Education Establishment versus USA: War of the Worlds

A famous novel by H. G. Wells begins: “No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely…[that]intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the 20th century came the great disillusionment.”

That’s a perfect summary of Professor John Dewey and his friends— intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. They looked at our culture and our schools and came to a hostile conclusion: this place needed fundamental transformation.

So John Dewey and his pals set about the overthrow of American society. This is a huge ambition and most people would not think it remotely possible. But Dewey had a plan, a remarkably ingenious and economical plan. Behold Dewey’s War On Our World:

There would be no fighting, no preaching, no running for office, no changing of laws, no legislation, nothing in the newspapers, nothing visible at all. And yet John Dewey would get a grip on American society even greater than television has now.

Here was his gimmick. With Rockefeller money, Dewey and his pals built a lot of new schools of education, the paradigm being Columbia’s Teachers College. Dewey and his gang had control over the curriculum in these schools and the people chosen to teach there. Ambitious young people from around the country were invited to begin their training at a Dewey school. They were invited, in short, to be indoctrinated.

Thoroughly saturated in Dewey’s educational philosophy, credentialed to an impressive degree, these “teachers” returned to the small towns of America and begin the hard work of destroying one world and birthing another. In fact, these so-called teachers were not teachers as that term was traditionally understood. These teachers (increasingly this was the case) had not mastered a subject such as French or biology. Their main job was to go back to Any Town and inject collectivist thinking into the young. Taught to think of themselves as “change agents,” Dewey’s teachers were more akin to a PR firm.

It’s as if John Dewey and his invaders went to every town and brainwashed the next generation, and then the one after that. Here was the astonishing power of Dewey’s plan. First control the ed schools, and thereby control the new teachers, and thereby control the young students, and thereby change the country.

All of John Dewey’s crowd had studied at a German university. They had absorbed all the latest ideas, best characterized as Hegelian and Prussian. These ideas tended to glorify government and to view the public as a mass of peasants that should be obedient.

John Dewey’s invasion of American culture was underway a hundred years ago and has continued unabated. Resistance and setbacks do occur. But the overall pattern is one of Dewey and his crew winning battle after battle. The proven theories and methods that once prevailed in American schools were killed off. One weird gimmick after another became set in stone. The result was a relentless dumbing-down that has been apparent for more than 50 years.

American culture valued independence, individuality, personal initiative, and responsibility. Public schools traditionally assumed that every child could be educated; certainly, the effort must be made. Now, public schools seem to assume that most children are capable only of a marginal, mediocre education.

John Dewey’s essential lie was to call himself an educator when in fact he was a propagandist and community organizer. He and his fellow professsors didn’t think that typical Americans needed much education. After all, they were peasants.

To make this War of the Worlds successful, our Education Establishment has become skilled at everything but education: marketing, propaganda, jargon, sophistry, misinformation, casual dishonesty, and Machiavellian manipulation. There is a steady promotion of methods that don’t work (most obviously, sight-words to teach reading and Reform Math to teach arithmetic).

So let’s think of the Education Establishment as the strange and hostile aliens they are.

Common Core is best understood as the latest installment in a long-running campaign against the American mind. This continuity is nicely captured by the satiric phrase “Commie Core.” Nobody should be surprised that, in the late 1920s, John Dewey was in Moscow to study Communist schools so he could come back to the US and praise them.

ADDENDUM: published a year or so ago, this article remains a good statement of what happened to our country over the last hundred years. Now we have to hope that Trump and DeVos can undo the mess.

A pretty good summation.

I could really see the difference in the schools when the Teachers Unions took over, and the Department of Education was established.

What should be done at a federal level to overthrow this huge power center of brainwashing? Now they are in and imbedded at every level of education, how can we ever get them out again?

"Now they are in and imbedded at every level of education, how can we ever get them out again?"

While it's true that there are lots of lefties in education, there are also quite a lot of pragmatic nonpolitical teachers and those from the conservative side of the spectrum. You don't hear about us too much because we're now the counter-culture and mostly do our best (quietly) to teach the kids and to offset some of the damage from the other side. Many of us are under the radar to hold onto jobs and to keep peace in the faculty rooms. When I inherited my classroom, I tossed all the global warming videos - just for starters. I do my best to encourage the kids to think and challenge them to strive. I'm not the only one. By the way, many people who lost their jobs in waves of corporate downsizing went into education. They're not all lefties. Hang in there. It's not hopeless - just difficult.

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