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Guggenheim Foundations colluded to begin the process of designing our current public education system

****

“The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun”.  John D. Rockefeller

In 1905 J.D. Rockefeller kick-started the creation of the General Education Board (GEB). Rockefeller alone, with 1905 dollars, initially gifted $1 million dollars, then increased it to $10 million in 1907, later a further sum of $32 million and through subsequent decades granted some $7.5 billion. With significant money buys significant influence and loyalty.

In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these newly created NGO foundations. The commission after a year of testimony concluded:

“The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation. The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.”

The Guggenheim Foundation agreed to award fellowships to historians recommended by the Carnegie Endowment. Gradually, through the 1920′s, they assembled a group of twenty promising young academics, and took them to London. There they briefed them on what was expected of them when they became professors of American history. That twenty were the nucleus of what was eventually to become the American Historical Association. The Guggenheim Foundation also endowed the American Historical Association with $400,000 at that time.

By 1950 the Rockefeller Foundation endowed Columbia Teachers College in New York City, formerly named the Russell’s Teacher College, produced one-third of all presidents of teacher-training institutions, one-fifth of all American public school teachers, and one-quarter of all superintendents.

J.D Rockefeller and family additionally funded and founded the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University (which focused on offering only postgraduate and postdoctoral education), the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health as well as the Rockefeller University Press.

They also controlled, and continue to maintain ownership control in, school textbook companies and scholastic literature copy rights used in the public school systems thus being able to direct the historical narrative used in schools through Guggenheims American Historical Society.

Additionally, through use of political favors and influence as well as the structuring of public educational taxes through property ownership, these few NGO Foundations were able to mold educational policy and control the flow of funds to school districts and community colleges at the Federal levels.

*****

“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.“    – David Rockefeller from his autobiography entitled “Memoirs” pgs. 404 & 405.

At the same time as Henry Ford was developing the assembly line for mass quantity automobile production, J.D. Rockefeller was extracting and selling ever greater quantities of oil to be used in automobiles. It is a little known fact, possibly due to Rockefeller’s influence as to our U.S. history, that the first Model A’s and T’s that came off the Ford assembly lines had a simple switch where the autos could run on either alcohol or gasoline. This was because at the time, in the early 1900′s, we were and Agrarian Society, with few gas stations across the country. Ford’s cars allowed drivers to be able to get alcohol fuel from farms across the country.

When J.D. Rockefeller could not convince Mr. Ford to produce his cars to run only on oil, he along with Joseph Kennedy, (JFK and RFK’s Father) manufactured the era of Prohibition in the 1920′s so that every new car would be forced to run on his oil and he used his newly created PR firms to sell the country that Prohibition was solely a social issue.

In 1936, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tires, General Motors and Mack Trucks created the fictitious ”United Cities Motor Transport Company” which succeeded in buying up most electric trains in cities from Seattle to Philadelphia so that everyone would then have to use personal automobiles for transportation.  (A good documentary of this revisionist history can be found in the movie “Taken For A Ride”.)

*****

“The power of the individual large foundation is enormous. Its various forms of patronage carry with them elements of thought control. It exerts immense influence on educator, educational processes, and educational institutions. It is capable of invisible coercion. It can materially predetermine the development of social and political concepts, academic opinion, thought leadership, public opinion.

The power to influence national policy is amplified tremendously when foundations act in concert. There is such a concentration of foundation power in the United States, operating in education and the social sciences, with a gigantic aggregate of capital and income. This Interlock has some of the characteristics of an intellectual cartel. It operates in part through certain intermediary organizations supported by the foundations. It has ramifications in almost every phase of education.”  -John Taylor Gatto, author of “The Underground History of Education” and Thrice NY Teacher of the Year

In 1954, a special Congressional Committee investigated the interlocking web of tax-exempt foundations to see what impact their grants were having on the American people. The Reece Committee, as it became known, stumbled onto the fact that some of these foundations had embarked upon a gigantic project to rewrite American history and incorporate it into new school text books.

Norman Dodd, the Reece committee’s research director, found, in the archives of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the following remarkable statement of purpose:

“The only way to maintain control of the population was to obtain control of the education in the U.S. They realized this was a prodigious task so they approached the Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that they go in tandem so the portion of education which could be considered domestically oriented would be taken over by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the portion which was oriented to international matters be taken over by the Carnegie Endowment.”

Dodd proceeded to show that the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Endowment were using funds excessively on projects at Columbia, Harvard, Chicago University and the University of California, in order to enable oligarchical collectivism.

Dodd further stated:

“The purported deterioration in scholarship and in the techniques of teaching which, lately, has attracted the attention of the American public, has apparently been caused primarily by a premature effort to reduce our meager knowledge of social phenomena to the level of an applied science.”

Mr. Dodd’s research staff had discovered that in 1933-1936, a change took place which was so drastic as to constitute a revolution.”

The Reece Commission also indicated conclusively that:

• The responsibility for the economic welfare of the American people had been transferred heavily to the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
• That a corresponding change in education had taken place from an impetus outside the local community.
• That this “revolution” had occurred without violence and with the full consent of an overwhelming majority of the electorate.

Mr. Dodd stated that this revolution “could not have occurred peacefully or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it.”

According to Mr. Dodd, grants given to these Foundations had been used for:

 –  Training individuals and servicing agencies to render advice to the Executive branch of the Federal Government.

 –  Directing education in the United States toward an international view-point and discrediting the traditions to which it (formerly) had been dedicated.

 – Decreasing the dependency of education upon the resources of the local community and freeing it from many of the natural safeguards inherent in this American tradition.

  – Changing both school and college curricula to the point where they sometimes denied the principles underlying the American way of life.

  – Financing experiments designed to determine the most effective means by which education could be pressed into service of a political nature.”

Mr. Dodd cited a book called “The Turning of the Tides”, which documented the literature from various tax-exempt foundations and organizations like UNESCO, showing that they wished to install a centralized World Government.

The Reece Commission quickly ran into a buzzsaw of opposition from influential centers of American corporate life. Major national newspapers hurled scathing criticisms, which, together with pressure from other potent political adversaries, forced the committee to disband prematurely without action.

****
Additionally, in 1951, Hon. John T. Wood (Idaho), House of Representatives, added these remarks in the Congressional record on the Report to the American People on UNESCO (United Nations for Education, Science and Culture Organization). From the Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 82nd Congress, First Session on Thursday, October 18, 1951:

“UNESCO’s scheme to pervert public education appears in a series of nine volumes, titled ‘Toward Understanding’ which presume to instruct kindergarten and elementary grade teachers in the fine art of preparing our youngsters for the day when their first loyalty will be to a world government, of which the United States will form but an administrative part…

The program is quite specific. The teacher is to begin by eliminating any and all words, phrases, descriptions, pictures, maps, classroom material or teaching methods of a sort causing his pupils to feel or express a particular love for, or loyalty to, the United States of America. Children exhibiting such prejudice as a result of prior home influence – UNESCO calls it outgrowth of the narrow family spirit – are to be dealt an abundant measure of counter propaganda at the earliest possible age. Booklet V, on page 9, advises the teacher that:

‘The kindergarten or infant school has a significant part to play in the child’s education. Not only can it correct many of the errors of home training, but it can also prepare the child for membership, at about the age of seven, in a group of his own age and habits – the first of many such social identifications that he must achieve on his way to membership in the world society.’”  

*****

“Schools were designed by Horace Mann and others to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population.”   John Taylor Gatto author of “Weapons of Mass Education”

The advent of compulsory education in the United States originated out of Prussia, which was within the area of modern Germany today. The Prussian Monarchy divided the education system into three groups: those who were to make policy: those who would assist the policy makers, the engineers, doctors, lawyers and architects; and the rest would be the common laborers.

Using the basic philosophy prescribing the “duties of the state,” combined with John Locke’s view (1690) that “children are a blank slate” and lessons from Rousseau on how to “write on the slate,” Prussia established a three-tiered educational system that was considered “scientific” in nature. Work began in 1807 and the system was in place by 1819. An important component of the Prussian system was how it defined for the child what was to be learned, what was to be thought, how long to think about it and when a child was to be allowed to think of something else. (This is where the Pavlovian bell-ringing each hour of class time comes from in our current school system.)

In 1814, Edward Everett was the first American to go to Prussia for Doctorate in Philosophy or PhD. He eventually became governor of Massachusetts. During the next 30 years or so, a line of American dignitaries went to Germany to earn degrees (a German invention). Horace Mann, instrumental in the development of educational systems in America, was among them. Those who earned degrees in Germany came back to the United States and staffed all the major universities. In 1850, Massachusetts and New York utilized the Prussian system, as well as promoted the concept that “the state is the father of children.”

Horace Mann’s sister, Elizabeth Peabody (Peabody Foundation) saw to it that, after the Civil War, the Prussian system (taught in the Northern states) was integrated into the conquered South between 1865 and 1918. Most of the “compulsory schooling” laws designed to implement the system were passed by 1900. By 1900, all the PhD’s in the United States were trained in Prussia. This project also meant that one-room schoolhouses had to go, for it fostered independence. They were eventually wiped out.

In 1890, Carnegie wrote a series of essays called “The Gospel of Wrath”, in which he claimed that the capitalistic free-enterprise system was dead in the United States by the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgans. It was about 1917 that the great “Red Scare” was instituted in the U.S. in part to set up a reactionary movement intended to get the public to accept the idea of compulsory schooling – Prussian compulsory schooling!

The implementation of the German educational nightmare in the United States met some initial resistance. In Carnegie’s home town of Gary, Indiana, the system was implemented between 1910 and 1916, mostly through the efforts of William Wirt, the school superintendent. It involved no academic endeavor whatsoever. It worked so well in supplying willing workers for the steel mills that it was decided by Carnegie to bring the system to New York City. In 1917, they initiated a program in New York in 12 schools, with the objective of enlarging the program to encompass 100 schools and eventually all the schools in New York. William Wirt came to supervise the transition.

Unfortunately for Carnegie, the population of the 12 schools was predominantly composed of Jewish immigrants, who innately recognized what was being done and the nature of the new “educational system.” Three weeks of riots followed, and editorials in the New York Times were very critical of the plan. Over 200 Jewish school children were thrown in jail. The whole political structure of New York that had tried this scheme were then thrown out of office during the next election. A book describing this scenario, “The Great School Wars,” was written by Diane Ravitch. Curiously, William Wirt was committed to an insane asylum around 1930, after making public speeches about his part in a large conspiracy to bring about a controlled state in the hands of certain people. He died two years later.

*****

“We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom and defeat the primary purpose of democracy as heretofore preserved inviolate in our common schools, normal schools, and universities.”  National Education Association meeting, 1913

Another great influence on how public education would be directed was John Dewey (1859-1952), known as the “Father of the progressive education movement” and a great influence with the powerful National Education Association (NEA).   Mr. Dewey’s progressive model of active learning or pragmatism promoted a revolt against abstract learning and attempted to make education an effective tool for integrating culture and vocation. Dewey was responsible for developing a philosophical approach to education called “experimentalism” which saw education as the basis for democracy. His goal was to turn public schools into indoctrination centers to develop a socialized population that could adapt to an egalitarian state operated by the intellectual elite.

Thinking for Dewey was a collective phenomenon. Disavowing the role of the individual mind in achieving technological and social progress, Dewey promoted the group, rather than the teacher, as the main source of social control in the schools. Denying the ideas of universal principles, natural law, and natural rights, Dewey emphasized social values and taught that life adjustment is more important than academic skills.

In his book, The Great Technology (1933), Harold Rugg elucidated the grand vision:

“A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions of individual minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old stereotypes must be broken up and ‘new climates of opinion’ formed in the neighborhoods of America.

Through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government—one that will embrace all the activities of men, one that will postulate the need of scientific control… in the interest of all people.”

The Rockefeller-endowed Lincoln Experimental School at Columbia Teachers College was the testing ground for Harold Rugg’s series of textbooks, which moved 5 million copies by 1940 and millions more after that. In these books Mr. Rugg advanced this theory:

“Education must be used to condition the people to accept social change… The chief function of schools is to plan the future of society.” Like many of his activities over three vital decades on the school front, the notions he had put forth in The Great Technology (1933), were eventually translated into practice in urban centers. He advocated that the major task of schools be seen as “indoctrinating” youth, using social “science” as the “core of the school curriculum” to bring about the desired climate of public opinion. Some attitudes Rugg advocated teaching were reconstruction of the national economic system to provide for central controls and an implantation of the attitude that educators as a group were “vastly superior to a priesthood” and to “create swiftly a compact body of minority opinion for the scientific reconstruction of our social order”.

Money for Rugg’s six textbooks came from Rockefeller Foundation grants to the Lincoln School. He was paid two salaries by the foundation, one as an educational psychologist for Lincoln, the other as a professor of education at Teachers College, in addition to salaries for secretarial and research services. The General Education Board provided funds (equivalent to $500,000 in year 2000 purchasing power) to produce three books, which were then distributed by the National Education Association.

*****

In 1960, “UNESCO 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 disguised to halt discrimination and segregation.  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” developed by Dr. B.F. Skinner,  the father of Behavioral Psychology.

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan Administration recited in her excellent book, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” a speech Congressmen John M. Ashbrook delivered before Congress on July 18, 1961 entitled, “The Myth of Federal Aid to Education without Control” (Congressional Record: pp. 11868-11880):

“That there was any doubt of the Federal bureaucrats’ intentions in this matter was laid to rest with the discovery of a Health, Education, and Welfare publication, “A Federal Education Agency for the Future”, which is a report of the Office of Education, dated April 1961… I feel that its pronouncements are a blueprint for complete domination and direction of our schools from Washington. The publication was not popularly distributed, and there was some difficulty obtaining a copy.

Fifty-six pages of findings contain recommendations which call for more and more Federal participation and control and repeatedly stress the need for Federal activity in formulating educational policies. It recommends a review of teacher preparation, curriculum and textbooks. It calls for an implementation of international educational projects in cooperation with UNESCO in the United Nations and ministries of education abroad”. (page 62)

*****

Between the years of 1967-1974, teacher training was covertly revamped through these original foundations created in the early 1900’s. Working with other private foundations, for-profit global corporations, certain universities, state education departments and the U.S. Department of Education, three critical multi-volume documents were produced. They were called the “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Designing Education for the Future and the Behavioral Teacher Education Project” and totaled over 3,000 pages.  John Taylor Gatto outlines these three areas of focus:

1) DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE. They were the collusion with the federal education department and the presumably independent state agencies. They redefined education after the 19th century Germanic fashion (quoting now from the document) “as a means to achieve important economic and social goals for the national character,” — and I would hasten to add that none of those goals included the maximum development of your son or daughter. State agencies would henceforth “act as Federal enforcers insuring compliance of local schools with Federal directives”. The document proclaimed that (I’m quoting again), “each state education department must be an agent of change” and proclaimed further: “change must be institutionalized”. I doubt if an account of this appeared in any newspaper in the state of Vermont or for that matter any newspaper in the country (U.S.). Education departments were (I am quoting a third time) “to lose their identity as well as their authority in order to form a partnership with the Federal Government”.

2) The BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL PROJECT outlines specific teaching reforms to be forced on the country, unwillingly of course, after 1967. It also sets out, in clear language, the outlook and intent of its invisible creators. Nothing less than quoting again “the impersonal manipulation through schooling of a future America in which few will be able to maintain control over their own opinions”, an America in which (quoting again) “each individual receives at birth, a multipurpose identification number which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of their [underlings]“, (underlings is my interpretation, everything else came out of the document), “and to expose them to the directors subliminal influence of the state education department and the federal department acting through those whenever necessary”.

3) TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES, which has, since its publication, spawned a number of descendant forms, like “mastery learning”, “outcome based education” and “school to work” business-government-economic projects. Dr. Bloom’s compilation was a tool, (I’m quoting from Dr. Bloom), “a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think or feel as the result of participating in some unit of instruction”. I would be dubious if any parent in the U.S. would send their children to schools under these auspices if they were thinking people. In this fashion, children would learn proper attitudes and have their improper attitudes (brought from home) remediated. In all stages of the school manipulations testing would be essential to locate the child’s mind on an official continuum.

*****

In 1972, Dr. Chester M. Pierce, M.D. of Harvard University wrote an article entitled “Becoming Planetary Citizens: A Quest for Meaning,” in the November 1972 issue of Childhood Education. Excerpts follow:

“Creative Altruism;  In the past forty years social science experimentation has shown that by age five children already have a lot of political attitudes. Regardless of economic or social background, almost every kindergartner has a tenacious loyalty to his country and its leaders. This phenomenon is understandable in the psychological terms of loyalty to a strong father-figure and of the need for security. But a child can enter kindergarten with the same kind of loyalty to the earth as his homeland…”

In 1980, “Schooling for a Global Age” was authored by James Becker. In the preface to Mr. Becker’s book, Professor John Goodlad, who has been at the forefront of implementing a global education system with funding from tax-exempt foundations and federal grants, writes:

“Parents and the general public must be reached also [taught a global perspective]. Otherwise, children and youth enrolled in globally-oriented programs may find themselves in conflict with values assumed in the home. And then the educational institution frequently comes under scrutiny and must pull back.”

*****

In 2006, in an interview with Aaron Russo (producer and director of movies like “The Rose”, “Trading Places” and “Wise Guys”) relates in his documentary “Freedom to Fascim”, how he was courted by the Rockefeller family when he ran for Governor of Nevada in 1998. After a friendship developed he was recruited to join the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), a private non-profit organization created by the Rockefeller’s in 1921. (Caroll Quigley, Professor of History at Georgetown University and favorite mentor of President Clinton has stated, “The CFR is the American Branch of a society originated in England and believes national boundaries should be obliterated and a one-world rule established.” Other members of the CFR have included Presidents Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, George and G.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to date).

Mr. Russo retells in his documentary the story, as told to him directly by Nick Rockefeller, that the Feminist movement in the 1960′s was manufactured so that women would have to enter the workforce and so that more taxes could be collected with women working, thus having to pay taxes. Additionally, children would then have to be put into day care and pre-schools where indoctrination could begin at a much earlier age. The State could then be seen to the children as part of the family.  Interestingly, it was also reported in an article in the Village Voice on May 21, 1979 that Ms. Steinem’s M.S. Magazine was funded by the Ford Foundation and the CIA, to which the article claims she also a CIA asset.

*****

In 1998, Rep. Bob Schaffer placed in the Congressional Record an 18-page letter that has become known as Mr. Marc Tucker’s “’Dear Hillary” letter.  Mr. Tucker is President of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and in this letter he lays out a plan to:

1. Remold the entire American system into a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave.
2. Is the same for everyone and is the same system for everyone coordinated by a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels where curriculum and job matching will be handled by counselors accessing the integrated computer-based program.”

Mr. Tucker’s ambitious plan was implemented in three laws passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1994: the Goals 2000 Act, the School-to-work Act and the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act. These laws establish the following mechanisms to restructure the public schools:

1. Bypass all elected officials on school boards and in state legislatures by making federal funds flow to the Governor and his appointees on workforce development boards.
2. Use a computer database, a.k.a. “a labor market information system,” into which school personnel would scan all information about every schoolchild and his family, identified by the child’s social security number: academic, medical, mental, psychological, behavioral, and interrogations by counselors. The computerized data would be available to the school, the government, and future employers.
3. Use “national standards” and “national testing” to cement national control of tests, assessments, school honors and rewards, financial aid, and the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), which is designed to replace the high school diploma.

Designed on the German system, the Tucker plans objectives are to train children in specific jobs to serve the workforce and the global economy instead of to educate them so they can make their own life choices.

*****

We see the actions of our Federal Government continue along this path of taking over the duties of caring and managing children at younger and younger ages. A  recently created private public partnership with federal government called “ZERO TO THREE” wants to reach out to children from “cradle to three years of age”. On its website the organization describes itself as:

“A national nonprofit organization that provides parents, professionals and policymakers the knowledge and the know-how to nurture early development. Neuroscientists have documented that our earliest days, weeks and months of life are a period of unparalleled growth when trillions of brain cell connections are made. Research and clinical experience also demonstrate that health and development are directly influenced by the quality of care and experiences a child has with his parents and other adults.”

“School Readiness Interactive Birth to 3”– “A web-based, interactive learning tool designed to help parents and caregivers support their young child’s early learning. You’ll find age-based information on how children develop the four key skills—language and literacy skills, thinking skills, self-confidence and self-control—that are critical to later school success.”

Also, the Center for American Progress (CAP) is receiving a doubling of funding from the Obama Administration. The reason for more funding according to the CAP website is so that:

“All children ages 3 and 4 should be able to voluntarily attend a full-day public preschool program,” CAP states. “Preschool should be free for children from families at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line ($46,100 for a family of four). Children from families above 200 percent of the poverty line should be charged a sliding tuition co-pay, ranging from about 30 percent of the cost to 95 percent of the cost (for families above 400 percent of the poverty line).”

This private public program is being funded extensively by the Soros Foundation and is necessary because, according to Arnie Duncan, Secretary of Education, “the parents will have to be working 2-3 jobs in the future to support their families” (Charlie Rose show interview, March 10, 2009). His vision is that every public school will soon become the hub of every community that he wants to be open 24/7/365 where after school programs are managed by NGO’s and open until 9 p.m.

Additionally he would like to see these ‘hubs of the community’ provide three meals a day to children and offer full care health services. Already we are seeing the implementation of his visions where school enforcement programs like state mandated vaccinations and the providing of fluoridation pills to children are being carried out where profits go to the corporate medical industry as costs are socialized to the people.

*****

”We are creating the most meaningful reform of school education in a generation designed to fundamentally transform America’s education system”  President Barack Obama

Now, as we enter the “Computer Evolution of Education”, we see a mass coordinated roll-out of a global effort to uniform education and mono-mind our children through an internet-based education called “Common Core.” Funding from Obama’s “Race to the Top” program require schools to accept the Common Core curriculums.

These products being rolled out globally and nationwide have been designed, written and implemented by the largest technology companies in the world (Google, Apple, Cisco, Texas Instruments, McGraw Hill, Scholastic, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc.) through newly created PPP’s just as Obamacare was directed and overseen by Ms. Liz Fowler who is an Executive VP at Wellpoint Inc., the largest HMO in the country.

The largest foundations are also involved with the technological transformation of the public schools globally. Like the behemoth Gates Foundation ($ 65 Billion), Joyce and the omnipresent Rockefeller Foundation. NGO lobby groups like the National Governors Association ( NGA), and the  Common Core State Standards Organization (CCSSO), also helped establish the curriculum standards for academic criteria and evaluation to the Common Core Initiative. The NGA and CCSSO, also enjoy sole copyrights to Common Core and retain legal rights to any changes to the CC material.

The build out of Common Core is breathtaking as the business end is being implemented by CORE International. CI’s technology, staffing and security services are already being used in 47 of 50 States as well as the Commonwealth of Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, El Salvador, Kenya, Japan, Israel, Mexico, and many other countries. Its own financial website states that its business plans are to be in every country “with a global education plan that reaches children from the cradle through post graduate school”.

Here is CORE INT’L’s description of their program directly from the company’s website:

“CORE is a global end-to-end, best-of-breed education solutions provider that aims to transform the education spectrum encompassing Pre-K, K-12, Higher Education and Technical Career Education. CORE strives to improve the quality of human capital as well as the global learning ecosystem through innovation in order to produce better educational outcomes. CORE’s operations span multiple geographies globally, with its primary focus being the United States, the United Kingdom and India, and with additional operations in Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East.”

Aside from referring to our children as “human capital”, their businesses models include the control in the hiring and evaluating of teachers and administrators, designing and creating computer-based education, evaluating academic testing and scoring, the providing of a program known as “Secure Schools” as well subcontracting to provide  school healthcare services.

We will address more fully the business end of the Common Core in the United States in Part II.  In Part III we will look into the globalization of our education system through the one-size-fits all “Education for All” agenda being sanctioned through the United Nations and Agenda 21 based on Common Core standards and largely funded by with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

About the Author

Jamie Lee is the author of Tabu Blog, and a strong advocate of personal liberty and freedom from overbearing government.

References:

– Arne Duncan on Charlie Rose (7 min.)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuO_nB7WY9w
 – The Prussian P.H.D. (9 min.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZp7eVJNJuw
 – 1 Hr. Full History of Education by John Taylor Gatto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5BFK539-I
 – .PDF Underground History of American Education System by John Taylor Gatto http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
 – From Chapter 12 John Taylor Gatto http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/12o.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Thomson_Iserbyt
 – Common Core http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm,  http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/coredocs.htm
 – Aaron Russo, interview about Rockefellers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCpjmvaIgNA
 – Gloria Steinem and Women’s Lib/CIA http://www.rense.com/general21/hw.htm, http://www.sallyhomemaker.com/journal/the-hoax-of-feminism-part-1-moms-kids-taxes-rockefellers/
 – Taken for a Ride Documentary – http://www.culturechange.org/issue10/taken-for-a-ride.htm
 – Mark Tucker http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/marc_tucker/
 – Obamacare and Well Point http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKjLfhdfmQY